Of course, I am riffing:
Thelma & Louise is a 1991 American crime drama film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Callie Khouri. It became a critical and commercial success, receiving six nominations at the 64th Academy Awards, with Khouri winning Best Original Screenplay. It has box office receipts of over $45 million on a budget of about $16 million.
For my trip to Bengaluru, I thought (IYKYN, see Live and Let Die) that I would greatly benefit from having as a travel companion:
Louise Elisabeth Glück (April 22, 1943 – October 13, 2023) was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
I had first chanced upon her poems through Celestial Music, from Ararat, which also contains:
Labor Day. New World. Terminal Resemblance. Lament.
I enjoyed the many Vespers in The Wild Iris. I interpreted Roman Study from Vita Nova (directly inspired by Dante Aligheri‘s Vita Nuova) as an encouragement to keep writing about my experiences in the material world through the trajectory of my own watchful nature. I have read Parable from Faithful and Virtuous Night as often as Celestial Music.
So, here we go, attempting to mimic her:
Arrival
I click my seatbelt.
7A.
In the unclaimed 7B—Louise sits.
I don’t say I’m glad.
She was trained
to understand what is not spoken.
The descent is silent.
No turbulence.
No talk.
Bengaluru accepts us
like a city long used to returnees.
The Mercedes waits.
The flowers in the Four Seasons lobby
are precise.
Not wild.
Selected.
Instructed to bloom.
We do not stop.
No one checks our names.
No one questions.
We arrive
at a room that opens without a key.
Sweets are waiting.
As if someone knew
what we would not ask for.
Louise rests.
I go visit my mother.
Toblerone in hand.
She is smiling.
We hold hands,
not tightly.
A few memories pass between us.
Then we sing.
Not our song,
but hers—
as हेमा मालिनी
flickers in and out of laughter
on YouTube.
सीता और गीता 1972 में बनी हिन्दी भाषा की हास्य नाट्य फिल्म है। इसमें हेमा मालिनी दोहरी भूमिका में है। सलीम-जावेद (सलीम ख़ान और जावेद अख्तर) द्वारा लिखित कहानी और पटकथा के साथ, यह रमेश सिप्पी द्वारा निर्देशित है। इसमें आर॰ डी॰ बर्मन द्वारा संगीत दिया गया है।
Back to the Four Seasons. You know I could not resist this!
Vesper
In the evening,
I ask for a Vesper.
The bartender nods.
He doesn’t smile.
He has done this before.
The light is low—
not absent,
but leaning toward it.
A twist of orange.
Not decoration—
a kind of signal.
The lobby flowers
do not move.
Blue, indigo—
petals that do not speak,
but listen.
I raise the glass
not in celebration.
Not in mourning.
Only to mark the hour
that divides
the seen
from the unseen.
One sip.
No prayer.
What next? Off to see Nilanjan P. Chodhury’s:
An imagined courtroom drama that reveals the tragedies and the triumphs, the wit and the wisdom and the life and works of this scientific giant from the subcontinent, who lies buried next door, isolated and unacknowledged in the land of his birth.
