Manali teeth, helmet kisses and beet rock

Disclaimer: This is not a biker's review because I am not a biker, I am a traveller. For excellent biker reviews click here and here. When Mani writes one, I will link to his.

A moving earth

It was on the Delhi-Manali-Leh highway that I saw the limbs and bones of earth. Green muscular calves flared in mid-leap, brown knobby elbows holding up books nobodys read ('how to quake elegantly'), bare bony backs bending over a secret, perimeterless paunches pinched with snow, hollowed clavicles (my most favorite body part) collecting sun-knead melt. The earth moves with unknowable purpose in the Great Himalayas, and for the 3 days it took us to get from Manali to Leh we moved with her – soul-stirred and cradle protected. To say she is beautiful is a redundant declaration, ofcourse she is but there is much more to be said about her. Those 3 days she will have you foraging for oxygen, dreaming of tar and numbing in her glacial melt.

Fringes of sense
40 kms out of Delhi and we have a rear flat. I, at that point, in keeping with good gender training, know nothing of bike internals. Mani, also in keeping with good gender training, does know. So I follow my instructions intently, and keep my eyes blinklessly open. I am fascinated, the Enfield Thunderbird is a beautiful creature. Over the next few days I will have seen her many layers disrobed, I will have massaged her joints and understood her sounds. At this point, I learn how to extract a wheel, change the tube, check the tyre for objects of heed (a silvery blade thingey this time, which, with my little hand I successfully dislodge), pump the new tube with air with our handy blue foot pump (it was so useful I was ready to kiss it by the end of our trip) and properly screw the tyre back on. We had some help but we did most of it ourselves. I am beaming, my first flat, painlessly renewed. We chat about the ill augurence of such an occurrence so early on in the trip but we press on cheerfully. Night halt at Chandigarh has us rushing to see the Rock Garden just before it closed. The contents of one man's imagination shaped out of rock, concrete, ceramic plates, toiletware, saucers, fuse boxes, it houses gnomes, pixies, goblins, two-headed smiley triangles and even bettered strangeness. I like places like these that reside on the fringes of sense. What, however, made serious sense in Chandigarh were the cycle lanes. Those I wanted to take home.

Manali teeth

Next day onward to Mandi, an ordinary town full of ordinary hotels. We stay in a room overlooking the river Beas, which followed us all the way. We are now in the Himalayas, dapper in its best monsoon green. Upbeat, de-grimed and river-fed, we decide to go down to rev the engine for the next days drive. And the engine refuses to wake. We sleep tense, and the next day, in a Sunday-shut town we ferret out a mechanic. Some more bike anatomy gleaned from the procedure– the bike tapit and spark plug assembly this time. We leave at noon, and thankfully Manali is 3.5 hours away. We are relaxed now and stop at Kullu for lunch when, quite dramatically, an upper-side crown in my mouth slips off its golden screw. I am a tooth short and a screw loose.

In Manali, there is a furious hunt for a dentist, which effort, like in Mandi, is Sunday-impaired. I was told quite conclusively that no person in Manali will drill teeth on Sundays. So I live with the exposed screw, careful not to commission my left side into any manner of chewing. It is difficult, I feel wounded, all smiled out. In addition, the bike shuts down again. It is looking dim, our prospects of steep ascent the next day. We are both despondent. Manali, with its beguiling snow-soft beauty and wool-covered markets, does mend us a few smiles, but we are once again tense. We spent 2 hours in the dying light at a mechanic's adda, watching leather and silver give way to dull steel and winding wire traffic. The carburetor is cleaned, wiring is checked, nuts are fastened, tapit adjusted. Sonu the mechanic and Raj the garage owner each stock us up with travel tips, route difficulties and words of encouragement. We are bolstered, and treat my recoiling mouth to some creamy spaghetti.

The next morning, I find my dentist, he fits the crown back on, with warnings of temporariness which I ignore. The bike does not start until a hardy sardar gives it a brutal kick. Poor Mani has, by now, worn out his right leg due to incessant futile kicking. So on we proceed trepidatiously to the highest point on the earth that either of us have been on.

Creepers to the skies

Rohtang Pass is your first creeper to the skies. The road winds, tapers and steepens until you are literally clinging to it, foot and wheel, inching upwards cautiously. On this one the earth tries to drown us in 1.5-2 feet of her wet refuse. Several times during that 10 kms stretch I got down and walked while Mani valiantly rode though all those metres of chee chee keechad. So challenging was it supposed to be that people in Manali are prone to saying 'Rohtang pass pohonch gaye toh samjho ke leh pohonch gaye'. Well, they exaggerate.

The second day sees us crossing a knee deep rampaging stream, spiny cold, right after Darcha. And day three has the earth spilling into our shoes and shirts as we almost fall, bike and baggage, into 3-4 feet of loose playful sand to be found in the More Plains in Jammu and Kashmir. We steer off the road once and spend an hour trying to get back on, go 20 kms downslope with the engine off because the bike wouldn't start, overcome countless streams and rolling-rock, ribbed and landslide ruined roads. A chain link breaks, another tyre gives, my skin burns. But the beauty, the beauty counsels every worry.

Platypus skin
As one departs Manali, all that thick green gives way to brown - chocolate cake brown, cocoa powder brown, cocoa powder stirring into flour brown, toasted bread brown, aloo tikki brown, Mani brown and Pooja brown. The earth is dessicated, scraggly, wrinkled skinned and smooth, oily platypused skinned. She is crumbly in places, spilling on to the road. She is studded with green buttons in places. She is striped tiger in places. She is infuriated in places, flaring like fire. She is snow shrouded in places. Colour, light, texture and shape mingle unfettered to form several Ganesha trunks, several Buddha eyes, several noses of my mother, three hippopotamus, soda cans, screaming faces, piano playing hands and whatever else the windings of my subconscious and idlings of my imagination muster. We stop several times, take pictures to capture in vain rock stream sky cattle road mind-reeling.

For me, it is beauty retold and by far the best part of the trip. If you're going to Ladakh, go by road through Manali. That is all.

Beet rock, jewelled Buddhas
In Ladakh the rock turns beet colored. The Leh markets are, like in Manali, typically foreign-tourist-tuned with german bakeries, hebrew signs, italian fare and aggressive hawking. Needle like trees frustrate the desert-barren in patches. Prayer wheels squeak at every street corner, white chortens spot the scapes, monasteries fling to the sky. We sit opposite several Buddha statues, large and less than three storey large, gold skinned, bronze fleshed, mellow-eyed. The Thiksey Monastery, where the Maitreya Buddha(future coming Buddha) resides is ofcourse lovely but, to see a Buddha jewelled so, swathed in silk actually upset me a bit. For me, Budhha is renunciation defined. He is an ideal to be striven for. A jewelled Buddha I do not understand.

The blues
Pangong lake really is as blue as it was when I first saw it a year or so ago on a movie screen in Bangalore (3 idiots). I was sure it was engineered but even still, in that cinema hall, I made a silent promise to myself that I would, one day, see this blue. Actually, one needs a complete day, rise to set, to really see the repertoire of blue. We decide to ride to, but maybe a taxi would have been better, considering we had just ridden 1100 kms to get to Leh and the lake does not reach easy at 150 kms. On the way we drink free army-offered hot tea at Chang La, incorrectly stated as the second highest motorable road but our highest point on land thus far, and arrive at the lake just before twilight. We stay in a tent camp like thing by the lake and come morning just sit and watch the lake negotiate colour. Early morning it is rusty blue, at 8am it holds the mountains, at 11am it is a no-expense-spared concentrated blue. It turns green too, Aishwarya eye green, and sometimes it is lined with very light blue ribbon. And thus this writer has a new simile, 'to be as blue as Pangong Tso'.

Awake at Kargil, breakfast at Drass, lunch at Sonmarg and dine at Srinagar

The way back is much less breathtaking but more interesting for its political and military histories. Kargil is a let-down given how famous its become. Crabby roads, common-stocked markets, very ordinary bustle. We rush on to Drass after a night's stay at the worst Rs.1200 room I have stayed at. We breakfast at the Tiger Hill Cafetaria in Drass, flanked by the hills that Pakistan had advanced towards in 1999. The war memorial there sparks quite an argument between Mani and I as we differ on the appropriateness of the celebratory tone with which killing 'le enemy' is described. Both Sonmarg and Srinagar are as scenic as pictures and films had had me expect. The Dal lake stuns, the house boats intrigue but Mani is against lake pollution so we skip it. Srinagar is also as militarised as the news had had me expect. Guns growing fingers right at the trigger, pointing at whoknowswho. Both Mani and I are startled at sighting so many but for the people who live there it is common-sight. When a gun loses its power to shock, that is a frightening place and indeed it is unsettling. The Kashmir Times is full of news of militant shooting and protest-muting. We see the lake once again, in her morning colors, before we drive off to Jammu. I regret being so close to Vaisnodevi and not being able to go but that is perhaps another visit. From there on Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Ambala do not compel too much out of us and we ride on to Delhi, exhausted, dirty and quite happy.

The numbers read 2965 kms in 16 days across 1 NCR, 1 UT, 4 states and atleast 4 rivers for company.

To have done it on the bike is to have the road run through you instead of beneath you. It can be painful at times with the roads one will encounter but you also get to lick the breeze, parcel the air in your hair, stick your arms out all maniacally, have glacier-soaked shoes, greased hands and a higher esteem for your body that survived it all and quite well too. To have done it with someone I love is the biggest gift of all, to have someone to pass spanners to, helmet kiss with (yes, this too people do), fascinate in Pangong's blue with, peel noses with, find the missing glove with, plan stream crossings with, shiver in Sarchu with, argue about patriotism with, watch a documentary about Ladakh's increasing commercialisation with, get my shoulders massaged from after a 400 kms gruelling stretch.

Peep, peep, don't sleep


Border Roads Organisation is the national road jester. Among the superlative signs we saw, the writer was moved by these,

• This is a highway, not a runway
• Know Aids No Aids (ya we both paused to understand this one)
• Drive on horsepower, not rumpower
• Be a Mr. late not a late Mr. (we stopped to laugh at this)
• If you are married divorce speed
• Darling I like you but not so fast (double meaning and all)
• Safety on road is 'safe tea' at home
• After whisky driving is risky
• Don't gossip, let him drive (at this, I was both offended and amused)
• BRO cuts the mountains but connects hearts
• Are you going for a party? Then why drive so dirty (this is my favorite)

We crossed a twing twing bridge and a place called Zingzingbar. That's my bar's name.

Things we learnt

• There is no such thing as too many pairs of socks or tools or spares
• Cramster biking gear rocks
• Know thy bike
• There is polyandry in Ladakh
• Always have your dentist's number on you
• Spark plugs accumulate carbon pretty quickly when ascending
• Prepaid phone connections from other states do not work in J&K
• Waterproof your clothes in the bags
• Free and very cheap maps are available at the local government tourist reception centres
• Prayer wheels must be turned clock-wise
• Use sunscreen

Detailed itinerary (for those who want to bike it)

Day 1: Halt at Delhi, after retrieving the bike from the station, it was too late to leave
Day 2: Halt at Chandigarh
Day 3: Halt at Mandi
Day 4: Halt at Manali
Day 5: Halt at Keylong
Day 6: Halt at Sarchu
Day 7-Day 11: Leh
Day 12: Halt at Kargil
Day 13: Halt at Srinagar
Day 14: Halt at Jammu
Day 15: Halt at Ambala
Day 16: Depart from Delhi

Photos here

Of us

I thought of us today

beneath a melting sky

I took us by the hand

of a faintly flinching arm

And walked us through a shop

of moss mellowed antiques

I held us in my mouth,

an unpronounceable word!

And spat us on the seams

of a disappearing ground

A shifting notion

Will those same three words that so slide down your tongue

Get caught in my mouth like very good toffee

And will they squat down and dig their heels

Do teeth decay from words that won't leave

You demand from me surety of the future

Constancy of the present

Collapsibility of the past

When God doesn't even pretend to know the quantum mechanics of a rustling leaf, or a baby's sneeze

Do you wish to erect a picket fence around me

And cover rabbit holes with hard marble flooring

For no good ever came out of girls falling through holes

And discovering brilliant new worlds

I am many sides made

Many angles bent, many times over

How can your palm, its lines deepened with habit

Ever grasp a shifting notion

Losing its sea

His fingers bend

to pick out bones

A thin silver ribbon collects under his nail

In the cleave of his hands -

those lovely corners -

the fish, grilled and served with lime, finally loses its sea

The lights go out

He smiles

The restaurant is draping in his skin -

that lovely, dark, silken sheet

And I wonder if everyone else around can feel

a warm night breeze between their thighs

A generator is picking sound

People speak above their stations

Mincing lies with grains of rice

He asks me if I need anything

in that lovely gathering voice of his *sigh*

I nod my head and swallow my truth

Karma's soldier

In both the novels and the TV series, Dexter is a forensic blood spatter analyst who works for the Miami Police Department; in his spare time, he is a serial killer but only preys on other murderers who have escaped the justice system. He follows an elaborate code of ethics and procedures taught to him in childhood by his foster father, Harry Morgan (which he refers to as "The Code" or "The Code of Harry"), which hinges on two principles: Dexter can only kill people after finding evidence that they are guilty of murder, and he must dispose of all evidence so he never gets caught.

Since childhood, Dexter has felt homicidal urges directed by an inner voice he calls "the Dark Passenger"; when that voice cannot be ignored, he "lets the Dark Passenger do the driving". He abides by a moral code taught to him by his foster father, Harry Morgan, in which he only allows himself to kill people who are themselves murderers. Dexter considers himself emotionally divorced from the rest of humanity; in his narration, he refers to "humans" as if he is not one himself. Source: Wikipedia

Necks are punctured, limbs are severed, hearts are carved out, cheeks are peeled open – depraved bodies are unpieced and discarded so that tiny young feet may once again frolic freely on soft green grasses. Dexter doesn't just kill people who kill people, he dismantles them, as if hoping to locate their evil under a heavy vein or inside a skeletal crevice. If only evil were pluckable, then with perhaps a pair of tweezers aimed at exactly the right places in his body, he might actually have a chance at being normal, even suburban. He might stop killing. He might even stop hating himself so much.

Evil is examined here, even explained. We are told that Dexter witnessed his mother's brutal execution as a baby and this rearranged him quite fundamentally. Through consistent first person narration, Dexter is humanised, even endeared to the audience. He kills but we understand. We are made to understand. And through this effort, we are forced to consider the tortured childhoods of every serial killer and child rapist that is Dexter's victim. Not only are our wounds made in childhood, but so are our daggers. And not everybody had the good fortune to be trained into directing their murderous tendencies towards the extermination of 'deserving' people. And every deserving person had a thoroughly undeserved childhood.

Dexter is one shape of moral outrage, he is one response to suburban apathy, he is Karma's soldier, he is a traumatised child, he is a reluctant husband, he is a heartless killer. As the series continues, Dexter has to grapple with the consequences of feeling, even of loving. He questions his urges relentlessly. He develops a morality. He fissures before our very eyes. This is the complexity for which I love the series. Not just for a sick dude with a knife you know.

The old debates brew on – does systemic failure justify individual vigilantism, is killing ever right, etc. The arguments are as old as evil itself and the world of Dexter is a fine jousting place for these.

And another thing, Michael C. Hall is, in my estimation, one of the dreamiest yummiest sexiest people on television. He is sin itself.

Boxing up Dhobighat

On the big V day, I post my fumbling reflections on a movie arguably about love, inarguably lovely.Spoiler warning hereby issued.

A city is so much crumpled space. Lives are colluded upon irregular bends, opening ridges, crinkling edges, disappearing corners are brutally contested, unlikely alliances are inspired in well-shaded clefts. A city never sleeps, it merely crumples over and over again, denting every fortitude of line into ever finer fissures of space. Economies falter, policies change, governments fall, jobs outsource, friends relocate, prices rise, landlords oust, cars crash, values devalue. There are people who like to be rearranged thus, they engage with the conversing landscape, they even teach it to move to new sounds. Then there are others who like to stand still on flat feet and touch walls. They like the certain bend of boxes. Their toes get caught in the uneven terrain of the city, they lose balance and fall to bloody noses and splintered eyes. In them the city finds its filthiest sewers, collecting at its base mean sin, stale frustrations and tired fears. In Dhobighat, Kiran Rao has deftly captured this crumpling through compelling characters that have remained with me, remaking themselves constantly into fuller, fingered and nostriled persons.

I wonder why Arun fascinates with Yasmin when he has Shai, a far more interesting person, to contend with. Shai is a more familiar archetype, conspired of the same socio-economic milieu as he, whose life is negotiated not just by the circumstances of her birth but by the shape of her will. She has chosen to come to Mumbai and she has chosen to take a sabbatical, spending it doing what she claims to love, photographing lividly. Then there is Yasmin, an immigrant by marriage, corseted into a life hard for the breathing, trying to keep balance on grounds that shudder at her gross naivete, her slack pace, her protruding gaze. I found her observations most pedestrian, and if I were Arun, I might not have continued on to the 2nd and 3rd tapes. She came to the city from a village or town with many boxes of expectations of what a marriage ought to be – boxes of double pressed firmness placed into her hands by the rule-makers, the tradition-keepers who define conduct, consequence and roles. And when her boxes empty out inexplicably, she can find no repair to the situation but to deaden the hands that have no more carrying to do. A Shai might have walked out months ago. A Shai might have moved with the city. But for Yasmin, the city had just moved away her boxes. And she stood alone, unable to sketch a life without the support of firm straight lines. Nobody showed her how to live with so much lightness.

Of all the capturing devices used in the film, her eye was the least artistic. Why was Arun so attracted to her? Arun is a painter and a voyeur. He crumples reality, shapes squish with colour, light with shadow, dull human meandering with profound symbolic meaning. His life is chaotic, his marriage asunder, his child apart, he fetched life in the same way his canvas fetched form, with spite for rigid rules, reared practices, easy, meeting lines. I think his attraction to Yasmin, besides satisfying his voyeurism, is the attraction that order, structure has for the non-conformist. I have felt this too, this grotesque fascination for those whose futures are knowable (first study, then marry, then build, then breed, then marry the bred), whose actions have the consequence of heaven or hell in the waiting, for whom socially sanctioned boundaries have so successfully confined desires and dreams. So simple, so comforting to know how to live and how to die, like Yasmin did. One wants to imbue that smugness, to consume a tiny bit of that sweet tasting certainty, to cling to the rooted. I know I do.

Why does Shai like Arun so much? Why does she gild him in that much gold? Perhaps because Shai found in Arun's expanse of canvas a resonating vision of the city. He never saw her work, to him she was still an investment banker groveling after money, not the artist with a conscientious gaze and a captivated heart. Somewhere in an artist's interpretation of the world is a strand of truth about it, perhaps in his most furious exertion, a stroke or a colour reveals the shape and shade of God's hand. Perhaps Shai spotted this and was altered by it. Of course she stalks him. He bent her hands to the fit of his paint brush.

Munna loves Shai because he wants her freedom, from leaking roofs, from murdered brothers, from detergent hands and numbered collars. He is the aspiring Indian, dangling at the ends, who hopes that in the next crumpling, the city will finally fetch his feet. Shai implicates herself in his dream by publishing his portfolio. She is independent and apparently fascinated by his poverty compromised life. She wants to box it up and display it in exhibitions. Uncertain existence framed in firm certain lines. He indulges her voyeurism, never quite understanding it. It is enough to be the subject of such beauteous meditation. Shai is obviously attracted to Munna but never pursues it. Perhaps she is too infatuated by Arun, or perhaps because, when crossing class boundaries, a modicum of distance preserves the social order so necessary to propel the economy and maintain internal 'security'. It is this distance that will most likely keep Munna in his place, killing rats for the benefit of wood laden, sea-aired kitchens of higher placed Mumbaikars. Shai fell into bed with Arun on first encounter, but didn't dare touch Munna in a series of encounters. There is charity in her gaze undeniably, and it will always keep Munna from being her equal.

Dhobi ghat is closeted love, slowly deteriorating happiness, mediated gazing, crumpling spaces.

New sound

There can hardly be acts more self-pervading than the yearly ritualistic commemoration of one's birth. A day when fleets of confetti flutter just for you, when a knife is swung into the belly of a cake in your honour, when fancy purses are matched precisely to flashy dresses for festive rejoicement over the particular pleating of vein and muscle that is you. I have always enjoyed birthdays, mostly because my mother was the biggest birthday buff I have ever known. Because, for her, the new sound in the room that November 4th noon in 1980, that piercing scream that peeled the skin off her ears, was perhaps the most definitive calling she had ever heard in her life. With my birth on November 4th, my mother, Anita, was essentially born. She cradled that sound in her ears, her first instance of her first child, for the rest of her life. And every year on November 4th, she celebrated the becoming of her genes in her thin, bulging eyed baby, in this brand new sound in the world, with the loudest sound of merriment she could muster.

My mother knew how to throw a party. She planned properly, plod through yards of grocery lists, invitee lists, party food lists, party music lists, return gift lists and probed every shop in town for the most perfect birthday dress for me and my sister. She was a nimble crafter of crumbs. She would ask me what shape of cake I wanted and then proceed to carve out of the clinging crumbs of a regular round or square shaped cake the most exact replica possible of what I had indicated, layers of gooey butter icing and clusters of hard coated candy completing it suitably. My eyes would latch onto the sight of her plucking out the ears of Mickey Mouse or the wheels of a train carriage from much humbler shapes, knowing just where to look for them. She was an artist always, my mother, never a squire to routine or convention, a channel always for the most unruly waters. I remember her climbing upon chairs plastering vapid white walls with spirals of shiny colour and light. Balloons bawled from every corner, games were intricately planned for, for every age group. She was a formidable hostess, succumbing neither to exhaustion nor consuming conversation at any time during the party. There was enough for the children to do and the adults to eat. On that one day, my mother hauled from every breathing body in the room an acknowledgement, whether genuinely felt or not, of how special her daughter, a cauldron of the most likely substances in the world, was. On that one day, I was the king of the world.

It is therefore a particularly wanting day this November 4th, a cakeless, balloonless day hosted by nobody in particular. The lack of her is festering civilizations within me, tall buildings of dark-windowed emptiness. It is strange to not be able to hold your source on the commemoration of such sourcing, it is the strongest feeling of disjointing from the human race as is possible. And yet, I must survive it, and carry on with her birthday buffery. I must celebrate her donated skin, her over-stretched, twice-ageing skin, over my bones. She would have wanted that, to be in life an artist, in death a muse. And so I bake a cake today. For myself for the first time. A sugar-soaked paean to my mother and all her inspired efforts to make this day mine. It will be a heart shaped one, with yellow icing, her favorite color, and gems dotting the centre. And with friends, darling lovely friends, I will record into memory my first birthday party without my mother's careful, busy hands ensuring brim-fuls of cold orange juice in every cupped glass, her gleaning ears ever tracking my mouth for happy expressions of that brand new sound she heard for the first time on November 4th, 1980.

You linger

You linger in my sunday

in the depth of its minute

in the scope of its promise

in the lack of its ambition.


You linger in my sunday

in the rest in my bones

in the sleep in my eyes

in the silence between heartbeats.


You linger in my sunday

in the tight alliances between these letters

in the distant spaces between these words

in the flight of the hand that wrote them.