Colors in grey

The reversals

It is seven fifteen, A tells me. We are both awake as the noisy neighbours from adjacent rooms knock at each other's, calling for 'mummyji' or enquiring 'ready ho gaye kya'. A draws away the blackout curtains but it is only the blobs of white light globes from the street below that glow; the sky hasn't lightened up at all above the Fulham Public Mortuary that overlooks our hotel.

We are in London, a few days before Christmas, and my son tells me how the air feels fresher, compared to Bangalore, as we await our taxi ride from the airport. Hasan is in stealth mode - he asks for the destination and then waits in a secret corner, messaging that he can't find us, before canceling. Mohammed accepts the brief, but his cab does not move a meter in the App's tracking, neither does he respond. So A cancels this time. It is finally Tariq who shows up in his newly purchased Toyota bz4x EV.

Tariq keeps his mouth shut till A asks him about the traffic. He gives a verbose reply in his broken English, but the conversation peters out soon. After a while I ask in hindi, whether he is from India or Pakistan and only then the floodgates open. He starts with his wisdom of the three Ws one needs to be careful about in London and tells a story of his life that rings true in the sheer conformance of the typicality of an immigrant experience: the layering of that hope and desire of one's homeland's prosperity in abstraction and the pride of sons and daughters making it to college and honorable vocations in immediate, familial reality.

I have brought along a few books to read in this trip, but the thinnest of them is the Dostoyevsky novella, White Nights. In the book it is past ten in the night and our first person narrator is walking along the canal embankment of Petersburg in the last lights of the long day. He is to come out of his solitary existence and meet someone that is going to change his life forever.

Come afternoon, which is also the evening already, we walk up to, and then along, the brightly lit King's Road. We falter a bit in the beginning as we forget pressing the buttons for pedestrian crossings, Bangalore having seeped into us in these four years. On the way, the Christmas lights are measured, tuned to true British reticence, dignified even. Someone comes looking for more copies of Huxley's A Brave New World in the World's End Bookshop we are in now and running our fingers over signed copies of vintages. Only a little while ago we were being mesmerised by the sound and design of the artefacts in Seven Oaks Sound and Vision. People in partywear gather outside bustling restaurants, smoking in groups. My son relishes the tart raspberries and we bite into sweet and plump cherries we buy from one more immigrant run shop on our long walk. We are close to the Kensington Dishoom, where we queue up for a table. We are to meet up with A's cousin and her husband.

The cousin is a doctor, born and trained in Bangladesh, while her husband, even though he studied the law, was immersed in creating music for decades. I bring up the recent happenings in their home country which makes them sad. The home of a fellow musician, a hindu, whose house was like a museum of over three thousand hand made instruments was burnt down. But we have only this sliver of an evening, on a weekend, to know each other, before the cousin goes back to her draining shifts of intensive care at an NHS Hospital while the husband to his current job with the railways. So we talk of happier things instead.

More than four centuries ago people from this island nation sailed to the subcontinent and the rest is cliched history. While the structure of exploitation and extraction of resources to serve capital remains well in place, I wonder naively if there is a slow and leaky reversal. It is as if the colored people are now clawing back on this island, in search of what was lost, but not entirely sure of their purpose. The night was perhaps long, but seasons change, and days might start getting even.

Blind fish

The breakfast is twenty three pounds a piece and not included in our room. So we set out to walk to a cute little cafe on the other side of the King's Road we did not walk the last evening. Our boy is not happy and is irked further as I err in my navigation which makes the walk longer. On the way we peek at a tube stop to get the Oyestercard, a tapable card in multiple commuter modes. The physical cards are sold no more, the only person in the information kiosk repeats what we now see is printed in big letters on the opposite wall; it is now an app in our smartphones.

Two cheerful and chubby girls are running the morning at this cafe opposite to the lush green Eel Brook Commons. It is the last Sunday before Christmas and friends with and without babies are exchanging presents over breakfast. A attempts to get the Oyestercard app on her phone but the multifactor authentication messages won't come to any of her numbers. We give up and decide to use our credit cards for a contactless tap on the buses. I let my son know the breakfast cost twenty three pounds, in total, and he gives me an eye roll. On the bus, the credit card taps make satisfying sounds and the driver is happy. Once seated, I check my phone for a text about the charge. Nothing.

We missed visiting the Victoria & Albert the last time we were here, more than seven years ago. The museum is busy with mostly European tourists, but less crowded than the neighboring Museum of Natural History where kids are practicing their dinosaur roars for their parent's phones. We choose the metalworks in the design section and work our way from iron to gold. In between there is a pathway from which we look down upon a pavilion of casts. Casts of famous works of art like the Trajan's columns or Michelangelo's David dwarf the people around them, looking up in thrall. How well have we, the people, served the empires?

We are in the theatre section, seeing small clips of performances from various playhouses in the city when our son comes running to us. We must see this one now. On a huge screen, with an equal sized area in front covered with something reflective, a movie is about to end. I catch the spanish narrator's word and ask him if this is in South America. He asks us to sit, the rerun will start in a minute.

This is a digital art, a narrated documentary by Juan Covelli which flows like the barge on the Atrato river in Colombia, carrying a digital screen. The river is a site of exploitation and extraction, of gold, copper and platinum, presently needed for smartphones and satellites, connecting us in our digital happiness and indignation. The fish there are all blind now, and the river's water has changed. We, the conscientious, who recycle and ride EVs, mostly, do not want want to see the cost.

The walk to Harrods, along the Brompton Road, reminds me of the last few days before the Pujos in Kolkata, where everyone is out and about to shop. The brushing of people on people, hordes jumping signals and making traffic stop creates the collective noise that I find warm and satisfying. There's a new air whip that the tall guy at the toy section demonstrates tirelessly. He competes with the girl demonstrating the robot which can do push ups. There is a temporary pause in the flow of people when wonder competes with budget. Grannies and mommies keep the little eddies in check. Then the flow moves down the escalator, flanked by the sphinxes and hieroglyphs of the Al-Fayed commission, to the hall where the jamboree of perfumes seems to lead it to a crescendo of holiday shopping.

In my book, the narrator is able to turn the table of his life. He is able to bare his wretched self to Nastenka in the language of a dreamer. It is their second night of meeting and there is a hope of understanding.

Is off-white even a color? And what about sky blue?

The houses that span the borough of Chelsea and Kensington are white. Of course many are still red brick, have quirky signs, a co-op kinda place is bright green even. But the ones with a fresh wreath at the front door and an spell of happiness hanging around them are all white.

From bus drivers to tour ticket sellers, bus boys to cocktail servers, I see the colored all around the boroughs of Westminster and Southwark. Color spills bright out of the Flame Angelfish and Mandarin Dragonet of the Sea-Life Aquarium and swirls along the spray cans that fuel the grafittis of the Leake Street Arches. Color leaches off the wrapping papers and tea-biscuit tins of Fortnum and Maison and rushes past the satchels of the French and Spanish speaking tourists before it lights up the wings of the angels hanging over the crossing of Regent Street and Oxford Street, against a grey London sky. Color sizzles in the red of the lobsters in Borough Market baking pans and the red of the lips that hold one smoke after another.

But come back to Fulham, and inside a charming pub of a quiet neighborhood, and it is white again. On TV, there is a prediction of white Christmas across the UK.

Before the third night, Nastenka talks about herself. The lodger at her grandma's house takes them to The Barber of Seville a few times already.

The city of London is full of theatres, but we had been lazy to get tickets on time.

The night is for queueing up for a late night jazz show in Soho, but the evening is stowed away to meet a friend. Not the banker friend who always insists I let him know when we are in London, but I never do, as I do not know what to talk to him about. Not the comrade friend who has scheduled a holiday that overlaps with our visit and just let me know a few days ago. It is a friend from high school with whom we have not spoken in twenty five years. It is a friend with whom I would dip fingers in sugar syrup and fish out communal rasogollas after a lengthy chemistry tuition class twenty five years ago. A friend who was elegant with the cricket bat, genuine with the strums of his guitar, but the most true in his heartbreak tears. The friend is a C-suite executive now, with dreams of a Devon retirement.

We walk into a bar opposite to his today's workplace. He has had a two hour commute and had to miss a neighbor's Christmas party. But he waffles on drinking, as he his sculpting his body now. I do not insist, rather feel relieved as I see a glimmer of lightness and a reflexive dropping of guard. We are social media aware of the kinetics of each other's lives so we mostly talk about kids, other friends and our midlife crises. At some point our migration back to India comes up. We compare our current life's colors - his is off white and mine is light blue.

It is not what you see or feel, it is what you choose to remember

The tapping works, credit cards are getting charged by TFL, and I now ride the double deckers with ease. Ever since I have read Sam Kriss' NYT piece on how AI writes, I am obsessed with the power of three. Not just how I see people writing sentences, but even people. I see the three Asian kids at the back of the bus number 22 towards Piccadilly circus we are now on. A local, giving the lay of the land to two other likely visiting cousins who are holding on to their duffels on their laps. I see the sharp-eyed girl in her black leather jacket, trying to sense where we are from as she occasionally jokes with her sister and mother about about their endless visits back to Pakistan. Looking out through the window, I see the brilliantly crafted posters of Mrinalini Mukherjee and her knitting circle, an exhibition running now at the Burlington House of the Royal Academy, at the doors of which I see three cheerful Korean girls, all wearing black shorts with long black boots, taking selfies. We pass a Hard Rock Cafe and my son tells me how each such store contains a used guitar of a famous artist. And then he rattles off the names he knows - Slash's in Mumbai, Sponge's in Bangalore and Clapton's in London. Later in the evening, we would take the underground and overground rails the first time in three days and all I will remember are three faces - the fidgety girl with Asian eyes dropping her phone, the petite white lady with a stern face who kept smelling her bunch of flowers and took her time to decide sitting on an empty seat and the big black man munching on his home brought snack.

The British Library building is a newly built one, though its inheritance is several centuries old, collections growing at the rate of 8 KM a year and its charter is to record every published word in the UK. Ever since I heard Amitava Kumar speaking about doing some of his research on India here, during his London residency, I have been longing to take a peek. We go around the museum library, looking at rare manuscripts and correcting my knowledge about the history of print techniques. But I want more. As A waits patiently with our son, I get a reading card made, picture taken and all. I rush to the reading rooms and walk along the shelves that line the wall. The room is mostly full, people at the desks busy with their laptops and tablets, but some making hand written notes as well. I pick a book here, read a sentence there, aimlessly. In that moment I am back to all my libraries past and remember things I might have done. The moment passes and I come down the stairs, the card sitting in my wallet along side a hand made paper card of cat library that my son made for me many years ago.

In the White Nights, it is the fourth night. The lodger, who is back in Petersburg, has been given Nastenka's letter but there's been no reply. It is as if there is no remembering.

The body does not remember, AK says, it forgets everything, even things that it loved most. As we stand at the platform 1 of Clapham junction, cold wind slapping my cheeks, I vaguely recall our Chicago nights at the Howard station where red line ended and purple line began, where CTA staff would empty the train and the homeless would have to look for a new train to get warm on. The pulsations of those nights I will never be able to feel again.

The shaving mirror

The final morning arrived darker than usual, the 'mummyji' voices still loitering the corridors, but eventually the sun is brightest now, reflecting off the corrugated mortuary roof. After a long bout of convincing as to why we can totally haul three large suitcases along the London tube to Heathrow, our son fills the room with Green Day's Holiday played on his phone. He has started to get a spare phone to himself on trips now.

Even though this was our second London visit, we still did not get a proper guidebook. Instead we had gotten John Chesher's Guide for Curious Wanderers. Of course, we did not go around and find the green cabbie booths that were set up around the city in old times to stop them from gravitating away from cold to the pubs and ales. Neither did we look for the wedding cake church nor the protruding seats meant for the porter's rest. But as our number 22 made its way through the Brompton Road, we pointed to The Swallows and Amazons creator Arthur Ransom's house, our yesterday's discovery, one more time.

I have finished the White Nights. There is heartbreak, yes, but there is the unforgettable reality of living a dream, if only for a few days.

The leaves of the London Plane trees, that line so many of its streets, look almost like the maple, only bigger. And even when they have fallen to the season of cold, they are living in green, yellow, and brown all at the same time. Back in Bangalore, next to our apartment building elevator, they have recently installed large screens to display ads. Sometimes, it throws out fun facts, like, you have never actually looked at your own face, only photos and reflections. On a day in the hotel bathroom when by chance I look closely at myself in a shaving mirror and notice spots and ridges on my aging face I never knew existed, I also look at the glass front of the Waterstones and see the latest books of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai next to each other in recommended display. A lament for a time lost fogs the window with a breath that is fervent. And it is so, that the excitement of a little more knowing of what I am bleeds into the enchantment of a little audacity of what I want to be and tinges these few winters days in London.