Keeping the blog alive

Though I am trying out the new version of blogger, and after a few blogs there have begun to love it as my own, I want to keep this blog going as well. I have not decided what to put where, and there are good chances of occasional overlaps and cross-posting. That is, if I do keep blogging!

Midwinter spring is its own season

This is a cross-post from my other blog.

I am in the mood for Eliot today it seems. So here are some more favourite lines. With all its improved typography, Blogger isn't allowing me to indent as I want. So here is some Eliot typographically altered from the usual anthologized text.

Marina

Quis hic locus, quae
regio, quae mundi plaga?

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat,
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
-T.S. Eliot

Another World, Another Time

“Biyer shanai jachchhe bole, chhotobelake jachchho fele,” stares at me from an 8'x10' billboard as I pass Golpark. A pensive Deepika Padukone, resplendent in bridal jewellery, a distant gaze on her kohl-rimmed wide eyes, her forehead gently resting on her bejewelled left fist… Saturday afternoons idled away looking at black and white photographs… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion over my head at the gate of Sakshigopal Mandir would devour me… my mother cuddling me in the lobby of a Benares hotel, my freshly lost incisor on the table in front... me in school uniform posing on the Victoria Memorial grounds, one sock drooping… … summer afternoons spent in coaxing the local sweetshop man for clay cups to pour milk for our kittens… poking fingers in the bellow of the harmonium while my uncle played and sang... reflecting sunlight on his face with book transperencies as he checked on the mirror if a shave was due... my brother and I busily assisting our father in repairing leaks on the roof before the monsoon set in… poking the colourful caterpillars that infested our ghaashphool in the monsoon so that they would curl up … Honking horns remind me I must pick up altered trousers on my way to my parents’ place from my in-laws’. At home, my mother has kept an album ready for me to take along to another land… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion…
At night, when I hear familiar snores around me— I miss these sounds at my in-laws’— I login hoping to find my husband online. He isn’t there. I wait. I type something in a new Word document. He’s still not online. I type a few more lines, and more, and more. My blog is born.

Blogger's Block?

This is the first time I am blogging in New York. I have been itching to write for a long long time and don’t know quite what has held me back. I had much more time before the semester started, and much more new in life each day than I do now. All the newness that my mind registered went into the long emails I wrote, and yet I never once tried to blog. Perhaps one needs to get used to even a new corner in a new home to think of it as suitable for personal, reflective activity, even through its fruits will be shared with others.

A Beginning

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right-angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

From: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, rpt. 1995)

One of the many things Scout’s words here highlight is the existence and inevitability of competing narratives of the same event, which partly explains the reason I chose to name my blog as I have: it will inevitably represent only my version of things. Another reason that governed the christening is that this is a book very dear to me, and whenever I reread it (never in full), I am reminded of my childhood, and I thought I could have a blog that not only focuses on my present, but also my past, and the ‘pastness’ of my present.