Act of Penance

Restoring this post from perpetual-lab.blogspot.com on September20th, 2025,I laugh at what I wrote then

I have an urge to penance. It is not to punish myself for any particular sin, but to follow an inbuilt impulse towards sackcloth and ashes, that the Bible refers to so many times; as if depriving oneself of physical comfort helps obtain spiritual comfort. Prayer and fasting comes naturally to the human animal. And confession too …

A certain blogger* is my confessor and has prescribed that I mend my ways. As a Bengali, he helps me see how loose and meandering are the ways of the Anglo-Saxons. Anything goes with us, and such eclecticism is not to our advantage. I learnt this not just from that blogger but the character Gogol in Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake. The hero acquires an American girlfriend, but when his father dies he feels bad about straying from the ways of his ancestors, shaves his head, and gives her up.

Then he falls in love with a Bengali girl who had been introduced to him in a meeting of match-arranging parents long before. We really believe this will work, for what they have in common is being half-Westernized. So they endure the traditional wedding ceremony with the chanting and silly hats (to me that would be the worst part), proving they are really American by immediately rushing off to a bedroom, to consummate what has hardly yet been formalized.

Alas, she betrays him later with a Frenchman. She is too Westernized. His roots are pulling him back, in the form of love for his parents, alive and dead, and for the Bengal he turned his back on. Hold on, how could he be blamed for betraying Bengal—he was born in New York!

And all the time I was watching the film I was thinking of that blogger, imagining at first he was the hero Ashoke (played by Irfan Khan) and then his son Gogol (played by Kahl Penn). I wanted to tell him “Please please don’t go to America! Don’t sell your soul!” And even whilst watching the film I said to my beloved that if I, a rootless alien, had to choose between the culture of America or Bengal I would choose the latter, despite all sorts of reasons.

This is part of what the blogger sent me from his mobile:

Boss, you did a great injustice to your natural talent of a narrator, who can actually draw pictures with his words, by not following this style of writing.

And other words of encouragement.

Which shows that he is an angel-messenger, something which I periodically need, because I go more and more off-course. “Boss” indeed? Who does he think he is? Zorba the Greek? Well, why not? Zorba was an angel-messenger too, to his boss. And anyhow, we have a literary relationship of mutual criticism and a bit of editing, with a view to a Joint Project which shall dazzle the world, or at least some of its human population, before the century is out.

So, penance is the only answer. Any time other than winter, I would go for a long walk, ending up footsore, hungry and thirsty like a pilgrim of old who goes on till he sees visions in the clouds and hears choirs of angels. But I stay in and hibernate, in this house of warm-toned wood; stripping a couple of original Windsor chairs, in this town which once made most of the chairs in England, in factories a stone’s throw from here. Lacking the skills of making, I pay them homage by stripping off the varnish, exposing the elm seats, the beech legs and backs, that might have been rough-hewn by bodgers in the woods.

I shall perform my penance with sandpaper. And apologize to any readers who expect any particular style or theme for this particular example of the ephemeral literary medium called “blog”.
Posted by Vincent at 8:28 PM 2 comments Links to this post
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
apologize to any readers who expect any particular style or theme for this particular example of the ephemeral literary medium called “blog”.

* Ghetufool, he doesn’t want me to publish his real name on Facebook or other social media. as he’s now a respected journalist in Mumbai.