Marut and his Pens - Story 1

While I enjoy a very high degree of freedom with regard to indulging in my passion for fountain pens…an occasional warning (from you know who!) suffices to douse my ardour for quite some time till temptation strikes again…but I have been remarkably successful in recent times in resisting fountain pen temptation…more so because I now have my grail pen, Montblanc Meisterstuck 149, with me and the other pens in my wish-list are quite high priced too…so I don’t want to venture too far…but some heavy discount offered on Parker Sonnet pens left we weak kneed and I dissolved into ink…and bought 2 Sonnets…see, I am running away with my pens…I have to link up somewhere near the second line and continue with what I wanted to say initially…I will come back with another post on the Parker Sonnets…god promise…

My colleague Marut is a fountain pen enthusiast too…but he doesn’t enjoy a great deal of freedom to nurture his hobby…his missus lays down the rule…but Marut is a clever fellow…I have so many stories to tell…well, at least three good ones about Marut and his pens and his missus…she was once a colleague as well, for only a brief while though… and sometimes this ‘everybody knowing everybody’ leads to tricky situations as narrated below…

This happened almost a year ago…I had to make some pen purchases at Deccan Pen Stores, Abids and I thought I’d alight at the last stop, Koti, instead of my usual Secunderabad stop, and go to Abids from Koti…Marut also travelled in the same bus and gets down at Koti…when I told him about my plan to visit Deccan Pen Stores, he was tempted and decided to accompany me there… and while on our way to Abids from Koti, he switched off his mobile phone…I didn’t know why…I asked him and he smiled…at that time I didn’t know about his travails…it was later that I understood it as a strategic move…I had already informed home that I’d be late…but Marut had just impulsively joined me and no information to missus!!!

Going to a pen shop is not a brief affair for a pen freak…we were there for almost 45 minutes when my mobile phone rang…Marut looked at me and smiled and said, ‘must be my missus’... I looked at the number…it was not a ‘saved’ number, so no name…I read out the number to Marut…he said, ‘yes…that’s my missus …’ and smiled again…he was enjoying my discomfiture…I now had to answer the call… I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and there she was asking me about Marut’s whereabouts …I wondered how she knew that her dear hubby was with me… Marut would have reached home by now and he was now missing for more than 20 minutes from the scheduled time of arrival…she must have dialed her way around some of our bus-mates and somebody would have said innocently that Marut was seen with me last at Koti…Marut had purchased 4 pens by that time and the total cost came to Rs.280/- or so…I wanted to buy something in a higher range, but didn’t find anything within my limit…so I generally chewed the air for some time with the knowledgeable people there…strange fountain pen lingo…feeder, section, aerometric, eye dropper, cap lip, piston…anyway, coming back to the phone call…I told her that it is true that Marut had come with me, but he dropped me at Deccan Pen Stores and went home… how long ago was this…about half an hour ago…he hasn’t yet reached home…must have been stuck in a traffic jam, don’t worry, he’ll reach soon…and all this time Marut was grinning like a cat which had stolen, eaten, and digested the cream…I didn’t know that I could lie like this…must have sounded convincing…she said thanks and closed the conversation…Marut and I decided to make a move…it was now close to an hour since we entered the shop…I wanted some empty pen boxes to store my pens…I got some…Marut paid for his pens and we went out…Marut then told me to take his pens with me and give it to him the next day in the college…I was surprised…why?…you don’t know, saar, I will be interrogated and searched, pockets, bag, everything, now that I have come from a pen shop…we were now together in this pen-spiracy…he had unwittingly made me a partner in this caper… I had to play along…I took the pens he had bought and put them in my bag…

We went our separate ways…it must have wrenched his heart to see his newly bought pens going with me…that too with his approval and consent!! I hopped on to a rick and was winding my way home when my mobile rang…the number seemed familiar…I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and whose voice do I hear? Shouldn’t have surprised me…Marut’s missus…where is he? Why, what happened? He hasn’t reached home yet…he must be riding, can’t say with traffic these days, don’t worry, he must be close to home…when did he leave the shop (very tenacious, this lady!)…around 45 minutes back (I had to do a quick calculation, look at my watch, guess the time she called me when we were in the shop…and bingo! 45 minutes)… he hasn’t reached yet…(oh god!)…I then started weaving around some pointless sentences like traffic, potholes, time he left, time he’d reach, etc., intending to confuse her…I think she got the drift and closed the talk…Marut must have reached home soon enough as I didn’t get any more calls from his missus…

The next day Marut said he got an earful…in fact, two earfuls…for more than an hour…I said he got away lightly…because his pens were with me…imagine what would have happened if the pens were found on his person or in his bag…I shudder to think!! I then handed over his pens…she promptly discovered the pens that evening when Marut reached home (because she is a very tenacious lady…I told you so!)…and interrogated him…Marut told her that all these pens cost only Rs.80/- (!!!) … and self-pedestalled himself by telling her that I had bought a pen worth Rs.600/- or so… What? Oh my god! So expensive!…Don’t be too friendly with him…ok?

(Haaen!! I helped him cover his tracks and this is what he does to me...discredits me?? Traitor!!!...but as a fellow fountain pen enthusiast...you understand...and know how one feels...!!!)

A much awaited book...and a small, but impactful, publishing house

I have been watching out for the publication of this particular book about Hindustani classical music for a long long time…when I saw the reference of this book for the first time, sometime in 2000 or so, it was in the catalogue of the publisher, I thought I must have this book…at that time, I was totally ‘into’ music…reading about and listening to ‘fusion’ and Hindustani classical music…so much so that my actual research got derailed for some time…anyway, it said ‘forthcoming’ under a brief description of the book and a tentative list of topics…I wrote to the publisher and it was still ‘forthcoming’… I wrote after six months or so and it was still ‘forthcoming’…I had seen another book in the catalogue and decided to buy that…it was Ustad Alladiya Khan’s ‘autobiography,’ called ‘My Life.’… Ustad Alladiya Khan is the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana, and his autobiography, dictated to his grandson towards the end of his illustrious life, is a fascinating moving picture of Hindustani classical music from the mid nineteenth century to almost the mid twentieth centuries … though I was vaguely aware of a bygone Hindustani classical world – the world of small principalities, their court singers, royal patronage, musical one-upmanship, singers and their families, bandishes being closely guarded like family treasures, etc. – Ustad Alladiya Khan’s book revealed this world in full colour…not through photographs, but through words…this is still a cherished book in my musical library…

For some time, I forgot about ‘forthcoming’ book…and recently, a few months back, I remembered that book again and felt that it would have ‘forthcome’ by now…I decided to check if the publisher had a website and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the publisher, Thema, had a website (www.themabooks.com) and more pleasantly, the book had forthcome!! …

Thema is a small publishing venture in Calcutta and publishes books in both English and Bengali…and it has got a compact and ‘impact’ful list of books in its various subsections…women’s studies, oral history, Indian history, children’s literature, culture studies, film studies, radical literature, science…

I browsed the site and saw two more books that interested me… I then spoke to them and placed an order for these three books…the books arrived yesterday…

Ok…the much awaited book is ‘Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in An Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (edited by Amlan Dasgupta) … what first struck me was the subtitle…a reference to the famous essay by Walter Benjamin…The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction…the articles in this book range from early gramophone records to the forms of the Sarod and from women musicians to reflections on the Khayal…some articles do look tough…but that is challenge…

The other two books that I bought are Imaginary Maps, a book of short stories by Mahasweta Devi (Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) and Manik Bandyopadhyay: Selected Stories (Edited and introduced by Malini Bhattacharya)… there are more that I want to read from Thema…one by one…

Carl Muller's Yakada Yaka and other stories...

The other day I was re-reading Carl Muller's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetry...in fact, I have lost count of the number of times that I have read this book...the book relates a number of humourous, and sometimes hilarious, incidents from the life of the author... some of these are from his navy life...absolutely 'laugh-your-head-off' hilarious...and there are some incidents taken from his life as a journalist in the Gulf (Persian/Arabian Gulf)...and some inincidents from the general life in Sri Lanka...

I bought this book long back on the strength of his wonderful abilities as a 'riotously' humourous writer as seen in his wonderful trilogy...The Jam Fruit Tree, Yakada Yaka, and Once upon a Tender Time...this trilogy introduces us to the Railway life of the Burgher community in Sri Lanka...like the Anglo Indians in India, Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and formed the bulk of employees in Railways...and this trilogy traces the three generations of the Von Blosses...a thinly disguised retelling of the events of the three generations of his family...the Mullers...the protagonists are Cecilprins Von Bloss, the patriarch, who we see in The Jam Fruit Tree, his son, the uncontrollable Sonnaboy Von Bloss, holds fort in Yakada Yaka and Sonnaboy's son, Carloboy Prins Von Bloss, who comes to the foreground in Once Upon a Tender Time...of the three, my favourite is Yakada Yaka...it is a laugh riot...and this book has rescued me many times from low moods and gave me company on many lonely rummy saturday evenings...and I have invariably ended up laughing uncontrollably at the end of each funny railway episode... 'hilarious' would be a mild term...how Sonnaboy thwarted the pentecostalists, how he ruined the perfect party, how his railway colleagues almost ate a human heart and had to be rushed to the hospital, ...all this and much more...Sonnaboy's volcanic anger...his brood of children...his cranky brothers and sisters...their spouses...their children...a real volatile mix actually...and each episode explodes with laughter, songs, ribaldry, sometimes innocence, and many a times, the English Railway officials, are left wringing their hands at the perfectly loony explanations given by Sonnaboy and his equally crazy railway colleagues...

The Urge to Write with Fountain Pens

I actually wrote a letter today!! I mean 'wrote,' as in 'writing with a pen/pencil'...not typed on the computer...!! This was a letter of thanks to someone who had given me a couple of pieces of something which is part of his heritage and which he hands out very carefully...and this also gave me a chance to test the flow of a recently acquired fountain pen...and also to see how Pelikan brown ink, an ink colour I hadn't used till now, looked when curled into letters on a white sheet of paper... and it was all these three... and I was completely satisfied with the flow of the ink in the new fountain pen...the Pelikan brown ink looked good on white paper...and the letter came out very well...though I was exra profuse with the thanks...I think I can safely blame that on the urge to write some more and some more...what with the ink looking good and flowing well in the pen...

Though I collect fountain pens and use them, I don't get the chance to use them as much as I would like to...so, I create situations where I can use them...I keep a small notebook in my pocket and I write down a lot of things in that with my fountain pen...sometimes I feel I need to write and I don't know what to write, because most of my professional and personal 'writing' is done on the computer...including this post on this blog...and I feel I am cheating the fountain pen fellowship by hoarding pens and not using them...that too expensive ones...

I have made a mid-year resolution...that I will write at least one letter every week to someone I know...far or near or even in Hyderabad...those of you who want a letter from me may please enter your addresses in the comments section and you can also specify the pen and ink! and if I have that pen and ink...I will write a letter to you...sounds terribly stupid?