Remains of the Storm ..

Look there. How calm those waters seem now that the season has turned. Only yesterday, they were savage seas. Churning violent storms and casting them our way. The vengeful east winds that crashed on our shores. Dancing dervish. As if they wanted to reclaim the land. To take it away to the sea. How they raged andplundered. How we waited and watched. Many days and many nights. And when it passed, we came out to gather the fallen pieces of our lives. To scavenge what the storm left behind. To mourn what it took.

The storm itself dissipated. Scattered itself across the land. Precipitated. Into a weeping autumn rain. Dissolved. Perhaps atoning for its sins.

Or maybe it simply wandered. Couldn't find its way back to the ocean. Who knows ?

Whirlwinds uncoiled on their vortex. Squalling over arid sands. Caught between nowhere and nothingness. The solitude of the desert drove them mad. Deranged, they shifted sand dunes by day - only to move them back by night.

Convectional crosscurrents ascended the firmament. Nothing remained of their wrath but a passing turbulence. Somewhere else, a translucent breeze touched land. It rippled golden through the tall seas of praire grass. Waxing-waning. Cresting-falling.

Some storms became winds. Some winds disintegrated. Into the cold drafts that condensed on your skin on muggy, moonless nights. Yet others, like tattered paper kites fluttered hapless from old telegraph wires. Gales rattled windows, crept in through cracks and settled in damp corners. Occassionally stirring but mostly silent. Fragments of air stood motionless. In suspended animation. As if they had died mid-sentence.

I collected them all. The fragile, broken pieces of a tempest dead. The consequence of sorrow. And its cause. Withered wafts surrendered themselves. I held them down with paperweights lest they should escape. They crumbled to ash between my fingertips. I inhaled every moving gust till my lungs could hold no more.

And I walked. I walked till the ocean found me. Till the tide drew in. It had waited long for the storm's return. Keeping vigil on the eastern sky. Hoping for the winds to ride back into the sunset. Water looked at me, questioningly. Melancholy waves leaped up and then subsided. They knew. They knew what the silence meant.

I stood there for a moment that was both brief and long at the same time. Reflecting. Reminiscing. Then I said a prayer. Exhaled deep. And in doing so I buried the remains of the storm. At sea.

-the girl.

to the Left of Right

I have always had trouble with fundamental truths.

As a child, I could never be sure if the long arm of the clock showed minutes or hours. Somehow, I had made the association that because an hour is "bigger" than a minute, technically, the longer arm ought to show hours. Then ofcourse, I would find out that I was wrong and would make a mental note of it. But the next time around when I was asked to tell the time, I'd go over the same premise and arguments in my head and become horribly muddled again.

Relative directions were another bane to my existence. I had a hard time telling left from right. Ironically, I understood cardinal directions very well. But if I was told to turn left, I would have to stop and think. Even then, much to my embarassment, Iwould end up getting it wrong some times. Then my grandfather taught me a trick.

I remember him and I walking home from my Saturday hobby class. I must have been about seven years old then. Everytime we reached a corner, he would ask me which way to turn and I'd choose. It was our game. What amazed me was that no matter how many wrong turns we took, we were never wrong enough to be lost. We would always make it back home in time for lunch.

In the course of these weekly games, it had become apparent to my grandfather that I fumbled with directions. I'd say left when I meant to go right and vice-versa. He'd correct me politely when I made a mistake but was careful not to make me feel conscious about it. "We are just the same, you know", he said to me one day. "I used to have trouble with these things too when I was your age. But its nothing to worry about". And then after a brief pause, he chuckled "Maybe it runs in the family".

I was secretly delighted because this was something we had in common - something that bound me together with my grandfather. I was also relieved to know that there was hope for me yet. Afterall, for someone who claimed to bungle up directions himself, my grandfather had done pretty well in his life. I explained to him my futile attempts at memorizing left and right using all kinds of mnemonics.

"Well, lets forget all of that. It isn't going to help us. We must think in pictures. That is the best way to remember anything", my grandfather said as he walked ahead and stood at the corner of the sidewalk across from me and a red mailbox.

"Now remember the spatial details of what you see here. Try and click a mental picture of it and tuck it away in your head somewhere. The mailbox is to your right. I am standing to your left. If you want to go right, you walk towards the mailbox. If you want to go left, you come to me. Right - mailbox. Left - me. Thats all you need to know", he said to me and then we continued on our way home.

That was many years ago. A lot has happened in my life since. I have grown up for one. My grandfather has passed on. The house that where I grew up was torn down. Occassionally, I still have trouble telling time on a dial-type analog clock. But when it comes to directions, I have become very clever. If you ask me to turn left, I don't have to think twice - or even once for that matter. The neurons in my head fire away mechanically. A familiar scene flickers in my mind's eye. I see a red mailbox on one side. My grandfather is on the other side, smiling.

And I walk towards him. I just keep walking towards him.

-the girl.

badla lungi!!

a book review is anytime better than a post where the boy questions my gender! :-1

the boy must note that his 'little' post is well-regarded and taken into consideration to plan a few things against him.

glorious females,no comments,eh?? thou shalt see the consequences!

wait and watch! till the meantime,i pray to god that the boy gets basked in colours by his hostel mates and also that his room is flooded with water and walls coloured in vibgyor!!

-the girl.

Atonement

Writers are omnipotent. They sit by the brook on sunny afternoons and create bubbles of lives that sway with the wind - every bubble an universe in itself, pregnant with lives twisted and tortured by a greater purpose and responsibility. The writer can then create lives, destroy them, lure the eve with a shining apple or destroy the bubble with a indistinguishable colored pixel. Period.

They could either sweep the rug of reason off your feet and take you to another space and time where their protagonist becomes the center of an ever expanding thriving universe (like how an unassuming ten year old from pivet drive realized his parents were the greatest wizards of all time). Such a premise easily lends itself to drama and larger than life characters (like the man who cannot be named). Or they could show you a seemingly insignificant card and make you a witness while a minor accident sways it and makes it fall. And just as it falls, it kisses another card and takes it along and soon they all fall, an entire castle of cards, kissed with death and a twist of fate. And when the whole castle is in shambles, you have no one to blame but a minor insignificant accident - a woodworm that ate the cross. And a satisfied writer who orchestrated it all.

On a midsummer morning, 13-year-old Briony Tallis watches, from a hidden window, her sister take off her clothes before her father's ward and jump into a fountain. An admittedly unusual incident (aggressive foreplay if it were in a hollywood movie) but not an event that by itself could entwine three lives, destroy them beyond belief and dismember a family. But by the time you are through with Part one of Atonement, you realize that the lives of those caught in that decisive moment have been irrevocably altered and each of their picture perfect plans for future irrepairably destroyed.

The first part of the novel is a master piece. It paints an upper middle class setting in the early part of twentieth century, overlays it with an entire family of interesting characters. Briony Tallis is looking forward for her brother Leon to return and writes a play as a welcome act, that she plans to stage with the help of her cousins. Her sister Cecilia is spending time at home after her years in Oxford and living with them is Robbie turner, who's on his way to study medicine, after an exceptional year of academics. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one character and hence events are revisited and shown in the different perspective. And it's eventually this difference in perspective - subjectivity of realism - that causes the seemingly insignificant card to sway and fall and take with it the entire castle.

The story could have ended there. But the laws of cause and effect wouldn't have been complete. The unlucky wouldn't have been victimised and erring soul wouldn't have repented. The rest of the book binds the ends and records the atonement of the protagonist. Though the text is exquisite, the imagery detailed, these introspective parts fail to capture the magic of the first act. More so because they do little to advance the story - time goes by slowly as the characters trudge through the walk of life reconciling themselves with here and now and try in their own little ways to mend it. But like the author himself writes, "The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself ... it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception .... However, such writing can become precious when there's no sense of forward movement ... underlying pull of simple narrative".

In the end, time flies. Lives end and plot twists are resolved. The thirteen year old girl reaches the autumn of her life and waits for the witnesses in her prosecution to fade so that she could finally atone for her sin. In a master stroke in the end, the line between the reality as in the book, and those recorded as a work of fiction by the Briorny is forever blurred. And when the final page is flipped, she stares out at the autumn sky and reconciles with herself and her written word.

Atonement is no doubt a work of class. And as with anything with class, it runs the risk of being compared with itself than with its contemporaries. I would have loved to like Atonement a little more. You know that when the last word is said, you don't feel the emptiness that only art could leave you with but in its place a sigh, a shadow of what it could have been. A master piece.

ps: [Atonement : A Novel - by Ian McEwan].

- the girl.