The Taj hugging story

For those who wonder where I have been, I was off to Agra to meet the dead queen :P
Quite literally this month has been the most apt definition of adventure, not necessarily pleasant though. With a weekly record of losing almost everything valuable, including a phone (and hence no communication for days now on) I have done it all. This trip was with the Mumbai friend who had also (like many of us) not seen the Taj Mahal! Back when I was a little girl, my mother showed me pictures of her first trip after marriage ( I won't say the word!) and there she was, standing as tall as the Taj Mahal and touching its tip with her fingers! The photo caught my fascination and ever since I had been wanting to make "the" trip to Taj Mahal. We also visited the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri. A small advertorial note: choose youth hostel if you know not where to stay!
But, all the minute travelogue details apart, I have been asking myself, why write a travel entry? You would surely find a million others on famous places as such and once they are old, the information obsolete. Also, I have realized that increasingly, my travels are not about the place, they are about places within. Astonishingly how, while reprimanding a wicked bus conductor or bargaining with a guide, frowning at the fellow tourist or laughing as you eat aloo tikki in Taj ganj, every street, every wall, each man's two eyes and every woman's pocket holds just one little thing out to you: mirrors. They keep reflecting facets of you that come out, or are born in not-so-ordinary circumstances.
Coming back to this trip, as we walked patiently entering gate by gate to see the white marble monument of love and grandeur, people's voices kept ringing in my ears. Many told me how I'd be disappointed,how places don't live up to their hype. For me, it wasn't true. It was so gorgeous that we circled it for almost two hours before we even touched a brick of the main building. Almost postcard-ish in memory.
Such was the romance of the dead silent place it continues to ooze in bits and pieces, I can hardly visualize it entirety. While leaving, as I hugged it, I donated two beats of my throbbing life to the slumbering queen inside.

Monolith of an impasse, this.

Like the owl of the camel barn, two big glassy eyes can convey the meditated ranges of boredom and silence can be the final axe.
I wept and I wept and I wept endlessly. Hiccuping I wept. Life’s choicest memorabilia was nothing but bulbs of cold pus, dotted in bitter memories. I do this often, feel lacerated, dismembered into smaller people, almost like elves jumping right out of the rib cage, one of which cannot stop weeping at what has been done and lost. I felt so little and there was nothing to do really. Just keep emptying pints of bitterness, hurling pots to flood the floor. It hardly feels any better.
It’s not only bitter, it’s burdensome. To write is burdensome, and to keep feeling that there are two worlds, one that you can and the other you cannot describe in any code, image, syllable, and that you've scrambled to the highest corner of the former while your round head hits an impasse at the corner of the glass ceiling where three dimensions of mundane livelihood meet, now that is an impasse.
Also how the only thing in life worth learning, mastering, reveling and melting in easily is observation. Of me who thought words were my weapon, think again is necessary when you meet an army of other word-blasting debacles, slicing like carrots and flying like tiny plastic discs.
Someone must find what the lotus inspired, quick.

Divided we live, united we bicker

Once upon a time in the whirlwind of love, cemented in the heart of the very evil frowning society, then a few years into blue tint photos by the sea, a couple of months with the newly born daughter and a few arid years past, someone took the trouble to drag it in our bitter chance dialogs over fried eggs and orange juice. You spelled it, I signed, we sealed the pending hunch, it wasn't meant to be. For the daughter who now knows, who can spell it as well as us, it is called s-e-p-a-r-a-t-i-o-n. Divorces have an epistemology. Let me locate it for you.
They exist in films, imagination, they form a characteristic salient feature of the bad houses with dim lights that balance the diabetic good of our neighborhood, they are placed in drunken adulthood, abusive childhood, impulsive youth and a couple of 'changed-man/woman' experiences later, they finish with a big dramatic bang. Do you see? They define bad houses, bad parents, bad kids, bad homework, fear of intimacy, stigma, burden, baggage and a debris of flooding photos and clothes out of the attic. Do you see, you two? You brought them conclusively to the finer side of delightful household disagreements. You pin pointed the finely carved hollows of all our tree-houses. Such confusion, such dreadful thoughts come to me, if mine will end up like you. After all, I was one of the kids in the blue sea photos.
Why mustn't you be quiet and live like others do, half your life is already gone, the half promises to be a cycle of retrospective mourning followed by epiphanies of the metamorphosed life, discourses on change, on making colder harder selves, and a few vengeful afternoons later, the wrinkles will wash all this confidence away. For lovers to commit and publicize, for married and betrothed people to eulogize, for panegyric romeo tales, and for us unwilling to enter into the holy familial bonds, you must stay. Fight within the room and sleep over it, be doomed over that one hasty wink and stolen kisses. Make believe.

Sariska and the travel birthday:Fish, tigers and age

I sat again, fretting at the edge of the epic twentieth birthday, it will JUST be another birthday of 178 facebook wishes and 20 twitter mentions, 10 calls and millions of handshakes and hugs. It is me, my birthday! How could it possibly not be big, fun etc? And, enter Chandan Gomes and his prized silver Santro car. *drum rolls*
Sariska, the tiger reserve in Rajasthan happened, a drive, yes. Exhausting, yes. But, exciting-typical-Noopur birthday? Yes!
The night started with baked cheese cake and other chocolate cake and ended in... McDonalds! I realize over years, McDonalds has stood for me, many things. It stands for the face of consumerism, the shiny place of eternal advertisement poster happiness that I never participated in my childhood in. It stands for all the Barbies I never had, all the remote cars I watched from afar and all the Super Marios I played only at a chance relative house visit. My romanticizing of McDonalds must irk you, make you laugh too maybe.
The morning too began with the same. We did not spot tigers, I doubt there are any, but we pretended to be very interested in clicking pictures of Peacocks and monkeys, all other tourist followed us, making the most of their trip :) Come le dejeuener, hunger growled like a tiger from the depths of our stomachs and we landed at this haven of food, not only food for body,but food for thought! The picture do the job, though I'd allow myself some space to describe "The Quest" cafe in the middle of Sariska town/village, its walls etched in "Free Tibet" slogans and wind chimes, surreal!
The walls dripped of poems, painted with fish, wouldn't you think this is some dreamy destiny moment, for me to encounter wall full of fish and sweet word nothings and Buddha mentions on the wall! This is what birthdays should be, a moment of crazy crazy delight. I couldn't get over it the entire day, of course. Hence, the fish eye pictures too! :)
Thanks much to all the cats, fishes, Pablo Nerudas, friends, frenemies and unknowing, unsuspecting display picture admirers, birthdays like these ease the anxiety of turning 20 (or 47, as many would agree). To celebrate the larger travel of life, by the metaphor of the car travel, it was a literary moment of joy!

Picture, lens curtsey: Chandan Gomes

Bah-bye Taiwan- Day III and return

Anecdote one:
Perched at the edge of the Shi'lin market road, as she munched harmlessly onto some veggies, a taxi driver harkened in the background, collecting all his English words with great effort, an unmatched prowess to convey: "Eu... Eu...ahr a rabbit!" Huh, what! And,then came the aha moment, well yeah, I was munching on a carrot. He wasn't the only one, almost every third passerby was slightly amused at a carrot muncher, so was the shop keeper who broke into genuine hundred percent laughter. Of course, even you would, if 95 shops in your market sold every variety of meat possible, and the other 5 had fruits (rose apples that leak and burst in your mouth!). This was the story of every lunch and dinner in Taiwan, the vegetarian grumbling and fussing drones in the air, "NOT meat, not chicken, not beef, not pork, not fish, not salmon, not eggs...ve-jee-tay-rean". This baffled most people there, there remains little to eat, though you can always resort to rice cakes, tofu and bean pastes!

Anecdote two: KFC is home
So, after a satisfying shopping spree for 2.5 hours, hunger screamed from the deepest corners of my stomach. This is how I thought of food in Taiwan: Hunger-food-daal-rice-not-vegetables-fruits-mcdonalds-all non veg-despair-hunger-apples-sigh. But, I thought to take my chances, to go to KFC to eat vegetarian, yes, something a normal Indian vegetarian would never do. Of course I found nothing, but I desperately bought a beverage. As I sipped on it, the familiar taste, of at least something tasting the same made me feel so good! For people who scream hoarse at these capitalist food chains, there are certain experiences that only KFC and McDonalds reproduce anywhere you go. Thank God for that.

Story of the city, workshop and scrubbed clean solitude:
The workshop to begin with, was good, very vague but, a lot of food for thought. The people I met, never had imagined meeting someone from Kyrgyztan or Moldova, but I did and loved it! The city, yes, how American! All clean, large 'freeways', less people, the modern buildings, typical urban imagination, tall and shiny. Maybe its just a scared little girl's first time in the foreign lands, but it was so different than where I live. Not only do cows and dogs stay out of the picture, but also the personal space seemed larger. The freeways to me, seemed hopelessly alone, or maybe I am just very uncomfortable with halogen lamps and buzzing cars. These are the fleeting impressions of Taipei, though something remarkable to leave you all with: the way the people thank and welcome anybody at all. Shie shie, for all the warmth.
Bah-bye (head tilted at 45 and hand shows peace sign) :)