The Little Grey Cell Scrap Book

I often think that if we could figure out how the mind - stores, connects and retrieves information, we would be able to find acceptable explanations, if not solutions, to most of the world’s humdinger mysteries.

Isn’t it strange? Often months and years pass without us thinking about something/someone, and then suddenly we read/see/hear something and the mind is flooded with memories as if it all happened yesterday.

On Saturday morning, I was just too bloody flaked out to go to Bonn. I just lay down and watched TV, floating in and out of sleep. Mtv played ‘Ironic’ - the unplugged version.

I had asked her, sitting by the Tennis Court, ‘So what have you been listening too lately…?’ pat had come the answer ‘Alanis Morisette’. That thread over, we doodled over other topics of polite conversation . A few months later at Heathrow, I had an hour or so to kill, so walked across to the apparel store ‘Rohan’. It gives me quite a kick, to buy clothes from a store which shares my name. Well that’s me and my vain self! Now the world knows!

The store was closed, so for the lack of anything better I browsed Music at Virgin. I came across the ‘Alanis Mtv Unplugged’ CD, with the lady strumming her guitar against a wall with a red motif. I thought of her, and I bought the CD. By the time I got back to Calcutta she had left, and as it later transpired, the departure was forever. I could never giver the CD to her, and unwittingly it became part of my collection.

Years later, in a hotel room with tired walls and pretenses of art, which look over me as I sleep. Of all the Videos in the world, Mtv plays Ironic. And it all comes back as if it were yesterday.

‘Rohan … when you meet the right person, everything will fall in place, and nothing else will matter’

That’s what she left me with. Simple? Simple like we were. True? Yes true like we were. In retrospect, the broken promises were our rites of passage.

She somewhere in northeast Canada ensconced in a bank job and me here in a Dusseldorf Hotel, writing my blog.

The greatest summer I ever had and the clear night sky, under which I had kissed a woman for the first time. All that remains of eating Vanilla ice cream on a cold winter evening, of buying our first bottle of beer, of thinking she was the most beautiful girl in the world, is this - Alanis Morisette strumming a guitar and singing her songs, and me asking the white crazy cement ceiling, ‘Isn’t it Ironic. Don’t you think?’

Labels: Fiction