Love and Longing in Nirmal Verma's literary world

Love! For those short sentences and the long ones with curves. Sensuality. It's exhilarating to experience someone's yearning and it tugs at memories, some familiar, some forgotten. The cold knots untie themselves when  you meet the narrative you've craved. He takes away the noise of feeling, and probes the silence.

It's not often that I let myself be hooked to a book on love and I refuse to use a pseudonym that can only snatch and tear away at the meaning, with each connotation and implied sense. I want the core, and I want it now. His language has the intensity of something that is most often fleeting. That which is inescapable, honest, and brutal yet silenced. He wins my heart. I normally, hate to use terms indicating victory or anything grand because it undercuts the fragility and indicates unwarranted strength. But, I've found this emotion in literature to be a challenge, and shied away from stories that had love somewhere lurking because of fear that it may have been dealt with frivolously.

The gaze of a young narrator feverishly desiring a friend, whose neck crevice is all that tells us about his passion, is utterly bereft of any trace of sadness. It's that intensity, and I was compelled to look for anything similar that I've read in other books (English/Hindi) but I couldn't recall, maybe Browning and Marquez. And unlike me, it's unhurried. There's cadence, rhythm, like a lingering note from Thomas Newman's music. They are tinged with longing, yearning, and he's a master at that.

The matter-of-factly tone to talk about something annoyingly depressive, such as a girl watching a couple from a distance, the man's fingers, and her incapability of expression, is charged with the author's restraint. Annoyingly so. You want to know more, and somewhere you feel he's letting you crave. He's a tease.

End

SOS - Save our Sandwich or What Happens When Colleagues Learn Skills for Hostile Situations

Day 1

So we begin at 8am, that's where the story really fleshes itself out, with little help from the narrator. If you look around, you'll see faces, some deeply expectant, some made heavy from sleep, while the rest in a corner, gleefully watching. We'll come to the corner later. There's
a heavy set man, with lips and ears protruding, and his eyelids are wide open, as if inviting combat. Some may say that he's got it right - that it is, after all, a hostile training camp. His noisy coughs punctuate the silences, as screeching door handles provide a grinding chorus. And then, we begin.

The trainers, shipped from England, are ready with tools, kits, and video clips to demonstrate life skills in dangerous situations. The expectant ones are ready with pens and notebooks, the sleepy ones shuffle in their seats, trying to angle their arses to doze off again. The ones in the corner, well, remain where they are - exercising their peripheral vision to look around.

So the first trainer, starts off with a dizzying list of things that people need to watch out for - lot of it common sense. But as they get drawn in, the room begins to carry a worn look, as people suddenly realise with rapt attention that their lives have been missing lists, medical kits and tragically, some fitness. The trainer seems to catch the aura and he begins to further unleash darker stories about people being kidnapped and perhaps even dying. The coughs continue, and papers rustle with breathtaking speed, necks jerk downwards and in the corner, a man intently gazes into oblivion, fantasising about, er, a sandwich.

He imagines flattened meat, slapped on bread with fresh vegetables and as he reaches out with his hands, a ball point pen rolls off on the floor.

Okay, all of you! The trainer announces a short breakfast and the herd makes a noisy exit, and the world returns as a fuller, sated place once again.



12:55pm

By now, everyone is struggling to balance their burps with etiquette and the medic calls out for a volunteer. All eyes dart on the floor, and the wily trainer, picks out the most sleepy from the lot and puts him flat on the floor.

While the irony is on, our man in the corner, now fully comfortable in the cosy air conditioned room, finds himself slipping, going down, easy, and there finally. Sleep comes quickly and before the person next to him has point number 5 scribbled on his notebook from the power point, a light whirring noise, like a motor, jars him.

Turning around, he spots our man, who is now sporting a zen like aura, which makes him look no less than a Munch painting (no, not Scream), if you will. The harmony soon breaks when a sharp elbow pokes into our man's dreamless paradise.


4:30pm

The day has trundled along, with reams of white cloth spread on the floor, fake broken bones crying for relief and fake blood doing the rounds. As gory real-life incidents play out on screen, the mood resembles a tragedy, with people forgetting about medicine, and contemplating suicide.

Our man in the corner, who has now downed four cups of tea, and smoked an equal number of cigarettes, pledges to himself that he will conquer humanity's troubles by er, volunteering? No, no, he shrugs off the thought as soon it is about to perch on his head. Like a victor approaching an open arena, he broadens his shoulders, looks around and pledges one percent of his salary to the animal NGO, which had last week sent him letters to save donkeys suffering in brick factories of Nepal.

All right, everyone! See you tomorrow! The trainer's booming voice brings the curtains down.

anger

Ultimately, you don't want to be seen spewing words in a fit of rage. Isn't that something Godfather taught us? Isn't that what every monk teaches too, ironically. However, words come easy at a time when things have rather cooled off and not boiled and brimmed over, scalding all those who touch us.

It's during such moments that we must (me, in this case) just let it all pass, even if that means not talking to anyone for we might just step on the gas and speed away to our own personal disaster. It is rather rich to just sit back and condemn those who do so. My message to those who are camping at the edge, is to just pull yourself away from it all, and not be tempted to think backwards. The reason simply being that under acidic conditions, the solution is red.

let me conclude...


let me do this for you
for you would frown
as if it would spoil,
your emphatic progress
to new lives, meanings
a dirty ol' memory
must be hidden
must not be touched
concluded as it were
in memory alone
but since when did silence
and time together
weaken truths and bonds like these
for you, i'll wish the same as i did then
don't be ridiculous, and get some peace!

The workaholic

Perhaps the pen is stifling you
Don't roll it inside your mouth
Not as if a less exotic gesture
might fail to create the impression
of a workaholic.

Don't dance around so much
it is what it is
your enthusiasm
mangles up your concentration
or some such

don't dangle around the desk
it's not a park, missy
collect your gaze, not your hair
to the perennial shapeshifters
in a workplace

the fork comes out soon enough
while noon has begun settling in
the shades carry a dull shine
don't mock his penchant
because it eventually works out

Every evening, when you step out
he greets you with a ritualistic smile
Like a monk in a new role
same fervour, new clothes

The miscellaneous little froth, and ice
a glint, and a lemon squeeze
the intuitive organiser
a workaholic.

Rohan: So... what did the monumental debate on life, love and everything conclude?
Sent at 14:24 on Wednesday
me: a bill of 1100

a blink's perspective

The two men sat on the yellow bench. They had their trousers rolled up, while the flies buzzed close to the ears, the slow humming barely veiling the sharp jutting sounds of the chopper above them. The roof above was scarcely making sounds when the wind slowly catapulted some dust into their eyes.

"It's an old tree," said one of them to the other.

"Here she comes. She's been asking about that boy since morning. Just look at all of them, trying to get the things in order. Make that entry," he said.

They both were in the early 40s, short, cropped hair, writing names in their registers of men, women, children, old ones, who had been charred to death in the airplane crash four days ago.

"Don't ask me again, madam. I told you," said one of them.

The woman in front of them, in her late 40s, looking haggard without sleep, had been looking for her son, just like the whole milieu behind her, slowly snuffing out hope alongside embers of the aircraft's remains.

The gigantic turf where the plane had crashed, left little to the imagination of the horror that skewered lives.

The palm tree above the plane looked as it lost a meek struggle to the machine, with its leaves mangled into the left wing.

The mini mountain of ash brewing smoke had looked too difficult to douse, but the locals had come to the rescue, even as a handful survived.

Among the survivors was a child, a four-year old girl, who had lost her parents in a blink. The sight looked familiar, of those many such accidents where people have only found hope and communion in tragedies like this.