Because

Hallelujah!

and now, for…

confession #1:
a priest on a bicycle is quite a sight!

confession #2:  
in Rome, at the Trinita dei Monti, a Baroque church,
i recorded the gregorian chant of a holy choir
with a secret little stick of a machinery.

until today, the voices haunt and awe me.
like a fear of the Lord.
like a joy in the Lord.
a trembling and a settling down.

O sing unto the Lord a new song: sing unto the Lord, all the earth.
- Psalm 96:1

Je t’aime! ♥

to do even a wee bit of Europe satisfyingly in a month turned out to be overly ambitious. it has so much to offer! in that short time span, my memory gathered a flurry of song, dance, excellent coffee and art. all of these which share a common quality — that of being so highly addictive. could i ask for more? yes, yes and yes!

a) musicians, Barcelona
b) Gaudi museum, Barcelona
c) cafe, Barcelona
d) cafe, Barcelona
e) Dali museum, Barcelona
f) busker, Barcelona
g) metro, Madrid
h) St. Isidro festival, Madrid
i) bullfight, Madrid
j) night music and dance, Madrid 
k) train ride, Paris
l) Venus de Milo, Paris
m) Eiffel, Paris
n) singer, Rome
o) bicycle, Pisa
p) gifts for my ladies, Singapore
(hehe.. nicely hand-wrapped too because i couldn’t wait to try out the new letter stamp from London!)

Europe + London = ♥♥♥!!!

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but time changes everything. if i move the hands of the clock 5 hours forward, there is a place close to my heart that is aching and is far from love. i stole away occasional news headlines on the planes where there were free papers. and good news often doesn’t make news. 

“Everything okay?”
“Okay,” Jamil says.
“Okay,” in all the English he can muster up.
(and courage, too) 
“Everything okay?” he asks back.
“O… kay.”

Pakistan = ♥♥♥

 *

In other news, The God of Small Things has been a great vacation companion, how can it not be loved? and why had i not read it much, much earlier? in any case the sights and sounds of a pretty land far off are now trapped within its pages — not too bad a thing, yes? ;)

The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.

- Arundhati Roy

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still, there is a season for joy and indulgences ♥

A) white hot chocolate from Whittard of Chelsea is a dream come true!
B) and its traditional biscuits make two dreams come true!
C) Succour magazine is “Granta for the Facebook generation” according to Time Out. am neither a fan of Granta nor Facebook, but this is still nonetheless one of the more amazing discoveries from the remarkable Shakespeare & Co. 
D) in Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Adrian Tomine draws out the nuances of the isolations of modern life. and makes them beautiful.
E) Phoenix croons in Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, “where would you go / where would you go / with a lasso?” how not to love such a rhyme? ;) heard the album at the legendary Rough Trade and it’s been hard to get it out of my mind since!
F) and finally, before Elliot Smith there was Nick Drake and a gorgeous Pink Moon.

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Don’t be shy you learn to fly
And see the sun when day is done
If only you see
Just what you are beneath a star
That came to stay one rainy day
In autumn for free
Yes, be what you’ll be
- Things Behind the Sun, Nick Drake 

earth

India (though not particularly Mumbai) and Pakistan are places i’ve grown to adore. it makes sense to defeat sinners, but what is disheartening is how a whole country gets tarnished by a few black sheep. in Pakistan, their faith makes them extremely gentle and tolerant beings, and the men are just like any uncle at the coffeeshop wanting a good cuppa after a hard day’s work. but nobody today is going to have such a naive idea of them. and i can almost easily say all of that now after having an experience myself. for many who read about the deaths by terror though, the savageness is hard not to get angry about.

all wars are political and god is a most convenient excuse. as tighter security and defenses are put up, they are eventually local solutions to the universal problem of guns and bullets. a snippet from the nytimes that sums up our tomorrow:

“I am ashamed to say this,” Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. “As the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow.”

that window

here’s an incident behind this window i would only tell after returning home safely (mum reads..) and also because i can pretty much laugh about it now. it happened at a a cathedral in Pakistan where i had met a caretaker who brought me all the way up to the 4th storey. the climb was pretty rough because of the stairs, they were more like ladders actually, that were wooden and sleek. but upon reaching the attic it definitely paid off – it was beautifully rustic. structured with angled planks and having no electricity whatsoever, it was largely dark with light coming in only from the arched windows. there were also lots of little nestlings of birds around with their eggs so it was a quite a sight to me then. i was blissfully shooting the treasure of the place when the caretaker started behaving strangely and i pretended not to understand his advances, to which he then switched his demands to money. “400, you have?” he asked. “300?” i ignored him and pretended to shoot. then he started stretching out his hands, as if words were not enough, hand-signaled to me my options: 1) money (a twitch of the thumb against index finger) or 2) kiss (pointed to lips). of course by this time i was infuriated with the lack of choice. and by his intention of wanting to get something out of me all along. and most of all because of my unfamiliarity with the dark attic i could not preempt what he might pull up next. so i actually screamed “I WILL JUMP DOWN THIS DAMN WINDOW IF YOU COMIN’ NEAR ME!!!” then peered down to realise fact #1) that it was high, and fact #2) no bushes in sight. discovering the folly of my sentence, i pretty much dashed to the exit point, jelly legs and all, and shuffled down the ladder-stairs with what initially took us 20 mins to get up, fear allowed me to make it down in 5. back on the ground level of the sanctuary, the ass of the caretaker pretended nothing happened, straightened his back and asked, “bible? see?” i looked at him like he was the greatest sinner on earth. then walked away. now this hasn’t made me want to stop exploring places on my own, but i have since been seriously considering a pepper spray.

dissonance

haven’t been home for a year — first 6 months discovering another time and place, next 6 months thinking of the gone time and place. if i knew it would be so hard to recover….. i still wouldn’t trade it for the world.

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ONE ART
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Child

getting all the texts, texts, texts into my head — principles, history and airy-fairy theory — makes me realise that the single most consistent achievement i’ve had so far is this very mere getting through of the system. for 17 years of an education i did as i should. apart from the system, there might have been minor accomplishments at some points, but at most points, major errors of inconsistency in following up with them — just about one of my biggest flaws, this short attention span. good time to think about what i really want as i graduate next year. when the only thing i’ve steadily had to strive for has been exhausted. what can i do for the next 17 years, unchangingly, with a willed promise of full commitment?

(perhaps that’s why travel is so enduring. you tear all the rules of obligation to bits and stash them into a little box, then so defiantly fling it out of the air plane — celebrate the irresponsibility of pleasure, vice-versa. a temporary euphoria that’s deceptively charming of course, as you get back home to an air-parceled box seating pretty at your doorstep – that dreaded box! – and open it to see those shredded pieces. a kind of puzzle you used to do and have pretty much forgotten how to, now demands your attention. then repeat cycle, again, again and again.)

Mirrors vs. money

“Look, there are more mirrors here than all the money in India!” Shinda points out the intricate workmanship inside the Lal Devi temple. He lives in Amritsar City and is a Roman-Catholic, “That’s how I learnt to speak English, at the pews,” he says. Not without good humour he gripes that “in India all the money goes into building temples, so I’m still rickshaw man!” Ironically he brings me into two temples thereafter — whether Hindu or not, they inevitably can’t help but feel a huge sense of pride for their majestic monuments.

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