Rainy Day and Mondays

It’s raining like anything.

Down the memory lane, half-forgotten tunes are streaming in through the bars of everyday indifference, and wonder of wonders! I never realised that Bengali modern songs have such an influence over me, that I am such a hopeless prisoner of Rabindranath, Salil Chowdhury and Suman.

The brilliant sanchari of "chaaya ghonaichhe bawne bawne" is beyond words. I see innumerable arrows of sharp waterdrops upon the musical plane. A sense of deprived longing hovers over the entirety of existence.

And, then, the miracle happens. A voice, resembling the monsoon sky, moist with tender pain, bewitches us with its deep resonance. "Rabindranath brithai bhejen, brithai bhejaan"! All these words absorb your graceful lies, they penetrate the deepest truth that there is. It has always been there, even before the stars were born, even before the idea of a Godhead was conceived.

Victorian Vivacity

A dimly-lit lamp, cobblestones, street urchins emerging out of dark corners, foggy lanes with people trudging up and down with top hats. A perfect detective story almost always leans onto the reign of Queen Victoria. Honestly, I love the feel of London more than the elements of mystery in a Sherlock Holmes story. How wonderfully those stories reflect the little eccentricities of that era!
Since then, Scotland Yard has become the perfect abode for Lestrades of this world. It does not allow for the hook-nosed genius of Conan Doyle’s imagination. They just don’t make them like him anymore.
If we take a short break from the smoggy streets of London for some fresh country air, Victorian England provides us with a black-robed priest. Don’t get fooled by his innocent looks and constantly blinking eyes. He knows the darkest secrets of criminal minds, almost like daily sermons. Father Brown can smell crimes in an otherwise serene hamlet; religion has its macabre instinct quite on the good length spot!
These two sleuths not only solved crimes with their amazing process of detection, they also showed us the peculiar charm of Victorian values, and enhanced the dimension of historicity for the goggle-eyed pedants. Regardless of the mystery stories they are known for, we stay glued to the characters as they reflect the socio-cultural peculiarity of a period that looks so distant and yet is so familiar to us, the charmed ones!
What about modern detective stories then? Do they have any place in the history of literature, or, say, in the history of a population’s reading habit? With a wry smile, a tall gentleman of 221 B Baker Street curls his lips in mock amazement, and a faint sound –“elementary” hisses through his mouth.

Modesty, they say, has never been the hallmark of the true genius!

To a memory

It was very uncomfortable. Standing there and flashing idiotic smiles to half-known faces. I am not the one to get embarrassed too soon, but yesterday was an exception. Unknown faces, to be true, do not matter much. It is the semi-familiar people who have always been an enigma. I cannot get into a thorough conversation with them, and they never cease to inspect you with expectant curiosity to start one! So much for socialization.

And, it hurts most when a friend turns the table on you. So, there is no solace even inside the garden of Eden, this world is getting too wise almost against my wish!

There is a wind where the rose was.