Home Alone

Now that the 4 week transition period that I had with my colleague whom I replace here at on-site is over, he's back home in Calcutta. Leaving me to fend for myself in the vastness of America. Not that I'm hating it too much. The thrill of an unscripted adventure tingles my senses. Then I look across the devastation that is also known as my studio apartment and rest my eyes on the place I love to hate. That place is the kitchen.



During my time in Calcutta, I religiously avoided any kitchen activities by buying cooked stuff off the street. But Taunton, Massachusetts is hardly the place to search if I were looking for good ol' 'tarka dal' and 'roti'. So the dull pain of having to cook my own food lingers on like a reluctant rain cloud. If there is one activity that makes every lazy bone of my body groan in disgust, it is cooking. So much effort is put into that one single act and cursed with my culinary skill set, the effort just is not justified. I did manage to stir up a semi-palatable dish of cauliflowers and potatoes but the thought of having it to do it every day for the rest of my stay here gives me the shivers. The aesthetic nightmare that my flat is right now is a side issue, considering the criticality of whether I'll be able to perform the basic survival act of cooking myself food. Walmart is always there like an old friend with its kilometres of stacked packaged foods, but also like an old friend doesn't really care how good or disgusting what is being served is.



All factors taken into account, I am still elated with the idea of being alone. Being able to drop off to sleep whenever I feel like it without offering lame justifications to raised eyebrows has to be at the top at the list of the guilty pleasures I intend to indulge in. Leonardo Di Caprio needed the keel of a gigantic ship and the exhilarating company of Kate Winslet to say this. I say this in the comfort of a little flat in the anonymity of suburban America with a laptop on my lap. The sentiments in the words ring true in both cases. "I am the king of the world!"

The Day of Reckoning

It's official. Deathclock.com - a website that I had heard of a long time ago and found time to browse only yesterday has chosen the day for me. It offered a variety of combinations to evaluate a day of demise and the two combinations that I tried with an honest heart conjured up the same date. Scary, huh? And then I tried various other false combinations of smoker/non-smoker ('coz I am somewhere in between) and sadist/optimist (somewhere in between again), just to check and the dates were came up different. But the original date was what stuck in my mind.

July 8th, 2021.

My last day on earth, and then maybe onto a happier, prettier place. That leaves me about 13 years to do what I came to do, or at least to figure out that I was intended to serve no purpose at all. So many things to do, places to visit, people to meet and so little time. My impending demise leaves me with at least one less worry. That worry is the need to worry or be sad because frankly speaking I haven't got time enough. If that fateful Thursday (Yes, Deathclock.com told me that too) is really to be my last and I were to pick a really self-centred list (as a condemned man ought to have the freedom to) of 13 aims to be accomplished off the top of my head, they would be the following:

(In no particular order)
1. Drive a Porsche 911 down a sun-baked Mediterranean coast.
2. Go on a majestic cruise across the width of the Atlantic from England to America.
3. To visit the remote islands of Easter in the lap of the majestic blue Pacific.
4. Hike up the Andes to the haunting ruins of Machu Pichu in Peru.
5. Spend a day on the cool marble of the Taj Mahal, on a baking Agra summer day (That's the only thing on this list that I've accomplished yet but I don't mind doing it all over again)
6. Do an African safari in a Land Rover, where else but in the Serengeti!
7. Get astride a KTM Super Duke and let it rip through desolate night-time city streets.
8. Visit one of those mysterious paper palaces up in the mist covered mountains that frequently make an appearance in Japanese paintings.
9. Live for a month in an old seaside mansion complete with its own grounds bordering the sea, its own guard dogs and a family ghost too.
10. Work a job that pays me for being lazy, i.e the lazier I am, the higher I am paid. Something like a model for the comforts of Kurl-On Pillow.
11. Sit on a desert dune and just gaze at the Pyramids from a distance.
12. Sky-dive from the highest altitudes humanly possible to feel the incomparable thrill that must come with free-falling and gliding through the air.
13. Put all of the above and every incident that occurred in between into a book that everybody'd would love to read (Now that's wishful thinkng, if there was ever any)!

Life isn't such a pain if you find that you don't have to deal with it for too long. For such a wonderful sense of transience, I owe a very grim website my heart-felt gratitude.

An exercise in frugality

An exercise in frugality, that is the true nature of the studio apartment to which I have to be confined to whenever I return home from frazzled and spent from yet another tough day of office in the USA. It's got a carpeted floor like most other houses here, unfortunately it's already blotched with stains of an unidentifiable nature, the vestiges of its previous occupants. The TV in the corner of the room serves as the sideboard for all paraphernalia ranging from keys, defunct mobiles, change, ID cards and what not! It's ironical that in the land of the idiot box, the occupants of this one room apartment take the minimal interest in it and it serves the purpose of junk furniture. And not that it is defunct. It works too but the charms of passive entertainment are not attractive enough for people on their first fleeting visit to the USA, as the previous occupants of this room and now me are. There is no furniture apart from an easy chair and a sofa set so swamped with long forgotten clothes that it's quite hard to see them. There's a cupboard and an attic whose contents I cannot dare to describe. A little kitchen with the customary fridge and microwave whose use I hope to minimize and a tiny switch in the corner for a functional AC (thank goodness for that) complete the picture. An apology of a mattress where salvation is sought in deep slumber also dots the landscape and order will be the last word on your mind if you ever enter here. We eat off paper plates, we minimize any kind of activity that might lend this room a single element of permanence. One week from now, it'll be my room alone 'coz the other inmate whose lifeterm is served will be leaving for India. If there was ever a room that said "Only temporary" without the use of a board, this has got to be it.

Inane and pointless

Must be a psychological thing, this not wanting to write until there is an Internet connection. On paper, a laptop provides me with infinite possibilities to make good use of my writing inclinations but when confronted with the ample opportunities I conveniently sidle out, This post is going to turn out like so many of them that I've put down in my journal back home. It's all about how I want to write but somehow lack the initiative to do do.

Things can only improve from now on in and that happens to be my only consolation. Coming to America and all the associated excitement is too strong a influence to let me return to my lazy ways very easily. Though I have grown past the stage of doing a cartwheel whenever I saw a Harley roaring across the roads in front of my house, I have still managed to retain a sense of wonder about how radically different things are in America. The people here seem to be obsessed with size as everything around here comes in two sizes - big and super big! The system and order that prevails here is like some kind of an otherworldly experience for us chaos hardened Indians. The houses are well kept and neat, and in a neighbourhood like ours you could never tell that so many people live here but for the occasional car making its way out of the car park. It is an unique experience and worth thousands of times more than the money I get for working in the USA. 4th of July just came and went. It'd have been a great time for me to sample first-hand the high season for American patriotism. But as usual I wasted a long weekend, lazing around at home!

The great American dream

This is a strange land with inexplicable lure! We were on our way to Boston downtown and the parking gate attendant at the Quincy Adams subway station turns out to be an Indian from Bareilly. I wonder what had made him come here. Was it just the instinct for survival which made him search for greener pastures or just a mad wish for adventure or a little bit of both? After all, not every man from Bareilly makes it to the USA and doesn't even want to. The man seemed reasonably happy too. Or maybe it was the thought of interacting with fellows from a land whose feel he longed to forget was actually making him smile then.

I'll never know because one can never ask these kind of questions outright. It'll only come out as demeaning or highly intrusive, a far deviation from the innocuous purpose behind my curiosity. So I'll be content by imagining a million possible stories on how the man got here. The American dream that drove him thousands of miles from anything even remotely resembling home to a little glass box in the suburbs of Boston is pretty difficult for me to comprehend. But dreams are too personal a thing to comment on.

A room with a view

So it begins. The American chapter of my long-forgotten blog. A million toils lie ahead of me as I have ignored this old friend for too long. There's my sister's marriage to cover, plus there's the tornado of thoughts that rages through my mind in these, my first few days in 'the land of the free'.

I look out through the windows of my carpeted studio apartment to see a red Ford Mustang and an equally red Honda CBR600 parked on my driveway. Yeah, no prizes for guessing that they ain't mine, at least not yet. But just taking a cab from a house where these kind of exotics are casting their divine glow keeps me constantly reminded about where I am. U.S.A, or at least what I've seen of it thus far is an exercise in lavishness. Huge open spaces, huge SUVs rumbling down the roads, pretty houses spaced so far apart that you could build two houses in between and superstores that could house at least 10 Indian bazaars. But its simple, since they have it, they might as well flaunt it.

And as opposed to the big, brash image that the country seems to project as a whole, they are incredibly polite and amazingly disciplined people. It's my first foreign country but I don't think its possible to be more well-behaved than they are without seeming artificial. If first impressions are the last impressions then it'll be difficult to overturn this one. I did run across a few 'punk'ish teens on the train to Taunton, and they were hardly angels! But if every one were really the same, it'd be really boring.

Uh! What else? It's a really beautiful place. New England is an area which is considered especially beautiful and Taunton (the town near Boston where I stay) falls within this zone. It's lush green all around, overflowing with blossoms, perfect weather and a general sense of utopia. I feel a bit like a fool with all those sweaters and woolen socks bursting out out of my suitcase but I'm told by all my American friends that winter will be a reality check for thin skinned Indians like me. Right now, it's spectacular weather with a bright sun and a cool breeze. There are so many things to say and so many things to do, so I'd better break this up here. This sure ain't my last post!

Mithapur

Imagine a children's park late on a moonless night. The swings though unoccupied sway restlessly in the strong breeze. The silhouette of the slide is against the clear, star filled sky. Underneath is soft, yielding sand and beyond the streetlights which cast their light on the park, there is only the light pouring from the distant stars. In that region of darkness, I can hear the yelps of foxes who are not visible and evidently do not want to be. On another day and in another place, I might have been a little tense but this night is different and so is this place. The rules from the concrete jungles do not apply here. And that's because just beyond where the swings are, the sands have frequent visitors. Every few seconds, waves from the depths of the Arabian Sea are paying them a courtesy call. This children's park is right on a sea beach and the intoxicating rhythm of the gentle swell of the sea plays on. Of all the images worth retaining from my trip to Mithapur, this one was the most striking.

Mithapur is a small, picturesque little town located on the blue Arabian Sea (as is its colour is - in and around Dwarka) near Dwarka in the north west coast of Gujarat. It owes its existence largely to the Tata Chemicals Limited plant there around which the entire economy seems to centre. The 3 hour drive from Jamnagar is a great one too with gradually undulating, smooth roads running through acres of open, uninhabited scrub land punctuated in intervals by wind farms. Wind farms being of course the evocative name for dozens of huge windmills standing guard over these desolate areas as they go about their dreary but essential business of generating power. The Tata colony is an example of beautiful planning and whats more, its got two private beaches of its own within its vast boundaries and a toy train that ferries kids during the summer months for a day out on the beach.

The tiny, single-platform Mithapur railway station (I refer to the real Indian Railways train now) opens out into a square situated in the heart of the Tata colony and its shopping area. This plant and its associated colony was set up in the late 1930s, and back then it must have been even more magnificent, literally the last outpost of civilization in the desolation of north Gujarat. Its the typical plant colony with complete self-sufficiency and especially distant location. Its the aspect that I appreciate most about set-ups like this. The whole thought process and effort that goes into creating something exotic like this out of scratch is astounding. The insularity of the location may be stifling for some people who are used to crowds and more variety but its a really exhilarating place for a visit. It was May when I visited but the weather was shockingly pleasant with the sea breeze making vicious summer take off on a holiday! Its difficult to describe the remoteness and beauty of the place and what an incredible dimension the waters of the bordering Arabian Sea add to it. A complete soul searching experience for me if there was ever one!