It was an early autumn morning in 2004. An old lady was walking through the cobble-stoned street, near her home in Mação. As was usual for the place and time, the road was silent and deserted. It was then that she came face to face with the ghost.
The ghost was very dark and wore a white tunic and was walking towards her. Then it spoke. She ran inside her house slamming the door behind. The petrified lady later told the mayor of the town that the ghost tried to follow her inside and in fact knocked at her door.
29 September 2009
13 September 2009
Mação...
Ten o’clock in the morning. The sun shines a bright yellow, The air is a strange mixture of warmth and chill. The cobblestone streets cut neatly through the white and yellow houses. The church bell rings out the time. Then there is only the sound of my footsteps…
This is Mação, a little town in the heart of Portugal; nested among the hillocks and in the valley of Tejo. From the nearest hill, Macao is a cluster of bright red rooftops, set in the green and yellow landscape. Autumn is slowly giving way to winter. When you are alone in the street you think you are walking inside a painting.
This is Mação, a little town in the heart of Portugal; nested among the hillocks and in the valley of Tejo. From the nearest hill, Macao is a cluster of bright red rooftops, set in the green and yellow landscape. Autumn is slowly giving way to winter. When you are alone in the street you think you are walking inside a painting.
31 August 2008
The Alexandrian Diary 7: Cairo II
“He was born around 1303 BC and at age fourteen, Ramesses was appointed Prince Regent by his father Seti I. He is believed to have taken the throne in his early 20s and to have ruled Egypt for 66 years, from 1279 BC to 1213 BC. On his death, he was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, his body was later moved to a royal cache . For the last decades of his life, Ramesses II was essentially crippled with arthritis and walked with a hunched back. His successors and later Egyptians called him the "Great Ancestor."”
The old man looked immersed in his own world, oblivious to the numerous faces that stared at him. He was visibly dead, but the skin tight over his sunken cheeks and the yellowing hair bore traces of life. I would have walked past him unimpressed. Then, there was a moment, when the years struck me. And I looked at the face through the three thousand years.
The Royal mummy room of the Egyptian museum of Cairo houses eleven pharaohs and queens from 1650 to 940 BCE. They lie there stripped off their grand lives, with their battle wounds and dental ailments laid bare for public scrutiny. One cannot but feel an unexplainable sadness. It could be for the folly of our times, for the casual manner in which we took them out of their eternal abodes; tombs that had sweated out (often out of their lives) thousands of labourers and architects and goldsmiths and sculptors.
The Train to Cairo…
Rajesh is my brother Mathew’s schoolmate. He is a chemical engineer and is in Alexandria on a project since the last three months. Strangely we seem to be the only malayalees in the city. We were to go the museum together. He had already seen it and thought I should not miss it.
The Masr train station has trains leaving to Cairo every hour. We were to catch the 8 o’ clock train. I was all ready when I was informed that from that day the clocks had turned an hour behind. It took me the hour I gained to comprehend why 8 o’clock was now 7 o’clock.
After his enquires after Amitabh Bachchan the cab driver dropped me off at the station. Masr and the other stations on the way to Cairo are strikingly similar to those in India. So much so, that I almost expected the ‘Railway Mazdoor Union slogans to appear on the walls at any moment. Once, these rails undoubtedly were conduits for the cotton factories of Alexandria once housed in the gray buildings with their dusty signboards that I see around.
The railway tracks and stations are one of the very few things that look similar in different parts of India. They look superimposed upon a jigsaw puzzle that was made all wrong. Now, if one of the trains from an Egyptian station take me all the way to Gwalior I would not be very surprised.
Unlike Delhi, the difference between the outskirts and the city of Cairo is not glaring. While there are indications of displacement, it does not look as if the city is forcibly pushing people to its fringes. The canals and branches of Nile have filled the distance from Alexandria to Cairo with patches of green. One either side of the tract fields of grain and vegetables can be seen.
La Museè
From Midan Ramses railway station, the Cairo Metro takes you directly to Midan Tahrir, the house of the Cairo museum since 1902.
From the outside, the red two floor building does not give a fair estimate of its collection. It has in its possession over 1, 00,000 items ranging from the Old Kingdom to the times of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, the number is too large, that artifacts that are thousands of years old pile up without labels in obscure corners.
I cannot do justice if I try to describe all that I saw. The five hours I spend there was just enough to appreciate the sheer number of artifacts. An entire section is for mummified animals. They range from beetles to cows. One ‘mummy’ crocodile had a baby croc in her mouth! The beetles are not the flesh eating monsters of the ‘Mummy returns’. All they do is move around pushing a huge dung ball which the Egyptians thought was the solar disc… They obviously thought there was a huge beetle somewhere that was rolling the sun about for fun!!
The most celebrated finds are the collections from the tomb of Tutenkhamun. It will take quite a few visits to believe that the multiple gold sarcophagi, the gilded chambers, the ornate bed, well, a quarter of the space of the entire museum were all meant for the posterity of the boy- pharaoh. The time of Tutenkhamun, it is believed, was one of turbulence and his death was followed by a major regime change. Some are of the opinion that all that symbolized the authority of the earlier regime were buried with the young pharaoh. It is possible that he was assisted towards a speedy afterlife.
Museums have a closing time. It is all a jumble in my mind now- Nefretiti in a Venus attitude and Pharaohs with Greek curls falling on their foreheads…
But then, I have with me all those centuries
The old man looked immersed in his own world, oblivious to the numerous faces that stared at him. He was visibly dead, but the skin tight over his sunken cheeks and the yellowing hair bore traces of life. I would have walked past him unimpressed. Then, there was a moment, when the years struck me. And I looked at the face through the three thousand years.
The Royal mummy room of the Egyptian museum of Cairo houses eleven pharaohs and queens from 1650 to 940 BCE. They lie there stripped off their grand lives, with their battle wounds and dental ailments laid bare for public scrutiny. One cannot but feel an unexplainable sadness. It could be for the folly of our times, for the casual manner in which we took them out of their eternal abodes; tombs that had sweated out (often out of their lives) thousands of labourers and architects and goldsmiths and sculptors.
The Train to Cairo…
Rajesh is my brother Mathew’s schoolmate. He is a chemical engineer and is in Alexandria on a project since the last three months. Strangely we seem to be the only malayalees in the city. We were to go the museum together. He had already seen it and thought I should not miss it.
The Masr train station has trains leaving to Cairo every hour. We were to catch the 8 o’ clock train. I was all ready when I was informed that from that day the clocks had turned an hour behind. It took me the hour I gained to comprehend why 8 o’clock was now 7 o’clock.
After his enquires after Amitabh Bachchan the cab driver dropped me off at the station. Masr and the other stations on the way to Cairo are strikingly similar to those in India. So much so, that I almost expected the ‘Railway Mazdoor Union slogans to appear on the walls at any moment. Once, these rails undoubtedly were conduits for the cotton factories of Alexandria once housed in the gray buildings with their dusty signboards that I see around.
The railway tracks and stations are one of the very few things that look similar in different parts of India. They look superimposed upon a jigsaw puzzle that was made all wrong. Now, if one of the trains from an Egyptian station take me all the way to Gwalior I would not be very surprised.
Unlike Delhi, the difference between the outskirts and the city of Cairo is not glaring. While there are indications of displacement, it does not look as if the city is forcibly pushing people to its fringes. The canals and branches of Nile have filled the distance from Alexandria to Cairo with patches of green. One either side of the tract fields of grain and vegetables can be seen.
La Museè
From Midan Ramses railway station, the Cairo Metro takes you directly to Midan Tahrir, the house of the Cairo museum since 1902.
From the outside, the red two floor building does not give a fair estimate of its collection. It has in its possession over 1, 00,000 items ranging from the Old Kingdom to the times of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, the number is too large, that artifacts that are thousands of years old pile up without labels in obscure corners.
I cannot do justice if I try to describe all that I saw. The five hours I spend there was just enough to appreciate the sheer number of artifacts. An entire section is for mummified animals. They range from beetles to cows. One ‘mummy’ crocodile had a baby croc in her mouth! The beetles are not the flesh eating monsters of the ‘Mummy returns’. All they do is move around pushing a huge dung ball which the Egyptians thought was the solar disc… They obviously thought there was a huge beetle somewhere that was rolling the sun about for fun!!
The most celebrated finds are the collections from the tomb of Tutenkhamun. It will take quite a few visits to believe that the multiple gold sarcophagi, the gilded chambers, the ornate bed, well, a quarter of the space of the entire museum were all meant for the posterity of the boy- pharaoh. The time of Tutenkhamun, it is believed, was one of turbulence and his death was followed by a major regime change. Some are of the opinion that all that symbolized the authority of the earlier regime were buried with the young pharaoh. It is possible that he was assisted towards a speedy afterlife.
Museums have a closing time. It is all a jumble in my mind now- Nefretiti in a Venus attitude and Pharaohs with Greek curls falling on their foreheads…
But then, I have with me all those centuries
26 August 2008
The Alexandrian Diary 6: Une Pettite Detour
The twenty third was a particularly hot and humid day. It was our last day in the field. The water of the lake whose shore we study is polluted and brackish. This makes the air particularly heavy. By the end of the day I had a splitting headache and nausea. My friend Lucy and Athena did not look any better
Samir’s car had apart from us our Egyptian friends, Emad, Ahmed and Ehab. (Samir makes amazing tea on the gas cylinder in his boot. Those who get to go with him to the field are the chosen ones). A kilometre off to the West from our regular route we stopped in front of a small yellow painted mosque. We learned that they wanted to buy some figs. The megaphone announced the evening prayer just then. And we were left to a fifteen minutes wait.
The mosque was the face of a small fig grove. It stood out in its greenery from the occasional shrubbery and the near total absence of trees of the region. But the sight did not help us much because the heat in the parked car was too oppressive for us.
As our companions left either to pray or to pluck the figs, the gardener invited us to sit in the shade. He had spread a carpet there for us. (alright… it was a plastic carpet). The shade was cool and we discovered a breeze that we missed inside the car. Lucy immediately crashed on the carpet refusing to budge. And then the man returns with his hands full of the choicest figs…
As the queens of Arabia reclined, chatted and ate thus for a while the men returned. They had a tough time persuading us to come back.
Samir’s car had apart from us our Egyptian friends, Emad, Ahmed and Ehab. (Samir makes amazing tea on the gas cylinder in his boot. Those who get to go with him to the field are the chosen ones). A kilometre off to the West from our regular route we stopped in front of a small yellow painted mosque. We learned that they wanted to buy some figs. The megaphone announced the evening prayer just then. And we were left to a fifteen minutes wait.
The mosque was the face of a small fig grove. It stood out in its greenery from the occasional shrubbery and the near total absence of trees of the region. But the sight did not help us much because the heat in the parked car was too oppressive for us.
As our companions left either to pray or to pluck the figs, the gardener invited us to sit in the shade. He had spread a carpet there for us. (alright… it was a plastic carpet). The shade was cool and we discovered a breeze that we missed inside the car. Lucy immediately crashed on the carpet refusing to budge. And then the man returns with his hands full of the choicest figs…
As the queens of Arabia reclined, chatted and ate thus for a while the men returned. They had a tough time persuading us to come back.
18 August 2008
The Alexandrian Diary 5: Ahmed al Hind
Over twenty years ago there was in Alexandria a man called Ahmed. Ahmed used to roam around the city on his motorbike. Attached to his bike was a music system with huge speakers and Hindi film music streamed out from them constantly. In the movie halls showing Hindi movies, Ahmed would sing along and dance with the songs; his steps in synchrony with those on the screen. People called him Ahmed al- Hind.
Ehab spoke with nostalgia of Ahmed and the days when there were seven movie halls devoted to Bollywood movies. (Now there are only two). Ehab works with the Supreme Council of Antiquities and is a part of our project. Father of three, he is a jovial man in his late thirties, with a ready smile. Ehab is a great fan of Amitabh Bachan and Hindi film music. So are many of his generation that I have come across.
From my day one in Alexandria I have met people, who have asked me whether I am from al- Hind. My Malayali nationalism as Neha has often pointed out is far too strong to be pleased for being included in the ‘Indian’/ Hindi rubric. But their next sentence invariably is “Amitabh Bachchan?” Well I can’t argue there. It is not Shatrukhnan Sinha after all. My ready recognition of Amitabh Bachchan brings about an instant change. It is the warmth of meeting some one from a long time ago.
I have also met a few younger people who are the fans of current bollywood. Then, that is more alien to me. At least, there is no shared nostalgia. Ri-ahm the charming ticket collector at the National Museum of Alexandria said she loved Indians and she loved Kareena Kapur and Shahrukh Khan. Shahrukh Khan is the hot favourite. (why oh why?!!!) In Cairo I went to a small souvenir shop in the medieval market of Khan el- Khalili. Sherif the salesman shook hands with me and said. “I like you; I am Shahrukh Khan”. I have found my oasis in the desert, haven’t I??
Ehab spoke with nostalgia of Ahmed and the days when there were seven movie halls devoted to Bollywood movies. (Now there are only two). Ehab works with the Supreme Council of Antiquities and is a part of our project. Father of three, he is a jovial man in his late thirties, with a ready smile. Ehab is a great fan of Amitabh Bachan and Hindi film music. So are many of his generation that I have come across.
From my day one in Alexandria I have met people, who have asked me whether I am from al- Hind. My Malayali nationalism as Neha has often pointed out is far too strong to be pleased for being included in the ‘Indian’/ Hindi rubric. But their next sentence invariably is “Amitabh Bachchan?” Well I can’t argue there. It is not Shatrukhnan Sinha after all. My ready recognition of Amitabh Bachchan brings about an instant change. It is the warmth of meeting some one from a long time ago.
I have also met a few younger people who are the fans of current bollywood. Then, that is more alien to me. At least, there is no shared nostalgia. Ri-ahm the charming ticket collector at the National Museum of Alexandria said she loved Indians and she loved Kareena Kapur and Shahrukh Khan. Shahrukh Khan is the hot favourite. (why oh why?!!!) In Cairo I went to a small souvenir shop in the medieval market of Khan el- Khalili. Sherif the salesman shook hands with me and said. “I like you; I am Shahrukh Khan”. I have found my oasis in the desert, haven’t I??
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