This is the link to an interview of parvathy Baul which was published in Actupondy. Parvathy is an exceptional woman and this interview was taken in novel circumstances.

If I were an abstract painter

If I were an abstract painter,

I would paint you and me,

In the cashew grove,

Whorls of green,

Strokes of knotted brown,

Dotted here and there

With luminous red,

Blurred coins of lemon sun,

And underlying, in the centre,

A collage of squares,

Of bright orange and faded blue.

If I were a miniaturist,

I would spend hours on the composition.

Then line up the brushes side by side,

And with infinite care,

Paint the veins of leaves,

The striped roughness of the bark,

The red, smooth, pulpy fruits,

With  dark, obscene, foetus nuts.

The orange curve of a breast,

The freckled flesh of an underarm,

Glimpsed through a blue t-shirt sleeve.

Two beings caught by the painter's brush,

Brown gaze locked in green

But wait! That's like death!

To be frozen in a single mood.

And however lovely it might be,

I choose to free you and me,

To stroll out of the picture frame,

Leaving behind the central space,

For other lovers to occupy.

 Arunima Choudhury

The Other

As a child I grew up in a strangely eclectic religious atmosphere. My parents and I lived with my uncles and aunts as a large, extended family. Our household deity from several generations was Krishna. On special occasions such as on my grandfather’s death anniversary or on Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday, my youngest uncle who was a staunch Vaishnava organized devotional concerts in our house. Big, hefty men clad in white dhotis and kurtas, some with cymbals and others with khols 
( a two headed drum held horizontally while playing)  strapped around their necks and hanging down to their midriffs, gathered on our terrace. At first they sat in a circle and sang. As the night deepened and the singing got more fervent, they rose to their feet and began dancing as well. My father and uncles joined in, the music and dancing rose to a pitch of excitement and ended with a shower of exclamations , “Hari! Hari!” This was followed by the Vaishnavas throwing handfuls of sugar candies in the air which I along with other children scuttled to gather.My father though had strayed from the flock. He had become the follower of a Bengali freedom-fighter turned philosopher-saint, settled in Pondicherry, and a “French woman,” my relatives muttered amongst themselves, with revolutionary ideas on education, marriage, society and gender equality.  

I was sent to a school run by nuns where every week we went to the chapel and read colourfully illustrated books on the miracles wrought by Christ. I was particularly attracted to the picture of a gentle, bearded Christ feeding a small, fluffy lamb.There was no contradiction in all this. I bathed in the holy soup of Krishna, Jesus, Sri Aurobindo, and felt safe and protected.

There was also a Muslim servant called Chamatkar which means wonderful. Chamatkar was old. He had a white, longish beard. His face was like soft, crumpled paper with bright, laughing eyes . He always wore a dirty, white skull cap and a lungi with blue and white checks. He often carried me in his arms and the elders in the house teased me by saying, “When you grow up we will marry you to Chamatkar.” Chamatkar too found this funny and when I was unbearable, pulling his beard or wanting to wear his skull cup, he would threaten me with the same fate. I knew he had a wife but he lived alone in our house on the ground floor in a damp room with a single window. Like all devout Muslims he prayed five times a  day. I knew I was not supposed to disturb him then, but when I could I peeked in through the window to watch him spread his prayer mat, wash his feet and hands and kneel down to pray. This ritual of withdrawal into a private world which had nothing to do with the one which surrounded him, fascinated me.I don’t know if I asked him about his beliefs, maybe I refrained unconsciously because I knew there was an invisible barrier to be respected. But I do not think that I was consciously aware of the fact that he was the other.

As I grew up the outline of the others grew clearer, all those who believed in other divinities than the community I belonged to, were the others, all those whose financial and social status was inferior to ours were the others, all those whose skin colour and physical features were different than our own were the others.  My father later sent me to a school founded on the teachings of his gurus and there all those who did not belong to the same line of belief were the others. So in fact we were surrounded by others and had to define our identity by distinguishing ourselves from the others. All this happened during my teen years. And it was natural to lose the innocence of my childhood and define my self by taking into account  existing boundaries. But with growing awareness of these boundaries was also a growing revolt against them.  During my childhood the devotion that was spontaneous became fraught with obstacles. The ethical rigidity of  Rama repelled me, the elitism and intellectual snobbery of my education suffocated me, the belief of middle class families of which my family was a part, that all those who are poorer are also dirtier, less intelligent and less honest  than they,  infuriated me. I wanted a way out. I could not say to hell with religion and become a Marxist because I was fed on belief along with my mother’s milk, but accepting it was like entering into a room, locking myself in, and throwing away the key. I wanted a way out, whereby my atavistic tendencies and my personal beliefs could find a meeting ground, where poetry and philosophy fused, where humanity and divinity walked hand in hand.

Kabir showed me the way. A boyfriend who walked on the margins of heresy himself gifted me a tattered translation of Kabir’s poems translated into English by Tagore. Wallowing in a morass of confusion and disillusionment where the heaven that I had been promised had turned out to be a country divided into mined frontiers, the poems touched my being with their simplicity and courage.

... It’s just as well my prayer beads scattered

I’m free of all that holy chatter!

The burden of my head is gone.

or

Your words are sweet as sugar

Your deeds are poisoned bread.

Quit the words, walk the talk.

   Turn the poison to nectar.

or

          Some say the lord dwells in heaven.

Some say in the land of holy cows.

         Some say in the land of Shiva.

In every age they set up their shops!

                                                             Do what you must, you seekers!

There are so many more. I could keep on quoting.   Here was a voice which went directly to my heart, where all that created The Other was knocked down with frightening ease and nonchalance, mosques, temples, the Gita, the Koran, the rich, the poor and what remained was not emptiness but an infinite vastness.

So Kabir made me reconcile myself with form by being supremely irreverent to it. His words gave me the courage to be radical because he had by abandoning everything found all. The world was made whole again, the Other only an illusion.

Arunima Choudhury

Landowner for a day

My father called me up yesterday and asked me if I could come over to his house because he had something to tell me. 

"What?" I enquired. 

The line was not very clear and I thought I heard him mumbling,"You have inherited land."

"What! Where?" I exclaimed. 

"In Bhagirathpur. But I can't talk about this over the phone. Come over as soon as you can."And he hung up. 

"Bhagirathpur," I muttered to myself. Bhagirathpur is the village of my grandparents in Bengal about 1,500 km away from Pondy,  if not more. I went there once with my mother and her distant cousin twenty years ago by means of a back-breaking bus journey, through a countryside of lush  green rice fields, stagnant ponds and little girls with sticks in hands calling out in high-pitched voices to herds of waddling ducks.  To know that I , Arunima Choudhury,  who has lived in rented apartments all my life,  own a piece of land,  be it in a remote village thousands of kilometers away , sent a shiver of pleasure coursing through my veins. 

I thought about the time I had spent there two decades ago.. We had stayed for a couple of days at my mother's cousin's place, a middle-aged man with a lovely wife and two teenage daughters. They lived in an enormous, rambling , broken down house, or rather in one portion of a conglomeration of houses bound to each other by a network of narrow alleys with mossy walls looming on either side. My uncle's portion consisted of two huge rooms, one immense courtyard and a kitchen where his wife cooked on a mud oven. The  toilet was outside, more of a huge pit than a toilet. 

In the evening there was the inevitable power cut and the flickering flames of the lanterns fought valiantly with the surrounding darkness by casting pools of dim, yellow light.  I remember sitting in the room, chatting with my cousins when the elder one told me, "Do you know this year after Durga Pooja when the idol was being carried on the boat to be immersed in the river tears coursed down her cheeks. She really did not want to leave us and go."

"No!"I exclaimed incredulously.

"Yes, "her younger sister added emphatically., "many people in the village saw her crying."

'Oh," I replied weakly. I did not want to contend with what they were saying. And somehow in the semi-obscurity of the room with the lanterns casting eerie shadows on the walls, it did not seem impossible.

My cousins took pains to show me around the village. As  I walked down the mud roads we were stopped at every street corner by curious old men sitting on the porch of their houses. "Who is she?",  they asked. "Where is she from?" The answer was she is our father's third cousin's daughter. And presto! I was slotted in their heads. "Aw, she is Rekha's daughter", or by virtue of the immense network of family connections, imprinted in their minds,  "She is Ananda's daughter, Kalipada's grand-daughter. It is to be noted that my parents were not born or brought up in the village. The questions were followed by a clinching phrase which indicated their satisfaction of having done away with my strangeness and found my rightful place in the village, " It is OUR blood which flows in her veins," they declared triumphantly. I felt like royalty, blue-blooded, my honourable ancestors kings and queens of yore. 

And now,  my father had told me,  I was landowner in Bhagirathpur. The same evening I went to see him.. "So what is it you told me over the phone? How come I own land in Bhagirathpur? How come nobody ever told me?" 

My father looked at me quizically and said, "Because you didn't own it. Your maternal great-grandfather bequeathed it  to your grandmother. When your grandmother died her children inherited the land. Your aunt and uncle have sold their portions and since your mother is dead,  you and your sister have inherited her part. It is upto you now to decide if you are going to sell it or not because a buyer has contacted us from Bhagirathpur. Your sister is willing to sell."

So in the morning I had got to know I had inherited land and in the evening I was already being solicited to sell it! Ilooked at my father blankly  and fired a series of questions:

"But why should I sell it?"

"How many acres of land?"

"What kind of land is it?"

"Who is the buyer?"

"I don't know what kind of land," my father replied," I have never seen it. I suppose it's agricultural land. It mustn't be much because the land was divided into three portions. The same buyer who bought the land from your uncle and aunt would like to buy the remaining plots."

"But I don't want to sell! " I retorted indignantly . 

"Why?" my father was astonished. "Do you plan to go and live in Bhagirathpur?"

I was stumped. I obviously did not plan to go and settle in Bhagirathpur. 

To drive the nail even further my father continued, "Anyway if you don't sell someone will come and occupy it illegally. Would you then be willing to enter into litigations?"

I could feel the sense of satisfaction of owning a piece of land in the countryside with rich, loamy soil, trees with their canopy of leaves, perhaps a pond and a broken down house thrown in as well,  leaking out of me. Before despairing completely, I asked belligerently, "How much? How much is he offering?"

"Twenty-five thousand."

"What?"I yelped.

"Yes, but don't worry. I told him that my daughters would not be willing to sell for such a low price, so he has agreed to fifty thousand."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "But pa I wailed, here people in the countryside are selling one acre of land for fifty lakhs and even more." 

My father looked at me severely and said, "Pondicherry is Pondicherry and Bhagirathpur is Bhagirathpur. And anyway why are you being so greedy? Thank God instead for having been given this unexpected gift." 

Now I was truly silenced. I lay down my arms, blinked back my unshed tears and nodded meekly.

Afterwards back home, lying in my bed, the picture of a beautiful plot of grassy land rose before my eyes. I resentfully mumbled to myself, "However I have had the satisfaction of being landowner for a day. Nobody can take that away from me," then chuckled at the delightful irony of the situation.

Arunima