beyond..

I first read Arun Joshi in my final year college days, there was a pre-cooked link I felt with Joshi, his way of writing and the character representation bagged my attention almost immediately. Maybe because I learnt a part of me I tried to suppress in his Bimal Biswas and the unnatural palates of him which I discovered appealing.

I visualise a guy with sombre eyes who lived in Harlem among piles of books and magazines in his white shirt and faded blue jeans with a red baseball cap, who had a craving for Anthropology and fascinating societies of India, who read of bizarre happenings in newspapers, who was fascinated towards Vincent Van Gogh and was passionate about life. He surprised me and he kept doing that. Who was he? There are some sockets in life when you look at yourself and wonder how unusual you are but when you find someone like you, who had similar thought patterns and ‘unaccepted wisdom’, you start to believe in the most extraordinary things, more supernatural I believe. I still don’t know who is Billy to me or what role he has in my life? Only few people understood Billy or like how Rima Kaul rightly said “how misunderstood you are, my poor boy”.

When people around me criticized Billy for cowardly running away from reality, for being ‘extremely selfish’, leaving behind a number of people who actually loved him, for making love with all female charms he found attractive, for being critical of a ‘phoney society’ who lived on money and materialistic dreams, I identified with Billy and I don’t know why I lied myself that he is real and he is out there somewhere that in some point in life I actually waited for him to magically appear in front of me. Yes I was in an utopian land but it was a beautiful domain I must say.

So, what fascinated me? I like to think there is someone like Billy out there, somewhere ‘beyond’ and I wrote him plenty of letters when I was fuming with my ‘meaningless existence’, was agitated with myself for sitting among people who could barely ‘think’ and sometimes when I was immensely happy. I have no clue if someone actually read those letters I passionately composed or they got unnoticed among the piles of surplus letters of Calcutta. I looked for this familiar face among the urban crowd, in the obscurity of forest foot hills, among the corners of coffee shops and dusty book stores, on the faces of the strangest looking human beings on a metro station and among the curious faces in those extraordinary art exhibitions but I couldn’t find him. I know in the ‘sensible’ angles of my conscious brain that he cannot be real.

What was my role? Was I Romi? A ‘good friend’, a critical outsider in reality to whom he finally narrated his story?  Was I Tuula? To whom he intellectually connected and had those amazing conversations which people around them assumed abnormal.  Or was I Bilasia? With whom he found all the hidden treasures. I searched my role all through the words, all through the characters and didn't really realize that the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are the same. I learned finally that I was the Billy Biswas I was searching all these days and I need to be in perfect harmony with myself.

…but where did he abscond?