A Sultry Melancholy

I was going through my diary entries from last year and found the following lines written on one of the pages.

 
‘Summer days I remember
The Sultry melanch’

 
I don’t quite recall now why I have left that word incomplete and where do these lines belong. I have never left anything unfinished and this is really a mystery to me. The first two entries on the diary page are lines from Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. It’s quite strange to be honest. I have googled a very many combinations of these incomplete lines but nothing has turned up so far. I am not sure if this is a poem or a verse. Aah! I wish I could just go back to last year when i was writing it and finish the lines. I get quite restless if I can’t decipher a puzzle. And this is nothing short of a mystery.

I suppose its time hasn’t come yet. Someday I will know what words come next to melancholy. Right now I feel what Virginia Woolf once felt.

I wish it were possible. Things come to such a standstill when we don’t know what it is that we are looking for. There is a constant search for something that we haven’t seen and yet we long for it. Longings and belongings also bring a great grief for those who cling to them. One of my favourite poems by Dylan Thomas is Love in the Asylum and he writes in there,

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

I forever feel enamoured by that stranger. Is it me or my imagination that each poet tries to tell me what I don’t wish to accept about myself? I am learning to embrace both the stranger and the girl who’s mad as hell but knows she can get out of this misery to fall into another reverie, even if it is not forever.

Istanbul- Memories of a city by Orhan Pamuk

This is an interesting read! When I studied Hagia Sophia in school, its beauty imprinted my heart! Turkey has always been a mystical land of the Great Eastern Culture and symbolized to me Constantinople’s conquests and Constantine’s architectural vision that made Istanbul one of the best cities during the Roman/Ottoman Empire.

The cover art is sheer beauty! The warm, fuzzy yellow catches the eye first and immediately touches the heart. This is my first Orhan Pamuk book and I am in total awe of this wonderful writer. His melancholic verses on his city and childhood, dreams and magic, walks through the city made me peep into my childhood memories and all those fascinating walks through the by-lanes of Mumbai. Every word of his resonated with my memories of Mumbai- the city I love so much. Perhaps, sometimes its difficult to understand how people fall in love with cultures or cities or Urban Spaces(such an architectural term I use here!), however, people with passion for art and history and especially, ones who dream endlessly easily move through stone-walls and crumbling facades to glass cubes of uncomfortable realities!

When I think of Turkey, Huge Minarets, intricate jaali designs adorning those columns, Every moment I read through the writer’s Bosphorus walks, those historical references drove me into a parallel world of my own, making me travel that era! When he writes about the river’s silent witness to centuries of change, it takes me back to Mumbai’s history. How mesmerizing it is that another city’s history and culture ignited awe and pride in my heart!

Somewhere he writes- If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from the Bosphorus.
When I read his poetic verses on the Bosphorus, I couldn’t help but imagine the Ganges or Yamuna and how those ancient cities that existed by these rivers now just cease to invoke those memories! In a way, these cities have failed the rivers and the great civilizations they carried within themselves!

Think of people walking by everyday, talking, celebrating life by the rivers where now the only remnants are the ruins, those crumbling walls, forgotten history, moss and overgrown grass! Rome still has the colosseum and even Istanbul has the Hagia Sophia, but what does my city preserve? Where is that city from my dreams? The more I read, the harder it is to search!

***Came across this lovely song originally recorded in 1953 by The Four Lads.