When we were young...

When I was young I used to live a stone's throw away from Charlotte Street. I knew I was young because I could still look myself in the mirror...

Derek Raymond and Mumbai...

Strange coincidence. Started Raymond's book, which is a breath of fresh air after Updike. No elaborate descriptions and objects are just objects. Realism or anti-literature? No idea, but it's a great antidote to the grandiose claims of 'the novel'. What carries it is not the precision of language nor any deep insights but, rather, the background mood it evokes and a particular moment in time. Perhaps in another twenty years it will come across as completely dated. What is the lifespan of an ordinary book?

What caught my eye was a reference to Charlotte Street since I lived on Fitzroy Street, one street down from there, for two years. By bizarre coincidence anton then posts something about Charlotte Street. And to my utter amazement, two nights ago, I started watching the tail end of an Indian film in which the main story line is, as far as I could make out...

A painter moves into a flat in Mumbai. The last tenant has left some stuff (jewelry. clothes, etc). In any major city there will always be, at any point in time, thousands of people moving in and thousands out. It's similar to an airport where as you work your way to an exit you can see across the glass barrier other travelers moving in the other direction, just beginning their journey. In the city and in airports we rub shoulders with people moving in all sorts of directions. There is death and bereavement and birth and joy, love and memory and desire and it's all mixed up. It's all here.

On the street, an old and disheveled man with unkempt hair, totters along, quiet and lonely, the few words he has muttered to himself, heavily bracketed. He walks past-like a ghostly survivor, a man from another era whose slang no-one would understand-two young mothers in jeans and cardigans. The infants in the strollers, with less than one hundred words between them. The bright-eyed world barely notices the dead who live with their eyes open.

Old buildings and tradition, hemmed in by the ever-advancing shiny glossy world of technology, entertainment...culture industries. The shape-shifter's world, eternal flux that Heraclitus would have died for. What remains? The ever-greens, the faces (whether black or white, shaped by the same anxieties and hopes) that are universal, timeless. In London you see a recurrence of types. The roles remain the same; only the individual players change.

Sometimes there's a transition and objects from one domain slip into another. And that move across the border means anything can happen.

Imagine coming across someone's blog for the very first time. The beginning: the life before, shrouded in darkness. What do you make of it? Is this person still alive, even? What books did the person read, who did they love, was there any underlying theme to their questions and writing? You want to piece it together. It's a detective story like no other. You dare not try any such reconstruction of your own life. Days and years have fallen irrevocably into the past, out of sight. You want it to slide, disappear at an angle.

So, back to the painter. He comes across some tapes which the previous tenant, a young woman from a village, sends back to her brother and sister to let them know what she's experiencing in the big city. Nothing lasts in Mumbai, the squalor and the bright lights jostling for space. The painter (Amer Khan) is hooked to the tapes, the daily recording of the everyday.

She's unhappy; that much he knows. She sighs, looking into the camcorder: "I used to be so happy before I was married..." He lights a cigarette. It's as if he knows her personally. But he doesn't. Who knows anyone any more? But he listens on. Is there some great truth hidden here?

Well, all this is eerily very similar to the Raymond story. The detective finds some tapes of a man, now dead, who narrates some key moments of his life, boiling them down to get at the pure essence. Is there time for anything else? He's divorced (as is the painter), and the detective, too, lives alone. Failure. The ones who couldn't hack it, but can't go back.

You revisit the places you once knew. Time has changed the tempo of your walk. The sandwich shop is no longer there but the French restaurant where you first had snails is. A lot of it looks the same. A bit run down, to tell the truth. The old coffee shop at the far end (towards Oxford Street)  is no longer there. By contrast, at the opposite end old Fitzroy Square, elegant and refined, seems timeless.

You're not here any more. To accept one's fate is a virtue-or so I'm told. Room 128. I think someone died in that room a year after me.