This piece was written a few weeks back and then I forgot to post it. So here it is now!
Everything
that happens in life has a reason. At
least this is what I try telling myself when things go wrong or something
happens which I would have preferred not to happen. Like going and breaking a
leg. Or an engagement I was looking
forward to, being cancelled. Or my computer dropping dead out of
the blue. Which is what happened last week.
Of course it wasn’t quite out of
the blue, there had been signs of the damn machine ailing for a while, considering every two or
three days it would go hang right in the
middle of some very innovative sentence or some earthshaking plan to change the
world, which I was trying to express in
words. Then I’d have to close down the
machine and start afresh. This time there was nothing to start. No matter how
hard and how often I jabbed the switch the hard disc refused to swing into action. Encouraged by
my friends’ experiences of managing to organise parking space in the city
through doing “Reiki” I tried that as
well. When it didn’t work I thought of giving the old comp a good old kick
because, I know you’re not going to believe me but inanimate objects have been occasionally known to
pick up your thoughts and suddenly spring into action and do what you want them to. But now there was
not even a hiccup from the machine. The CPU gazed at me blank and
unresponsive, dead as a dodo.
The
computer engineer who turned up an hour later took it apart, examined
some large and tiny metal parts which he extracted from the unit and
scrutinized, then muttered something
about the fan belt needing to be replaced or perhaps the motherboard needing to
be changed. He wouldn’t know until he had examined it thoroughly to do which
he would need to whisk off the main unit. A day later the
engineer called to say that data on the
C-drive had been corrupted and asked if I’d stored anything important on it. No
not really, I sighed. Only the odds and ends I’d been working on since the beginning of the year, which I had quite
forgotten to back up. Serves me right, I smacked myself mentally. Idiot! How
often have I told you, it’s absolutely essential to stick that pen drive in at
the end of the session and copy all the work you’ve done.
So
anyway, I reluctantly left my study which is where I spend most mornings
goggling at the computer screen and snapping at anyone who disturbs this staring routine and went and sat outside in the living room with
a book. It was the one about Bombay by Suketu Mehta whose gory contents I've been groaning and gasping over since about the middle of February. At the best of times I tend to crawl through books and most of my reading is anyway done in the loo. It was a loooong time since I'd snuggled down on the sofa with a book at something like eleven thirty in the morning.
When
I’d had enough of the blood and gore and murderers philosophizing about the
existence of god, I decided to
take a look at the mess in the loft in
the guest room which probably hasn’t seen a broom or cleaning rag for the best
part of a decade. The two maids whom I inherited along with the flat when my
grandmother died a couple of years ago, joined me in gawking at the contents and very cooperatively
seconded my feelings of disgust though they didn’t quite as enthusiastically
back up my suggestion that we start to actually deal with the mess. Well, at the
end of about two hours we had found stuff which had been rotting there for I
don’t know how long. Mouldy slippers, moth-eaten cardboard files, a huge
mysterious trunk filled with holes which
had been shrouded in a faded cotton sheet, whose contents nobody had bothered
to check for a lifetime, because, the
two maids, (when asked why they’d never bothered to take a look at it) said,
“it was locked.” So we broke open the lock and found that the trunk was quite empty. There were not even any rats
or roaches in it. It turned out to be the one my mom had taken with her on her first trip abroad when she’d sailed
to England to join my father in the summer of '53.
As
I sat down for lunch that day I felt better than I had done in the morning but was still vaguely missing
my computer the way you might miss playing with a cat or pet dog when you’re at a loose end. In the evening I sat out on
the balcony watching the goings on in the world outside and as the sun began to
make its regal descent towards the horizon I realized that for the first time
in ages I was really watching it, and looking at the pinky-orange sky against
which its mellow light shone through. I was really looking at the boats
picturesquely outlined against the setting sun, and at people sitting on the rocks and mongrels happily trotting around
the place and not just pretending to look while thinking of what I was going to write the next day. It was quite simple.
No computer no writing, no blog, no anything involving too much thought. I’ve
come to the point when my hand refuses to push a pen for longer than thirty seconds without going off into the most grotesque cramps.
When
the computer engineer calls up the second morning to say it might take a while
to fix the problem I’m cool as hell and really not pretending to be that way. I
haven’t become so stupid as to tell him to take his time but am able to ask him
in an even voice when he thinks I can have my piece back and when he says maybe the end of the
week I shrug OK. By now I’ve begun to enjoy a different kind of morning routine
enriched by the sensation of being able
to look at things for their own sake and not because they are so important they
need to be written about. Finally when the computer returns, I even manage with some amount of fiddling around, to recover the files I’d believed lost. I am
amazed at how easily it happened but what amazes me even more now, is
my singular lack of enthusiasm about getting back to work. No, I don’t want to
think any more because now I am
enjoying, really enjoying listening to
the vast library of music which has been gathering dust on my hard disc which
I’ve greedily copied from friends in the past months but haven’t had the chance
to dip into since acquiring.
One week later, it is all somehow beginning to
make sense, at least to me, even if the Almighty had intended it differently.
And now that I’m slowly returning to my
old routine and my brain is gearing up for work again I’m wondering how to keep
that sense of freshness I inadvertently
regained in the last few days, a certain carefree enjoyment of the world
which too much head stuff cramps
out. Well I have an inkling about how
its done but it’s difficult to put into words.
Uma
A couple of afternoons back I bumped into a woman I used to know
about thirty years ago. Needless to say we didn’t recognize each other at
first. It was at an informal lunch hosted by M and C who had just got married. I
had spent the first half hour or so sitting out in the drawing room amongst a
bunch of women in their seventies and eighties, friends of the bride (M’s) mother, all smiling affably at each other. The
silence which prevailed most likely covered up a hearing or a memory loss. Every now and then
a rather cute looking elderly lady sitting near me, wearing a bright red top and black trousers fired questions at
me in Gujarati which I was unable to deal with since my half baked knowledge of
the language prevents me from communicating
in it. This left me only one choice: to keep smiling at her and nodding away
for all I was worth. 
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