A loud, unmelodic, male voice sings in a high falsetto – “Paartha Mudhal Naale” startling me from my deeply discontented reverie, intruding into the mind’s eye with images of grated coconuts and bristly chins. The song abruptly ands in a gleeful cackle, and an ecstatically self-congratulatory exclamation of “YeppaDEENNen!“.
My gaze shifts to the door to my quiet, empty house; the door that’s left hanging slightly open on its hinges, a mute and pathetic testament to the loneliness of the Sunday afternoon. It opens into the adjacent room where a typically unsympathetic and scoffing teenager is talking to her mother. She can see her mother’s glittering eyes clouded by a wisp of shyness and a hint of the apparent silliness of her transports. In a voice thrilling deeply but with undertones of the same halting shyness she tells her daughter of how what promised to be a typically boring Sunday afternoon was reclaimed when a majestic lemon coloured feline, pushed the garden gate open haughtily and strutted in royally into the tiled kitchen and then on to the carpeted hall, paying not a whit of attention to the inviting furniture legs and the soft plush sofa, not turning a hair as he walked commandingly out of the front door, in a benign silence. And outside, he halted for a moment and was framed befittingly in golden sunshine.
I can see her smile now, and the disapproving thoughts fade gently out of my mind, to be replaced by a golden haze of contentment as the surprisingly tuneless entertainer flits on to an old favorite of mine. I hum along, my face reflecting my mother’s smile, unembarrassed by a scoffing audience.
X---------------------------------------------XI dream of writing. Of all the glorious, pointless, irreverent, mundane richness of the daily lives of Seinfeld-like thirty somethings; of the narrow yet brimming lives of mothers of grown up children with stunningly keen insights into their childrens’ needs, interspersed with obtuse blindspots regarding their offsprings’ enthusiastic flights of fancy and steep narrow dives into despair; of the solid respectable self-made uncles, for whom one alternates between deep admiration and dismissive though tolerant attention; of children ready to conquer the world, yet stunted by painful shyness in the presence of their peers; of characters enmeshed inextricably in the humdrum of routine and yet testing the limits of sanity in their inner lives;
I dream of writing words that thrill one with their aptness and their beauty; trivial details, of shoeboxes covered in dust and fingertips drumming on the windows of the cab, that capture the mellow twilight of reality and imagination; stories that involve Alice and Dorian and Che, a veritable menagerie of fictional and real people, but indubitably real acquaintances of my characters.
My dream fades and im left with a series of images, all of which are plain, monochromatic – made so by the limitations of my imagination and selfcentered single track of my consciousness.
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Recently i picked up the well-thumbed favorite of mine, Franny and Zooey and something happened. I was reading it out loud, the process making the details rather ponderous to my imagination(they are much better visulalised with silent reading) but also rendering the characters more immediate. And it suddenly struck me, how it would be for an actor to portray these friends of mine, Franny and Zooey and Buddy and Bessie on stage. i realized how my voice sounded unbearably flat and totally unreal. Then imperceptibly the characters took over and for a magical moment I found myself a part of the scene, inside the heads of the protagonists, happy in the omniscience of the author, the honest expression of the actor and the pleasant anticipation of the reader. ‘Twas Bliss.
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