The Dance

An old tune fades into being
Those silver stairs fade back into being
The cigarettes are relit
And forgotten
As lovers sigh and fall to passion
The skeleton piano keeps pace
The bass muscles its way
Into the velvet night
Up step the horns
And the reign of sound is renewed
Will you come to me now?
Send a shiver down my soul
And fling me to the sky
A million stars glitter and fall
Are reborn
A call to arms then
The night throbs with electricity
As the tenor blows blows
Snake on horn man
Slither across rooms
Down eager fingers
Waft gently from parted lips
Flow down breasts heavy with desire
Through fine hairs
Explode into starlight
Be the world, the universe
Endless
Flow like tears in the rain
Clad your ship in the sails of darkness
Burn lamps to light the way


The cadences fall
The misty beat of cymbals grow silent
As a new melody is prepared
A call to the night birds from their nests
And moths to flames
The long forgotten knight of the east awakens
Under a silver moonrise
Shades dance a slow number
The white and black keys
Tumble down the wells
In swelling waves of sound

Dance with me love
Dance away death, ruin
Dance the jig of life
Dance the dance of beauty out of time
Dance with me love
A dance of wild steps
Quick pirouettes

Blow man blow!

This last dance holds all creation
In the palm of my hands
In my wild hair
In the sweat, the pain
Come dance
Gather your breath, move slow

Foreheads touch, arms encircle
The heat remains
Come taste my skin
As we sway down the floor of the night


Whisper
Breath
In
My
Eyes
Mist envelops my mind
As the skeleton crew gives up the tune
And the tenor man gives a final blow
And is still

The lights go out, the stars are dim
Exhausted we lie
In each other’s arms
A new day will arise, passing fair
A day of soft, velvet mornings
We’ll remember the night
And the graceful dance of the nyads
The dance of the dervishes
A kind of blue

-Beq

Friends

I was just reading Sue's blog about all the people she knows who've left the country and have left her that much poorer. It strange when that happens to people, especially when some of the people leaving are close friends.
Nothing such as this has happened to me. Almost none of my closest friends have gone abroad, and yet so many are away. Some are right here but we don't talk much. But I guess that doesn't matter.
In the beginning there was Rajah. We became freinds when we were in school and quite inseparable ones at that. Mostly people found him difficult, pompous, self-obsessed. But show me one teenager who isn't. But what was cool about him was that he was interesting. He had this innate sense of style that was unapologetic and an intelligence that shone through his shades. We loved the Beatles, we hated the Stones, we rapped Kerouac to each other and shared books. We smoked our first cigarettes together, rolled the first joints, drank the first beers. What a guy, I hope every kid has such a friend to grow up with. Today I don't even know where he is. He's been missing for the last six years or so. It would be fair to say we drifted apart. While I opted for the cool joys of JU and Rajah took some disastrous career decisions. He was unhappy and lonely, while I was enjoying myself too much to care. So he fell off the map, and today I doubt he'd want to know me. I don't know if I'd want to know him either. I'm scared of who he might not be. So there's that.
Then there was Arj. He was the sleeping partner in the triumverate at school of which me and Rajah were the other members. He was the loosest cause he loved people so much, and people loved him back. He was easily the most popular guy in school by the sheer dint of his personality. He never held any posts, did not have any myths about a lady-killer(though he was that as well) and he was the most wonderfully random boy to talk to. You could rap about anything with him, and he'd match you blow for imaginative blow. He laughed uproariously, gave nicknames to people weirder than what I could think up, loved Douglas Adams. Its even unfair to begin to describe him. When I went to JU, he left for Presidency, and we formed our rival gangs of cool people, which loved having wild parties with each other. And so he is today, an MBA later, an executive in Bombay, who I believe in the heart of hearts, doesn't really give a damn. He continues to love and be loved, and I miss him and his madness. These days, he even has a secretary!!
Then Boz. Ah Boz! What a collossus of the imagination! He is the one person I know who was so desperate to have a lost weekend that he literally codeined himself to a weekend-long stupor from which he emerged on a Monday in college with his tattered sports bag, and his mad scientist hair and his dusty jeans and his scruffy beard looking like a Jerry Garcia of the Indian night. We were great pals in school and that friendship deepened into a form of unconcious telepathy when in college. Chewing his lips, shaking his head vigorously, making mad dashes across 2000 km to woo some girl, making a mythic monster of his nice dog to scare us, going into the sea in the buff in Goa to meet the dolphins...ah where do I stop. He started out a rocker, with his cheap Fender copy reading "Mark (Knopfler) and I", decided that we didn't appreciate Chinese tones, and so chucked it all to seriously get into photography. Today he's finishing off as a cinematographer in FTII, and making promises to come meet me and go to Manali for some hash! All the while he's dodging adoring women, proposing drunkenly and running away the next day, helping yet other women find their roots...he is the candle!
And now Rudder. I hated him for a while as a freshman. He had the temerity to say REM were better than the Beatles! But it was a ruse, really, when all he wanted to do was do cool things and have sex. He metamorphosed into a kind of living fertility symbol, who could cook, play football, swim, run, win awards at academics, go for treks, and make a succession of women swoon over him. Oh Rudder, they'd coo, and we were all the richer for it! He was my alter ego, which in a strange way he still is. We would share stories of exploits, behave like weird twins by saying the same thing together, bum condoms from each other, rap Kerouac (again!). I was in the same band as he, so we also had the music. Later, when I came to Delhi, there was no question about it. We would stay together...which we did, for a while. He's still here, and I'm still here, moving in different orbits, making the same mistakes, being ourselves and in a way reminding each other of all the things we are; all the things we have become and all the things we yet could be. We're still in a band.
And finally, Sue. She was a fresher when I was in second year, and I was floored. She wasn't glamorous, she wore her pyjamas to college and was mortally afraid of anyone touching her. But she was hot! I bumped into her down a staircase, and devised devious means to get her to go for films (with Rudder's help), get her to sing with me...when I hugged her once, she was shivering. And yet she was free. She had her own opinions, and she'd never give an inch. I pined and I kicked walls in fustration- she was with some country yokel down in Vizag- I threatened Rudder to back off when he evinced interest. Then I read her Borges at Kharagpur and told her about the fair greens of Lothlorien. In a few months we were together...a mythical Beq'n'Sue in college, the same person, always together, singing together. I guess only we knew the truth to it, and thankfully it was so complicated. I became a lover with her, I became me, I lost my arrogance, I got rhythm, and she was freed once and for all from all the chains that bound her. But after three years of (almost-though-not-quite) bliss, we had a falling out, as lovers often will. But I guess we both gained a friend in the parting. She lives in Cal with her V and the wonderful little Wee Kiddo, trying to be a good mother and a thoroughly cool human being. We have our jokes and each other, in a weird fractious family where everyone is king!

Hour Of The Wolf

I knew of Ingmar Bergman only as a rumour till last year. I was never really that crazy about films- music does it for me- but, all that changed last August. Without a home, I was backpacking my way through people’s houses, while filling up the time with freelance work here and there, which was always quite interesting, but never financially too rewarding. It wasn’t a happy time, and I often despaired. Often I felt like chucking it all and going home, dunno why I persevered. And then, in the second house that I was passing through, I saw Hour of the Wolf. I was mildly interested by the name, but nothing prepared me for it. From the very first shot of Liv Ullman standing on a windswept northern island with that unearthly daylight grabbed me. And of course it got better.
Liv’s character Alma tells the story of her troubled artist husband Johan Borg, played by Max Von Sydow, who had gone missing a few months ago under very strange circumstances. Its one of Bergman’s few horror stories, but as with all films by him, its not just that. We get to know of some strange creatures on the same island that the couple lives in. There is the fetishistic Baron who lives “on the other side of the island”, and his strange family of assorted debauched creeps. They are obnoxious exploitative people, but Van Sydow feels they are worse…that they are monsters. One, The Birdman, apparently turns into a raven, another, The Hat Lady, threatens to take her hat, and with it, her face off. But how do we know? Through the Johan’s diaries, where he writes about his daily encounters with them on his painting trips. He even draws their monstrous images.
But is it true? Is it just that he is going through a delusional breakdown brought on by their loneliness? And what of that unsettling story of a vampire boy that Johan kills one afternoon? As the movie slowly carries with its stark still images of horrible beauty, and the occasional startlingly hideous juxtapositions of the real and the imagined, Alma starts sharing her husband’s delusions. She wonders at the end if it is possible to love someone so much that you start inhabiting their madness? One surreal day, the couples’ fragile world comes crashing down in a real/imagined sequence of utter horror and beauty when the creatures- we see their true selves at last- bait and claim the artist. But is it true? Or did he just commit suicide, or was perhaps killed by his wife? We’re never told. But the centerpiece of the film is this beautifully taut scene of the night before the fateful day. Johan is afraid of going to sleep and stays awake till dawn, with the only light coming from a candle. His drawn out, exhausted face seems etched in stone. Alma stays up with him, looking at his face with a fragile, helpless, despairing gaze. Then, after what seems like an eternity, at the still hour before dawn he diagnoses his own madness and the nature of despair…or maybe he voices his fear of the night and the shadows that inhabit it. He says that this is the crucial hour, the hour of the wolf, when most people die, when children are born, when monsters creep out of our nightmares and become real. It is as poignant as it is chilling in its portrayal of the couples’ helplessness in the face of this vast unknown. I was hooked. I think I saw it another three times in a row. Sometimes I wished that the couple had some faith. That they could steel their resolve. In fact the artist does, promising to protect his wife and their unborn child, but it is in vain. It just tips him over the edge. But I knew then, as I know now, how difficult it is for faith to be born in the face of despair. But the failure of the artist and his wife to battle their demons- real, or imagined- gave me the strength to face mine.
Now I know that it is one of Bergman’s lesser known films. Since then I’ve seen and grown to love his classics like Wild Strawberries, Persona, and The Seventh Seal. But none have touched me as profoundly as has Hour of the Wolf. And to think the Bergman passed away in that very same hour, makes me feel strange. I remember him, the fondness for movies that his films gifted me, and the way he moved me. Rest in peace.

Yea Korea!

A food review...here's the unedited version:

Korean food often suffers in comparison to its more glamorous siblings- Chinese and Japanese. That and dark rumours of dogs in your buffet have long kept punters off this delicious branch of East Asian cuisine. Not that I'd ever had Korean food before this, but that's more for a lack of choice than inclination. Armed with the smugness of an official review for my magazine, I headed to a newly-opened Korean restaurant called K2 in Gurgaon. Designed in sleek noir ish colours of chrome, red and black, with high backed red leather chairs, the restaurant makes you feel that you've stumbled into Kill Bill and the widow's going to emerge from some corner. But anyway, it does not take away the limelight from the the USP of the restaurant, which is the food. Apart from a variety of standard Chinese fare, K2 offers a large selection of authentic Korean food. These range from staples like the traditional Kim Chi to grilled meats like pork and tenderloin. Koreans like their food uncluttered and unfussy, so with most dishes you will get a helping of steamed rice or noodles. K2 also offers a wide seafood selection, ranging from prawns to cod to shark-fins! But these are prohibitively expensive (anything between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000) and even the office's expense account didn't embolden me to try out any of these.
We ordered a kind of Kim Chi called Kim Chi Chige and an intriguingly named Jea Yuk Dap Bop. The former is a slightly sour stew of pork, diced cabbages and onions and comes bubbling in a nice stone pot. You also get a separate bowl of steamed rice to eat it with. Its a fermented dish, which accounts for its distinct sour taste.
Jea Yuk Dap Bop is a sweet dry dish of pork cooked with red and green bell peppers, sliced cabbages, black peppers, carrots and tomatoes and sprinkled with sesame seeds. This is a traditional form of grilled meat called Bulgogi (or “fire-meat”). Again, the dish comes with steamed rice. The restaurant is generous with the meat and the food is, quite frankly, delicious.
Vegetarian dishes are not their forte though, yet the restaurant does offer a large enough selection. These range from the one we ordered- Jab Chea- to bean curd dishes. Jab Chea is a dish of fried vegetables and glass noodles in soy sauce. Traditionally Koreans don't do separate vegetarian dishes, so I suspect that most of the dishes in the veg section are actually converted non-veg dishes.
The restaurant is also a Karaoke club with many tunes to choose from, including four different versions of “My Girl” and a strange sounding song called “Shoot the chicks”. These Koreans must be crazy.
If you include soup, and some drinks, then a meal for two will set you back by Rs1,500 to Rs 2,000. Of course, if you go for shark fin, the bill will be a totally different kettle of fish.