I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song / I’m twenty-two now but I won’t be for long / Time hurries on / And the leaves that are green turn to brown. Simon & Garfunkel.
Not finding anything earth-shattering to write about this week (if truth be told, it happens to me every week), I was moping around the house scouring newspapers, keeping the television set on for interminably long hours on the off-chance that some entertaining nugget would come my way and I could start beavering away at my keypad. No such luck. Kejriwal, Modi, Trump, Zelenskyy, Rohit, Virat, Rahul (both of them) have all become yesterday’s news. During my early teens in school, if someone came up with second-hand news, we would tease him mercilessly thus, ‘Stale news stinks and so do you.’ For the full effect, it had to be delivered in a screechy, sing-song voice. We were an insufferable lot, we boarding house boys. In short, posting a column week on Sunday week is not a walk in the park. If I manage to pull something off before desperation and thoughts of self-harm set in, it is only because of sheer bloody-mindedness. That is precisely when I spotted this dried, withered leaf peeping out from the middle of that estimable tome, Cardus on Cricket, on my bookshelf. A bookmark! but where did that dried leaf come from? It has lain pressed between pages 134 and 135 for at least 15 years, give or take, since I last read it. A superb book, a literary cricketing classic but my interest was riveted on the leaf. It was an ‘Eureka!’ moment. Not a non sequitur, in case you were wondering. I had my idea for the blog. And thereby hangs a tale or three.
Let me revert to that dried, brown leaf converted into a bookmark. It was bright green when it gently alighted on my head from a tree, the botanical genus of which I am ignorant, somewhere while traipsing in the verdant, beautiful Black Forest in Germany eons ago. I was about to instinctively brush it away, as one usually does when something unexplained falls on your head, often a bird moving its bowels. My wife, who has a keen eye for all things pertaining to plant life, decided to preserve the leaf as a souvenir from our trip to this part of Deutschland. ‘This is the Black Forest. We may never come back here again. This leaf will be a constant reminder.’ So saying, she secreted it away somewhere in her handbag. This was so much more imaginative than spending a small fortune in a gift shop in Frankfurt’s Duty Free. Now, whenever I look fondly at the brown and frail leaf, I think of those chorus lines from Simon & Garfunkel’s lovely song, And the leaves that are green, turn to brown. The song goes on to elaborate on the leaves, And they wither with the wind and they crumble in your hands. I dared not touch that leaf for fear that it might have completely disintegrated.
Stepping lightly away from leaves, I shall now turn my attention to stones and pebbles. We have a few of them at home mostly serving as paperweights or just something to put into an empty brass or glass bowl. These are not just any common or garden pebbles. A couple of them were picked up on the beaches of the Costa Brava in Spain. Smoothened by years and years of erosion, they are lovely to touch and feel and, for the most part, just to look at. Therapeutic, as well. Once again, I am serendipitously back with Simon & Garfunkel and another line from that same song, I threw a pebble in a brook, and watched the ripples run away, and they never made a sound. And the leaves…You know the rest.
As for the stone, we chanced upon it in the Lake District in England. There is nothing pretentious about it. Just a greyish, misshapen lump, like any other stone you might find anywhere on a city street. The poet Wordsworth, who lived in this area would not have been inspired to knock off a verse on sighting this stone had he tripped over it. But here’s the catch. On this non-descript stone was an imprint of a shell which might have excited any anthropologist. Not being able to find one readily, we showed it to our hotel manager, a Basil Fawlty type of individual. He examined the stone carefully, looked at it this way and that, took a magnifying glass to it and finally declared, ‘I think you’ve found a gem here. 14th century, I shouldn’t wonder, the late Middle Ages. Plenty of volcanic activity about at the time. Take it to Christie’s or Sotheby’s in London and you might become a very wealthy man.’ He was clearly having me on. The mischievous glint in his eye was a dead giveaway. We brought the stone home with us, along with the leaf and the pebbles, but every time I look longingly at that stone as it rests on my bank statement file, I cannot help wondering if I missed out on the main chance. The stone could have acquired international fame and I, a small fortune. Instead, like Bob Dylan’s rolling stone, it remains a complete unknown.
I shall always remember the look on the Calcutta Customs official’s face when he asked me if I had anything to declare. I was sorely tempted to take a leaf out of Oscar Wilde’s canon, ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’ Wiser counsels prevailed. Instead, I produced a bagful of stones, pebbles and one half-dried leaf. He was about to say something nasty, but a carton of Benson & Hedges silenced him instantly. He chalk-marked our suitcases with a flying tick of approval. There were more bottles of Scotch in the suitcase than the permissible, duty-free limit. Remember, these were the 70s. Even if you were a non-smoker, a few cartons of imported ciggies went a long way in keeping the wheels of bureaucracy well-greased.
Amongst other collectibles that I did not have to pay a penny for during our travels abroad in the distant past, mention must be made of my hotel room keys (in duplicate) in Birmingham, which I failed to return as I checked out. You may rightly surmise that this particular hotel was still operating in the pre-digital era. The keys, with their plastic room tag, were guiltily jangling in my blazer pocket as I reached the station to catch the train to London King’s Cross. On arriving, I called up the Birmingham hotel reception and proffered my embarrassed apologies. The lady at the desk was very sweet about it. ‘No problem, Sir. Those keys will serve as a constant reminder of our hotel when next you visit Birmingham.’ By now they must have changed the keys to the digital card format.
Bus and train tickets, theatre tickets, (Phantom, Cats et al), a ticket each for Wimbledon and Lord’s, admission cards for Madame Tussaud’s, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh and other must-see destinations around Europe – all these are lying around somewhere along with our photo albums stored over the decades. When am I ever going to get around to digitizing them? But somehow, it is that leaf from the Black Forest, those stones and pebbles from the Costa Brava and the pair of keys from the Birmingham hotel that bring a broad smile to my lips. It is true, as a cynical friend of mine tartly pointed out, I could have picked up an identical leaf from a tree outside my home or stones and pebbles if I took a leisurely stroll down the Marina Beach in Madras and passed them off as exotic souvenirs from far-off lands. No one will know the difference. Then again, I will. And that makes all the difference.
Suresh's Corner 