parotechnics

FROM THE ROOFTOP GARDEN OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM FROM ARVIND'S BALCONY ON A WARM EVENING For the first time, rather a detached visit to New York, not distracted by and marvelling at its every multicultural oddity, its street life sort of washing past vaguely out of focus. New York rendered into just another city, made familiar by warmth, noise, habit, rendered into the ordinary by familiarity. Possible then to see it from afar, and notice famous buildings sometimes, instead of always feeling in the heart of it. Still I must confess - whenever I go I look first for the Chrysler building. Seeing it rekindles the sense of glamour and romance, of wild coincidences just waiting around the corner that some cities call up in me - New York did, and also that lost love, Bombay.

Met my friend Martin downtown, after all of four years. We ended up in a bar called KGB. It was completely empty and we felt the suitable sense of subterfuge and as a response whipped out our respective laptops and began swapping music like true sophisticates, I mean, geeks. As we were doing this the people began to flow in to the bar and we realised a little too late - the tide had come in and we were trapped in the middle of a reading. The young lady who was reading, read mostly letters that some ill fated boyfriends of hers had written her, but that was in between spilling her guts about every trauma she'd ever experienced. Suffering seems to have taken the place of art. As soon as she paused we fled. I took a detour to the loo - which was was every bit as sinister and decrepit looking as the loo of the KGB should be.

New York sucks up your time till you seem to always be running but doing very liittle. Then you call it treage. Maybe the sign that a place is too familiar is that you don't really see things in it too much anymore, keep forgetting to take your camera with you. Last few weeks in New York, coming and going for screenings and play-dates with friends, apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, fat yellow tulips, motion sickness from cabs, too many cuisines for here and to go. And just never enough time...

For weeks, in Provincetown, I stared at the plants, willing them to bud before I left. I thought often of my father when he heard he wasn't going to live, consoling me as I cried and cried, telling me I would get used to it which would make me cry even more. He stroked my hair and said - do you think I don't want to live? Do you think I don't want to watch my children's lives grow and see them become happier? But you have to accept whatever it is. I felt as if if the plants showed themselves before I left, my father would have seen us, slowly folding the sadness of his leaving into the mixture of our days, learning, that to taste happiness knowingly, was not to betray his memory or lose the reality of his love. I am in New York now, where the trees are bursting with pink cherry blossoms. It's almost a year since my father left us. Before I left Provincetown, the plants did bud. As Larkin said, their greenness is a kind of grief. And yet. Whatever it may mean, it is

Place where I learned a lot, about myself, about how beautiful birds can be, about how one way of keeping your heart intact is to leave bits of it in different places. Lovers know this, as do travelers.

Last night in Provincetown - rainy, cold, not pretending to be anything but itself, the town that was home for some time. Amy had a goodbye party which of course had great food - chorizo and shrimp skewers- and a killer cocktail made with white rum, strawberries, pineapples and a little orange juice. Also there, were Amanda, who had spent some time in Bangalore and was at the Fine Arts Work Centre, Vanessa&Liz whose video store I had haunted through my trip, renting a DVD a day, regularly and absent mindedly returning only the boxes, and Anna who I had met at their housewarming. Amy lectured on the how sugar neutralises the effects of alcohol. Right. And right on. PICTURE OF AMY'S BAR Like many goodbyes in these globalised times, this one too was oddly distracted - filled with the sense that it wasn't real, that I could come back, they could come to Bombay. We planned the menu for the restaurant we will one day open in Goa. I'll drink to that. My Ptown friends in Andher