Charlie’s Chatter

Maybe March isn’t so bad after all. After the initial wave of heat has passed and I’ve had the wisdom to stop roaming around in jeans and switch over to shorts, the weather’s transformed into that lazy warm that makes you want to wake up late on a Sunday morning and play Led Zeppelin II before grabbing an indifferently buttered slice of toast and some juice from the fridge for breakfast.

“Damn it! I want chai “

“Go make some. And for me too.”

“Naah. Too lazy.”

“Chut.”

“You actually expected something different?”

There is no vocalist in the history of music as gorgeously obscene as Robert Plant. Him and Page finding each other was just a miracle. And as with most miracles, we’re all glad it happened.

“Eh fucker go make chai na! “

“Go screw your self.”

“At least tell me where the cheese is.”

“In the fridge, duh!”

And now that April is just around the corner and May just a flip of the calendar after that, we can actually start dreaming of mangoes again.

“Dude, I’ve had ONE mango in the whole of the last year!”

“We get it, you weren’t in the country and have a bank account stuffed with green notes that you aren’t going to spend on us, now shut up!”

We don’t have to go across the street for Mango ice cream every time we have a craving for the fruit.

Let other men feast on other things,

The king of fruits is still the fruit of kings!

Suddenly some of my older posts actually sound a little less ridiculous. And Lamb Of fucking God are visiting! Plus Rajini’s new movie release! What a summer!

God I love that album, Zep II. It’s got so much variety – pop, folk, rock and the beginnings of metal all dripping with the blues.

“Virtue is insufficient temptation”, my notebook informs me Bernard Shaw once said precisely when “Livin’ Lovin’ Maid” starts. Aah, how beautiful.

Have you seen all those Jacaranda trees that are in bloom all over Bangalore? OK they were week ago, but still there’s enough of them now for me to proceed.

They’re big with pale purple or pink flowers and they shed all theirs leaves just before blooming and end up completely covered in flowers.  So in bloom they’re like these giant sticks of cotton candy stuck upside down into the soil. And they look awesome!

Walking out of my violin teacher’s house in Jayanagar, there’s this one street that is completely lined with Jacaranda trees – on either side and on the divider in the middle. That is such a sight. For once people have something to grab the eye besides neon signs and half naked mannequins from the hosiery shop.

And once every couple of days the Jacarandas discover they’ve overloaded themselves with flowers and need to shed a few. So the next time there’s so much as the hint of a breeze they just let their flowers rain down covering everything and everyone down below. And the best part is there’s just so many of them! You try not grinning at that!

You’ve seen photos of cars speckled with white in foreign lands after a night’s snowfall, right? Cars parked under Jacaranda trees often land up looking like that this time of the year. Plus they are pink, not just white. So there, we’re better.

It’s not like that Jacaranda has the prettiest flowers in the world or anything like that. They’re actually quite mediocre to look at. But it’s just so shamelessly uninhibited by its lack of being “the best” at something. When it decides to bloom, it just gives it everything it’s got and lands up in pure awesomeness. For eleven and a half months it’s just a tree with leaves and branches, but for two weeks in March it tells everyone to shut the hell up and pay attention. And how it impressively succeeds! The city you thought you knew so well is transformed by a tree gone nuts. You have to tip your hat to it. It may send you a flower or twenty by way of acknowledgement.

Soon, it’ll all be over. Elvis will leave the building. But he’ll be back, it’s comforting to know. It allows you to continue loving it when everything that could have change, has.

So there’s your spring Sunday rambling on about what is and should never be before tripping over a metaphor and bringing it on home to a mound of wisdom, thank you.

(Charlie’s Note: I’ve hit a block )

Oddly, all he felt for the present was apathy – this vague distance from where he saw it all, and felt nothing. Once there was a tale in every whisper, a story behind every flitting sliver of waste paper. Ah, the beautiful people how he loved them and how he hated them. How they were it all, and yet they were nothing.  Those little details that once thrilled him now just piled up like a bunch of dry leaves under a summer tree waiting for each other’s company, yet insensitive to it.

Perhaps March was just that tepid excuse for a month when the year, having run out its newness sighed and sat down on the footpath staring idly at an inconsequential insect passing by, wondering what to do next, wearing a look of exasperation borne out of the frustration of the desperate search for meaning, that for want of direction wore down towards a slow meandering and thence to a tired stumbling and finally a hopeless amble that brought it to a bunch of grapes and its present stupor.

In time, it would pass. But not knowing how, it remained just this time of the year that promised nothing but boredom for the present and blistering heat for the future. It was something like trawling for fish, see. You just let your net down and kept sailing and suddenly you found that you had caught a whole bunch of fish. Just like that. He lived his life and eventually his net would snare a passing dream or an idle fancy that would change it all and the world would go back to being the way it always was.

Until then I’m going to read Dickens and listen to The Beatles. Tata.