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Letter from Cary, North Carolina
November 10, 2009
I have put up three sets of pictures at my flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/28059352@N07/. These are
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| Cosmos daisies, Kufri |
- Pictures of wild dahlias in Kasauli
- Pictures of Nek Chand's Rock Garden, and
- Fall pictures from my yard.
Please turn off the "embiggen" option for best results.
What the pictures from Nek Chand's garden don't show, and perhaps no pictures can show, is the plasticity with which Nek Chand shapes his space. I was constantly surprised as I walked through the narrow lanes and open spaces of his garden. Everywhere on the walls and the floors there are forms and textures that suggest things. There are things that suggest other things, and perhaps yet other things
as well. Suggestions lurk everywhere, and even more than in the objects and the structures he has fashioned, the suggestions lurk in the visitor's head. There they shape themselves, then tumble down and reconstitute. Being different every time.
In the Italian movie Il Postino, Mario Ruoppollo, the postman, befriends the exiled poet Pablo Neruda. Shortly after he begins delivering mail to Neruda, Mario happens also to fall in love with the ravishing beauty Beatrice Russo who works as a waitress in an inn owned by her curmudgeonly aunt, Donna. Donna, irked by the penniless and unprepossessing Mario's romantic interest in her niece,
asks Beatrice, she says: "So what does he have but for the fungus between his toes?"
Mario copies one of Neruda's poem and gives it to Beatrice pretending he wrote it himself, for her.
Naked, you are simple as one of your hands
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round ...
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| Laundry, Kasauli |
is how it starts out. The paper on which the poem was written is plucked from Beatrice's bosom by Donna who, illiterate herself, takes it to her priest to read aloud to her. They both nearly fall down as the priest reads the very first word: "Nuda". Donna wows to gun down Mario, who complains to Neruda. You've put me in one hell of a spot, he says. Neruda says: That's a fine one!
Did I ask you to steal my poem?
Mario tells Neruda that it wasn't stealing. "You know," says Mario, "Art does not belong to the artist. It belongs to those who need it."
Great art, although it starts out in the hands of the artist --- Neruda's poetry or Nek Chand's structures or the voluptuous form of the Chola Parvati --- ultimately completes itself in the mind of the person who seizes it. The first strokes are indeed the artist's, but the final strokes belong ultimately to us all.
Suddenly in Nek Chand's garden one walks into a space that could be right out of some great Rajput fortress or some grand Mughal palace. To capture that sense in a limited space, using the rudest of materials, that is his art. Shortly thereafter one is in the midst of humble dwellings in a little village by a stream. The surroundings bucolic, the mind in harmony with the simplicity of the
surroundings. Then one comes across fantastic structures that grow out of the ground, jut out of the walls, drop down from above, suggesting things both familiar and unfamiliar, both the familiarity and the unfamiliarity melding harmoniously as if in some picture of a Martian landscape shot by the MRO. I have never seen Antonio Gaudi's work in person, but I hope to some day, and when I do
I expect that Gaudi's work will remind me of Nek Chand.
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| Balcony, Kasauli |
My mother's side of the family holds an annual "rumpus", I guess one might call it, in the memory of my late nani, one of the sweetest and loveliest people I have known, and I attended for the first time this year. We met in Delhi, late September, and drove up to Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh in five hired minivans, some twenty-five people in all. Uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces,
and nephews, some of whom I hadn't seen in years, or ever; people lately married in, children lately born. I had a wonderful time re-bonding with the family. I wish Abha and Bui and Teetee had been with me.
The hillsides of Kasauli happened to be ablaze with Dahlias. It was that time of the year. Thousands of them in all imaginable colors blanketed the green slopes of Kasauli. Those flowers are the subject of the first set of my pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28059352@N07/. I will also, by and by, post a set of
pictures from Simla. Also at flickr I have placed a set of family pictures.
From Kasauli we drove down to Chandigarh where I stayed about a day with a friend. Minutes before we drove up to her house, I saw Nek Chand's Rock Garden to our left and I was very happy to see it because I had promised myself years ago to go see that garden. Also in my plans was a visit to the Chandigarh Museum, which happens to be next door to the College of Fine Arts of Punjab University
whose Principal my little sister Archana was for a short while.
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| Windows, Simla |
My cab driver, Krishna Kumar, was a very pleasant young man from Patiala. I always sat up front next to him so we became good friends. His father had owned a farm in Patiala, but it was of more profit to him, he said, to drive a cab rather than work the land! His wife and two sons live in Patiala and he sees them only once every three months or so because he works for a cab company in Delhi. He lets his farm out to other people.
He said that he can tell the Americans apart from other foreigners easily, and he said he can also tell the Indians who travel in from the US apart from those who travel in from elsewhere. How is that? Well, the way it works is that the Americans love to chat, he said. They always smile and laugh when they talk to him or to anyone else. They are very generous with tips. The Americans talk
to a cabbie as if he were a person, rather than a cab-driver, he said --- a concept which Indians and foreigners from other places seem to have some trouble with. I said yes we Americans are a very friendly people. So three cheers for America!
Since Krishna was from a farming family, he told me what all we saw growing on all sides as we drove up through Haryana. I was surprised at the quantities of rice they grow in Haryana. There was also a lot of corn. I can now tell a Basmati rice plant from a non-Basmati plant, and I can diagnose some problems with an ear of corn, if anyone has need. The highway we traveled up from Delhi to Kalka was quite like an American highway, four lanes, and fast. In places six if I remember right. There were plenty of dhabas alongside. And I passed through my very first toll-booths in India. How very exciting!
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In a corn field, Krishna Kumar |
On our way back, Krishna Kumar was to drop me at Reena's house. He was quite certain I had the wrong address because, I guess, he reasoned that a person he had picked up from the shabby East End Apartments in Delhi, where my sister Archana now lives, could not be visiting someone who lived in such a grand area where there were even armed guards in front of some of the houses. He was worried
that I had copied the wrong sector number over the phone. I persuaded him that I was not likely to get shot, dropped off my bags at Reena's, she wasn't home, and after washing some grime off my face hopped into an auto-rickshaw for a drive to
the Chandigarh Museum. The museum was closed on account of Dussera. So much for that! I passed by a row of students' sculptures outside the College
of Art, ate some chhola-kulcha at a small garden restaurant and caught another auto-rickshaw to the Nek Chand gardens. The driver had no idea where Nek Chand gardens were! We had to hunt some. The entrance fee to the gardens: Rs.10 = $0.20. What a bargain!
I wanted to go home and shower before Reena got home. Her husband, Ina, Ina's sister Punita, and I, were all three of us students at Wash U in St. Louis, where Punita and I spent forever on our respective DSc's, graduating ultimately on the same day, while Ina escaped a little before us, but was back a couple of times with his new wife Reena. I think Abha and I were already married and well-established
in the student ghettos of Clayton and University City before we got to know Ina and Punita well. Ina, by the way, has been immortalized, if that's the word, in a piece called "Tabby's Quiz and Mr. Clinton's Indian Ladies" at http://www.kahany.com/writing/0298tabbysquiz.html.
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Retired soldier, Simla |
I should have spent about three hours at Nek Chand's garden to do it full justice, but anxious to clean up before Reena got home, I got done in a little over one hour. The next time I'm in Chandigarh, I will have to go again. Reena too had gone up into the hills, also near Dharampur, near where Kasauli is, to meet with an old friend who has given up having a fixed home and simply travels
from place to place living an itinerant existence. Reena came back home well after I had had a good hot shower and recovered myself with a couple of cups of tea.
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Grooming for the camera, Simla |
In the evening, after more tea with Reena, after listening to her stories and telling some my own, we dined with Ina's dad who also happened to be in Chandigarh. Reena is one of those delightful raconteurs, like Suji Lamba, who one can happily listen to for hours. And from what I hear so is Reena's daughter Gitana who I met but briefly when I was last in Delhi, but at a sorrowful occasion.
Gurpreet uncle, Ina's dad, has set up a school called Sikhya (http://www.sikhya.org/, a site well worth spending some time at) in Chandigarh that caters exclusively to children of the poorest in the city, and at no charge. In addition to education in very well-equipped classrooms with caring and well-qualified teachers, the children also
have access to showers, transport, meals, and clean clothes. It is a grand experiment.
I had been to Sikhya on an earlier visit to Chandigarh, had met with its very able and energetic Principal, Sonia Channi, and I was to visit again briefly the very next day. I asked Gurpreet uncle if he were not worried that the model he had set up with Sikhya could not easily be replicated. Is the school equipped to survive in perpetuity? Is it a model that others could replicate? Is it
not an institution that might create some sort of dissonance in a child from the slums, worse, a distance between a child and a family that survives but barely in strained and impecunious circumstance?
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| Mama monkey runs away after stealing a roti, Simla |
I am sure that Gurpreet uncle has thought over these question carefully, but he is a modest man, and he said he didn't have answers to these sort of questions. That Sikhya is an experiment, and time will show the way forward he said. On my flight back I was thinking about Sikhya, and thinking that even if Sikhya were to fail to survive the next twenty or thirty or hundred years, it has touched so many lives already, and will touch so many more, that already it may have succeeded but we may not know for a few years yet. Already it may have graduated a few children who may transform the world but who may not have had that opportunity were it not for Sikhya. Sonia had explained to me what difficult homes many of her children are from. How many live with violence and alcoholism every day of their lives, and how the school attempts to provide them an atmosphere where they may culcate a sense of dignity and self-worth, and attempts also to equip them with readily marketable skills.
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| Railway ticket, Kalka Shatabdi, Chandigarh to New Delhi |
I had to cash a few traveler's checks in Chandigarh. It took two officers ("officers" I say because they had cubicles) of the Punjab National Bank forty-seven minutes to cash American Express traveler's checks. After I had been there 40 minutes, an American couple with Texas accents came in to cash their American Express checks. I suggested that they go find some nice American bank
in the vicinity. That I had already been there 40 minutes. The bank officers who were working me over complained that I was giving them a bad name. I said what do you expect? This job takes one person thirty seconds anywhere else in the world. The Punjab National Bank efficiency ratio, given my experience, is a factor of 47 x 2 / 0.5 = 188 below everywhere else, I am very sorry to say. In
a plaza full of banks I had chosen to go to PNB because my late grandmother had had an account at a PNB branch in Delhi. It used to be an efficient and courteous bank back then.
Delhi is a slum. Every time I go to Delhi it looks worse. The roads are all dug up. The traffic is senseless. Dirt and disorganization are everywhere. But Delhi also has its pleasures of course. I had a quick dinner with with two dear old friends, Ina and Ram Gopal Mukundan at a Mediterranean restaurant in Khel Gaon before I left for Kasauli. Muk had to repeatedly ask them to lower the volume
on their music, but the food was excellent. Punita was away in Slovenia, hobnobbing with gypsies, who she feels great kinship with. So I missed her. It's on her account that her niece is named Gitana. When I got back to Delhi my mother was very ill and I didn't have occasion to catch up with with a number of people I wanted to connect with. Next time then. My mother had contracted some nasty
variety of malaria. After a long while now she is finally back on the mend.
Arun
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| Wild Dahlias, Kasauli |
