A sort-of Ode to my House. NOT in Verse.

To break the monotony and intimidating abstractness of verse, I’ve decided to resort to a bit of non-poetry to post on my blog. This is something I have otherwise refrained from doing (both my blogs only contain poetry), but I figured, why not make it a little easier for all those who complain about not understanding  poetry? And well, let’s face it, I really need to get back to writing again. Can’t keep using the same old “writer’s block” excuse for years on end, can I?

So coming to what I actually wanted to say: I’ll soon be shifting from my little studio in the beautiful suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses, only about 15 minutes by train from Paris. I’ve lived in many houses in my almost-two years in Paris, each special in its own way, but I haven’t lived in any of them for as long as I have in this one (September 2012- June 2013).

First of all, the studio is not just a studio, it’s actually part of a lovely bungalow inhabited by a big French family. It’s not like any of the houses you find in Paris, more like one of those in the south of France (as a  friend recently pointed out). It’s made of stone, and therefore, the inside of it feels like a newly out-of-service refrigerator (which is great when it’s summer and it’s hot, but since there hasn’t been a summer this year, the low temperature has actually kept my friends from coming to visit me.) The family live on top, and I have a separate and private room below, facing the garden. And the garden, oh it’s absolutely gorgeous! It has daffodils, bamboos, a kiwi tree, tulips, about a million different shades of roses and a beautiful white cherry blossom (well, these are the ones I can identify, it’s actually full of many, many anonymous weeds, blossoms, blades and bushes!) There’s even a cat that comes and visits me occasionally. I suspect it’s made the little area around the outside ledge of my window in to its private toilet, and being a cat, of course, it expects me to be very grateful that it has deigned to choose my window ledge to relieve itself; and I, the privileged onlooker, must respect its privacy and not look as it gets down to business. Typical cat behaviour. And yet I persist in trying to befriend it. But I digress.

So why is this house so special to me? Because I have had some of my best and worst moments in it. In no other house that I occupied in Paris have I oscillated so dramatically between complete, uninhibited joy on the one hand, and total, insane depression on the other. There was a time when I disliked being here so much, that I lived with friends in the city for almost a week. But over time, among the yellow-wallpaper covered walls of this out of order fridge, I learned to be alone and independent again. And though it sounds like the end of some second-rate cliched hollywood movie, I found myself again. Why is the colour of the wallpaper so important, you ask me? Because I worked on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper‘ by Charlotte Perkin Gilman for a paper this semester, and it occurred to me that I too, was trapped in a yellow-wallpapered room and was too terrified to properly look at my walls ever again. Especially at night. (Rough summary: The story is about a married woman who gets obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper on the walls of her room and eventually goes mad and crawls about like a snake.) So yes, the colour of the wallpaper disturbed me. Gravely. But unlike the woman in the story, I did not go mad. I think. Luckily.

I remember my first night here. I had only about a quarter of my bags with me, no food, no utensils, no warm clothes, nothing. Not even toilet paper I think. The rest of it all had been stored in different locations in distant corners of the city. Everything around me was unfamiliar. There were a hundred million spiders around me. Some, it seemed to me, were of a whole new species, because I was sure I saw wings in lieu of limbs. I spent most of the night jumping about in sheer panic, chaotically dismantling cobwebs with newspaper and was made to calm down. Then there was the painfully tiny bed with its pink, embroidered cover. It had a virginal air about it and looked like it had been brought in from a convent. The stern message it gave out was clear- it had to be slept on by only one person. No shenanigans, young lady. The no-nonsense church bells to which I woke up the next day were the icing on the cake. And yet, the posters put up in the neighbourhood said, ‘Je suis communiste, et ça fait du bien.’ And there I lived, between a church and PCF posters, on my convent bed, surrounded by spiders. Oh nostalgia!

So it was in this house that I had some great moments, after I moved in for my second year in Paris and life was easy. And in this house that I was left to grapple alone with the uncertainties of a menacing future and deal with some overwhelming self-doubt at the end of my masters. But it’s also in this house that I spent time thinking about Life and Its Meaning over solitary smokes in the garden, cooked with my friends and befriended a warm family that were kind enough to invite me to dine with them and help me whenever I knocked on their door. And now it’s time to move on. Needless to say, I’ll miss it all. The garden, the luxury of having my own kitchen and bathroom, being able to hear the train pull in and leave the station, running to catch it and waiting for hours if I missed it, rushing to the supermarket because it closed as early as NINE at night, cooking my own food no matter how bored I was because there was no McDonald’s  about (and even if there were one, it would probably close at 8 p.m. or something anyway), plucking cherries from the garden (competing with birds to get to the ripe ones first) and surviving on them for days on end when I felt too bored to get groceries and yes, even those stupid loud church bells that woke me up every morning. This house has been through a lot and seen a lot with me this year. And soon there will be no traces of me, and it will be someone else’s. Will it take as much time to move on as I know I will? Probably not, and the thought of it makes me a little sad. But when I think of the time I spent here, I keep thinking of Charles Dickens and the beginning of ‘A Tale of Two Cities‘, because these lines seem so incredibly fitting:
“It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair”
It was these words that Dickens began his story. And it is with these words that I will end mine.

One-night stands that sit

I am old
And my skin folds
Under the lamplight let us us lie, legs entangled
As they once did in the fading rubble of Dachau
Before that much talked about dawn. Enemy to-
Donne. John. And I fill the gaping hole of tonight
With your name. And promise to be yours for
A thousand and one nights.

I am old
And my skin unfolds.

As our folding skin unites in waves of the virgin Atlantic
waves of flesh. Unending. Crashing on the shores of dawn
I shall be the keeper of secrets. Of your love that died under
the Andalucían sun. And the snake that bit you when you were
a naked boy playing by the twisting meandering Amazon
Slipping through your fingers like sand. Like my childhood.

I am old.
My teeth no longer hold.

As I tell you of prophesies I told no one. Our Past
Spilled in the anonymousness of this nocturnal
Pairing. Bird-like. Momentary. Ephemeral. Brief.
Nous sommes les fleurs de la nuit. Du mal.
I pretend to care one last night. Deceive one last
Time. Space. Light. Sound. Already, I am gone.

I grow old.
Covered by mold.

Waiting for Beckett/ En Attendant Beckett

I first read Beckett when I was studying French back home in India, when we were supposed to read a book in French and present it in class. Not being as familiar with Beckett’s ‘absurd’ (geddit geddit?) ways then as I am now, I looked at the slim little copy of En Attendant Godot I had located among heavy and intimidating-looking volumes of Œuvres Complètes (The Complete Works) at the Alliance Française library in Pune and figured reading it would be a piece of cake. Like that time I read Le Petit Prince in French for my level 2 class. Which is a children’s book. The simpleton that I was then, I had no idea of what I had just signed up for. I hated French, I hated doing French homework, and reading a book in French that was also available in English seemed like a completely unnecessary exercise.

Armed with my hardly-ever-borrowed-before-I-came-along copy of Beckett’s most famous play, I headed home to finish reading it, knowing I would just read the wikipedia page in French/English to present the play to my fellow-french haters in class. It’s not that I didn’t like to read, in fact it’s one of the only things that make life bearable, but having to do it in French just sucked all the fun out of it and made it a tad too difficult. Having to look up every other word while reading just kills a book. However, I thought I knew enough French by that point to actually be able to read the play. And I was really, really excited about reading it. The French on the first page seemed easy enough. A couple of hours of struggling through the first 10 pages later, I was completely confused and lost. All ideas of presenting it in class in a couple of days were abandoned. I just presented Voltaire’s Candide instead, a book I had already read a long time ago and loved  for its humour. Numerous calls were eventually made to friends all over town, trying to get hold of the English version. A friend finally lent me his photocopy of Waiting For Godot. What followed was a long romance with Beckett and absurdism.

My fascination for Beckett’s work since those early days drove me to choose a class on Molloy in the second semester of my first year at the Sorbonne, and to work on the question of the representation of women in his work for my second year dissertation under an eccentric professor specializing in 20th century writers like Bataille, Camus, Sartre and Beckett. I knew that Beckett had been buried somewhere in Paris, but I hadn’t found his grave at the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the who’s who of the last few centuries lie crowded together competing for space and attention alike, among hordes of tourists clicking invasive-seeming pictures of their idles (bad pun, I know), smiling and posing by their graves. Way to rub it in, guys. Nothing like being full of life on a beautiful day next to dead people.

The more well-known Père Lachaise cemetery. Please don’t use this image without my permission.

So when I realized that Beckett was actually buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery, I resolved to go there immediately. However, a lazy person’s resolve to do something immediately being about as meaningful as Modi’s promise that he had nothing to do with the Gujarat riots, it wasn’t until many, many months and missed opportunities to go there later, on a pleasant day in June 2012, that I finally kept my appointment with the dead. We quickly found all the other graves we wanted to visit- Sartre and Beauvoir,  the Ionescos, Baudelaire, Vallejo etc. etc. However, search as we might, we just could not locate Beckett’s grave. No amount of map-reading and calling out helped. It soon started raining- it was the perfect horror-movie scenario. Eventually, it was closing time and we were forced to abandon my search for another day. And that day didn’t arrive till last week, when I finally made it back to the cemetery after over a year.

Accompanied this time by my determined friend Saumya (name unchanged out of lack of concern for her privacy), we searched low and low (see what i did there?) for his grave. Given my complete obsession with the man, was his grave not calling out to me, she chided. We knew there was something obvious that we were missing. How could it be so hard to find such an important person’s grave? This time, however, thanks to my friend, her smart-phone and her determination, the grave was finally found. And just as we had thought, it was in an extremely obvious and visible place, we had somehow just managed to not spot it all that time (HA, no I’m not going to reveal the exact location. Have your own little adventure, trying to locate his grave!).  In a way I was happy to not have found it the first time round, because it was a special moment for me, and it was a relief to have shared it with the female equivalent of a ‘bro’ (I’d say ho, but I don’t want to offend anyone).
There lay the tomb, nonchalant and unpretentious, humble and austere (much like Beckett himself when he was alive), right under our noses. Waiting for us to notice him, perhaps. No fancy epitaph, nothing, (unlike the more flamboyant grave of the more stylish Oscar Wilde, if I may say so). Just his and his wife’s names and dates of birth and death. And on it, a little scrap of paper placed by another fan, with ‘En Attendant Godot‘ scribbled on it. The moment I had been waiting for since that day when I first picked up En Attendant Godot was finally here.

 Again, my personal photograph. Please don’t feel free to use it without my permission.

Since, I have decided to visit his grave more regularly. Not just because I think that the cemetery is extremely beautiful and that it would be a good place to meet smart young men who love Beckett and are thus, by default, attractive to me. Not even because I think hanging out at a cemetery will make me look edgy and eccentric enough to be considered an intellectual and/or an artist, but because in a world where one is painfully aware of the absence of a higher power to turn to in times of trouble and the living are too imperfect to set an example, I turn to the dead to show the way. Don’t get me wrong, Beckett was certainly not perfect, but death brings a sort of consolation in imperfection, unlike the disappointment you feel when the living prove themselves to be fallible. I have a personal bond with Beckett because like him, I am homeless. Having left Ireland and settled down in France and even switched languages from English to French, Beckett spent his life in search of a home. So is his work haunted by the themes of waiting and the quest for Home. Some of us are born at home; some of us spend our lives in search of it. And all we have to keep us from being too lonely on our solitary journey is some healthy self-derision and dry, ironic humour. All we can do is laugh bitterly at ourselves and our petty dramas. There is no other hope, no other consolation. And most certainly no resolution.
Eventually, towards the end of his life, Beckett changed back to writing in English from writing in French. Was he finally at ease with his heritage and his language? Being an Indian writing in English and speaking hardly any Marathi even though I really want to (I’ve now even forgotten to write in Devnagri), and studying in French for the last two years, I am often consumed by questions of language and heritage. I never felt at home in Pune, and when I came to Paris, it finally felt like I had found home. But of course, things are never as simple as that, and perhaps, like Beckett, it will be many years before I find my language and home, before I am at ease with my roots, if I even have any. Meanwhile, I have his grave to keep me company in a strange city where I live far away from everyone I love and care for. So maybe that was home, right under my nose, while I  unwittingly looked for it in so many other places without knowing- that simple tomb of a beloved writer where I finally felt at harmony with the world.