Adam and Eve bursting with the colors of a Sicilian summer. Oil on linen. A table littered with intricate calligraphic art. Ink on wood. And in the far corner of the room, the abstract geometrical shapes that had hung in the SF MOMA for months before retreating here to die. Silk prints and paper.

“I sold the twin of this painting thirty years ago for nearly fifty thousand dollars. That makes this piece worth a couple of hundred thousand.”

He paused to tug at the label on the thrift store shirt he wore, carefully pushed aside the cheap Chinese takeout he’d tried to get us to buy for him a little earlier. And then beat the drum again, swaying to a beat in his head, closing his eyes and disappearing to a café in Paris a half century ago. Slipping away for a few moments from the insane hell of a world that he imagined in his paranoia to be arrayed against him. Forgetting the desperation that led him to believe two Indian students would be buying his art and arranging for him a triumphant retrospective in exotic New Delhi.

We were standing in the midst of a small room in an old shack within the confines of a desolate naval base on the outskirts of the city. Around us warehouses rose up from gravel, beautiful and stark, all concrete and asphalt and steel. And in the distance, a vast, decrepit hulking ship, ghostlike and sinister, half enveloped by the gray wings of the San Francisco fog.

This used to be an officers mess once upon a time. Look carefully and you can still see the name painted on wood, paint peeling, letters twisted and morphed. Submarine Café it says. For some reason a piano lies outside the front door.

“They plan to make condominiums here, he told us. But until they do they’re letting us use this place. The artists of San Francisco.”

That’s the sort of detail that almost seems too good to be true, a cliché come alive. He was being too kind of course, I’d guess he was the only real artist there. For this is a city overflowing with many who accessorize a bohemian idleness with the badge of that unfortunate profession.

We must have cut a strange sight, the three of us. The most pitiful, also the most accomplished. In that small space and for that little time, as he showed us his paintings, he was once again the master of his world.

Talk to the disappointed, broken and ill for a little while and you see a mirror in their eyes…or at least I did. It is a frightening, terrifying thought, but it is not that hard to imagine. Our minds flash and quiver and dim and glow and spark and splutter and crack and heal and the question isn’t when things will fade irrevocably, but whether we might be lucky enough to die first.

I liked the old man – not for himself – but for being imperfect, for struggling, for clinging to things he’d done once upon a time, for seeing himself as brilliant still. “I am a very famous artist you know.” That is how he had introduced himself – many hours ago – a decrepit stranger in the wooden hipster coffee shop, aware he was dreaming a lie and knowing it so easily might have been true.

The bay area is a lovely home to the beautiful and successful. Its geography outlined with organic food and bikram yoga. Sunshine and startups. Mac-books and road bikes, expensive khakis and carefully overgrown hair. Stanford and Berkeley. It is a land where if you’re not climbing a ladder to someplace wonderful, you’re busy engaged in a search for your own personal zen-like equilibrium. It is a place where good people do good things, and do them well, and do them young. Where the only unforgivable sin is to fail to be confident, and secure, free of angst and doubt.

If not for the lost and lonely, the insecure and scared, the dreamers and the disappointed…I do not think you could live here long.

Typically, we were distracted and inattentive and on the way to the rather grandly named Forbes-Marshall manufacturing unit, a group of us decided to slip away. Four boys, three pairs of steel framed spectacles, clutching a paper bag full of warm breakfast buns. They don’t make quite the same thing in this country, plain bread with sweet fruit bits in them. You dip them in tea or eat them with butter and when it’s raining outside they bring laughter to the soul. But I digress. This is not a story about factories, nor one about breakfast buns.

We hitched a ride in a truck carrying hay and ended up in the little pocket of first world affluence that surrounds Pune’s Osho ashram. Evidently global citizens in search of spirituality, like their brethren in Armani suits, prefer to fly business class. The incongruence of wealth aside, there was the illicit attraction of stories of sex and drugs, the color of red robes topped by blonde hair, white tunics over dark brown skin. Archers on the wet green lawns, and a cloud of blue incense smoke cutting through the winter air.

And outside, in the world of the sane, an outpost of itinerant wanderers. Bamboo roof, long dark wooden tables and air you could cut with a knife. Coffee, beer, ganja and cigarettes – seasoning the thick heady scent of fresh baked bread. The air outside was cold but the crowded café was warmed by food, by drink, by human bodies. It should have been in a Terry Pratchett novel, perhaps I just caught the German Bakery at a good time, but you couldn’t help looking around for a female werewolf and an incompetent magician sharing a mug of dark beer and a glucose biscuit.

In the hour that I sat there, a girl threw a coffee mug at someone across the room (she missed). A couple of young americans sat around eating brownies (yes maybe they were, I didn’t try any). The long haired spaniard next to me spoke of how he came to paint two years ago and never left, hugging his indian friend close. She looked like she was leaving behind a conservative family in south India for a few months of secret hedonism. Kajal paired with a nose stud, framed by curls held in check by a red headscarf. I remember thinking she was pretty and feeling vaguely resentful at the firangi, arriving to steal our women away.

Not just artists and international seekers of spirituality and yoga of course. Also college kids from nearby – middle class India reading books in the sun. Listening to Arundhati Roy turning words to music in their minds, Ayn Rand in the afternoon, perhaps Jeffrey Archer. Not to forget, Gabriel Garcia, essential accessory to the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Today you’d need a Mac and a Moleskine (™x2). What was I holding in my hands I wonder? Perhaps Wodehouse. I hope so. More likely Marquez though sadly.

Spaces where different tongues can speak of things that do not matter, with words that didn’t need to be said. Where the murmur of conversation is a rainbow colored tapestry. Where French touches Hindi and both become the sound of the sea. The world does not have enough of those places. Mourn the German Bakery attacks. Because long after the dead have been buried and bread is being baked again, a skeletal man in dark robes plays chess in that corner you can’t quite see from where you’re sitting.

Amidst bodies on the barstools,
sinners in their pews.
A cancer in the cool blue air,
the stench of night old booze.

She wrote in search of laughter,
and meaning for her dreams.
Each heartfelt word a stillborn child,
each thought a prayer revealed.

We gazed across the vastness,
of three feet of wine drenched wood.
And felt a mutual sadness,
that shattered as she stood.

As teardrops on the sidewalk,
washed gold smoke from the skies.
The drunkard beat the trashcan lid,
In warning to the wise.

It exists in the wide spaces between post burning man decompression parties at one end and determinedly hipster soy lattes at the other. To find it, walk out the doors of those raw vegan cafes, walls resplendent with jute bags holding grain. Look past the overgrown hair, cute laptops, and caffeinated hand gestures of all those earnest, embryonic iPhone millionaires.

Slip through a costume shop, seductive pink wigs and all, and ignore those girls clustered around a joint. Avoid the unwashed dreadlocks of the amateur poet (and professional consultant) as he sits scribbling aphorisms on napkins for his admiring date. Try not to disturb the couple playing chess in a corner, the tension in their eyes evidently flowing from a source very distant from the game.

Forget the morning bike rides along the bay and into the mountains that will take your breath away, and not because of the cold. Smile vacantly at the young mothers pushing their strollers past a sequence of coffee shops, each brimming with ‘character’, overflowing with bagels. Push away images of a tiny garage hosting an art exhibition, a student concert and a blossoming love affair all at the same time.

Go beyond the activism and the flag waving – always rainbow, sometimes green. Stare through the crowds in an otherwise cookie cutter pub… girl boy girl girl girl boy dog boy girl girl…yes you did see that and no you can’t turn that way again.

Escape those distractions and walk to the intersection at 24th, past the street musician with the badly tuned guitar, and also the one with the ethereal sounding violin. Skip down the stairs that smell of ammonia, of drunk nights, of agony and ecstasy and half digested food. When you hear the tone, you have reached your destination.

8 car train in 3 minutes.

So perhaps I have simply not cared deeply enough. Or possibly I have not looked long enough. Whatever the reason, the suburban town I’ve lived in for two years now is as strange and unloved today as she ever was. Hugging a university that beats with vibrancy and life has led her only to retreat further within. Even the metaphor rings false, failing to capture the blandness and superficiality that this little piece of California stands for. A beige snake eating its own tail and the choice of a cliche is the real description here.

I suppose it takes something extraordinary for the whole to be so much less than the sum of its parts. For the interesting, rich and successful to come together in a tepid, pasty porridge of good school districts and farmer’s markets. All busily fighting a grim battle against the east, against unpleasantness and against public transportation (for are not the sweaty hordes outside just waiting for this chance to invade?). Appreciating the soul of Palo Alto (there I said it), is like trying to connect deeply with the business class lounges at Detroit airport.

This is the strangest place I’ve lived in.

An avian Romeo and Juliet, writhing worm tragedy.
Breeding lousy metaphors
Between shards of shattered silence,
Like so many murmuring mosquitoes.

On a night like this,
The moon is always too bright
Stars too glittery
Lives too taut
Words too awkward

Rhythm and rhyme
Harmony and productivity
Are tuneless ariettas.
Eight minute plays
That end too soon,
or go on too long.

But edgy, chipped free verse?
Origami poetry?
Unmade beds?
Grainy videos and 3am cereal?
They work –
Tracing out a jagged discontinuous line,
A sort of naked, neon truth.

Apparently there’s a gentle flowing river out there
Comfortably clichéd
Refreshing, blue, with rounded pebbles
Upon which yellow sun drops dance
Where life is clear, healthy, organic, simple.
Indeed, insultingly simple.

————————–———————
Or as bahadur shah zafar said (because you can hardly get more self indulgent than that)

“My heart is not happy in this despoiled land
Who has ever felt fulfilled in this transient world”
————————–———————-

Mostly though, the years passed and I lived and studied in Delhi, and formed images of the world I had not seen from stories and movies. From the words of friends, from urban legends, from pictures on Orkut, from gossip and daydreams. Cities mostly – thats what caught my imagination – as they do for anyone who has grown up in one. There was New York, made so familiar by countless movies, episodes of Friends, and later by 9/11. There was beautiful, soaring Sydney – beloved by new wave Bollywood directors, a city you fell in love with watching Dil Chahta Hai. There was Paris, a sort of unattainable high watermark of culture and elegance, a sexualized, sensualized, aestheticized town – equal parts art, women, cheese and crepes. And in India there was Bombay.

Somehow I managed to spend 25 years in India without ever walking into Mumbai. And yet Bombay is a city I saw every day. It was in the news, on the front page, on the back pages, the business pages, page 3 and everywhere in between. It was in Sportstar, Stardust, Outlook. It was what everyone saw as the face of urban India, modern India, young India. There was only ever one candidate for India’s first city. Bombay’s insouciance, its reputation for carefree enterprise, money, hedonism and variety gave it a cosmopolitan, global, confident air that even Delhi lacked.

Then there was cricket. Cricket in the nineties belonged to Mumbai – everyone knew that. We all watched but if any city had a claim on the heart and soul of the game it was Bombay. And if you, like I did, devoured books on the history of Indian cricket with their stories of Hazare and Shivaji park – well then you knew the game had always belonged to one city.

Every hindi movie I saw would throw together a few actors and songs in order to clothe a set of vignettes about Bombay and it was no good wondering why Delhi virtually never featured – quite simply movies meant only one place and it was silly to pretend otherwise. So Mumbai, for all of us in school and IIT who had never been there, was this glorious, glamourous world of beautiful women, of melodrama, of colour.

And those books. It didnt matter who – Rushdie, Seth, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Keating, Naipaul – if they wrote about India, they wrote about Mumbai. They would write with affection and nostalgia and suppressed irritation (well thats the most Naipaul can bring himself to do). Full of inside jokes and no doubt pitch perfect adjectives describing their muse, those books would tantalize, leave you curious and wondering, and gently close a door leaving you on the outside. Try reading Satanic Verses, Sacred Games, even Inspector Ghote without having seen the city they wander through.

I could go on, but you get the point. Its been over three years since I graduated from college in Delhi and my friends have migrated to the parts of the world – ending up in those same cities which captured my imagination as a child. New York for those in this country. And Mumbai for those at home. Somehow though I never managed to go there myself – save a few hours spent earlier this year – only enough time to fall in love with a cafe by the sea.

Its an aching sadness therefore, to see images of places I have never seen and yet always seen, burn. Over the last few years the Shiv Sena, Congress, and Raj Thackeray have done their bit to chip away at the cities soul. An exercise in blasphemy, rendered bearable by its futility. This time perhaps, things will never quite be the same. To watch the Taj burning is like losing the last strands of a dream in the morning.

This blog has seen very little activity of late, and I’m reliably assured by numerous well wishers that this has been no great loss to the cultural capital of our generation. This is of course, precisely the encouragement one needs to write once more. Its the same sort of self destructive creative impulse as has driven the birth of modern day cinematic masterpieces such as Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag.

Obligatory self deprecating cynicism having been completed, there is a story to tell. A couple of days ago I found myself sitting in the midst of a quite charming movie theatre, all the necessary creature comforts at hand – comfortable seat, popcorn, something to drink. To the proverbial fly on the wall, all would have seemed well – unless that is, said fly happened to look into my eyes, where she might have spied a look of quiet desperation. The sort of despair that comes when resignation has set in, but the pain has not yet numbed and memories of happier times still remain fresh and clear. A glance up at the huge screen would have explained much of this suffering. Just about then, the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was dancing out of a closet, clad in a frilly little white dress that looked like something a ten year old would flatly refuse to wear to a friend’s birthday party. And watching the lovely Carrie, her three other eternally youthful friends. Like a sort of ghastly schoolgirl house party being held 40 years too late. The truly ironic part of course was that they all loved the dress, which for a movie obsessed with fashion would seem to be rather a gigantic mistake to make.

But the unique experience of watching Sex and the City from a male perspective has been documented elsewhere. Read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker for instance. And to be honest, I was never going to get it, something only reinforced by the fact that I had been trying desperately to watch Kung-Fu Panda instead (and it must be said, it takes a special kind of genius to make a movie about a kung-fu master who’s also a panda bear, weighing hundreds of pounds, living in ancient china, serving noodle soup for a living and with a duck for a father). If you love the panda bear, I guess you can hardly complain about the realism of a 50 year old female character who is apparently still irresistibly attractive to male super-models half her age. Of course once you’ve gone and watched it you can either shut up and avoid being teased mercilessly. Or you can choose to reclaim the night so to speak, and write about it instead.

Going to see Sex and the City was fascinating though, more for the folks filing in with me. There seemed to be primarily two kinds of people watching. There were the groups of girls, hunting in packs of three or four, all excitedly dissecting season six of the TV series. Then there were the women who had dragged alongside squirming men to watch with them – boyfriends or just an unfortunate and available surrogate (as I was). I believe there is a school of thought that holds that there is an exquisite pleasure to be gained from watching that movie with a cringing male companion or two. Anyhow, it was interesting to observe that all the men sported identical expressions – a sort of shifty, ‘I’m not really here and I hope I don’t see anyone I know’ look. And afterwards, in conversation with their female friends, all the usual suspects. Feigned interest, over-compensating rants, grudging admissions to not having completely died in there, and a heartfelt concern for the the retrogressive portrayals of the fabulous four. Incredible how many critics and male viewers alike (see Lane again) would have apparently loved the movie had it only been about a different flavour of liberated woman. In much the same way as all of democrat America is now busily convincing itself that really, the reason Hillary Clinton did not win was not that she was a woman, but simply that she was the wrong sort of woman.