Skip to main content

I wandered lonely as a cloud


Fiction

Something was amiss on top of the hill. I sensed it in my veins. My veins are the primary source of my awareness. As well as the little wisdom I’m gathering as I go on. I’m not wise. I’m just 30 years young. And I’m going to tell you a story about a woman who is just ten more years older than me. But she has grey hairs all over her head now.

Her name is Sujata. I learnt that when I was a ten-year-old boy who was driven by the kind of curiosity that killed the proverbial cat. I was living in the valley whose sunset was always blocked by the hill in the west. That entire hill belonged to one family. Aristocratic family, my mother told me. The history of their aristocracy went back to some Aryan invasion and all that stuff. History never enthused me. But heights did.

My history teacher told us about the Eiffel Tower that day in class. The tallest tower in the world. About its 1665 steps. About the grand vision it provided from its height. I imagined myself running up 1665 steps and looking at the earth. I thought I would be able to see the whole planet, the roundness of it. You see how stupid I was.

But Sujata chechi was the first one to tell me that I was a little genius. By the way, chechi in Malayalam means elder sister. I had just walked up the hill that belonged to Sujata chechi’s family the day my history teacher had spoken about the Eiffel Tower’s 1665 steps. What if I couldn’t climb up the Eiffel Tower? I have this aristocratic tower just behind my house. And I’m gonna climb that. That’s all what I thought. Of course, I didn’t know slangs like gonna and all in those days. Life teaches you that sort of rubbish as you get on.

Sujata chechi was amused to see me, a ten-year-old boy who seemed to have lost his way. When I told her about my history class and the Eiffel Tower and, of course, my desire to see the roundness of the earth, she laughed putting aside the writing pad she was holding. There was a tinge of sadness in her laughter, if I remember correctly. I don’t know if my memory is tincturing the colours of the past reality. Memory is terribly unreliable, I know though I’m only thirty. Thirty is dirty, I forget who said that. If I can’t even recall precisely what happened just about 20 years ago, how can my country recall its history of 5000 years ago? Well, that’s just one of the infinite questions that rage in my mind. My mind – which Sujata chechi called genius and I think is a junkyard.

She was writing a poem, she said, when I asked her what she was doing with the writing pad. I learnt that some of her poems were published in well-known periodicals like Mathrubhumi. My father was a fan of Mathrubhumi.

‘Do you like poems?’ She asked me.

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ I said in order to impress her. I was quoting the first line of the poem that was taught in class that day.

She laughed again. That laughter too carried the melancholy of history.

Pardon my memory.

Pardon history.

As I grew older, I learnt that Sujata chechi's father had died drinking when she was a child. Her mother was grappling with a perpetual depression. Sujata chechi's poetry carried all the beauty of Keats's saddest thoughts. 

Eventually Sujata chechi married another aristocrat and left the place. Her mother died and then the house on the hill remained abandoned looking like a haunted villa. 

Twenty years later... twenty years after my first visit...

I stood in front of an old woman. She was Sujata, I knew though her hairs were all grey. She wasn't half as old as her hairs looked. 

‘I’m selling the house and the land,’ the grey-haired young Sujata chechi said. She had faced too many cataclysms in her married life, I understood from her conversation. ‘Aristocracy,’ she said. Aristocracy is like history. Brutal. Butcher.

She had told her aristocratic husband to get lost. She wanted to live her life. Not being fucked around by a cock of history whose erection is now embracing everybody from Putin to Zelensky, Netanyahu to Trump – Trump whom he calls Doland affectionately apparently.

 Why is she telling me all this? I ask her. Do you know me?

I wandered lonely as a cloud, she said. And smiled. Sad smile.

Top post on Blogchatter

Comments

  1. It sounds like she had a very sad life. And if she's only 40...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is fiction, Liz. But there are sadder people in real life.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...

The Ramayana Chronicles: 26 Stories, Endless Wisdom

I’m participating in the A2Z challenge of Blogchatter this year too. I have been regular with this every April for the last few years. It’s been sheer fun for me as well as a tremendous learning experience. I wrote mostly on books and literature in the past. This year, I wish to dwell on India’s great epic Ramayana for various reasons the prominent of which is the new palatial residence in Ayodhya that our Prime Minister has benignly constructed for a supposedly homeless god. “Our Ram Lalla will no longer reside in a tent,” intoned Modi with his characteristic histrionics. This new residence for Lord Rama has become the largest pilgrimage centre in India, drawing about 100,000 devotees every day. Not even the Taj Mahal, a world wonder, gets so many footfalls. Ayodhya is not what it ever was. Earlier it was a humble temple town that belonged to all. Several temples belonging to different castes made all devotees feel at home. There was a sense of belonging, and a sense of simplici...