Being Janus-Faced (also a tag)

Another year has started. Time to start brewing new wine in my old bottle, inside my drab little cellar, using the same old recipe, with a bunch of sour grapes, sweet sugar, and fermenting yeast. Come, taste my wine. Smell it, sip it, roll it around your tongue. Call it light, full, round, or flat. Call it woody, earthy, soft, or complex. It might be sweet, bitter, sour, or just insipid to you. I brew it to lighten my days, and yes, I admit, for that little bit of intoxication, where reality gets smudged with illusions. But foremost, I brew it to keep you happy.

Let me start my year by playing Janus, that two-faced god who forgets to live in the present because he is always looking backward and forward – the past and future. And let me start by doing an almost-forgotten tag (tagged by Usha) about yesterdays and tomorrows.

Your oldest memories

It is a formless landscape out there in the corner of my mind. Fuzzy and hazy. More tangible are those first impressions rather than concrete memories – of stories told and fables recounted by loving voices and fertile imagination – of an ekadashi kakka (the crow that fasted during the eleventh lunar day) who fell into a well and found treasure, of a kunjattakili (a small bird?) who learnt it the tough way that only hard work pays, of Cinderella who ate dosa sandwich and who went thrice to a ball dance, or of an onion that was crowned the king among vegetables. It was a happy childhood where loneliness was a strange word impossible to relate to.

I did have a bout of nostalgia about four months ago when I raked the dried leaves in my mind and lit a bonfire. If you haven’t seen it already and would care to, you can find it here.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago – the beginning of 1999 – when I was in what I would call the prime of my life, when time still laughed at wrinkles and gray hair – I was in Pune, working as an English Language Trainer for a company. Living in my uncle’s spacious bungalow, relishing my aunt’s exemplary culinary skills, I was getting plumper. It was probably the first time in my life when I had fun – fun of the immediate, spontaneous, unthinking kind. There were four girls and four guys in our group, and we picnicked and danced and drank and gossiped and laughed those five months away. Many among us fell in and out of love. And when one of the trainees proclaimed that he had fallen in love with my eyes and thus excused himself for being the dumbest in my class, I was young and gullible enough to blush. Thinking about that life, it has a dream-like quality now. When I left Pune, my friends gave me a gold ring with a clover embossed – for love and luck. I still wear it.

Today

I don’t look at today. Remember, I am Janus. I can only reminisce and predict, I cannot just be.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

I look into that crystal ball and see a little turbulence, a little sorrow, a little boredom, amidst all that happiness and contentment that I would predict for myself. Perhaps it is a yearning rather than a prediction to let life live its course steadily and surely. It is an anticipatory bail against any forces of nature or man that might bring a disaster. I do not resist change or the passage of time. But let it just flow by slowly, unobtrusively.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

I would have a Noah’s Ark and a Library of Congress installed in the capsule. And put myself in too for good measure. When I finally disembark from it to a new civilization and a new culture, I would remake the whole world just as I know it and be the new-age Noah, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Galileo all rolled into one. That is a dream worth dreaming about :).

The tag is now done. It is open to any and all readers, whosoever wants to share his or her past, present, and future.