Chronicle Of A Bike Trip

As I have probably already mentioned (in fact I know damn’ well I mentioned it) one of the way I de-stress is by taking long drives on my bike. Sadly, not often enough. This trip, though, I planned over a week ago. Companion: Sim.
Was supposed to leave at 10.30 am. Accordingly, I made sure my appointments were restricted to 10am and before. Actually, Sim told me he would be late…apparently he would be busy before that with one of his numerous girlfriends, whom I call by the generic term Surpanakhas (those with knowledge of Hindu mythology will know whom I am talking about). So, we changed the time of leaving to 11am. On the other hand, my patients turned up with commendable but far too rare punctuality, so I actually finished before 10. And, since there is a barbershop just opposite, filled in the time by getting a haircut.
OK, let’s get this over with. Question: Why do I get those "awful" boule a zerohaircuts? Answer: 1. Because I like them, that’s why. 2. They camouflage my balding spot. I’d rather go skinhead than bald. 3. With that haircut I don’t have to notice the increasing number of silver hairs tinting the sides of my head. Happy now?
So, Sim turned up at ten minutes to eleven and we left right away. The plan was to go up to Mawkdok Gorge and return. I had been almost up to Mawkdok before on the bike (and, of course, far beyond it by car) and knew it could get freezing. Also, rain might come down, as it had on every one of the past few days, so I had made Sim wear warm clothes and carry a raincoat. I too had put on unseasonably warm clothing (and the oldest and toughest pair of shoes I had) and over that I’d worn the uppers of my rubberised nylon motorcycle overalls. The bottom half was in my pannier.
We hadn’t carried any food with us, since the original plan had been to return and eat in town. What we had was our mobiles (which would be pretty damn’ useless as mobiles since our Airtel connections ceased to find any network coverage almost immediately when we left the city limits on this side. I had not even much money on me, just about a hundred rupees (a fact I discovered when we were already on the way, having forgotten to visit the ATM). But we did have most of a tankful of fuel and a recently fully serviced bike.
Well, then, let’s go along on the trip:
We set off. Time: 11am. Weather: cloudy, but clouds breaking up, and warm. Traffic: very light, since today is not just Sunday but also Vishwakarma Puja. Both Hindus and Christians would tend to stay home. Other religions are not present in this state in numbers great enough to matter.
Up and beyond the Air Force station at which I will no longer work in a couple of weeks’ time. I want to stop and photograph the two static displays I missed earlier, a MiG 21 and a Folland Gnat, but decide to save that for another time. Possibly on the way back, let’s get on and take advantage of the good weather. Cast a longing glance at two Mi 17 helicopters parked on the helipad. Wonderful if only I could photograph them. Almost impossible, the stupid bureaucracy wouldn’t allow it though I could find 1000 photos on the net in seconds. Never mind. On.
Mylliem, where two guys, Jormanik Syiem and Laborious Manik Syiem, are at each other’s throats, legally speaking, to be the chief. What a godforsaken little village. Who on earth would want to live in such a place, let alone want to be chief at any cost?
By now it’s quite warm. We stop and take a photo of a quarry, share a couple of toffees. These quarries are all around, some new, some old. Some have wreaked havoc on the hills. Who cares? Not the quarry owners, certainly. There are terraces too, and I want to take photos. On the way back, I decide.
As we drive on, the weather becomes even warmer, except for a gusting wind. My bike is just 125cc, it has a difficult time making the slopes at more than 40km per hour without straining the engine. I should ideally have something with an engine of at least 500cc for drives like this. Someday…
Three buses overtake us. They are probably Assam Rifles, paramilitary at any rate. The first two are in olive green and the third in ochre yellow. They rush past , almost forcing us off the road. Bastards.
Something – a large insect, probably a wasp – bounces off my helmet visor at eye level with a hard click. The road is now better and easier, and we are making better time. Ah, there is our old friend the yellow bus parked at the roadside. Broken down? Don’t expect us to show you sympathy, you nearly forced us off the road. Zoom on by, and soon enough past the other two, grinding uphill in low gear. Now I’m doing about sixty or seventy when the road is flat, but I’m not comfortable on narrow roads at that speed, so I slow down when it begins getting curvy. And here is the Dawki bridge, finally complete! Hallelujah! Who would ever have thought it?
Mawjrong. Mawkdok Gorge has to be just ahead. Once I had been offered a job at Mawjrong, had spent a day there being showed around, but the offer had been mysteriously withdrawn. This is also as far as I’ve ever been on this road on the bike. Zoom on past. Ah, the D-for-someone-or-other Sing Syiem Bridge. There is a sort of viewing stand here on the bridge, but I know a better view of the gorge is just ahead. We stop, take photos. The gorge is superb. Also the light is excellent for photography. The three buses roar past, yellow seems to have caught up. We’ve made excellent time, too. Also the weather’s great. Do we go on or turn back? Up ahead is Sohra (also called Cherrapunjee, allegedly the wettest place on earth though I looked in the Guinness Book Of World Records in vain), we’re almost halfway already, and I’d always wanted to bike to Sohra. Why not? Sim says OK. Can we eat there, though? All right, we’ll starve long enough to come back and eat.
Go on. Now we are on roads I’m not particularly familiar with, it’s been a good seven years since I was in Sohra last. We pass the buses again, yellow is on the roadside. Must have a really weak engine.
Little villages with names like Marbaniang and Laitjynrew. One after the other, like beads on a string. In between, flat eroded land. Once this was all oak forest, but the British cleared them for timber, and the rain washed the topsoil away. Now there is nothing left except grass and boulders, it’s a true desert. The wettest on earth, perhaps.
The buses cross us again. Let them. The road is suddenly worse. It is impossible to avoid all the potholes, but Sohra is near. In fact, I can see the Ramakrishna Mission Centre I’d visited the last time I was here. Not that I have any intention of visiting it again, but I still stop and take a photo. We do not enter the town. We bypass it to the south, so we arrive at a point on the road where we can see the Mawsmai Falls. There is a viewing platform ahead but it’s not free, and as I said I hadn’t much on me. We stop. I take off the helmet to take photos and find a large insect sitting on it. It’s an insect I’ve never seen before, with the body of a wasp but legs of a grasshopper, and dark brown. I want to take a photo of it, but it flies off just as I press the shutter. I delete the photo. Take three photos of the falls. Only the first is worth keeping.
Now. No further, we need to go back. I turn the bike and Sim gets on, we begin on the return journey.
On the way, we see these falls whose name I do not know. Far prettier than Mawsmai, also far more easily visible than the former. We stop, I take photos and a short video. Sim waits till the road is free of traffic and urinates. When we go on, a small beetle begins walking on my helmet visor on a level with my eyes. I have to flick it away. I like beetles, hope I did not hurt it. But what is it today with my helmet and insects?
Here is a place where from the road we can see, to the south, Bangladesh’s plains spread like a carpet against the sky. Stop again, take photos and hope they come out OK. Mist is beginning to appear on the hills. Also, I’m beginning to get rather hungry, and Sim is too.
Ah, in one of the nameless villages, there’s an eatery open. Certainly not Christian owned. But the dying tribal religion, Niam Tre, still has adherents. We stop, and eat. Rice and pork. No one here in the boondocks has heard of vegetarian food. By now the sky is clouding over. In fact, it’s darkling. Better get on as fast as we can. No time to think of photographing what we missed on the trip out.
We pass a group of men on the roadside. I’d swear we passed them on the way out, sitting in the same place. WTF? Nothing better to do? So long there is a sack of rice in the house, there is nothing lazier than the village tribal. Yet some of them would undoubtedly possess high intelligence. But here, without schools or hospitals, what chance of flowering of intelligence? Even a shopping trip would be a major expedition for them, thirty kilometres at least to the nearest town.
The mist comes down, thick. Off to the left there is a thick white vertical flash of lightning. I suggest Sim puts on his raincoat, he refuses, says his light sweater is warmer. I stop when the road’s already wet and put on my overall bottoms. We are already up to Mawkdok again, but the clouds now hang heavy. Sim puts his mobile phone in my backpack for protection, and takes one last photo, of me in my biker getup. We just make it to Mawjrong before the rain begins in earnest. We stop again and Sim finally puts on his raincoat. He stuffs his sweater in the backpack, wrapping my digital camera in it so it remains dry. His rainwear is longer and better than mine, but then it is a raincoat; mine is a waterproof biker overall. He has a ridiculous rain hat, actually a woman’s, with a little plastic visor. Has to be held on, the fastenings are gone.
Oh my word the rain is crashing down now. We pass some vehicles coming the other way. I have to drive slowly because I can’t see. The raindrops come down like bullets, exploding like miniature bombs on my visor. They slash at my hands and chest so hard they are painful right through the overalls. Sheets of water fly up from the wheels, my shoes are now full of water, and I grow concerned about my mobile and digicam. No way to check in this deluge.
Mylliem. And, wonder of wonders, the rain slackens almost to a stop. We make better time. And now we’re already up to the Air Force again, and the streets are totally dry! Not a drop of rain anywhere, people walking along the streets with not one unfurled umbrella! Yet we pass on towards town and a half kilometre away the rain is back, worse than ever before. How could I have thought what came before was bad? I think I can feel my shirt soaked to the chest, and my trousers and underpants are undoubtedly wet through my overall bottoms. The rain is so hard and the light so bad I switch my headlights on. We are in town now, but no respite. I have never been out in rain this hard before. Is it trying to compensate for the awful drought we had all summer? It’s like standing under an open tap. I think if someone squeezes me, I’ll exude water.
Home neighbourhood. Drop Sim to his house, park the bike and wait while he takes his stuff from my backpack and wraps my digicam in a polythene packet. And now homewards. The rain is worse than ever before. Somehow, park and over the bike. Enter and leave wet puddles on the floor. What a pleasure to take one’s shoes and socks off! Hot coffee. Not a drop of water on mobile or digicam, thank whatever-it-is. Whoof.
Drove about 112 kilometres in all. And – oh yes – the rain slackened directly I’d got home. Of bloody course.
Fun. I wonder if Sim thinks so too.

Confession Time: I'm a killer

From Jan 2007

There is something that has been preying on my mind for going on thirteen years now, and I'd like to talk about it publicly and let it rest.
Back when I was in medical college (in picture), as a raw intern, I had to do a stint in the emergency department. One day in spring (and Lucknow in spring gets pretty hot) when the temperature was already touching 40 degrees, we had this young man come in with severe pain in his leg. he was a migrant worker and unaccompanied. Remember I was a raw intern, totally inexperienced. I had a kind of suspicion that he just might be suffering from deep vein thrombosis of the leg, which is a potentially fatal condition. I was also alone. There was supposed to be a medical officer supervisor (it was against regulations to leave all admissions in the hands of a solitary intern) but he had failed to show up. So it was my call. Now deep vein thrombosis is somewhat in the nature of a rara avis and I did not, obviously, want to make a fool of myself. So, I played safe and referred him to the Medicine department. There was supposed to be a wheelchair available to take him there but  as usual under the administration we had in the college at the time (so incompetent it might've given Bush a lesson in incompetence) the wheelchair was inoperative and there was no one to bear a stretcher. Ultimately the guy walked off by himself to the Medicine department (1.5km in 40 degrees), reached there, collapsed (it was deep vein thrombosis) and died soon after. I've tried telling myself it was not fair to expect a junior intern to be able to handle this sort of thing unsupervised and alone, but still I remain morally convinced that I killed the man.
And that is not the worst of it, oh no.
You see, when the medical officer in the Medicine department came to ask just who had sent the man to walk all the way there and die on arrival, I kept my mouth shut. There was no signature on the referral form (it was the emergency medical officer's job), so "nobody" was to blame. Case closeed.
I am not just a killler. I am a coward as well.

Responses:

delete reply extrascentsory wrote on Jan 13, '07 Killer? Or victim of circumstance. It was the system that killed the man, not you. People die needlessly in fancily equipped U.S. hospitals all the time and not a day goes by, it seems, without a story about pharmaceutical side effects killing people. That's why I gave up on allopathic medicine a long time ago and rely on alternative therapies. So don't be so hard on yourself, Bill. The fact that you have a conscience is your salvation.

delete reply ladycmog wrote on Jan 13, '07 i am positive that you are not and the fact that this still remains in your mind and heart proves that.

delete reply xiasiubao wrote on Jan 13, '07 You should read "The House of God," if you haven't already. One of the things that people don't understand is that doctors become the amazing godlike creatures we expect them to be by learning AFTER they leave medical school, when they're in internship and residency, and yes, they make mistakes, and yes, they kill people. Not deliberately, of course. And yes, a supervisor is supposed to try to make sure their bad judgment calls don't become fatal mistakes, but as you saw, that requires a level of competence that even the supervisors aren't held to. The thing is, they redeem themselves later with the lives they save by using the knowledge gained. It doesn't bring back the dead, I grant you. But still it matters. If you had it to do differently what would you change? The wheelchair didn't work. You didn't have the ability or knowledge to treat him where you were, given that deep vein thrombosis isn't a common diagnosis in a strong young man and you would have been hung out to dry if you'd treated him for that and it turned out to be a muscle strain. You learned from it. You will never make that mistake again. And that's all you can do.

delete reply ladycmog wrote on Jan 13, '07 there is a somewhat relevant article in the decmber issue of national geographic regarding medical interns in iraq called 'iraq war medicine' (http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0612/index.html) that might be of interest to you...

edit delete reply dockbillin wrote on Jan 13, '07, edited on Jan 13, '07 Yes, the fact is that I was afraid I'd send him in for deep vein thrombosis and it would turn out to be cramps brought on by dehydration, which is what we'd expect in a navvy working in hot weather. I had no desire to hear jeers about young medical graduates who thought they knew everything. Thanks, everyone, anyway. At least, yes, I will not make that mistake again.

delete reply wizengeeky wrote on Jan 13, '07 i agree with extrascentsory.... its the system that killed the man. and your blaming yourself even after all this years, is bit too harsh. i know conscience weighs heavily on anybody, and doctors usually see more cases of this than i suspect say engineers... and besides, it was a case that "could" have been prevented. some things although not easy to let go, serve no purpose staying on as residue. perhaps its time to move on... because you have admitted something that means a lot to you, even though it doesn't seem like a very heroic thing in your eyes. it takes courage to admit to cowardice (i still think admitting itself is brave). i hope that now, you will leave this past behind and move on.

delete reply sujay1984 wrote on Jan 29, '07 poor guy

The weirdest way to murder a rat

I don't think anyone is going to cap this one.

Back when I was fourteen years old, we had a lot of rats running around the house. One day - it was a school holiday, at about ten in the morning - I found a rat, quite a large one, in my bedroom. I called my dad, we shut the room's doors and windows, and began hunting that rat. Amazingly, we could not find it, and we looked everywhere. Not a sign.

Well, after an hour of fruitless effort (we really had a lot of time on our hands) we decided that the rat had got away somehow, so we opened the door and windows and I went off to the library. I returned after a couple of hours, rather tired (the library was a fair way to walk and it was very hot that day) and sat down on my bed to relax. As I was taking my shoes off I felt something move under my butt. I jumped up, pulled off the bedspread, and there was the rat, gasping out its life. It must have thought that was an excellent hiding place, in my bed. Unfortunately, it stayed there a sight too long. I'd sat down bang on it and crushed its chest...

I don't know how many more people have killed rats by sitting on them. My feat might even be unique.

Damn it, where are the Guinness Book people when you need them?

Words and my life

I have always been a loner. This is an integral part of who and what I am, and it’s gone a long, long way in shaping my creative work. I would not be who and what I am if I were the gregarious type. Perhaps all only children are like me in that respect.

I was born in a family of readers. That’s one positive in my start of life. Another, I believe, was that I was born early enough that I got into the habit of reading before TV arrived in this part of the country. I was all of twelve before television became a part of our lives (that was during the Asian Games of 1982), and by that time I was already much more interested in the written word than in the televised image.

My family was pure middle class and had that classic failing of the Bengali middle class – it discouraged its members from trying for too much. Anything out of the ordinary was “too much”. So reading books was fine; writing them was not. Aspiring to fame was for other people – not for one’s own members, and attempting to set out to seek the limits of one’s own capabilities was never encouraged. But that came later.

I first realised I liked to write back in school. My school teachers made us read and submit book reports; they also made us write essays. These essays had most of us sweating to produce a coherent piece, but not I – I enjoyed writing them, and, although they were undoubtedly primitive products (heavily influenced by Enid Blyton’s child detectives like the Five Find Outers series), they did get more elaborate and less derivative with time. Those days however I never thought of actually writing for public distribution in any form – the writing was just to satisfy class requirements. The middle class upbringing, remember – creativity was suspicious; what mattered was grades, creativity could go to hell. Grades were the route to success.

(Incidentally, a few years ago I met one of my old teachers. She told me she still keeps some of my old essays and uses them as a demonstration to her current lot of students on how to write. I don’t know whether I should believe that.)

I may possibly never have taken the step forward to writing semi-professionally except that a couple of my classmates wrote comic poems lampooning one of our teachers when we all were in the eighth standard. I decided to try my hand as well, and to my enormous surprise my version proved rather more popular among the classsamizdat than the other two (one of the two others is Siddhartha Deb, now a successful novelist in his own right). For months afterwards I hesitated to write any more, simply because I was so certain I could never cap my own first effort, before I said to myself “the hell with it” and when the next idea came along I went ahead and wrote it down. It was another poem lampooning the same teacher. Poor guy.

Real writing only came to me in college. Those were the days when I finally had a small but receptive audience, comprising people like me who had no friend network and no social life at all. My first story that really was a story, a coherent piece written not as a class essay but for the pleasure of writing, was something called Terminal Velocity. I still count an updated and revised version of it among my better works. Around that time I was still writing – with a ball point pen in an old ledger. Sometimes I would write on loose foolscap sheets which I would pass around. I am still grateful to those friends of mine, all of them long since lost touch with, because if they had laughed at my efforts I may well have given up right there.

Although I was writing some stories at the time, most of my output was poetry. Some of it was cringeworthy. Some of it was – even re-reading it now – quite high standard. But most of it, when I read it now, shows a lonely, wistful, and utterly immature boy trying to make things come true in his life by wishing it were so.

That was also a deeply unhappy time of my life in a lot of ways. I was obese, lonely, deeply depressed, and all this culminated in three failed suicide attempts over the course of a week, one of which put me in a coma in hospital for four days. I recovered, and that was a turning point in my life in a lot of ways. I lost weight – 21 kilograms – and I began to write much more coherently, and more to the point, though much less often. This was also the time I went away to study dentistry in Lucknow and there was almost no chance to write creatively there and no one to show one’s writing to. I did enter one creative writing contest, and produced what I still count as one of my great works (unfortunately I have no copy of it). I did not win – one of the judges told me later he could not make head nor tail of what I’d written. Whatever.

After leaving medical college I had another crisis period of lack of self belief but it was at the time that I began writing. I had no readers, but I had a typewriter (remember what those things were like?) and I used to bang out stories on sheets of paper that I still have. I have retained some of those stories, though in every case where I did, I’ve changed them so much they bear little resemblance to the original. Most of them were severely downbeat and reflected my inner tensions of the period. Then I got busy with my clinic, which was then new and which needed a lot of effort – and my writing suffered. It almost stopped. I wrote maybe two or three poems a year, nothing more, and even those poems were unambiguously rubbish.

In early 2001 I took a correspondence course in creative writing. I never got beyond the first module, but it taught me an extremely valuable lesson. Creative writing courses are rubbish. You can’t teach anyone how to write without turning them into a derivative, monotonous hack. I’m profoundly glad I never completed that course.

From 2001 to 2003 I was a moderately regular freelance writer for the magazine Eastern Panorama. It isn’t much of a magazine, and it paid a miserable pittance, but I needed to recoup my investment in that creative writing course and this was all I could think of. I wrote articles on everything from vermicomposting to piggeries to terrorism, not to mention the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club – some articles got published, some didn’t, the editor tried to skate out of paying whenever he could, and in 2003, when he refused to print an article on SARS he himself had commissioned, I stopped writing for him. His loss.

It was only when I wrote my debut novel, Rainbow’s End that I began writing regularly again. I still wonder at the drive that got me to finish it. I never would have done if I hadn’t acquired this computer. I was writing on paper in between patients (I had a much less busy practice in those days) and I used to transcribe it on the computer after work. These days I prefer writing directly on MS Word.

Once the novel was finished I began another, Fidayeen, which is stuck half way through. I will finish it though. I just don’t know when. In the meantime I’m concentrating on short stories, which I feel is a wise choice. Short stories are an excellent way of tightening up one’s writing skills and avoiding the kind of verbal diarrhoea that contaminates my earlier writing.

You understand this, of course – I’m not committed to a career as a dentist. If it were only possible to make a living as a full-time author, I would, with no hesitation. But in this country, it isn’t. Not yet. And with the rapacious publishers and the absence of a market, it’s unlikely that I shall ever be able to unless I emigrate. And that is not easy.

Somewhere along the way I lost my upbringing. What this means is that I was no longer bound by the teaching that I should concentrate on being a wage slave and that creativity isn’t something the likes of me should aspire to. I feel especially vindictive towards my father about this point at times when I think about it. He was always dismissive when it came to my writing efforts, and by my mid-teens I’d stopped showing him anything I wrote.

Where do I get my ideas? They come. Some breed from things I have observed, or heard of. Some just jump out at me – more about them in a moment. Some are of the genre of “what if” – what if such and such happened? What if a fighter plane crashed in your backyard (hey! Now there’s a story!)? What if your head suddenly began growing horns? What if…

I get two kinds of story ideas. There is what I call the “slow idea” – this comes little by little, and I may not know exactly how a story will turn out when I begin writing it. This sort needs days to complete, and requires a lot of effort and sweat. Also this is not the sort of story I find personally satisfying. However, my readership seems to prefer these stories.

The other sort of inspiration I get is the “brainstorm”. These stories spring out at me, complete and entire, with just the necessity of tweaking a phrase here and polishing a sentence there in the process of getting it down, which I normally do in one session. I have learned to get down to writing as soon as I get a brainstorm, if at all I can – if I wait too long the inspiration fades and I end with another slow idea that needs much developing. For brainstorms I have sacrificed sleep, food and workouts – many times. And brainstorm stories I find personally much more satisfying.

It is of course not just stories and poetry that I write. Most of my output is still social comment, some of it certainly controversial, and a lot of it is politics. I am deeply involved in the online anti-Bush/anti-war movement, both of which amount to the same thing these days. But on the whole, when I can write about something in the form of fiction, I prefer to do so rather than compose an essay on it.

Ultimately, I write for myself, not for a market. Also I write for my online readership and for anyone who has spent a few minutes of his or her time on what I have created. These words are my children – and I have to thank you all, whoever you are, for standing midwives at their birth.

Even if they are monsters.

The evolution of my musical tastes

From 2008

I belong to an odd generation.

You’ve got to understand something. Back when I was a kid, there was not much music I could appreciate to be had. Hell, I can remember the old vinyl LPs. That’s what it was like back in the seventies. And that music was stuff I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, then or now – wailing “devotional” music and so on, mostly Bengali or rarely Hindi, which was even worse, because I couldn’t then speak the language. The only one from those days I remember as worth the recollecting was Lal Kamal-Neel Kamal, a fairy tale about two princes, one human and one half-demon, who take it on themselves to rid a kingdom of man-eating demons. I can still recite most of it verbatim, for what it’s worth.

Anyway, those were also the days when there simply wasn’t much money around in my family (for reasons some of you already know and the rest of you will know when I decide I can put up a blog about it), and the middle class Bengali household, in any case, was loath to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary. One of the standard excuses my family used for not buying a tape recorder was ”Nobody sings in this family, so why should we buy one?” I finally got a player of my own when I was eighteen. I still have it, though cassettes are obsolete and I haven’t turned it on for years.

Oh, and then it happened, I got turned onto that artificial construct of lip-synch and pretension, only I didn’t know it then, BoneyM. Hell, I thought they were – to use a word I hate – awesome. But that was then.

You must understand, those of you who aren’t Indian. In those days, the early to mid eighties, one had to wait a whole month for fifteen minutes of what was referred to as “western music” – which was usually played around midnight, unannounced, and figured such staggeringly famous luminaries of the music scene as Dschingis Khan or Sabrina. You’ve never heard of them? Well, you could google.

So when I finally acquired some money of my own and could buy my own music I was fairly indiscriminate in my choices. I’d never heard any of this before, you see, and I hadn’t really heard of many of them before, either. It was buy, hear, and then pick and choose your favourites. Some of the stuff was fairly good, although I no longer listen to it, like Lobo, for instance, or Pet Shop Boys, or the acme of camp, Queen. Some of it was pure gold. I bought Meat Loaf, for instance, without ever having heard of him before, and he’s still one of my favourites (but then I still listen to the Beatles sometimes, I must confess).

Well, fairly obviously, I had to buy what was on offer, and what was on offer at the time was what most people would buy. So most of what I ended up buying was slow rock (some of which was good) and pop (most of which I learned to despise early on). I could only find hard rock and rap in the late eighties and early nineties, and I got tuned on to Meat Loaf, Scorpions, and the Strolling Bones, sorry, the Rolling Stones, and so on. I never really liked reggae – to this day, the only reggae that gives me any pleasure, apart from Bob Marley, is Inner Circle’s Whatever Happened To My Garden Of Black Roses. Country – one exposure to Kenny Rogers and Lucille turned me off country for life. Rap of the time – I can take it or leave it. Mostly I leave it. And as for hip-hop, I’ve told you all what I think of it here.

So, for years, my musical tastes basically revolved round (mostly) hard rock. I thought it was getting, like, set in stone. But in these last months I find myself getting sick and tired of the boy-chases-girl repeat motif. In fact I’m getting so sick of it that it turns me off right away ( I don’t know about gangsta rap. Maybe they talk about other things, but I can’t understand a word anyway).

And concomitantly I’m getting turned on to thrash metal, including rediscovering bands like Motörhead and Metal Church which I’d heard sing before but not taken to. Yeah, metal groups have been accurately described as "skinny men with big hair and tight pants", and I'd laughed my ass off when I read that back in 1991 - but they seem to be the only genre any more that talks, as a whole, about social issues and war and so on. Well, I’m taking to them now.

Better late than never, I suppose.       

  

The Time Machine: Bill at 16

I wonder sometimes if I should feel jealous.

I keep coming across teenagers online who agonise endlessly over whether they should lose/should have lost their virginity. I keep coming across endless agonising over sexuality and attractiveness. And I remember -

I remember back when I was sixteen and starting what was then junior college (nowadays it’s been reclassified as high school). I was obese, unattractive, aware of my unattractiveness, but still full of the surging hormones one gets at that age (I am a human being, after all). There were, of course, no girls in my college (I’d never sat down with a girl in the same classroom, something I talked about in earlier blog posts). So my exposure to the female sex was...let’s say...less than ideal.

And when I met a girl, I’d have killed for an appreciative look. Just a look. Not a touch, not a kiss, and as for sex, I’d never thought beyond masturbation.

Without being falsely modest, I have above average intelligence. This helped in driving home to me just how unlikely it was that someone in my position would ever be able to get anywhere with the other sex. And it also made it cruelly clear to me that there were not too many girls around who were remotely on the same wavelength as me as far as thought processes were concerned.

Ah, but those raging hormones...

There was a girl who lived in a house not far from ours. She also studied in a college (a girls’ college, naturally) not too far from mine. These colleges were a good long way (some three kilometres’ walk) from home. Since both colleges started classes at about the same time, we both left home about the same time and naturally we found that we were walking along more or less together.

Now I knew this girl. She – and her sister – were very pretty but had, you know, nothing upstairs. Utter airheads. I knew this. Also I realised that (what with the extreme Victorian mores of the time, only two decades ago now) she and I never really had any future. If I’d tried something, even if I’d been handsome and desirable, she’d have shied away. 

I knew all this. And yet I kept looking for her on my lonely walks, and felt strangely gratified when I saw her along, and enjoyed those few moments of chitchat; and I even tried to convince myself that she waited specifically for me so she could walk with me.

It’s a long, long time ago; and a lot many female eyes have slid off me as though I didn’t exist, and long before my teens ended I was inured to it. But sometimes I wish I could go back to that sad fat confused boy and comfort him and tell him a little bit of what I know. And I think back to what he was like, and I feel like weeping.

And I wonder if I should be jealous of the teenagers of today who can worry about having sex. I wonder what – in their position – I would have done.
 
Maybe it's better that there are no time machines after all.  

Starlight

for everyone

It is a summer evening, and warm. Not hot here in the hills, but warm nevertheless, and the power goes.

Damn.

You shut off the computer before the battery dies on you. For a moment you think of reading by the emergency light, then think again. The damn light always gives you a headache, and when the power returns you have to get back to work. You have a self-imposed deadline to beat.

It is the warmth indoors that makes up your mind for you. Outdoors it will be more comfortable, at least. You step through the door into almost complete darkness. No moon, not tonight. Damn, again.

For a moment you want to go back in. But the night is warm and fragrant, and the sky is pricked out with dazzling points of white. You stop and look up at the sky. It’s been a long time since you did this, you tell yourself. And the last few times, the lights of the town blotted out most of the stars that were.

Tonight, there are no city lights; there is not a cloud, not a starlit patch of grey, or a black opaque mass blotting out the sky. There is only the black ceiling of the night, and the dazzling points of a million stars. You look up at them and find yourself suddenly lost.

Half a lifetime ago, you stood like this with a man long dead, a man whom you called father, and he pointed out this planet and that constellation (you can see one of those constellations now, the Plough, and is that Scorpio?). You had stood on a summer night not too different from this one and were introduced to the sky. You feel a sudden wrenching desire for that man, that time. You wish you could have that time back.

High above, a few degrees above the hill-defined horizon, where once, many years ago, you had watched the two-tailed patch of light that was Comet Hale-Bopp. Just there, you see the dot of red that is Mars. You remember the photos from the explorers: the pink sky and the rust-red rock, the barren plain. You remember how tiny the sun looked in the photos from the planet. You wonder if someday within your lifetime there will be a chance to visit the planet. Or maybe it would be a good thing if there were never any such chance; the human cancer should be confined to one planet, you think. One planet is damage enough.

A tiny point of light arcs past Mars, swiftly crossing the sky. It’s a satellite of some kind, perhaps an American spy satellite, with cameras digitally recording the tiny lives of ordinary human beings with an eye like that of god. Your eyes track the satellite until it reaches the zenith; and there is the great faint band of the Milky Way, layer on layer of starstuff, great star clusters of millions of glowing points, and you wonder what eyes might be staring at you across the parsecs and wondering who might be looking back at them. At that moment you want immortality and a chance to roam the realms of space forever.

A long, long time ago, there was a comic of some kind, and on the back of it was an ad for the film of Star Trek. The Starship Enterprise, bejewelled with lights, going boldly ‘where no man has gone before’. How would that play out in reality?

Suddenly it happens; a streak of light, green and silver, flashing across the sky. It is a meteor, of course; that long-gone man had shown you the first meteor of your life, and you remember that one, too, and smile. You have watched many meteors since then, but it’s been years since you lost touch of  the Leonid and Perseid Showers of your youth. Who ever had the time?

A soft cold wet nose nudges at your hand. You stroke the warm head, and the large dog stands happily by your side, pressing her body to your thigh. You stroke her head and watch the Cosmos, and remember a poem by John Jakes:

Where no man has gone before
Venture boldly now,
To the blazing sea of stars
Point the shining prow.
Range the neverending dark
Seeking life’s undying spark
Out beyond all matter’s end
Bear the race that comes as friend.
Light years beyond the last red sun
Leave the mark of men
Then turn homewards, towards the day
You set forth again.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so silly any more.

The First Orgasm

This happened when I was about eleven years old.

Back in those days I was obese, callow, and quite frankly ignorant of a lot today’s kids know of at much younger ages. I was also no good – I still am no good – at mathematics. This is important to remember for a proper understanding of what happened.

It was during an examination that it happened. It was maths, of course, and at the end of 45 minutes (the paper was two hours long) I’d just completed the first of five questions, and that one I wasn’t too sure of. I was beginning to slide into pure panic.

It’s a habit of mine to this day that some kind of simple repetitive action in times of stress tends to relieve that stress. Nowadays, when I can, I chew gum. At that time, since I had no other outlet, I began rubbing my legs together. As I did, I began feeling a queer sensation in the pit of my stomach, and it built and built and I rubbed my legs faster and faster. I didn’t know what was happening – the rubbing was now a reflex. Suddenly there came this great convulsing sensation in my lower abdomen and groin, which made me shudder and press my thighs together and crunch my eyes shut as tight as I could get them. My breath literally caught in my throat or else I might have cried out.

A moment later, I opened my eyes, feeling wonderfully calm. Nobody had noticed a thing. I returned to the questions and managed a pretty fair go of doing them; not bad at all by my standards.

It was only a couple of years later, when I began masturbating deliberately, that I realised that back during that exam I’d had an orgasm. (Later on I’d make time to masturbate while studying for exams, quite regularly and with great effect, to calm my mind.)

Oh yes, in case you’re wondering; if I’d ejaculated at all, the amount was so small that my underpants absorbed it and there wasn’t any embarrassing leakage. I wouldn’t have known what it was anyway.

In Which The Future Done Come

From Jan 2010

Today, while rubber-stamping the date on a prescription, I had one of those moments of weird dissociation which most of us have experienced at one time or another. I looked down at the date 12 JAN 2010 and it was as though a voice was muttering in my brain, “Why, that’s a science fiction date! That’s a date straight out of science fiction!”

You see, I was one of the people who grew up reading the products of the “golden age” of science fiction, the sixties and seventies, when Edmund Crispin was compiling anthologies and Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke were writing at their best. Those were the days when the awful pulp science fiction of the fifties was a fading memory (try and read some of that stuff today, with its tales of blue-skinned Neptunian Xth smugglers and thinly disguised Cold War polemics; it makes one cringe). And science fiction hadn’t yet become what so much of it is today, hard to read and harder to comprehend and hardest of all to accept as science fiction and not some completely different genre altogether (take a look at one of Gardner Dozois’ recent compilations for an idea of what passes for science fiction these days).

Yes, science-fiction wise, I’m a child of the sixties and seventies, though I was actually reading the stuff in the eighties. Anyway, in those tales of robots, time travel, and exploring Jupiter’s moons, and so on, leavened with Bradbury’s thundering adjectives (Ray Bradbury is my favourite science fiction writer by some distance) – which was the most common era those stories were set in? When did those mysterious green lights shine out of the sky? When did our intrepid explorers wade through the primordial seas of Europa? When did the tideless (because moonless) seas of Venus (it was still an ocean world to the writers of that age) part before the hulls of expeditionary ships? You’ve got it – the first few years of the 21st century. That was the Golden Age when everything would happen; the world would set aside poverty and war and would unite under a benign government (albeit one where everyone usually had American names) and would, in John Jakes’ words

Where no man has gone before
Venture boldly now
To the blazing sea of stars
Point the shining prow.
Range the neverending dark
Seeking life’s undying spark
Out beyond all nature’s end
Bear the race that comes as friend.
Light years beyond the last red sun
Leave the mark of men
Then turn homewards, towards the day
You go forth again.

One look around us today – sharply rising poverty, the rapid disintegration of any idea of a world state, Endless War as an ideology, the retreat of logic before the forces of religious obscurantism – and one feels only helpless pity for the hopes of those writers, looking at the future and imagining it to be better. It’s difficult to see how humanity can survive in the long run, let alone tread the soil of another world circling a strange green sun.

Still, I looked at that date, and a strange shiver played down my spine. And I looked out of the window, and for a moment, just for a moment, I seemed to see a spaceship, like a multi-faceted dome all decked out in copper and green, hovering outside on columns of fire, about to launch itself into the unknown.

Just a moment, and it was gone, and I went back to filling in the prescription.

But a part of me went with it.

Stoned!

This used to happen rather often when I was a pre-school child, maybe about once a month: I'd begin to get a strange sensation under my tongue. It was a sensation as of something pushing out from inside, as though the floor of my mouth was imprisoning something that was trying to be free. This sensation would increase steadily, never quite reaching the point of pain, but getting close. And then the bottom of my mouth, under the tongue, would begin to literally stretch and swell, until, suddenly, there would be a bursting sensation  and the pressure would be relieved in a mouthful of saliva full of little granules.

I didn't know it at the time, of course, but what I had was salivary stones, or sialoliths, specifically in the submandibular gland, which opens into the mouth below the tongue. I was lucky that these stones were all very small and came out by themselves, with no more than a temporary blockage of salivary flow and a little discomfort.

I last had a submandibular salivary stone work its way out about five or six years ago. Knowing what it was, even though three decades had passed since I last experienced one, I looked for it and saw it, too, stuck in the opening of the duct - a tiny white dot which finally worked its way out as a little stick of mineral about three or four millimetres long. And that was that.

Well.

I've been considering orthodontic treatment, and at the suggestion of a colleague who's an orthodontist, I got my skull X-rayed a few days ago. And, apart from proving to me that I do possess a skull, it revealed a large, floating calcified body off to the side of my right lower jaw.

What it is, isn't a mystery: a large salivary gland stone, about the size of a big marble, entirely occupying the lower lobe of my right parotid salivary gland. The parotid gland is the one which is affected by mumps, so those of you who have had the disease (I did when I was seven) will know what I'm talking about.


This stone, which is shaped somewhat like Africa, and in fact like the lower parotid lobe, isn't a problem right now - it's right at the lower end of the gland. However, if at any time it grows or migrates far enough to block the duct, there isn't a chance in hell of my being able to extrude it like I did the tiny submandibular gland stones. In that case, pain, swelling, and surgical removal of the gland await.

Oh, by the way, parotid gland stones are actually rather rare, since the watery saliva of the parotid gland doesn't have much in the way of minerals and isn't conducive to producing stones - and a big one, like mine, rarer still. Some 80-90% are submandibular stones, like the tiny ones I used to have.

The oddest thing is that now that I know the stone is there (and I canfeel it if I palpate the angle of my jaw, faintly but clearly) I'm getting kind of paranoid about it. It's like someone who's phobic of cats becoming aware of a cat in the house. As long as he or she doesn't know the cat's there, it's fine. But once the presence of the cat's known, even if it's several rooms away, the feliophobe seems to feel it everywhere.

Well, if and when this object inside my body gives me trouble, I'll let you all know.

Till then, on with the programme.

The Crazy Stray Dog Feeder

One of the earliest - July 2006

When I was a student in dental school in Lucknow I used to feed the stray dogs in the hostel…there were about eight of them, mostly the progeny of a small white bitch I named Dogina. The pups got names beginning with "Dog" too, but I only remember some of them now. It was eleven years ago, after all!
There was "Dogstar" (had a white blaze on her forehead), "Dogtrine" (one brown and one green eye. Very odd), "Doglet" (extremely friendly little bitch. She would wait in the morning outside my room and I once gave her a bath), "Doggerel", "Doggone" and the rest I no longer remember.
The fact that I liked and fed these dogs got me a reputation as a bit of an eccentric in the hostel. Most of the others would at best ignore them or at worst lash out when one came too close. And yet here I was walking around surrounded by a forest of wagging tails, to which (to the other end, damn it, not to the tails!) I fed crumbs, and leftovers, and sometimes my own food as well, letting them take it from my hand gently with their soft lips. But then I was regarded as an eccentric anyway. I used to wear shorts (very brief shorts) in the heat and a sleeveless T shirt, and I never went to the movies either. Not to Hindi movies anyway, and as far as Hollywood was concerned I boycotted the action film staple. As for my religious (non)preference, it drove them all mad. How dare I be an atheist? How can you pigeonhole an atheist? It was monstrous…
Oh yeah. I forgot the top reason. When I got frustrated I used to go out on the verandah of the hostel in the evening and shout "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!" at the top of my voice. Those of you who know me know I have a soft voice, but I made a pretty good volume on that. I could not manage this more than about once a week, because it would take my throat a day or two to recover fully from one shout, but I can assure you there was enough reason to scream. One of these days, in the very near future, I’ll post on the frustrations of that college.
Anyway, to get back to the dogs. The last time I saw any of them was six months after I left the college when I went back for some paperwork. My old room mate still occupied our former room and was willing to put me up. And I’d scarcely dumped my bag and changed when there was someone waiting outside the door for me…you guessed it. Doglet.
Stray dogs are dogs. They are as faithful as the most blue-blooded pedigreed Chihuahua or pit bull. And I can tell you they are a hell of a lot more grateful for any attention. Be careful of disease, though, when you are handling them. They might be carrying anything, including rabies in incubation….so be careful. This is not to discourage you. But you'd get one hell of a lot more discouraged with a bitten hand. Gain a dog's confidence first - it might not be easy with mongrels who might have had a lifetime of maltreatment at human hands - before you try and become its friend. But if you do, the rewards are awesome.
The photos below are of a Chinese Crested Dog named Sam. He won the World's Ugliest Dog contest three years in a row. He  was no mongrel, but I couldn't resist posting him all the same.