Much has been written about muses and understandably so – they are salacious tales and scandalous to boot. The recorder always faithfully documents the gratitude the artistic and literary worlds owe to these little Lolitas who, by dint of their tenderness and tautness, aided the ageing masters in their Elysian pursuits. What might have started as a fugacious fuck culminated in a lot more – usually great works and sometimes children. Nothing great about the pick-up lines though which were insipid at best: ‘I am Picasso. We will do great
As children, our parents kept me and my sisters away from adultery and blaspheme by shifting to English. So we might all be sitting around and talking about the annual day celebrations of our village school in Koko, rural Nigeria, in Malayalam. Suddenly, they would go ‘Mrs Gloria caught Miss Pereira and Mr Okay in a tight embrace in an empty staffroom,’ in English. Or, how Umma, Fr John’s sister ‘was rumoured to have slept with half the congregation.’ We pretended these little loaded nuggets went over our heads so
Alice Delices is a rare place. Besides freshly baked bread, here you find people actually talking to each other, looking at books and photographs, debating the identity of artists on the wall posters next to that of Picasso and kids rolling the good old dice. We sat on the backless benches fashioned from wood, facing each other, croissants and black coffee in front of us. James, who is running the French bakery in Alice’s absence, is hotfooting about taking orders and serving the capacity guests. He has a permanent beatific
Je ne sais quoi For all their famous hatred, the French sometimes do come to the rescue of English, the language. The word above might sound like an endearment in Mandarin but it means a wonderful ‘quality that cannot be described or named easily.’ Which means those four little words can mean everything from the reason behind the Trojan War to what Mastercard – and The Language itself – simply passes off as ‘priceless.’ I thought of this word, though I couldn’t recollect it correctly, when I met Mohana and
Take it easy, he said It all started with a valium prescription following a workout accident: I couldn’t straighten up after I put the barbell down but had to crawl on all fours and finally clamber up a chair clutching with every movable limb. That’s how the ambulance found me – sprawled like a chilling octopus. Since I didn’t scream at his random poking, the good doctor ruled out a misaligned spine, rotated innominate and a pelvic upslip. “You just take it easy,” he said giving me the valium. The
Clashing with the police, as anyone who has clashed with the police knows, is addictive. There must be some endorphin involved in the heightened sense of indignation: ‘hey jerk, I am doing your job and you are hitting me?’ Observe the frontline protesters, they are regulars. You will find many of them in gym gear or hessian tees and chappals, their wallets and mobile phones given away for safekeeping. Watch them closely and you can see their eyes glow as they go about sloganeering, stone-throwing and indulge in various acts
The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, I have been told, is a sensory whirl: the colours and sights, smells and sounds waft around you, a gripping menagerie. In Paulo Coelho’s new book, Hippie, it is a phantasm as two women – one high on LSD – weave their way out of the maze. The whole act of walking through and exiting the melee is described so vividly that one can actually share the trip. The high one sees everything as beautiful and calls everything incredible till: Finally, an idea came to
It’s like John Wick – unless you know the history, you are just looking at a brooding, pretty façade. But under the sempiternal glow of the autumn sun falling unfiltered through a cloudless sky, even the air beholds the sprawling regalia with a breathless stillness. In the boughs and boles, even those afar, one detects a hushed awe. With name and genus tags though they all look very business-like, they have wilfully succumbed to the glory in their midst. Look at the branches of the Weeping Fig for example –
Everyone thanked the sand mafia. They said it was their tireless digging up of the riverbed which enhanced its water-holding capacity which in turn enabled additional water from the dams to flow on without incident. Thank you marauders of the earth! They were joking, alright. These jokes, these badly articulated relief sighs, came wrapped in uneasy icons: shit-colour heads that smiled or winked unconvincingly. I too laughed for two reasons. One was from remembering a recidivist friend from my teenage years. Between bails the only work he’d engage in was
At the O’Coqueiro in Alto Porvorim I sat exactly where the ‘Bikini Killer’ did over 30 years ago enjoying what would be his last meal as a free man for a long time. Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj, widely known by the last two names, might have been celebrating his latest exploit. Or he was serenading somebody – one led to the other, invariably. He was so immersed in his favourite curry, the Chicken Cafreal, that he didn’t notice the posse close in on him. Wanted for the murder of
