Weeping for Manetheren

James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (October 17, 1948 - September 16, 2007)







This past week has been one of terrible sadness. It is with great grief that I inform my small world, albeit late, that Robert Jordan, that writer of writers, that raconteur of raconteurs, has passed away.

Robert Jordan, as most of you must know wrote the Wheel of Time series. It is one of the most marvelous series that I have ever read. I began reading the Wheel of Time in the 8^th standard, 10 years ago. It has probably shaped my life and the approach to it more than any other book I’ve read. I’ve written about this before and I fear that I’m going to write a post that is exactly the same. I am the same person, however, and though water has flown under tons of bridges and has gone on to the sea, the river remains the same, the man remains the same, the book remains the same.

RJ showed me the grandeur of his mind and, through it, the grandeur of the world. The world was brighter owing to him and my dreams turned to colour when sleeping after reading WOT. My cycle turned into a stallion on my way to school, sticks turned to quarterstaff, plastic to burnished gold. Rainbows inevitably appeared when the rain storm ended. But, it was all much more than this, wasn’t it? RJ showed me what it meant to be a knight –that duty was often heavier than mountains, that death was lighter than feathers. That dreams have meaning beyond measure.

And who can forget his characters – persons who became my brothers, sisters, lovers. Who went to sleep with me at night and woke in the morning. Characters that shared with me their deepest sorrow, their profound happiness, their hopes, their fears, their love. Goodbye, Mat, Goodbye Min. You whom I once loved. Goodbye, Thom, Moridin, Demandred. And Rand… and Moiraine. Goodbye.

Thank you, RJ and Goodbye. May you shelter in the palm of the Creator's hand, and may the last embrace of the mother welcome you home. God bless Harriet, Brother Wilson and the rest of the family. May the Light protect all of us.

…and the raven said, “Strew a handful of seed around the stones so that there will be life here again.”

Past it on

He talked about yesteryears, about a time long ago. When the air was cleaner, the sky was bluer and the birds chirped louder and more melodiously. I remember that time too. As do most other people.

Every weekend I fly and fly back. And the fly back is an amazing two and a half hours for introspection. Especially with a good food for thought. I get incredibly energized during that time, with a rapid train of ideas flashing through my hyperactive brain. I decide to gym, decide to write a book, decide to open a restaurant chain, decide to quit, decide never to quit, decide this and that. Great ideas, often intertwined with long hours of sleep. So I lose most of these ideas.

One such idea was my listing-of-friends idea. I had thought it was absolutely the most fantastic idea I had ever come up with. It involved an excel sheet and 4 columns, 2 of which were name and last contacted. I will let your young infertile minds conjure the remaining part of that sorry excuse for the human condition.

Friends are a window to your memories. They are the only way to get to relive a past that will never be. Never of a present of a future you never saw and a future which for some strange reason seems like a past you had once had. Like the river. (T, that's your cue to smile). Friends, apparently, serve the only purpose of lighting the embers of recollection. Or rather, primarily. Hogwash. Kundera can get it wrong too. A minuscule amount of the time.

How obsessed we are with the past. A constant urge to think and talk about it. To reminisce. We actually signify its importance with a verb. Do parallels exist with the present and future?

Detachment is nirvana. Detachment of everything. Detachment of the past, present and future. The past is difficult to withdraw from, unless. Unless. Unless you get hit by love. Because love is the insatiable glorification of the present, so much so that you lose the concept of the past. The now conquers all. Swallows the future and vanquishes the past. Every other day, especially when we are young, the specter of our beautiful pasts comes a-knocking. Knock, knock, here I am, your life idyll.

Not to worry, T. That's for mortals. Those with a constant need to prove and worry. The insecure and the dissatisfied. Not us. For we know the truth. We know of that and more.

But you know what, we'll always have Bombay. And Modigliani.

Passe,
H

Let us write letters

I was reading one of M’s usual group e-mails the other day and was absolutely amazed with the fact that I was delighted to receive it. It’s become a pleasant part of a fortnightly routine to read of her adventures (or mis-adventures, as it were) in college. Much more, it is delightful to read the sheer wonder and awe in her mind for her everyday (mundane, some would call it) life. There is, she writes, something grand and larger than life in sitting in a quiet, moldy, sinister library, working on plotting charts (because she doesn’t know Excel) or making half an hour presentations on some weird rural economics or some such (I doubt she knows Economics). I also learnt, recently enough on Facebook, that M’s name is actually A! How quaint.

However, the real reason for my pleasure in reading M’s mails is more of nostalgia than anything else. There was a time in the past, the deep past, more the Jurassic period of T’s life, when a close friend of mine, S, and his family (including his brother T/V, also a close friend), shifted to Mumbai from Bangalore. S used to call me Ruby, incidentally, don’t ask, won’t tell. S, bless his heart, is now in Stanford, doing some rather random research on God-knows-what. Well, S used to write me letters and I used to reply to them. I still have some saved up in my drawer at home and read them in those periods of sharp existential angst and those others, of quiet, unadulterated bliss. I usually go through all the things I’ve stocked up in my drawers during those times, probably trying to piece together my whole life, looking back at it like a slide reel, picking up moments that defined it. What patterns emerge, I wonder, by gazing at a marble collection of Milkys, Dooms, Semi-Dooms, Brandys, Chunts, Appys and the like; or the broken brake guards on my first cycle – a red Street Cat (Boom boom shaka laka Boom Boom shak, street cat’s going to knock you back); or the books that I won as prizes for excellent academic performance (!! All of you can get up and give up now) when I was in Nursery and Prep – which consist of a book on X and Y’s birthday party, another on a Billy goat’s birthday party and a Secret Seven (Kindergarten teachers are fascinated by birthday parties).

So, as I was saying before interrupting myself so rudely, S used to write me letters. He used to fill them up with anecdotes from his life, just as M does now; in addition, he would fill me in on how much he had progressed in the first adventure game we played – Skullduggery. (Time for another diversion). Skullduggery was a lovely text adventure game (or is) about a guy who goes to an ancient estate of a long lost family to find (three guesses), buried treasure. In the process, he encounters ghosts, uncovers skeletons in multiple closets (literally! You actually enter a closet to find a secret passage, with the usual skeleton) and visits hell and speaks to the Grim Reaper. We finally finished Skullduggery when S returned to Bangalore, in the meantime playing other great adventure games like King’s Quest (started with part 6 and eventually played most of the others) and the hilarious Monkey Island (I’m Guybrush Threepwood, a mighty pirate!)

S’ letters, focus. S would also include a riddle or two in his letters and once put in a whole puzzle about a man on an island looking for (2 guesses) buried treasure. One of the answers was Vibgyor, I remember.

So there, thanks M, you’ve brought back welcome memories. Do keep writing. There is something in your mails that still reminds me of the smell of ink and paper and makes me think of flowers pressed between pages of old notebooks and sheafs of old letters tied up in violet ribbons.

In other news, to end the post on a high note, my demon lover has finally left me. He’s just told me some rather exciting news about his life and left me wailing within the walls of misty Xanadu. For more details, contact the enigmatic one yourself.

Oh yes, on his post, I find his projections of the future interesting, albeit flawed; though the interpretation of the past is bang on. I doubt we will remain the same. I doubt things ever remain the same – someday, I’ll be the magician and he’ll turn into a knight or a rogue. Who knows.

C'est la vie, (to quote him)
T

Then, now and later

14 year old T and H meet.

T is wearing a green cape and a greener cap. Otherwise he is dressed in a staid grey mail with a funky belt. He looks menacing, albeit young, with his silver ruby-encrusted sword, dazzling with the moon beams of the elvish magic shops. He claims to be a knight, the elvish knight, Azrael, of the First Order, come to rid our world of the black one. The black dragon named Brexon. H smiles. His usual, with jam and butter. He introduces himself as Sandalf the purple. He wears dull clothes of a dark blue hue which seems to overwhelm him enveloping all parts of his body except his left hand, which holds a wooden staff purchased for a grand from the peddlers gnomes in the Olde Forest. He looks funny. So does T. They take the Eurodean Oath of Allies and are on their way. One to free the beast and the other to kill the beast.

22 year old T and H meet.

T is wearing a pink banker's shirt. The one with the white collar and french cuffs. He checks his mail from his blackberry, and with his right hand takes a sip of deliciously insipid coffee. He talks of inner peace, of karma, of nirvana, of happiness and of purpose. H sits beside him, typing something on his laptop. A mail. He joins in the conversation every couple of minutes expressing his humble points of view. H is wearing an extremely boring blue shirt and black trousers, like always. They live reality. Yearning to escape. Yearning for freedom. Yearning for excitement. But the time's not right. The time's never right. It once was. It once was always right. But now it's never right.

30 year old T and H meet.

T is wearing red. Bright red. H is wearing yellow. Yucky yellow. They looked loud together. But as superheroes they didn't have time to really bitch about their outfits. They had time for doughnuts now and then, but T had to watch it - he was on a diet. Y was always giving him active feedback which weighed heavily on his mind. H was beyond such worldly things. He was too experienced for this to matter. He thought so. Poor soul. The world was waiting, feverishly, for T and H. The global problem of boredom was spirally out of control every day. Television was made illegal 5 years ago. Sports was restricted to golf and belching. T and H were the only ones who could help. Blog, dammit, blog.

We're back,
H

PS: Get well soon T!