‘The mind is a strange soil’: On Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat, the rains, and writing death
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The monsoons have come and made the dust settle. I’m legs stretched out on the window seat of my childhood bedroom in Kolkata with a Moleskine journal and colour pens, looking out at this raingreen rectangle. Brishti is the Bangla word for rain – is it not the sweetest word? It has the sound of water falling through air and leaves, a syncopated funk of liquid sheets. Through this curtain of rain and white noise, Kolkata of the monsoons is a gauzy fable-like thing. When the rain stops for short spells, the gauze lifts and you have a window like this.
The trees I’m looking out at are full of parrots. Thick with parrots. So many parrots that I cannot tell them apart from leaves until they flutter or fly out or flash a red beak. In the journal, I draw many green parrots with red beaks and hide them in the leaves. A few fly out. A level below the canopy of parrots lies a lacey fringe of krishnachura trees with bright red flowers the colour of curved parrotbeaks.
My father used to stand at this window, hands held behind his back, gaze focused on the green for a precise length...