I
don't intend to go away so much as a predatory departures sneak up on me. That
despite what I recognize since yesterday as the 'extreme crazy factor' involved
in a move to India!
Now
people see me; now they don't. And then again, in reverse, a few months later.
In
its worst moments, it’s a comedy of errors; but I’m awash in better scenes,
many consisting of a flo’-row ticket at a fire-side chat with long-beard
characters, whose black & grey ashen locks are lit as a night-skyward gaze roll
into bees’ nest turned upside-down on the head top perched for long-term
comfortability—buckle in for a long-haul conversation—‘cause this is gonna be a
trip, ‘cause
here
slows down and there
where
lots changes and a lot's changed,
who's
to match the slow
from
the slower with the fast
from
the faster how?
Now,
I
don't intend to go on & away makin’ no sense so much as I gotta bait a prayer
to prey on me. What better Revs. believers' compassionable engines ‘an
first-hand witness, or even second-hand testifyin’
than travel in India?! Yoga moms and ‘skrit kids, hear this! But…uh, dear…
yeah, you, don’t strain. Don’tchyou worry, I’m prayin’ you up, I’m prayin’ you
up,
even
in the midst of so much misery, I’m prayin’ you up so you jus’ enjoy yourself
in this precious space for written word. We ain’t lookin’ for solutions here
for problems there; but we I to detail below or above in fancy-type script with
numbers and numbers and likely more numbers, lettering the pages so to forget
me not that word is flesh and splendour of the holy isn't, indeed, misery; but
misery it could be you experiencin’, if I started to share in this precious
space from memory of this first week I spent arriving to India, when I mostly
slept in Bangalore.
Mind
you, I did manage to vicariously enjoy the fruits of a botanist who grows more
variety of mangoes & jackfruits than you’d care to know about. Not that I’m
sayin’ science is misery! This one, Dr. Sivan Paneer Menon, outside the
exquisite glass house at Lal Bhag gardens in Bangalore, ensured I took notes
for the reward he (now I know) intended to give to me. I was tired!
I’s
still luggin’ all my luggage from Whiteland through Dehli and onto Bangalore to
stop at Lal Bhag, where it was arranged I’d meet a diplomat friend on
assignment to just chill in the park
with this prospect (me), but then Dr. Menon caught me outside the glass
house—it’d have been exquisite for a
fruit exhibition--exquisite but not-to-be-used; set up outside, please.
Nonetheless,
Dr. Menon insists me to jot down notes, “X variety of mango; that Y variety of
jackfruit…gene sequence Q spliced with T chromosome and grafted onto an apple
tree…” and at the end Menon sir hands to me this fruitbag. Seriously! A bag full
of delicious, delicious fruit.
Taste
of the fruit, you ask? Taste of Andhra aam mango is unlike any mango other than
the common Andhra mango, which, of course, you’ve tasted before? Well, I mean,
I’ve had some great mangoes in the U.S…?
Here
& now I introduce you to one side of a possible misery, and to teach you
how you avoid it on your travels for tasting the Andhra aam mango. Alright then.
Imagine yourself in situ, Whiteland
circa 2012. You’re engaging a mango-enjoyment process: Step first, “I’d like a
mango.” So great a difference in the experience exists already here, already at
this inescapable stage of the process, let alone what’s about to happen ahead—peel
the skin, but not too close to the fruit; laterally cut only just firmly enough
to continue through the husky, inner-fruit layer—already we’re in different
mango worlds.
We’re
in different mango worlds! But what, like a person’s name a subject, shapes the
mango? Is it just a name? Is there magic, too?
I
don’t know about magic, but I’d be miserable if I wanted to taste an Andhra aam
mango in White Foods, or any other high-quality Whiteland grocery market. I’d
be miserable because of expectation and possibility. A linear slope defined as
a real number at expectation may meet a hot possibility function of all
possible values at the precise force-point of habit. And it can be quite messy to
reconcile the two; ‘reconcile’ itself is too nice a word, for it indicates something
‘ameliorable’, when, in fact, it’s more like fucking without genes in jeans a
potsherd, or any broken piece of ceramic material, esp. one found on an
archaeological site. It’d just give you a headache, and there’d be no relief in
sight. None. Nowhere. At least not walkable distance.
And
nonetheless after years I land, a metempsychotic turtle out to sea, to walk
around, to encircle a home for my Self on ne'er so far an oceans’ shores of
yore in bark & in palm cartographed, on playback to hear through what Ear
left from the horn (Indian English mein, this word should be understood plural)
or to imagine as a peaceful shanty kingdom come. But the kingdom’s, I think, come;
and the kingdom’s gone. In attendance at this fascinating wake imperial louts
and pillage capitalists from stage northwest and more northwest still.
"'ear right! 'ear right!
No
funeral 'ere! No pyre to see!"
at
this the longest wake in history.
Letters
and books,
of
kośa moopht sāgara—
didn't
think words came out like that there, eh?
well
neither’s supposed to spinach—
but
one's got the looks & the brains
young
lass & young lad, when
in
tie & starin’ at grampy's suit plaid
you
thought, “I got it bad,”
no
wonder they’re sad!
Plaid?!
A fucking suit?!
Try
a white sheet on for size,
like
the one you sleep with.
Yeah.
Roll
out of bed, roll it
into
your dowsers
and
walk away. Just walk away.
There’re
Andhra aam mangoes waiting outside.
A
pretty lady sells them.
She’ll
peel the skin better than you could. Closer ‘an Ever
to
the inner-fruity husk
Unless
you sold mangoes, too,
outside
of your house,
as
a different person, which,
truthfully,
is
possible only here in India,
Incredible
India!
