‘For LPs In Kabaadi Shops’

It was around the late ’80s and my father was posted in Meerut. Seventeen was a kind of turning point. My first book, Main Aur Woh (I and the Other), was published by a local publisher when I was 17. It was a book of conversations with the self, inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus spake Zarathustra that I had read sometime back. It left a deep impact. Meerut was a small town with limited exposure to the arts. I was a science student and thirsted for stimulating conversation. There was none. So I guess I turned inwards, and had conversations with myself—the material for my first book. It was in a Q&A format. Example: I sit on a rock looking at the Temple. It asks, “I see you looking at me, so you do want to visit me?” I reply, “Or is it you who’s looking at me wanting, drawing me to come and visit you?”.... Aspects like “Has God created man or Man created God?” or, “It’s said when you look at something beautiful you don’t blink. So, after death when a person does not blink, could it mean that he has seen eternal beauty?” These and other questions that interrogated existence itself. I guess at that age I learnt to introspect. Another running theme then was music. Film music was widely available, but classical music, my main passion, was not easily available. I remember visiting kabaadi shops to hunt for old records and tapes of classical music and dismantling tapes to clean the fungus from the spools. Another fond memory is of writing plays that my sisters and I would enact and record. Those tapes are lost, but the memories are still fresh.