Finding My Feet

The-need-to-get-away hammered against my brain like an untimely downpour even before I was fully awake. Real world was lurking outside my closed eyes and I did not want to face it. Not on that particular Sunday morning. I needed to escape, and not into Netflix or Prime Video. I had to go out. Out of my orbit.  Alone.

“Do it ‘Ma.” My firstborn, aiding and abetting me over our WhatsApp chat. His faith in my capabilities is touching. I looked at my feet on the bathroom floor. Scarred, discoloured, battle worn. They had lived through more than their fair share of misery and pain. Yet they’d see me through. I hoped.  

Google helped with the where and the how-to. Fort Kochi/Mattancherry, of course. Most sensible, time wise and money wise. And I never tire of the place.

The boat ride from Jetty was two and half songs long: the first a morose half of some modern Malayalam poem, followed abruptly by tinny versions of ‘choonariyaan ud ud gayi‘ and ‘yaad piya ki aane lagi‘ in rapid succession. Possibly for the benefit of the North Indian crowd that dominated the boat. Thankfully, we reached before the next song could begin.

From Fort Kochi jetty, I took an auto rickshaw to Paradesi Synagogue. I like going there – for the history, the blue handmade tiles below, the lovely glass-and-silver chandeliers above, and the air of lostness and stuck-in-time-ness captured in crisp Hebrew letters. 

There’s an affinity I feel for the ancient. They are repositories for stories. I even like myself better now that I did thirty years ago!

A photo wall with its David’s star to the right hand side of the entrance seemed like a new addition. I didn’t click a picture there. I just stood there wondering how a people that came peaceably to ask for refuge in a distant nation could inflict such unspeakable horrors on another.

I sat down on one of the benches inside the synagogue, and took in the tiles, the chandeliers and the sharp lines of the Hebrew words. Then walked around rereading the information on the walls. None of the information was new, but I was certain to have missed some of it earlier. The thing is, I invariably miss out details while reading or watching stuff – which is why I tend to reread books and revisit places. There’s always something new to discover. Maybe that’s the good part of ADHD: the perpetual newness.

An art cafe close to the synagogue had art exhibition in an art and antique shop, so I decided to go in. Art made for poor breakfast, I suppose, so the gallery was closed, until a kindly staff member opened it for me. The paintings themselves were mild to moderate on the scale of interesting. The space, a remnant of colonial architecture, definitely scored higher. 

The ground floor had an art shop on one side, manned by a man in an artist-looking attire. He looked up from his newspaper,  decided that I was not worth his time, and went back to his reading. His work (if it was his, that is) was certainly worth mine, so I looked around. 

Resisting the temptation of the million costume jewellery shops on either side of the street, I found my way to Ginger House, the restaurant that I had earlier on decided to grace with my presence. 

A long, dimly lit hallway waited beyond the entrance, flanked by ancient-looking statues on both sides. To the left was an antique shop. A moment ago, I had witnessed the saleslady turning away a young, eager looking couple saying that this was not just a shop, but a part of the big restaurant beyond, in case they didn’t know. Her tone implied that the restaurant might be out of their budget. Snobbery thrives well in Kochi’s humid weather.

So, just for the kick of it, I put on my best non-Malayali, pan-Indian look and accent (trust me, I’m a pro at it when push comes to shove), smiled at the saleslady, and asked her if I could look around and take pictures. She smiled a little unsure smile, gave me a once-over, and reluctantly told me to go ahead, though taking photos was not allowed, technically. I thanked her again, clicked some pics, and headed over to the restaurant. Past painted gods under spotlights, artfully placed antique pillars, and creepers spilling over with flowers.

A large, spacious, curving verandah lay at the end of the walkway, with sea on one side and an idyllic garden on the other. A stone Nandi sat peaceably near the remains of a vintage car, and a horse head was engaged in mute, frozen conversation with a plaster of Paris peacock. Other stone and wood creatures grazed amidst casually trained creepers and stone/metal benches. A stellar space. Calm, calming, and incredibly beautiful. Whoever did up Ginger House has my undying admiration.

I sat down at a wooden table, directly under a ceiling fan. Out of respect for the restaurant’s name, I ordered a glass of ginger lime, which turned out to be limey and gingery to a fault. The ‘red pasta’ ordered for main course was more red than pasta: a handful of penne, fusili and traces of overcooked vegetables drowning in a violent, gleaming, orange-red sauce that screamed of vinegar.

I had read reviews online about the food being ‘overpriced yet mediocre’. A rather kind assessment, considering. But then I didn’t go there for the food.

I took my time with lunch, washed down traces of vinegar on the tongue with stronger traces of lime juice in the pretext of black tea, paid the king’s ransom that the smiling waiter demanded, and left – vowing to return. 

Noushad, the auto driver that responded to my raised hand, hid his disappointment behind a wide, friendly smile when I informed him that I did not intend to do further sightseeing that day. He did manage to cajole me into visiting the All Spices Market on the way back, though. 

The oversized, dilapidated doorway of the market opened out to a cavernous courtyard. There was no visible human activity, though the air was dense with myriad fragrances of familiar spices. I hesitated at the entrance, wondering about my chances of featuring in the next day’s local news. Middle Aged Woman Found—

There was an algae filled well near the entrance, with large cement vats next to it, – used to wash ginger ahead of drying, I was told. A figure in a dark blue sari came out of what looked like a granary on one side and squinted at us. Reassured, I followed Noushad into the courtyard, towards where a strong, gravelly aroma of pepper was wafting from. Subhadra, the woman in blue, was drying out crushed pepper, tons of which were waiting in sacks in the dimly lit granary.

Beyond the granary were some overgrown ruins, familiar through some Malayalam movies that I couldn’t recall the names of. Noushad took some touristy photographs at my request, after which we went to the shop upstairs to buy spices. When I insisted that I couldn’t ‘tourist’ anymore, he once again hid his disappointment behind his unfaltering smile and dropped me off at the boat jetty. 

It was exhaustingly hot by then, yet the elation I felt was indescribable. The world suddenly seemed a nicer place, and I found myself smiling at complete strangers.

They say that you truly appreciate the value of something only when you are deprived of it. It had taken me more than three years of severely compromised mobility and complete disintegration of confidence, but I understood all too well how precious and beautiful a functional body was. And on that Sunday afternoon, as I stood waiting in queue for the boat, what I felt was profound gratitude.

Just a Number? Nah!

A year or so ago, during WhatsApp call with the extended family, a much younger cousin who was meeting me after ages remarked on how ‘different’ I looked now, from the last time she had seen me. Her tone was one of disbelief, with just a hint of I-don’t-know-what, but my hackles rose in defence.

Oh you think so? I can’t imagine why… After all, it’s just been twenty eight years since we last met, right? I said with withering sarcasm-

No I didn’t.

I wanted to, but couldn’t. Primarily because I suck at smart repartees, having neither the presence of mind nor the confidence to pull one off in time. As it was, a good five minutes had gone by before I could think up this one – by which time the collective conversation had thrice moved topics.  

So I just smiled benignly while fuming a little inside.

Later, I scrutinised myself in the mirror and decided that things were not as bad as her tone implied. Just a sagging neck, a couple of extra chins, some ridges on the forehead,  a frizzy grey wing on my right temple, and maybe a ton or two of extra flesh. 

So?

The mirror is kind, especially if the light is soft and you scrunch your eyes a bit. The camera, though, is heartless!

Whoever first said ‘age is just a number’ must have died young. Else they would’ve choked while eating their words.  

One thing I find really annoying is how people rush to reassure me whenever I mention something age-related. Oh, you’re not that old! No, ma’am. I’m not whining. I’m just stating the truth: my body doesn’t heal as quickly as it used to. It’s science, not self pity. I don’t think any less of myself because my hair has turned grey. If anything, it’s the opposite.

Yet, no matter how prepared you think you are to ‘age gracefully’, you’re taken aback when it actually happens. Maybe because you didn’t notice time creeping up on you quietly, taking over one cell at a time, while you were still eight-ball juggling with life. And then, one fine morning, you come face to face with a greying, slightly eccentric middle aged woman with a rather loud laugh. You.

Didn’t see that coming, did you?

The real tragedy of ageing, however, is not the loosening skin, the thinning hair or the aching knees. It’s the tectonic shift from naivety to awareness, from hope to acceptance.  You were all set to change the world, but now you know better. Therein lies the tragedy.

Ignorance waited with hope. Knowing broke your fragile world into fragments. You’re still standing at the edge of the chaos, wondering what to do with its remains.  

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Back in my childhood, there was a Tuesday ‘chanda’ (market) in the ground near the Ganapathi temple in my hometown of Nalleppilly. We used to buy almost all of the week’s supplies from there – everything from cheap stainless steel vessels to coloured glass bangles, from dry fish to firewood to vegetables, fruits and flowers. The vendors usually came from across the Tamizh Nadu border – mostly loud, outspoken women with weathered faces and oily hair.

The farm produce invariably came from Pollachi, and were sold in small heaps called kooru made on rags spread on the ground. The women would measure them out with their hands, so each kooru would vary slightly in size from the others. It’s up to you to pick the larger one and haggle for prices. If they liked you, though, they might throw in an extra vegetable or fruit.

Ulli oru kooru, oru kooru pachamulaku. Randu kooru vendakka… Oru kashnam injeem randu koth karueppelem idan marakkanda!

Maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’ll make tiny piles of my debris, and spread them out on an old bed sheet. You can go through them, pick the heaps you like, and haggle for price. And if I really like you, I might throw in a piece or two of pointless advice – who knows?

Oru kooru ‘Complex Trauma’, randu kooru ‘My Parenting Errors’, oru pidi ‘Money Management Mistakes’… oru kashnam ‘Love or Something Like It’… Ngaa…pinne, randu kothu ‘Vaiki Vanna Self Awareness’ vekkaan marakkanda… 

Though there’s always a chance that once you reach home, you may still find a worm or two. Just throw that one out, ok? The rest should be enough.

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To be continued…

Ignite: from within the confines

Once upon a 2020, when the virus was still new and intimidating, when the governments of the world thought the best way to contain the disaster was to confine human beings within their homes, Deepa Gopal came up with the idea of an online exhibition titled ‘Ignite: from within the confines’. She invited a few artists and paired each with a (in my case, aspiring) poet. The mandate was to work together and come up with art and poetry that spoke about the world, and what it was to think, feel, imagine and create in those torrid times.

To say it was a time of chaos and confusion is an understatement. Shaken and homebound as we were, most of us sat glued to news channels that were merciless in what they showed. News of people dying of disease and of dread, of migrant workers fleeing cities only to get run down by trains – or get hosed down with disinfectants at borders – competed with news of institutional apathy towards rape, lynching and murder. It was impossible to not get affected.

At a personal level, I was on the brink of an implosion. Menopause was ravaging my mind and body, triggering the autoimmune disorder which was already waiting in the wings. Though, at that point, I was clueless about the extent to which it was going to change the way I functioned. Or even the way I thought, for that matter. What I remember most from that time is the horror and helplessness I felt as I watched the skin on my fingertips break as if by its own volition, as it it were an entity separate from me, the rest of my body. For someone who found sanity in working with her hands, whether cooking, gardening, sewing, mosaicing or working with clay, being unable to even comb her own hair was hell.

We live in a lovely little gated community designed for easy social interactions, and that was perhaps the biggest blessing we could have asked for. Children could still play, and adults could still go about life (albeit with an impending sense of doom) without the restrictions that most of the world outside had to live with. Yes, some of us banged dishes and lit diyas to drive away the virus. Yes, I had my taste of cold shoulder for not joining in. Despite all that, I could not have asked for a better place to be in while the pandemic was raging.

Yamini Mohan, the artist I was paired with, wields her charcoal pencil with the grace of a dancer, creating lines that are equal parts fluid, powerful and disturbing. They were enough to inspire even the most inept writer, yet putting word after word proved to be a struggle at that point.

In retrospect though, Ignite was the catharsis I needed. It allowed me to weep and to scream – into the vast silence of the written word. The only place kind enough to hold me close, and rock me to sleep.

Deepa, I can’t thank you enough.

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Here’s the link to the site: https://ignitefromwithintheconfines.blogspot.com

And here’s the link to my humble attempt: https://ignitefromwithintheconfines.blogspot.com/2020/11/poet-profile-mini-s-menon.html?m=1

Of Antihistamines, Divine Pursuits and a General Election

Yesterday was Tough – with a capital T. My right eye started itching suddenly the night before, and in a matter of minutes became a purplish blob with a red slit in the middle. When the itch extended to my throat, I swallowed an antihistamine, and that sealed my misery. Spent the night tossing and turning in a restless half sleep, and was unable to pick myself up from the bed most of yesterday. And I’m no pleasure to be around when I’m forced to be horizontal – ask my family.

But that too has passed.

This morning I got up as usual, and responded to Poocha’s call in kind. Took my walk, with music on shuffle on the way back. There were fewer people on the road for some reason. 

Hazaron khwahishen aisi… 

After so many months, it’s still with a sigh of relief that I breathe in the verdant evergreen by the porch, the mosaicked patch under the staircase, the few straggly plants in front of the door, and the living room with its yellow curtains. Yes. We have somehow managed to coax out ‘the home we want to live in’ (as my boys put it) from the ruins that had resulted from 14-years of neglect. And in the process, lived to learn that rebuilding a home out of its own dark shell is an act of love and hope.

I’m now treating our home ‘as a canvas’ as Adu advised me –  adding one brushstroke at a time.

I invariably water my plants as soon as I return – rather upsetting these days. They were all lush and happy until a couple of months ago, but since then have been morose and unresponsive. Nothing I do cheers them up enough to grow. (I’m beginning to believe that plants feel trauma – and that their cells hold the memory.) All I can do is to keep urging them, hoping that they will, one day, forget. And grow up. 

Innam konjam neram poruthaal thaan enna…

Amma’s usually in her room when I return, attending to her many gods. Her days are (and have been for as long as I can remember) devoted almost entirely to the pursuit of the divine: her version of it, rather. And after living most of her adult life in various states of aloneness, she doesn’t take very kindly to human interferences. Occasional short periods of social interactions are borne with patience, but any attempt to integrate her into sustained mainstream family life is an exercise in futility. So we live our parallel lives that meet mostly at the dining table thrice a day or so.

Could’ve been worse, I guess.

Lag jaa gale…

Made my first tea of the day, and came to my room. I have an interesting selection of infusions now – hibiscus, tulsi and chamomile, sage… But the bright green tea I chose today is special; it’s a gift from Ricca, and has come all the way from Japan. It has the flavour of the wonderful stories she used to share with me of her almost nomadic life as a young woman from sub-Siberian Japan. 

Twitter opened to a wonderful essay on Walking by Maria Papova, where she quoted Lauren Elkin. “Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.”

Couldn’t have said it better.

Anuragini ithaa en…

The results of the general election are not a shock. But that doesn’t make me feel any less sad. I worry about what awaits our children, our academia, our minorities, our nation – our individual and collective worth as the citizens thereof.  The general mood on social media is either defensive or gleefully smug – an easy trap to fall into, I suppose. But it breaks my heart to see the young people I once taught use words like sickular, libtard and presstitute to talk about those with opposing points of view. 

Nothing is going to be the same again. 

As a kind friend pointed out, maybe people like me did contribute to what happened, merely by voicing our opinions on public platforms. I only hope I have the restraint necessary to not do so in the future.

Anyway, it’s time I stopped feeling sad – stopped feeling anything at all – and moved on with life. Or something like it. 

Zindagi tujh ko toh bus khab mein dekha hum ne…

For now, the kitchen awaits.

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Of Cats, Flats and the Local Grocery Shop

It’s Day 6. No mean achievement, considering.

As usual, Poocha was right outside the door, returning home to eat, rest and recuperate after her nightly adventures. She mewed her knock, waited patiently for me to open the net door, waited less patiently for her bowl to be refilled, and greedily downed a few mouthfuls. Then she generously brushed herself against my shin, telling that I’m not too bad after all, after which she jumped on to a dining chair, stretched out and closed her eyes.

She lives the cat’s life!

There are a couple of fat tomcats in the neighbourhood who come to court her – a grim-looking grey one and a black and white one with one ear chewed off. Poocha is petite and looks quite the damsel in distress, so I understand why she runs inside screaming when they come anywhere near her. But that doesn’t stop her from flirting from within the safety of her home. When she sees or hears either of them, she walks quietly up to the glass door and stays there, watching them silently. The menfolk try their best to lure her out, but she wouldn’t budge. 

It must be the Monday morning ‘josh’, but I saw more people out on the road today than usual. Took the same route, saw the same sights with a slightly different pair of eyes, and smiled a few more smiles. At least three of the new faces I came across today stopped and asked me the familiar question: Flateennano?

The local population of Eroor tends to attribute any unfamiliar face to ‘The Flat’ – an alien spaceship that landed in their backyard twenty years ago and wouldn’t leave. But when I confirm their suspicion, they invariably nod and smile. I told you they smile more easily in this part of the world. 

I usually put on Devi Kavacham (a 15-minute long rendition) when I start walking, go on ahead till it ends, and then turn back – which makes sure I have at least a 30-minute walk to take credit for. It takes me past Appu’s old school, and up to a tea stall that has come up, I guess, for the benefit of students. But since it’s vacation, I see only a couple of local fisherfolk sipping tea.

On my way back, I listen to film songs or ghazals, put on shuffle.

Pularkala sundara swapnathil njaanoru… I usually wait to reach home before I start humming along loudly.  A grey-haired woman in exercise clothes, walking through the bylanes of Eroor needs to exhibit some kind of restraint – for propriety’s sake. 

Maybe it’s the fault of growing up in the villages, or all those years of living in the desert with its landscaped urban gardens, but I get all sentimental about the local flora of Eroor. There are so many trees and plants on the way that were an intrinsic part of my childhood, and some that still seem exotic to my Palakkadan sensibilities. 

Opposite the chapel, at the corner where the road turns, is a small grocery which is open even at 6 in the morning. You can find almost anything you need in the baskets or gunny bags scattered around, but you have to pay the one-man act his king’s ransom. When you have the monopoly of the grocery business this side of Kaniambuzha, you are going to name your price, I guess. 

Every morning, when I reach back, the elderly lady who lives alone (except for her home-nurse) in one of the apartments would be taking her slow morning walks. The click of her walking stick against the bricks on the pathway is a reassuring, welcoming sound, and she always gives me the most beautiful morning smile. On most days, though, I have to reintroduce myself to her failing memory.

This morning, she was standing in front of her door reading a newspaper as I walked past. I greeted her as usual, and she beckoned me over. I went to her and introduced myself again to her curious, bright eyes. She smiled her beatific smile, took my sweaty face in her hands, and kissed me on both cheeks. Then she went back to her newspaper, and I came back home. 

The day has begun. 

Of Road Once Taken and Other Things Like That

So I’ve resumed my (admittedly irregular) morning walks. They’d been put on hold since moving to Kochi, and I had a whole list of excuses for that. In fact, I’d almost convinced myself that it’s ok, you poor thing. 

1. The stress of moving, you see.

2. The stress of renovating the house – you understand that, right?

3. The stress of dealing with the summer heat in Kochi! *Roll eyes*

4. Oh, and what can I tell you about the stress of menopause? *Shake head* *Long sigh*

So on and so forth.

But my increasingly uncomfortable sari blouses and the terrible cramps that ravage my previously unacknowledged body parts are a warning I can no longer ignore. Sleep, that elusive entity who only flirts with me even on a good night, now seems ready to abandon me altogether. And believe me, that spells disaster. 

Truth be told, it’s not just my body that feels as if it’s turning into lead. There are times when I teeter on the brink of something black and wordless, and I can see an all-consuming numbness staring back at me from its depths. And I’m not going to give in to it. Not if I can help it. Not when I’m actually learning to live. 

So I need the walk. Because endorphins help. Serotonin helps. Whatever else gets released in the course of that walk helps.

Four days in a row now, and the sense of achievement I feel now is beyond words. 

The walk on Day 1, though, was a trip to hell.  An ineffectual night rain had raised the humidity level to ‘unbelievable’ and I was sweating profusely even before I stepped out of the gate. But the sight of the rain-drenched flowers on the wayside was a motivation to plod on. So I plodded on, taking photos on the way.

I took the same route that Sonya and I used to take in a distant past for our occasional walks. Turned left at the gate and followed the winding road until I reached the fork, and turned left again to follow the path that runs by the river. My mind kept wandering to those walks with Sonya, and the random stuff we used to talk about back then. Things like Phi and its significance in the world, or whether we would dye our hair when it turned grey. 

But everything has changed. Sonya herself is now in another city, though her still empty flat suggests that she will return someday. Phi, however, has long been forgotten; it has absolutely no significance in my world right now. And as for turning grey, I’ve chosen to let it. Why fight the inevitable?

The once unpaved road has been tarred, and quite recently, as is evident from the absence of potholes. So the walk now is meandering but smooth. The grassy wasteland that we used to walk past has been divided into plots with names and numbers, with many with largish, well-kept houses standing tall within. There’s even a low-rise apartment block at the far end, near the school where Appu used to study.

Someone told me recently that such flats are designed for families with school-going children. I’m sure.

The steel fabrication workshop at the corner, run by two Italian-looking brothers, is usually closed at that time of the morning. But going by the small board tacked to the rust-free shutters, it’s still functional,. The patch of land just outside, though, has been tiled and chained off, and sports a few stone benches. A red board says it’s now a ‘Senior Citizens’ Park’, but it’s usually a white Volkswagen GT that’s parked there in the mornings, staring morosely at the river. 

The senior citizens, whenever they park themselves on the benches, might not have much in terms of space, but they do have a stunning river view as the background for their inevitable reminiscences.

New paths run like capillaries off the arterial road which is just wide enough for one largish car to squeeze through. They connect houses and housing plots, often reaching a dead end by the side of one. Another board, a white one this time, proclaims that a residents’ association is now in place. Good for them.

The Eroor West post office, which used to be a shanty halfway to the school, has moved to a small house closer to our apartment. A couple of new temples have sprouted on the way, along with a chapel at the corner of the road near our building. A testimony, I suppose, to the rising religious fervour.  

The ‘short cut’ I used to take to drop off Appu at school has become unrecognisable. It took me a second to register the once-muddy turn-off where my silver Sunny had skidded, taking down with it the three of us – Appu in his school uniform, and little Adu in his ‘kangaroo’ pouch, belted to my chest.

The whole area has been cemented, and leads to a narrow concrete path flanked by concrete walls, some with flowers spilling over. The canal that used to run by the side has disappeared under thick concrete slabs.

In this part of Eroor, concrete is king. 

Back then, when it was still muddy, that path used to run through a large piece of wetland. An entire ecosystem had thrived there under a thick canopy of trees, and we had to jump across a small, clear stream in which fish and ducks swam. Snakes, chameleons and other reptiles used to move casually about, completely dismissive of the few human beings who crossed their path. What they did take heed of were the mongooses who had the run of the place.

It was a different world back then – a brownish-green world of perpetual twilight. A  sublime world whose silence used to reverberate with the shrill of a million unseen creatures.

A memory now. Walled in, weeded out. Easier to walk across, but heartbreaking.

That patch of earth had ignited Appu’s imagination no end, I remember. And much later, he brought it back to life in his first college project – as an animation video titled ‘Way Home’. 

The other day, as I was about to get into an autorickshaw, a heavily pregnant young woman hurried across and asked me if I remembered her. It took me a minute, but I did. She and her mother were among the people who had helped us up from the red earth where we had fallen down. Later, but in that same life of mine, I had made dresses for her adolescent self. 

She told me that she almost didn’t know me either, but then she saw me smile. I’d recognise that smile anywhere, she said, smiling.

Made my day. 

Her little one has come out now, I think. I saw a line of nappies hanging by their porch.

Not many people are out at that time of the morning, apart from the few who would be heading towards Chambakkara on their two-wheelers. Sometimes I see a woman or two in housecoats, doing things that women do at that time of the morning: sweep the yard, water the plants, wash the vessels… Some of them seem familiar, and I try to chip away the decade and a half from their faces to see if I can place them. Sometimes I can.

People smile so much more easily in this part of the world.

On the first morning, there was an elderly man standing in front of his house and brushing his teeth. He was still brushing when I came back. His must be whitest teeth in Eroor. 

I return home each morning feeling as if my body is being slow cooked. My clothes would be drenched in sweat, and my misted-over glasses would have slipped off my nose. And I don’t even want to know how I smell. Yet, the sense of well-being I feel makes it worth all of that and more. It’s fascinating how the world becomes so much more liveable after a walk and a bath!

Life has taught me to be wary of myself. I lost count of the number of times I had decided to adopt a healthy routine, only to feel my engines grind to a halt in a matter of days. Today is all about good intentions and general well-being; who knows about tomorrow?

But then, that’s life. To be taken one day at a time. 

Of Diaper Pins, Rubber Bands, and an Old Man on the Metro

We were on the Singapore Metro (or the ‘MRT’, as Amy calls it), though I can’t recall where we were going to, nor the name of the station we were to get down at. The train was quite crowded, so we stood to one side of the door.

He was standing near us – an old man, leaning against a pole grip. His back was to the crowd, and he was swaying gently with the train. I don’t know what it was about him that caught my attention because his focus was firmly fixed elsewhere, below eye-level.

I found myself glancing at him every so often. 

An unusually large pair of eyes revealed themselves suddenly to survey the compartment and just as quickly went back under the heavy eyelids they came out of. I was reminded of Ollie, a tortoise we had with us for a while in Dubai. He would draw himself into his shell when he went to sleep. But every so often he would raise his head from his shell, look around, and pull it back in again. 

When the old man raised his head again to look out of the window opposite, I noticed a chain of red rubber bands circling his bald head. It took me a moment to realise that its purpose was not decorative – it was holding in place his rather thick, misshapen eyeglasses that might otherwise have slid down his nose. 

He seemed to be chewing at something, and a single loose tooth emerged from the confines of his cavernous mouth every so often and retreated as quietly as it appeared.

I could not help but stare. Our eyes met suddenly and he turned away, decidedly ignoring me and every other person on the train.

Rather embarrassed, I was about to look away when I noticed that the well-worn, dirty salmon-pink T-shirt he was wearing was sporting a neat row of half-a-dozen diaper pins at the chest where a pocket would have been.  More diaper pins were fixed to the pocket flap of his shabby olive cargo shorts, and next to them, a wristwatch hung from a string that disappeared into the hem of his Tee.

Thin legs ended in a pair of loose grey socks and olive sneakers that looked as if they would give up their ghost any moment. Two heavy-looking cloth bags lay on the floor by his feet, still and alert like obedient dogs. 

Try as I might, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. His, however, were fixed on something else by then. 

I watched him open a few sheets of folded paper that he had been holding in his hand – a few loose leaves pulled out of a ruled notebook. He started working on them furiously with a red pen. 

I forgot that it was rude to stare.

A red arc appeared on the paper, which soon became a head in the old Chinese style, with long hair on either side and a sparse, long beard at the chin. Small eyes, small mouth…

He paused, lifted his huge eyes, gave the surroundings a once-over. Finding nothing to hold his interest, he went back to his paper and began to draw lines around the head, like the rays of the sun. No – like the lines we used to draw in anatomy class to label body parts.

It turned that he was indeed labeling something around the head in a language that looked like Chinese. 

That done to his satisfaction, he paused, looked around for a long time, changed pages and started with the pen again. Soon the paper burst out in a bloom of red doodles that looked like small clouds interspersed with jottings in shorthand script – something that called for furrowed brows and unblinking concentration. 

After a while, his pauses became longer and more frequent, but he hardly bothered to look up. Soon he was sleeping – eyes closed, mouth slightly open, still holding the paper and the pen tightly, still swaying gently, but never once losing his balance. At times he would come back to the world with a jerk, quickly jot some things down, and then fall back asleep. The bags at his feet stood guard. 

When the train pulled into the terminus, he woke up as if to an alarm, gathered his evidently heavy bags, and got down before us – tall, thin and ageless, staggering under the weight of his bags.  No one offered help, and somehow it didn’t seem as if he would’ve accepted any. 

I looked around for him one last time before getting into the lift.

He was still there on the platform, just next to the door through which he got down. Leaning against the wall of the stationary train as if he couldn’t keep himself steady on terra firma. His bags waited next to him patiently.

I don’t know why, but I still think of him sometimes. A shabby old man lost in a world of his own making. Held together by diaper pins, rubber bands, and handwritten notes. Swaying gently to the rhythm of the train.

And I wonder.

***

*Illustration: Aditya Shivakumar Menon, aka Son 2, who is extremely dissatisfied with his work. 

An Orchid a Day

Day 1

They say orchids are the most highly evolved of all flowering plant species. I don’t know enough to verify that. In fact, I used to think of them as divas – all attitude and colour.

Well then, I told them. You can keep your airs. I have nicer flowers than you as my friends. 

Day 2

When I followed Amy to Singapore Botanical Gardens on Wednesday the 16th of January, 2019, it was mainly to see the gigantic lilypads I knew were in there – a cousin had shown me some photographs decades ago. They were the reason Singapore entered my bucket list at all.

Day 3

But if you have ever let yourself be guided by a determined twenty-five-year-old who loves orchids, you won’t have to be told that the lilypads had to wait.

We entered the orchid garden, and the rest is history.

Day 4

These posts are going to be about them, the prima donnas of the flower kingdom that I have fallen utterly, impossibly in love with. An ode to their beauty, grace and exquisite complexity.

An orchid a day. For however long it takes.

Day 5

I don’t remember their names, and frankly, I don’t care. An orchid is an orchid is an orchid. Heartbreakingly beautiful, regardless.

Day 6

***

P.S. I used a DSLR camera (Canon EOS1100D) to capture these images. Despite all the time and attention given, I can see the effects of age on my eyesight. Some of the images are blurred at the edges.

Like life. 

 

 

 

Lest I Forget

Memories from the far end of Bombay riots

I’ve managed to erase most of the memories of the days around December 6, 1992. A few fragments, however, remain stuck to my consciousness like a stain, and wouldn’t go away however much I try to wash them off. I was one of the luckier ones, of course – I was at the far end of the pool, where the ripples came only to subside. Thus the privilege of ‘forgetting’. I’m aware.

I was working in State Bank of India, Churchgate Branch, and less than four months pregnant at the time.

I remember that I was coming back from somewhere, though I’m not sure where. The train I was on was largely empty, but had stopped in the middle of nowhere. No one seemed to know why, though there was a general sense of disquiet in the air that the demolition of a mosque in Ayodha had caused. But at the time it seemed far away. And despite rumours of repercussions closer home, fear had not struck. At least, not me, not yet.

A good half an hour or so later, someone who scrambled up the train said there was dangafasad going on ahead, and that was the reason the train had stopped. After that, the train, with all of us inside it, was eerily silent.

Relief came as a long whistle, and there was a general buzz among us, commuters.  Just as the train was about to move, a heavily pregnant woman struggled up the steps sweating and panting. A few people rushed to help her. She flopped down on a window seat, still sweating profusely and sobbing all the while. She was trying to say something, but was mostly incoherent. The only words we could make out were: “They had swords!”

When she recovered enough to talk, she said that she had run away to escape a mob – they were not coming at her, but. They had bloodied swords and torches, though, and someone told her that a woman, similarly pregnant, had her stomach cut open.

I can’t recall the rest of the trip. Except that the heavy window pane fell on the lady’s hand and she started crying again. 

What I remember of the rest of those days are the random discussions that used to happen.  At work, in the train, among colleagues… On how if you were passing by this road, it is safer to wear a bindi. But if you were taking the other, your bindi could get you killed. About how a Hindu colony protected a Muslim family, or how a Muslim family that kept their Hindu friend and his family safe in their house…

Things like that. 

That was the time I learned that one’s name and surname could become something that saved or destroyed, depending. The first time I became aware of religion, in a way I had never been.

***

I was in Bombay on March 12, 1993, as well. And again, what I remember are the most frivolous details of the day. Like the extra-large white and blue dress I was wearing because that was the most comfortable one for my extra-large stomach. And how I was sweating excessively and feeling slightly sick as I walked from Second Road to Chembur Station, but would not take leave. Because it meant one less day at home for my delivery, back in Coimbatore. 

At the station, I began to feel dizzy. Two women from Adelphi – my personal banking customers – held me up and sat me down. They told me it was better that I went back home as I did not look well enough to get through the day. They put me in an autorickshaw and left.

When the call came for me in the afternoon, I thought it was to inquire after my health, or to say that they missed me at lunchtime. But the voice at the other end was hushed. “I’m glad you took leave, Mini. There has been a bomb blast at the Stock Exchange. We felt it in our PB department (which was in the basement).”

It took a while for the news to sink in, as it did for everything that happened afterwards.

I remember the warnings that were being repeatedly heard on railway stations, trains and BEST buses. Please make sure that there is no unclaimed baggage left under your seats or above you. If you do find anything suspicious, inform the authorities immediately. Do not touch or go near it… Announcements to that effect. BEST buses went the extra mile – they started playing old songs, which would be punctuated every so often by such announcements.

To this day, each time I happen to hear the song tum agar saath dene ka wada karo, my heart skips a beat. And my stomach tightens in anticipation of the abrupt pause after main tumhe dekhkar geet gaata rahoon… And I almost wait for the voice that would tell me to check under my seat.

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My scars, however, are thin. Barely visible, considering. I’m aware of that.

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And yet, one has to remember. Always. 

 

 

*PC: Google images.

A Letter to A, Post His Mortem

Dear A,

I have to tell you this. Yesterday, after so many months of your untimely, unexpected death, you occupied my mind space for a good while.

Are you surprised? I am. 

I was trying to send a photograph to someone via WhatsApp, but I couldn’t. Instead, I received a rather grim warning that my storage is full, so I better clean up stuff or else. I had no option but to comply, you see. So I went to Storage and started deleting chats one by one.

Your name came up in my list of contacts, which was quite unexpected. I had forgotten that we used to message occasionally, enough to take up 7.4MB of my old-fashioned iPhone – which is about as spacious as your apartment was, the last time we were there. 

A couple of jokes, good wishes for the now-old 2018, some articles about the state of our country, and something on Bitcoins – that’s what you’d sent. I’ve replied in polite emoticons, mostly. You must know that I’m not big on WhatsApp conversations.

By the way, the last message from you (which I have not replied to), dated March 30, 2018, is a video.  A man in a business suit is speaking in Hindi about why cleansing your ‘system’ is vital for good health. You were huge on health, I remember, what with diet and exercise plans and all that.

Life’s little ironies, right? Your heart didn’t give a damn, ultimately.

We had our comment-reply transactions on Facebook too. A few months before you died, you had taken to making short motivational videos. To be honest, I was ambiguous about them (having never been one to take to motivational speeches), so I kept well away. After I came to know of your death, though, I wished I had watched them, just so I can claim half your niceness reciprocally. 

But then, that’s what you were, right? Unfailing kind, unwaveringly considerate – right from the first time we met at the gate of my hostel in Tilak Nagar. Yes, it has been that long!

You and S, your then-new wife, were waiting at the hostel gate with Shiva, to be introduced to his wife-to-be. Then one day, we came to your house, met your mother, and listened quietly to your collective anxiety at not having an offspring yet.

Later, you and S helped Shiva appease his family with a quick round of astrological manipulation. With the help of an astrologer known to you, my horoscope was changed to match Shiva’s.

See, I’m shaking my head and smiling as I write this.

I don’t know if you are aware of it, but that little lie fell flat – literally at the altar. When the temple priest asked me about my star, I blurted out ‘moolam’, instead of the ‘chothi’ that my new jatakam required of me. But my father-in-law, the gentlest man I had ever had the fortune to meet, just smiled benignly and let it pass. No one from my side of the family had the slightest inkling of that little drama anyway, so that was that.

When I returned to Bombay alone after that hurried wedding to stay with my husband’s aunt, you and S had visited me diligently. I was pregnant, confused and completely unprepared as a mother-to-be. Then, when Shiva came down for a visit, we came to your house. You and S were trying to feed your curly haired, doe-eyed elder son at the time. A year or two later, you guys moved to Qatar.

When was it that we made that boat trip to Elephanta Caves? And which year was it that you all had come to our house in Trivandrum – the one that had nutmeg trees growing in the backyard? For the life of me, I can’t recall the timelines. You would have, I’m sure. Because you were the one that remembered everything including birthdays and anniversaries, and sent your wishes without fail.

You guys were in Sharjah when we moved to Dubai, and you were among the first ones to reach out. But by then, the equations of your own life had changed. Your search for— What was it that you were looking for? Meaning of life? Peace? Whatever it was, it had already begun to appear as cracks on your family wall. I saw the bitterness that had etched harsh lines around S’s smile. But yours was as white as ever, to my surprise.

It wouldn’t hurt you now, would it, if I admit that every time I visited your apartment, I couldn’t wait to get away from it? As much from the clutter of your brown-gold-ochre space, as from the darkness that hung like cobwebs in kitchen conversations. Maybe the darkness in my own head intensified when it came in contact with another. Which is why, like the lotus, I keep seeking sunlight.

After you all left the UAE, these occasional social media messages were our only contact. And then you died, just like that. Your heart gave way – just like your father’s, Shiva said.

Anyway, late as it is, I have something to tell you. It’s about this one enduring image I have of you, the one I have carried with me all these years, regardless of everything that came after. A collage, made of pieces of a memory from back then when Mumbai was still Bombay, and I was a 22-year-old in the big city. At a time when Lokmanya Tilak Terminus Railway Station was just a cleared out patch of land near our hostel. We girls used to walk there after dinner in our housecoats.

I can’t recall why I left my aunt’s flat in Sion so late that Sunday evening, especially since I was alone – I’m usually more prudent than that. In my hurry to get back to the hostel, I hopped on to the first train from Koliwada Station, assuming it would go to Chembur, so I can get down at Tilak Nagar. It was only when the train reached Kurla Station that I knew it terminated there. The only train that would stop at Tilak Nagar after that, they told me, was waiting at a platform at the far end of the station, and would leave in a couple of minutes. I ran in the direction pointed.

It was late, it was crowded, and I was panting with panic and exertion. I stood on the platform, inches away from the train, paralysed by the crowd rushing in. And then I heard your voice, calling out to me from the train that was almost moving. You told me to get into the train quick; there was no other train that day which would stop at Tilak Nagar. I scrambled up, pushed ahead by the crowd.

Did I cry? Or did you sense that I would, any minute? Either way, you stood there, rock solid, making sure I was unharmed. Then you got down with me at my station, and insisted on walking me to my hostel. You kept talking all the way, inane small talk intended to reassure me. Later, I came to know that you were a more compulsive talker than I am. By the time you left me at the gate and walked away in the direction of Chembur, I was almost normal, and grateful. Immensely so. 

Your kindness that night, dear A, has stayed with me all these years. It has survived your death, and I know it will see me to mine. Despite everything that was heard, said and known, that is how I will remember you.

I want you to know that, wherever you are.

Regards,

Mini

An Old Facebook Post, Revamped!

The original post came up as a two-year-old memory on Facebook. These two years have brought so many things to a head, but the sentiments expressed there remain the same. So do most of the attitudes that provoked this outburst, sadly.

So sharing it again here, with just minor changes. (I’m not prone to writing long posts on the Facebook wall, but the situation calls for it.)
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But before that, here’s something that I’ve been itching to say despite having taken the decision to stay off politics for a couple of months, for the sake of sanity:
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#Metoo is NOT funny. Don’t circulate jokes and memes on it. It is decades and centuries of pain, shame and misplaced guilt coming out in torrents. And if you are a man who asks ‘How do I qualify for #metoo?’ (This is not made up – someone actually did!), don’t worry – you most likely are, and have been for a long time. At least in intent.

And fellow women, please don’t think that taking years to speak up is a sign of weakness. It’s not. To retaliate on the spot does take courage – but so does speaking up after ages. Even more courage because they would need to deal with not just the abuser, the world, but also the likes of you who ask things like ‘Why didn’t you slap him and walk away?’

(I actually saw women sharing a post to the effect that if you are a real woman, a ‘shakti’, you do that! I can only say you, who said that and who share that with the same intent, are supremely privileged. And supremely insensitive.)

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Now, to my original post:
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Women have bodies, just as men do. And our bodies are different from those of men – with good reason. The species has lasted solely because of that.

Some of us are proud of our bodies, and why not?

Skirts fly, saris slip off, blouses open – whether we like it or not. We scratch our backsides, dig our noses and drool while sleeping. I’m sure the rest of the world does these things too.

This might be news to some, but these are very human acts. Every constitution has (or ought to have) these as part of the fundamental rights of its citizens.

Sometimes skin shows, and that’s ok too. It’s skin, not dirty laundry.

So stop taking photos of people in their vulnerable moments and circulating them in your groups. It’s as crass as hiding behind the doors of someone’s bathroom or bedroom and watching them. And infinitely worse for the damage it does.

That woman whose photo you’re sharing, with crude remarks textboxed into it, is a human being, entitled to live her life with dignity, unaffected by filthy camera eyes.

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Remember, so is vulgarity.

Even if you don’t actively promote such posts, stop laughing at them, stop accepting them. Somebody could catch you and me too in the wrong frame.

For, the camera, like the bullet, does not discriminate. Nor does the Internet.
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Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your patience.

Fish Whisperers of Varanasi

At Varanasi, they whisper to the fish and set them free in the water. 

I’d come to the Ghats to watch the sunrise, an event that was turning out to be more spectacular than I had imagined. Ahead of me, the sun spilled molten gold onto the calm waters of the Ganga. Majhis (boatmen) were ferrying passengers across in similar-looking rowboats, their silhouettes adding to the drama. A million seagulls circled above the boats, their squawks accompanying the sound of temple bells and the chants of worshippers performing pooja on the stone steps. Men and women were bathing in the holy waters, their faith shielding them from the biting cold of a winter morning. Wash away our sins, mother…

From the high octagonal stone platform I was sitting on, everything seemed surreal.

A while ago, I had bid goodbye to Pooja, a young engineer from Poona who was sharing the platform with me. She had come to the ghats with her brother and sister-in-law, and was kind enough to click a picture of me for memory. We had found each other on Instagram, and parted with vague promises to keep in touch.  

I sat there alone for a long time afterward, at peace with the world that was bustling around me. 

As I got up to leave, I saw a couple of Muslim men – father and son, presumably – carrying transparent yellow plastic bags, making their way to where I was sitting.  I noticed that the bags held water, with small, black, live fish in them. I stopped in my tracks.

“Are those fish?” The father ignored me. Talk about stating the obvious. 

The son nodded.

“What are they for?”

“To be released in the Ganga,” he mumbled without looking at me.

“To be…what! Why?”

“Why? Because…” He looked at his father, but the old man did not help. Then he turned and met my eyes. “...where else do fish belong except with Ganga Maiyya?”

Where else indeed. 

I followed them as they went to the edge of the platform, asking their permission to click pictures. The son looked at his father again. Though the old man decidedly turned his back on me, the son did not seem to mind. I decided to take their silence for consent, but maintained an unobtrusive distance. 

They sat down and carefully opened the bags. The older man took each bag separately, brought it close to his face and blew softly into it. Then both the father and the son gently took the fish one by one in their palms and dropped it into the water. That done, they got up and left.

No one gave a second glance. Except me, that is. 

Later, I came to know that this is a sadka, a ritual performed by the members of the weaving community regardless of their faith. Meant to ward off evil, to protect their person and property.

Protect us, mother, protect our livelihood. You, who are all-accepting, all-forgiving. You who do not distinguish between humans and their faiths.  Guard us against evil, Mother. Within and without…

A prayer or two, breathed into the slim, dark bodies of a dozen fishes. To be carried to the heart of a mighty river brimming with the desperate pleas of generations and lifetimes. Of the living and the dying, the hopeful and the hopeless.

Down there in her womb, these prayers too would feed on human sins and grow. As guardians, protectors. Shielding mortals from themselves… 

Perhaps.

 

Of Life and Loss and the Evolution of Grief

It’s that time of the year when something inside you becomes heavier and slows you down.  Not in an unpleasant way, but like your body does after a long, hard evening walk. You look for a bench to relax for a bit, knowing well that you’ll soon get up and get moving. There’s a mild sense of achievement as you sit down, face flushed, still slightly panting, feeling the sweat trickle down your throat and back.

And you look back on the path that took you through yet another year.

You see vistas of sand flanked by concrete buildings, you see cranes sticking out of half-made buildings like skeletal hands reaching out for the skies. Didn’t you hear the earth groan as you passed? You see the workers who were squatting on the ground outside the forbidding fences designed to keep out prying eyes, waiting for un-airconditioned buses to come and pick them up. Exhaustion drawn over them like a blanket, their collective silence punctuated by low conversations and brave attempts at hilarity.  What awaited them at the other end of the journey was no lovers’ meeting – just cramped bedspaces in a camp in some forgotten corner of the city. (Forgotten is not the word perhaps, because, those are the places we head to when we feel the urge to do good deeds.) There they would wait in line to wash their bodies and clothes, pray or not, cook in turns, eat, hold conversations over the din of TV, and fall into exhausted sleep.

You look back on the impatient cars inching their way through the congealed traffic, at the taxis with worried, tired cabbies talking to any willing ear about the prohibitive traffic fines. Madam, my eyes filled up this time when I opened the salary slip – I was hoping to send something home at least this month… My wife has been struggling, really, but–  Past the tired and hopeful faces of those waiting at bus stops, past young couples pushing their babies in prams, past the mosque-goers on their way to Maghrib. Past the tall gates of the park, on the treelined walkway, and around the lake, dodging other walkers, runners, bikers and stray cats,  inhaling the fragrance of marigold mixed with a hint of manure…

You are now thankful for the bench you managed to secure – under the streetlamp, facing the lake. A couple of feet away from the stray cat that is still contemplating the possibilities you hold. Watching the pink and blue and green and white lights of lifetimes lived – yours and others’ – undulating peacefully on the water, as if the chasm beneath did not exist. And you give in to the urge to give in, to wrap yourself in the mild, lingering melancholy of another late December evening. You sit back and sigh.

Really, what do you have to complain about?

I’m grateful for each passing year that has been granted to me. Truly. It’s a gift that so many are deprived of.

For no reason, I’m thinking of my cousin who had passed away when he was much younger than I am today (young being a relative term). He was among the closest I had to a brother, yet we had grown apart. Until that day when, from two ends of a phone line, we promised each other that we’d meet up for sure the next time he came down. Because I am his little sister, and don’t I ever forget that. No matter what differences we might have, we are family.

A few months later, when his body went home in a refrigerated box, I was not there. I mourned for him deeply from inside the walls of the small room in this desert city that I was barely getting used to. But what I mourned for was my loss. I lost a brother, a very very vital part of my childhood, my life. My brother whom I lost before I could–

Grief can be extremely selfish.

Today, years later, I still grieve for him. Not in a guilt-ridden, debilitating way, but as a fleeting, momentary sadness – a small white cloud at the corner of the sky that disappears as quietly as it appears. Today it is for him that I grieve, for what he lost.

My brother, I wish you had lived. Long enough to experience the luxury of growing older. Of watching your hair turn grey (though knowing you, you’d have reached out for the bottle of hair dye at the first glimpse of it). Of discovering that peaceful space within yourself…

We could have sat on the porch of your old house and laughed about our childhood antics. Remember the time when you–? We could shake our heads and smile knowingly as we watch our children walk through life as if it was something infinite, to be taken with utmost seriousness…

I still miss you, you know. At times. 

I don’t know why I’m thinking of him today, now, in this December morning when the mist outside has all but hidden the buildings across. I did not start out with the intention of writing about him! I was going to take a look at the year that was. I was going to contemplate on my own journey: the books I read, the people I met, the lessons I learned. I was going to talk about my writing – complete and incomplete, the teaching projects I have taken on, my students who are my dopamine.

I was going to talk about my ever-lengthening bucket list…

Instead, here I am, writing about life and loss and the evolution of grief. Maybe it’s time I stopped. I can start again, on another December morning. There’s a weekful of them left anyway.

 

Atlas of a Master Storyteller

As a child, the high point of my life used to be the storytelling sessions we had during summer vacations. When Preetha, Praveenchettan, Pramod, Rajesh, Dinesh and I gathered around Jagdish (or Jagguettan, as we call him; our eldest cousin on my father’s side), listening in rapt silence to the stories he told us. No one, but no one, told a story like he did.

In a matter of minutes, he could make the walls of the small side room in Krishna Vihar disappear. And I would be standing on an unpaved street in the Wild West, watching Clint Eastwood enter, eyes screwed up against the sun, a cigar dangling from the side of his mouth… I would see his hat and poncho, his black horse, the taunting men…Now he is taking out his gun and— Dhishkyaun! My heart would jump to my mouth even as the bad guys lay dead on the ground. Jagguettan could, with the same ease, take me to a studio in the Greenwich Village where Jhonsy would be looking out of the window and counting the leaves on the ivy vine opposite. And when Sue revealed Behrman’s masterpiece, my eyes would sting with tears too embarrassed to flow out.

Jagguettan, with his endless supply of stories, trivia and comic books, used to be my hero.  This, despite the fact that he had once declared me dead, while showing me how to find the pulse point on my wrist. After probing my then-skinny wrist for a good minute, he let go of it with a shake of his head. “No pulse,” he informed. “You’re dead!”

***

Growing up deprives you of a lot. For one, it takes you far away from cousins who tell stories. And when life decides its time for you to grow up, it comes at your bubble with a sledgehammer. All you can do is to quietly fold and pack the broken pieces of your childhood and stow them out of sight – in the farthest corner of your heart. Then you turn to books, a small part of you forever seeking your master storyteller between their pages. In hope.

Then one day, another lifetime or so later, comes a book. “I saw the home of a god at latitude 28º28′ south and longitude 105º21′ west — a deserted rock crowded with seabirds far, far out in the Pacific,”  it begins. Your ears perk up. That voice – you know it! You’ve heard it before, in an almost-forgotten past. You read on, now eager, hopeful. And as the “…wave-battered, treeless, bush-less cliffs devoid of fresh water, grass, flowering plants and moss” unfurl before you, you realise with a thrill that it’s him, your Great Storyteller. You’ve found him again, inside the covers of this magical book titled ‘Atlas of an Anxious Man’.

You are, once again, that wide-eyed child standing at the open gates of wonderland. 

As Christoph Ransmayr begins each story with “I saw…”, I see what he saw. I see people – living, dying and long-dead. I see oceans, islands, rainforests and polar ice caps. Icy peaks, salmon-filled rivers and volcanic lakes. Abandoned graveyards, sunken ships, and remains of ancient civilizations. I hear batwings, birdsongs, and five laughing men. And sometimes, as when I see “an empty park bench, one of three on the market square beside the wrought-iron fence of the adjacent apothecary garden in the village of Lambach in Upper Austria,” my eyes fill up.

Christoph Ransmayr*

Translated by Simon Pare for Seagull Books, the note in the jacket modestly describes Atlas of an Anxious Man as a ‘unique account that follows (its author) across the globe’. I would rather call it a book of stories. Stories woven out of Ransmayr’s experiences as an involved observer of people, places and events. Stories of love, grief, courage, heartbreak and lasting hope. Narrated as if to a group of close friends gathered around the fireplace on a cold evening.

The text inside the gorgeous jacket designed by Sunandini Banerjee is lyrical. It meanders unhurriedly through the many geographies Ransmayr has visited, pausing every so often to admire a garden or a graveyard, talk to its keeper, or listen to the sound of a sheepdog barking at a distance. The journey that starts from that first barren island 3,200 kilometres off the Chilian coast continues in no particular order across oceans, islands, mountains and continents, across treeless hillsides and tropical rainforests, across countrysides, cities and suburbs, until it reaches its lofty destination. As if the author is opening his atlas at random pages to shows us what he saw there.

“This crater, riven by erosion and tectonics, and half collapsed, resembled a skewed cauldron whose contents – a small house with a corrugated-iron roof, animal sheds, a barn and, above all, bellowing cattle and skin and bone horses on stony, black pastures – were about to be tipped into the sea. The cauldron’s lower rim lay so close to the surf that it was flecked again and again with flakes of spray whereas the upper edge of the crater faded away high above the breakers into scudding patches of fog.”

And I see it all. Every little thing.

Geography, however, is just one facet – albeit an intensely alive one – of this gem. There is also history, anthropology, politics, biology and astronomy. Philosophy too, among other things, woven intricately into the narrative by this master craftsman. Ultimately, Atlas of an Anxious Man is about human beings, as they come.

“I saw the dark, sweaty face of the fisherman Ho Doeun on a stormy November night in Phnom Penh. The capital of the Kingdom of Cambodia was celebrating the water festival that night. Ho was kneeling on the bank of the Mekong, under the sparkling bouquets of fireworks whose flaming arches and bridges of light spanned the river for two or three heartbeats before fading away in a thundering spectacle of colour.”

What makes this book so exceptional to me, however, is the silken thread of compassion that runs through the length of its narrative. There is no judgment – none at all. The man who narrates these stories has already made his peace with vagaries, both human and otherwise. He is merely telling us what he saw, heard, felt and remembered.

“…an autumn bird no longer really had to impress anyone very much. It sang, when it sang, more for itself than for or against another bird.”

And if I feel a lingering sense of melancholy after turning the last page, it could be because the afterglow has lit up some forgotten corners of my soul – where the wait for the next Great Storyteller has resumed.

Khasakkinte Ithihasam: an epic of forgotten dialects

Among the many items I had left behind of my childhood are some dialects. About half a dozen of them, in fact. Very peculiar to the times, micro-geographies and cultures of the places I grew up in. Dialects that smelled of green fields and steaming paddy. Of cow-dung, rain and persistent anxiety. Of palm-trees and claustrophobia of the wide open spaces, and a loneliness that stuck to your clothes like the yellow, gluey mud you scratched off the sides of the lotus pond.

“Enthinaanu thambraatti agiranathu? Namma ippo veettilethoolle?”

At the time I’d not even noticed the peculiarity of the lingo in which almost every vowel sound began and ended with the close-mid sound of ‘ɘ’. It was just a part of the landscape, like the greenness of the field or the blueness of the mountain, like the humid heat or the dark, lean bodies with their stench of sweat.

I’d just nod, not really sure why my eyes had filled up in the first place. Was I missing home or was I anxious about reaching it? I still don’t know.

Somewhere along the way, I made a choice – that of selective memory. Which meant that I let go of a lot of my childhood, including its dialects. I chose my memories in the order of their sunshine, and wove my narrative around them. I carefully picked the vocabulary, tone, and semantics of all the languages and their variations that had flowed past me, and created my own lingo. So now I have a set of streamlined memories that I can look back on and smile, and a language that rarely prods sleeping dogs. Malayalam with a hint of Tamil, which could have originated anywhere between the banks of the Nila and the blue shadows of Western Ghats. Liberally peppered with the English of all those cities I have lived, loved and read in.

Perhaps that was why rereading Khasakkinte Ithihasam (Legends of Khasak) was like a punch in the gut.

True. Like any self-respecting Malayali teenager with intellectual aspirations (pretensions?), I too had read O.V. Vijayan’s epic while still in school. But what I had never admitted to anyone was that most of what was in there had flown right past me without leaving a dent. I had understood little, and I remembered even less. When people spoke so highly of it, I would nod in agreement, embarrassed that I had nothing to contribute to the conversation.

The other day, while browsing through the collection in a tiny DC Books store in Karama, I picked up Khasakkinte Ithihasam again. A burst of enthusiasm triggered as much by the prices, as by the cover illustration. And of course, sheer curiosity.  What is in there that has triggered so much dialogue for so many decades?

Life comes back to where it started – in one way or the other. The world I had eased myself out of enveloped me again like quagmire, oozing out of the 168 pages of the O.V. Vijayan’s classic novel. Only now, with almost half a century of life behind me, there is no way I can escape the vagaries of Khasak.

There is little I can say about the book that has not been said before.

Ravi is familiar – a young, literate, well-read man from a reasonably well-to-do family, in the throes of existential crisis. The quintessential protagonist of Malayalam literature of the time. I have met him in various forms and names between the pages of the many novels I have read. Vijayan, however, does not make any concessions for Ravi, unlike some other ‘heroes’ of that era. He is what he is by choice. Or compulsion – take your pick. But the last thing he needs is your sympathy.

What Vijayan narrates, however, is not Ravi’s story – it is the history of Khasak in all its myriad, yet dark, hues. Madhavan Nair, Appukkili, Mollakka, Nijaamali, Mymoona, Chandumma, Kunjaamina…. the list of Khasak’s children is endless, and each one plays a vital role in taking the narrative forward. Even the ghosts, gods and folklore of Khasak are living, breathing entities in Vijayan’s eerily familiar world, as real as it is imaginary. A world that is raw, primal and open to the elements.

Which, like life, brings me back to where I started – the dialect. It was the Malayalam that Vijayan has chosen for his epic that took me by the scruff of my neck. And it dropped me right in the middle of a world that I had safely stayed away from for decades. A very Khasak-like universe where a third of my memories (because my idea of ‘home’ was split three-ways during my growing up years) are set in.

“Ootareelu Jayettande padau odunundu. Namukku puggua thambraa?”

Pazhanimala would tether the bullocks to the cart and we would go to the theatrein Oottarawith its thatched roof and stained screen to watch Jayan seducing married women with his pecs and biceps. Mutton biriyani from Rahmania Hotel after, and a return journey under the starry, starry sky, with the tinkle of little brass bells lulling me to sleep…

If all was well that is.

A stray memory that drifted in.

There is a Khasak napping inside me, like there is in so many others. And it has now become restless.

Every good prose, I feel, has poetry running through it like a golden thread. It is there in a turn of phrase, a line that you want to utter out loud. Poetry lingers like melancholy in Vijayan’s writing, woven into the harsh overtones of its vernacular, adding to its poignancy, its earthy shadows. Touching you in a way that only poetry can.

If the hallmark of good literature is to disturb the reader, to shake them out of complacency, then it’s little wonder that Khasakkinte Ithihasam continues to revive and thrive, decade after decade.

Found: Some Green, Early-summer Words

Yesterday morning, I made a rather feeble attempt to clear out the ton of paper that’s making my rather feeble IKEA shelf sag. I didn’t get very far of course, but I did find some interesting-in-retrospect notes I had jotted down. Most of them were work-notes, taken down while on assignments, but some are just wistful, random jottings, scribbled haphazardly, in Aditya’s old notebooks, sheets of A4 with stuff printed behind, or those cute-looking notepads I tend to hoard ambitiously.

Among them was this note – written at the beginning of this summer. I know I had just come back from my morning walk in the park, but I don’t know if I had meant to add to this or it was just a random thought. Either way, it brought a remembered smile – and a faint whiff of neem flowers – to my morning. And hope – that the summer is on its last legs, and it will become walkable again.

 

07/05/2017

It’s only May, and the sun is already sleepless. Now there’s June, July, August, and September to go. The balmy breeze that’s still hovering will soon be evicted, her place taken by razor-edged summer wind that sears all it touches. 

For now, though, the neem flowers are giving way to baby fruits – nature goes on, and so does life, 

I breathe in deeply wondering why we, who are perfecting AI and plotting to colonize Mars, have not yet found a way to capture the fragrance of neem flowers and release it slowly, so it takes us through the summer. 

That’s it. Just that much on a torn-out sheet of lined paper. I’m now sure I’d meant to add on, but it hadn’t happened. I did manage to dig out a photograph I had clicked on the day though, thanks to technology.

Ahead of me is a long summer day, complete with a long bus-metro-metro-cab commute to the end of Dubai and back. But for now, it’s just these green, green words jotted down in scratchy red ink. And they will see me through.

Some Onam Thoughts

Image courtesy: Google

Another Onam day. And like on every Onam day for the past howevermany years, today too I feel that familiar, lingering sense of sadness. Melancholy, as a thin film of salt water that gathers at the corner of my eyes, blurring my vision ever so slightly.

Why sadness, you might ask.

And I would say, because I miss–

Miss what?

Oh, so many things!

Like?

I don’t know. Things… There’s a word for it – there has to be. For this longing for the unnameable; for what’s lost and can never come back… Ah never mind!

But let me tell you this. Very, very long ago, I’d started writing a story.

So what’s new in that, you might ask again.

Nothing at all, I’d say.  It’s just one of the million almost-but-not-quite-complete projects that fill the hard drive of my Mac. Only, this one is on Onam. So I remembered it today. Also because I tend to drivel, and today I feel the itch to.

So allow me to share the beginning of my Onam story,  Two Onams, a Movie, and Some Dreams. As I have named it, for whatever it is worth.

Maybe I’d shared it here before? I’m not sure. Pardon me if I have. Here goes, then:

Two Onams, a Movie, and Some Dreams 

“I love Onam, don’t you!” She finished the sentence with an exclamation mark instead of a question mark, overwrote the ‘love’ and underlined the ‘Onam’, secure in the knowledge that the ‘you’ at the receiving end shared her passionate love for Onam. Malu was writing her diary after all.  A worldly-wise fourteen, she hadn’t managed to outgrow her fascination for the festival. She loved the rituals and the colours, and more than anything else, she loved the folklore associated with it.

“It’s the most beautiful festival in the whole world.”  Again she underlined and overwrote as required, for proper effect.  Her ‘whole world’ began at Thenappilly where she lived, a small town with a radius of roughly six kilometres, to her father’s village  – about twenty kilometres away. Her school was somewhere midway.

“Legend says that Kerala had, once upon a time, been ruled by a benevolent asura king, Mahabali. Now, Asuras were traditionally expected to terrorize humans and loot the land.  Mahabali, on the contrary, loved his subjects, and was in turn loved by them.  There was enough of everything for everybody in the land, so there was no theft, nor any other crime of any sort.”  Kallavumilla chatiyumilla, kallatharangal mattonnumilla… There was no child who had not heard those lines and marveled at the utopia that Kerala had once been.

“However, the Devas – the Gods above – did not like the state of affairs in Kerala.  They were worried that if this little piece of land became such a heaven, what was going to happen to their own ‘original’ heaven?  So they decided that it was time for some subtle political manoeuvres.” Like dethroning the king, sending him to the netherworld, and claiming the land for themselves… The usual stuff. 

“So they approached Lord Vishnu, one of the three mightiest gods, the thrimurthis. Vishnu heard them out, and promised to do something.” 

At this point, Malu made slight alterations to the story.  She did not like to believe that Lord Vishnu, her favourite among all the Gods, would do what he eventually did, just to appease some jealous immortals with serious complexes.  No, he was too much of a man for that.  There had to be a greater, more benevolent, reason! So Malu clung to a more acceptable version of the story she had once heard or read somewhere.  

“Mahabali was a great guy, but his sons had not inherited his benevolence.  Lord Vishnu feared that after Mahabali’s time, when his sons took over, they would reduce the land to nothing.  He had to do something before that, so he intervened.” 

That sounded like a reasonable enough explanation.

“So Lord Vishnu took the form of Vamanan, a dwarf Brahmin, and came to Mahabali’s court to ask him for three feet of land.  No one refused a Brahmin anything. And Mahabali, who did not refuse anybody anything, told Vamanan to measure out the land he wanted and take it.  The prudent men of his court suspected foul play and tried to stop him, but Mahabali, wise as the sages, knew his time was up. So he decided to play along.” After all, it was Lord Vishnu himself who had come for him! 

“Vamanan the dwarf then grew so tall that the first foot he measured out covered the earth. The second encompassed the skies, and there was nowhere left to place the third foot.  So Mahabali bowed down and asked Vamanan to place it on his head.   

“Mahabali was thus sent to the netherworld. He asked for only one thing in return – that he should be allowed to return to his beautiful land once a year to visit his ‘children’. Since then, every year, his subjects welcomed their beloved king in the happiest way possible, regardless of the religion they followed. They made beautiful flower carpets in front of their houses through the ten days of the festival, and on the tenth day made the traditional feast, sadya, in his honour.” Malu was also writing for posterity. 

Malu enjoyed preparing the flower bed in front of the old tharavadu – the family house where she lived with her mother and aunt – although growing up had curtailed most of the fun.  When she was younger, she used to get up early in the morning and join her brothers – though she was an only child, she had plenty of cousins – and a few other children from the neighbourhood to pick flowers from anywhere they could. Roadsides, fences, temples, even other people’s back- and front-yards. Malu firmly refused to call that ‘stealing’ – it was every child’s solemn duty to gather as many flowers as they could on Onam days. The end justified the means, as they say.   

So they would gather as many flowers as they could, rush back to tharavadu, and share the loot.  While sharing, there would be a lot of arguments and fights, but in the end, might was always right.  Malu’s brothers had a standing in the group that was unparalleled, so they were never short of flowers.

But now that she was fourteen, her mother refused to let her go with her gang.  Added to that was the fact that now this ‘gang’ was almost non-existent – only one of her brothers lived at home; the others had left for big cities in search of jobs.  So now she had to make do with the flowers from their own yard, and the supply was limited. 

“Oh how I miss the Onams of my childhood!”

She drew a line to indicate that the entry for the day ended there. Then she decorated the margins with flowers and leaves. It was the Onam day entry, after all. 

So it goes, my not-so-short story. On and on and on. Like me when I start talking. Do you know that I can talk myself out of anything? Sadness,  nostalgia, frustration, anger, broken heart, broken bones… you name it. Ask my family if you don’t believe me. Or my students. In fact, people get worried when I am silent.

And see how I’m already feeling better?

:

Anyway, here’s wishing you all a very, very soulful Onam. There’s a payasam boiling away on my stove, in case you’re interested.

In the Country of Men – A Story of Love and Grief

Grief loves the hollow, all it wants is to hear its own echo. Be careful.

Many times while reading Hisham Matar’s ‘In the Country of Men’, I asked myself if this book would have resonated so much with me had I not been living here, in the UAE. If I had not had, among my friends, people who hail from other Middle East nations. If we had not shared stories with each other over tea and croissants. Or reminisced longingly about our home countries while maneuvering the rush hour traffic…

The answer is, probably not. Because some stories tend to remain once removed until they enter your immediate orbit. Until the ambiguous ‘they’ becomes a Maha, Sameh or Yasmin. Until you see at close quarters the shadow of displacement and hopeless longing at the edges of their brown, sun-lit eyes. Then they begin to find their echo in you.

Once, early on in my brief stint with a corporate house as its content provider, I was introduced to someone who had just come back from Syria after the funeral of his sister. She had been arrested some weeks ago for taking part in protests. In the same office, a young girl, only slightly older than my son, went to her country on vacation and was held there under house arrest. In the idealism of her youth, she had posted some images of protests on social media. It took months of intervention for her to be allowed out of her country.

In the Country of Men reminded me of all these stories. And others I have heard and read over the past twelve years in the Middle East.

Set in Tripoli, Libya, during Qaddafi’s regime, the narrative unfolds as a series of events seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Suleiman. Slooma, as he is fondly addressed by the people close to him, is a not-very-silent witness to personal and political realities he is unable to fully grasp.  His beautiful yet ‘ill’ mother is an enigma; so is his businessman father who suddenly goes away without informing him. Then there are others – friends, neighbours, and acquaintances – whose lives are inextricably tied to his own: Moosa, Nasser and several others, including his friend and next door neighbour Kareem and his father Ustath Rashid.

Suleiman is puzzled and deeply hurt by the events that unfold, and he reacts to them in ways that only a child is capable of. In the end, he too bears the brunt of an uprising gone wrong in the world of adults.

In the Country of Men is also a story of love – the love of a nine-year-old son for his mother. She who condemns Sheherzadie of One Thousand and One Nights for choosing the life of a slave over death. Suleiman’s love for his mother is complex, often inexplicable even to himself. He longs to protect her from her own past, from all the men who seem to run her life. Yet there are times when he is filled with anger and hatred towards this self-absorbed woman with secrets he can’t bear to be privy to.

If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by a person, like light off a mirror, for me that person was her. There was anger, there was pity, even the dark, warm embrace of hate, but always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love. 

In the Country of Men certainly has its moments. Poignant ones. Some as beautiful as the Mediterranean sea and sky they evoke. And there are words that linger even after you close the book and put it away.

I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss. (…) How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if we hadn’t got in the way, if only we had waited to see what might have become of us.

So it goes, Matar’s narrative, which effectively conveys Suleiman’s love, loneliness, bewilderment and misplaced anger to the reader, while highlighting the pervading sense of the fear and anxiety that stems from Libya’s political climate of the time. The unease that Suleiman feels is also the reader’s.

I have to admit though that I was left feeling a little dissatisfied, especially towards the end, when the story suddenly seems to fragment, dissipate. There are  paragraphs that felt disjointed and rushed, pages I sought more from. When I turned the last page and closed the book, I couldn’t help but feel that the narrative stopped just short of achieving something. Poetry, perhaps. Or something equally vague.

Or perhaps the fault lies in my expectations.

For a while now, I had been reading more about books than books themselves. My desk and bookshelf are full of half-read fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  Sometimes I feel as if the summer has a vice-grip on my soul, not allowing me to focus on anything. ‘In the Country of Men’ is, in truth, the first book I have completed in many weeks. And I feel a sense of release – as if a dark spell has been broken. As if the ennui, the listlessness, will soon begin to ebb, like the heat outside. In that sense, I do have a lot to be grateful for. To Hisham Matar’s Man Booker Prize-nominated book.

 

Dragonflies in the Air

This morning, there are dragonflies in the air.

I woke up to those words. They were there, inside the warm sheets, hovering between me and my sleep. Nudging me awake. Gently, persistently. I wish I knew what they meant, those words. I wish I could read dreams.

But then, I don’t remember dreaming of dragonflies. I just remember the words. And they didn’t come in my dreams. They woke me up.

This morning, there are dragonflies in the air. Just words. Without a speaker or a context.

When I was a child, I remember my mother peering at the heavy, grey-green-and-brown sky above our front yard and telling me: See how dragonflies are flying low? It’s going to rain! Come inside! And I would stand there, looking up at them, listening to their glassy wings, waiting for the rain. Wondering whether they were flying low because it was going to rain, or it was going to rain because they were flying low.

This morning, there are dragonflies in the air.

But I’m in a city now. A desert city. In the summer. With a pale, cloudless, dragonflyless sky stretched endlessly outside my window. High above the sand, the cars, the buildings and the few brave trees. Out of reach of us, little people.  There are no dragonflies in the air. Never been.

In my living room, a painting. The result of a six-hour lesson on acrylic painting years ago. Where everything is a deep blue. The water, the sky, the sun, the people… Even the pink of the lotus is blue. In there, just above the flowers are a couple of dragonflies. Blue ones.

This morning, there are dragonflies in the air.

 

Of Gods Past and Present

When I was a child, gods were everywhere.

My mother would spend most of her waking hours with them – chanting prayers, singing hymns, preparing things for pooja or performing it. The pooja room of my tharavad (ancestral home) had a million – or so it seemed – framed images and statues of gods, with the central position given to my mother’s Krishna statue. Our backyard was under the supervision of Ayyappa and the many Sarpas (serpent gods), from whom we often borrowed space to play in the afternoons. 

Our family and its property was remotely protected by goddess Kali; the former by Chitturamma who lived a few kilometres away, and to whom we proclaimed undying slavery every year in the form of a coin placed on a brass sword. Another Amma, who lived in the middle of the paddy fields and demanded an annual pooja, guarded the latter. No one like a mother to take care of her family! 

When we bathed, it was either in the pond that was part of the Krishna temple next door, or the one near the Shiva temple a little further. Either way, a visit to the temple was mandatory at the end of each hour-long bath.

Gods were quite demanding, back then.

Our next door neighbour, as I said, was Krishna (the blue one who played flute and teased women, and was generally a cool dude as gods went). We kids gathered every evening at the temple, gossiped, skipped rope, played hide and seek and giggled at secrets. We prayed too, but mostly in times of emergency; an impending exam, for instance, brought out all our latent piety. 

Whenever we lied or cheated, we would silently appeal to him for forgiveness, swearing that we would never do it again. Until next time.

We would often bribe him too – three extra laps around the temple, two incense sticks, a banana… And most of the time he would oblige. I remember how he breathed life into Amitabh Bachan after his accident on the set of Coolie, just because my friend Vimala had offered to light a whole packet of camphor if he (Amitabh, of course) lived to tell the tale. She had been in tears for days, and as our friend and neighbour, he (Krishna) could not turn his back on her request now, could he? 

Gods were generous, back then.

The nuns in the school I went to – Vijaya Matha Convent English Medium Girls High School, Chittur, the only convent school in the radius of 10 kilometres – brought Jesus and Mary into my life. I remember how I had taken an intense liking to ‘Samayamaam rathathil njaan…’ (little knowing at the time that it was a funeral song) and would sing it at the drop of a hat each time someone asked me to. My pretty PT teacher in grade two was my biggest fan, and the huge smile on her face each time I sang it loud and clear for her used to be my biggest reward. 

We had in our class a girl called Beena who would fast during Ramadan. I secretly admired her determination to not even sip water, though I could not understand why she did it. It used to worry us, her classmates, that she turned all pale and near fainting by the end of each day, and we would be eager to support her in all possible ways. I don’t remember if Shani used to fast, but it was from her that I learned to pronounce Bismillahi Rahimani Rahim properly. I was so proud when she told me that I now knew Qur’an, which was a good thing. 

Gods were good things, back then.

I also remember the metre-tall lunch box that Shani’s mother used to send with the driver every afternoon, from which came out the most divine mutton cutlets and biriyanis I had ever tasted. (My lunch box usually had rice and eggs in varied forms, a meal that got a little unappetising over the years.) The best school lunches in my memory were the ones that Shani, Sheeba and I had shared, sitting on the floor of the landing next to the locked terrace door of the school building. 

Later in college, Nazir would bunk classes till lunch break so he could bring steaming hot pathiri and chicken curry his mother had made for his ‘college gang’. After lunch, we would all gather around Henry listening to him sing ‘Nilaave Vaa…’ for the nth time, good-naturedly indulging our – Honey’s and mine – repeated requests for Tamil songs. I would pester Henry for the meaning of the lyrics, and Praveen, Nazir and Anand would tease me mercilessly for that, chorusing ‘and that means…’ at the end of each line. Subramanian would intervene with words of wisdom and common sense, and all would be well. 

In my Bombay days, I used to seek sanctuary in the pews of St Thomas Cathedral near Flora Fountain on Saturdays after work before heading back to my hostel. My most intimate conversations with god would happen there, below the high-arched ceiling, under the marble eyes of the bas-relief angels that adorned the walls.

One day I admitted to the priest there that I tended to address Jesus as Krishna in my prayers, and he reassured me that He wouldn’t mind. Later, when I told him I was getting married, the elderly Father advised me to make sure that I retain my own individual bank account – not just share one with my future husband. It was important, he told me, that women were financially independent. I folded my hands and bent before him. He drew a cross on his chest and blessed me with closed eyes.

Gods were fluid back then.

They kept us separate, but did not divide.

Then came men with metal rods and plastic bombs. And gods are not the same anymore.

***

Photo: St Thomas Cathedral, Bombay – Marble Bas-relief (courtesy https://playingwithmemories.com)

The Weight of Unread Words and Other Things

My loyal, middle-aged MacBook is full to the brim with words. Words written, half-written and barely written. Words read, unread and forgotten. Words in worn out kurtas and saris, with unkempt hair and tired eyes. Words that cut in, overshare and bore. Words that hesitate by the doorway, unsure.

There are also those polysyllabic words in overpriced, uncomfortable jackets and shoes, attempting to get it just right for the client – press releases, speeches, speaking points, message houses, crisis communication manuals, so on and so forth that were done during my tenure as content writer in Dubai.  

I’m not going into the latter, though. The content writer part, I mean.  It’s a life I’ve put behind, and now rests uneasily in the large crowd of other lives I’d put behind. The life I’m living now is mostly one of clothes, paper patterns, anatomy and psychology – and a perpetual need to sell. It consumes me in a way that only a person who has lived the struggles of starting a business on a tight budget can understand. 

The former, however, refuses to lie low. Every so often, snippets of prose and poetry appear out of nowhere and frown at me accusingly. My laptop randomly shows me, while searching for something else, the title of a text I had written ages ago. Yesterday, at a wedding, someone I was meeting for the first time asked me if I write. Apparently, I look the part. Which secretly pleased me, and not just because I’ve always been told that I look like a teacher.   

My dreams/nightmares last night were understandably dotted with people asking me if I write. Or wrote. Or will write. When I woke up, I remembered that I do/did/will. The ‘Work In Progress’ folder in my laptop can vouch for that. 

There are stories in there that started out short but ended up long and meandering. There are paragraphs of thoughts that insisted on becoming words. There’s a longish document titled ‘Fragments’ which has – well – fragments of poetryish prose, and another titled ‘In Verse’ which has longer bits of similar stuff. And then there are three super long texts (countless versions of the same) tentatively titled (in reverse chronological order) Grief Is No stranger, You and Me, and Lesser Lives/Under a Sleepless Sun. 

The latter is a five-times-rewritten-work-in-progress with a back story. Loosely based on what I heard and saw during my initial tenure as a language teacher to adults of varied nationalities in an institute in Dubai, it’s about chaiwallas, teachers, housemaids, executives, escorts and others whose lives I had unwittingly been a part of, in my capacity as their language trainer. The stories they shared while learning to speak in English were humbling and heartbreaking at once, and I had to write them down.

I had ambitiously approached a young agent-editor (back in 2010 or thereabouts) who assured me they were stories worth publishing, but then took me for a nice, long ride. I was parted with my money in the name of editing charges, asked to write a short story for an anthology which the publisher who was going to publish my novel was publishing, and then not so gently told that I’d have to wait for my novel to see the light of the day. Wait till kingdom come, basically. Or until I called off the contract – which was what happened finally. 

Naivety sucks, really. 

Although, to look on the bright side, the experience wasn’t a total waste. I came across a few decent reviews of my short story (which, in thirteen years, has fetched me exactly one cheque of INR 2500/-), a more realistic view of my own capabilities (or lack thereof), and a lifelong wariness about anyone who calls themselves a literary agent, young or otherwise.  

As for the rest, no soul except yours truly has laid eyes on ‘You and Me’ yet, but Grief Is No Stranger is different. Two of my very dear friends have read the first and second drafts of my self proclaimed magnum opus and given me their comments and suggestions. They ask me every so often if I have had any progress with getting it published, and I very truthfully tell them I haven’t. I’m too busy making a living. Always been. Always will be, from the looks of it.

Like they say, there’s no rest for the wicked!

Now my worry is, what if I never manage to publish anything at all? Do I die carrying the weight of all these unread words?

Writing, some say, is its own reward. But tell me, is there a writer born who doesn’t want to be read? How am different from them?

So this is what I’ve decided. Since I have all these bits of writing lying around, and since I may never find a publisher, I’ll just use the internet (in the form of my blog/social media) to reach out. Even if I’m read by one person, that’s one reader more than I already have.

Life has humbled me enough to appreciate that.

On that note, here’s sharing some snippets from ‘Fragments’, written years ago.  For whatever they’re worth.

P.S. Your comments are welcome. Just don’t be too cruel. 

The Wonderful Cave Temples of Badami

Sudeesh Yezhuvath travels extensively, and documents his wanderings in images and words through his blog, ‘Kaazhchakal’. The haunting images he captured of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp have been exhibited across many Indian cities under the title ‘Yours Is Not to Reason Why’.

Sudeesh is also a dear friend who has more faith in my writing that I do most of the time, and such forms a substantial part of my support system.

Here’s sharing his post on Badami Caves – some stunning images woven together with an engaging narrative. A real treat for someone whose travels are now restricted to the vicarious!

Kaazhchakal

Pattadakkal and Badami have been on my list of places to visit for a long time and after the unprecedented and completely unanticipated experience of the world shutting down, I thought a road trip was in order and set out from Bangalore on the afternoon of the first day in October. After a rather long drive that involved torrential rains and me losing my way, I eventually arrived at Badami. This is a very small town with limited options for accommodation and completely centred around the attractions such as the Cave Temples, Fort, Mahakuta Temple and Banashankari Temple.

Badami is located in Bagalkot district in Karnataka and was the capital of the Chalukya dynasty between the 6^thand 8^thcenturies AD. It was known as Vatapi at that time and there are some inscriptions that show that King Pulakeshin-I made some fortifications on the hill nearby, in the…

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All It Takes Is a Song

 

 

The inside of my head is a strange land. I’ve known that for long.

An alien habitat with its own lifeforms, separate from the body it occupies. The landscape can change from green and sunlit to dark and desolate (or bright, blinding and arid, for that matter) in mere seconds. Sometimes, little eddies of something brown and dusty rise like ghosts, only to fall back, leaving behind a faint taste of something bilious on my tongue.

Who knows what lies hidden in the craters and crevices. The last thing I need is an implosion. So on most days, I tread with caution. Sometimes, though, caution is not enough. 

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Sunday evening, in an auditorium that’s slowly filling up. Making good use of the kind invite to a music programme from my colleagues in Mathrubhumi.

Unni Menon on stage, accompanied by a group of skilled artists on various instruments. The collective atmosphere is mellow, happy, and full of expectations. It’s not everyday that Kochi gets to enjoy a live performance of melodies from a long gone era.

Outside, cu-nims must be gathering, but inside the auditorium, it is nostalgia that hangs thick, undaunted by the glaring LED lights that an ambitious stage manager has chosen for the evening.

“This is one of my personal favourites,” Unni Menon announces. “Thozhuthu madangum sandyayumetho… From 1984, at the beginning days of my career. Lyrics by ONV, music composed by Shyam – for the movie Aksharangal, written by MT Vasudevan Nair and directed by I.V. Sasi.” He goes on to share an anecdote about how the song came to his credit.

I turn to Seema sitting on my left, excited. I love that song! She nods in agreement.

Thozhuthu madangum sandyayumetho
Veethiyil marayunnu…
Eeran mudiyil ninnittittu veezhum
Neermani theerthamaay…

His silken voice is a caress. I hum along tonelessly.

Suddenly something sears through my head. I scrunch my eyes as the world around me falls away like broken window glass.

I’m no longer where I am. I’m somewhere on the other side of thirty seven years.

A girl in pale blue davani is walking down the path that meanders past spent paddy fields in varying shades of brown and beige. Her steps are slow, deliberate – as if she is trying to stretch time to its limits. 

Thozhuthu madangum sandyayumetho
Veethiyil marayunnu…
Eeran mudiyil ninnittittu veezhum
Neermani theerthamaay…

The song plays in a loop inside her head.

For no reason, her eyes and nostrils sting. She quickly looks around. Not a soul in sight, she notes with relief, except for a grey cat that looks back at her with utter disdain before traversing the narrow canal by the side of the path in one smooth leap. She watches as it make its way past the tall, browning reeds, towards where houses are.

The tears she had held back flow down her cheeks freely, secure in the knowledge that there’s no one watching her, baiting her.

Pazhaya kovilin sopaanathil
Pathinjoreenam kelkkunnu…
Athiloru kalloliniyozhukunnu…
Kadambu pookkunnu…

At a distance, beyond the fields, beyond the un-tarred road, beyond the sprawling banyan tree at the edge of the village pond, the sun is a large red dot on the forehead of the sky. A single note from a brass bell announces that the poojari of the Shiva temple has started his evening rituals.

The gentle evening breeze carries a hint of an errant, untimely rain.

Once it rains, everything will turn green, she thinks inanely. There will be grass and weeds everywhere, dotted by tiny, intricate flowers in white-yellow-red-purple-magenta. Only the narrow spine of the trail, defined by millennia of footfalls, will remain bare.

Will she be around at the time?

Did she even want to?

Ivide devakal bhoomiye vaazhthi
Kavithakal mooli povunnu…
Athiloru kanyaahrudayam pole
Thaamara pookkunnu…

Will she ever sit by the edge of the lotus pond again? 

She paces herself to the beat of the song in her head, suddenly eager to soak herself up to the neck in the cool, green water of the pond.

Dalangalil…
Etho nombara thushara kanikakal
Thulumbunnu…

Water is the solution to everything. Water is what will wash away the sweat, dirt and shame of lifetimes.

A sense of calm descends with the setting sun and wraps itself snugly around her. She smiles. Almost. 

Thozhuthu madangum sandyayumetho
Veethiyil marayunnu…

Unni Menon’s voice forces its way back into my consciousness. I blink back the singeing pain as a shard of yellow light flashes past my eyes.

Yes. I’m still in the auditorium with its music, lights and nostalgia… still sitting between two people who have known me for decades. The singer on the stage is humming the final notes of the song. 

It’s the song that’s ending, not the world.

The throbbing in my head starts to abate, its place taken by a vague sense of unease that heightens with each passing minute.
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Four days of being on the edge, ready to break down at the drop of a hat. Followed by an excruciatingly painful flare up that has left me limping and fatigued. All because of a razor-sharp memory that was not even particularly painful.

Yes. The mind is a strange land. A rough, sometimes hostile, terrain. With, maybe, a landmine or two lurking. Waiting for an unsuspecting foot to land on it.

And sometimes, all it takes is a song.

The Straightest Route Home

I was twenty-one when I boarded the train, the one that took me from Olavakkode Junction to Bombay VT (now Palakkad Junction and Mumbai CST respectively). A month over twenty-one, to be exact. I was travelling with a bunch of neighbours from Nalleppilly, my hometown some fifteen kilometres off Palakkad town. My neighbours were visiting their extended families, an annual affair, and I was— What was I doing?

Running away from the black despair into which I was sinking deeper and deeper with each breath? Or dutifully stepping into the mantle of the one who should ‘finish studies, get a job, and take care of the family’? Both, I guess. I had grown up hearing ‘Nee valuthaayi joli kitteettu venam…’ The list that followed was long: look after my mother, pay back the small and big debts that had accumulated, build a house… So on and so forth. 

Hope was what awaited at the end of the thirty-six hour journey. Hope was the job I would get in the big city. Hope was the money I was going to make – which would  help me look after my mother, pay the debts, build the house… So on and so forth. 

Hope was also a thousand miles between me and the ghosts of a past that rose up from their graves every so often and took me to edge of the abyss. 

When I boarded that train, I had left behind everything that I had known for the fragmented two decades of my life. The corridors and shadows of our tharavad which had been my refuge, the trees and the deities in the backyard, the Krishna temple next door and the pond nearby where, every evening, I washed away the pain of a day’s living…

I had left behind my books, the pebbles I had gathered from the river that bordered the college where I did my graduation, some peacock feathers that someone gave me, a rose I had kept pressed between the pages of the large hardbound account book that had belonged to my grandfather, and some glass marbles with air bubbles trapped in them.

I had also left behind all the faces that were familiar – my friends and neighbours, my extended family, and my mother: the only constant factor in my life thus far.

With me were my clothes, certificates, and a couple of books that I couldn’t bear to part with. I don’t exactly recall taking my small tape recorder, but I must have. Because I remember sitting on a park bench in my Bombay neighbourhood and listening to Yesudas and Mohammad Rafi on the loop.

My train had reached Bombay thirteen hours late that time, which must’ve been symbolic. Of what, I still don’t know.

I did not know then that the trauma I was trying to escape had travelled with me – quietly, slyly, without showing itself. That it would lie low, waiting for the right time to pounce. It took me long years to learn that keeping the beast at bay is a struggle lived one moment at a time.

For the next two years I lived with my relatives – my aunt, uncle and cousins – in a single bedroom apartment partitioned further to accommodate the people who lived there. I lived with them, and partook of their space, meals, sometimes clothes, and almost always their generosity. We laughed together often, sang together on occasion – but if we cried, we did so separately, away from each other. I wept on a park bench, out of sight of prying eyes. Or in the solitude of the bathroom as I washed my clothes. I don’t know about the others.

Space is the most expensive thing in any big city, and more so in what is now Mumbai.  So I was grateful for the wooden bench in the kitchen which was often my bed. And for the occasional luxury of sleeping in the corner by the window, next to the dresser.

It took me two months to get the first job, and after that I changed so many jobs that I lost count. Receptionist, typist, sales assistant, accounts assistant, statistical assistant – you name it. A fresh graduate from remote South India couldn’t have been a chooser, you see. Especially when she was as needy as me. 

The one thing that kept me going, despite, was the small amount of money I was able to send home every month. I was, after all, fulfilling my divine duty – that of being my mother’s keeper.

Just when I thought advertising was going to be my chosen field of work, I landed the dream job – of being a clerk-typist in a nationalised bank. And there I was, finally getting to live my family’s dream!

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Everything runs out, eventually. Space, water – even kindness, beyond a point.

Moving into a hostel was a relief, in a sense. But it also stretched my limited resources thinner. Breakfast and dinner came with the stay, though the former barely sufficed  to break the fast. The hostel also gave lunch on Sundays, but during the week, we had to arrange for our own. The lady who came to clean the rooms agreed to provide a modest lunch five days a week, plus a glass of milk in the mornings – we could pay her on a monthly basis. On Saturdays, we had to find some our source of lunch. Most of us from Kerala bought it from a Malayali family in the neighbourhood. For five rupees, they would give rice, curry and vegetable, and for those who wanted it, a piece of fish. 

As my own living expenses increased, so did the demands from home. So I made do with the clothes I had, begged off the outings my friends planned, and walked across Azad Maidan instead of taking the bus from VT to Churchgate. A ‘half-lassi’ under the Chembur railway bridge became a rare luxury, as did the bright orange oranges from Ratnagiri that sold for rupees two a piece. Eventually, I learned to make do with a cup of kadak chai and a banana on some of the Saturdays. 

Hunger became my companion. It gnawed at the pit of my stomach, constantly demanding attention. And with it came something else, something unexpected – the longing to go ‘home’. It would start of as a stray, fleeting memory, and then grow into something with tentacles which dug into my stomach. 

For some reason, whenever I was hungry, I longed for home. And whenever I was homesick, I felt starved. The two feelings fed off each other and grew as one. And when I fell ill, whenever I fell ill, it would wrap itself around me and choke me until I sobbed in pain.  

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I’ve lived in many cities since. And each time, whenever the city loomed too big, bright and loud, I would long for the quiet shadows of home. Even when I knew that home was just an idea, a fragmented one that existed only in my head.  

Maybe there is a Pacific Salmon in all of us. A gleaming, writhing thing that compels us to go back in the end. Back to where we were spawned. Maybe that’s why we head back home on bare feet when fear and hunger hit us. Even when we know we may never reach. Maybe that’s also why railway tracks beckon us – because they show us the straightest route home. We walk on those tracks until we fall asleep on them, too exhausted to hear the speeding goods train that doesn’t give a damn. 

Because we long to reach home, regardless.

As for me, it took three years, a strong enough reason, and the support of some wonderful people – but I did board the train homeward that time. I had a second class upper berth that was mine for the trip, along with enough water, puris and fried bitter gourd that some kind friends had packed for me. I had a book with me which I was too exhausted to read, and kind co-passengers who woke me up dutifully at mealtimes. I did reach ‘home’ in the end. 

As you can see, I was/am one of the privileged. One of those who survived to tell the tale some three decades later. From home. Home.

Unlike so many others.

 

 

 

*Image via an article in Huffpost

Where rivers meet

shoes 'n ships

  …to continue the notes of a first-time pilgrim

Sokanasini

October 5 – 10, 2015

A river runs through it – the college where I did my graduation. ‘Sokanasini’ they call her. As in ‘the one who ends grief’.

I had spent some of my happiest hours there, by her banks, with some of the finest people I have known in my life. My friends who did better than all the king’s soldiers and all the king’s men in putting me together.

The river was my friend too. I had sat in contented silence on her banks, hidden from the world by teak and acacia trees, dreaming impossible dreams. We, my friend Honey and I, had talked, laughed, read poetry and shared secrets as only the very young could have. We had waded through the weeds to sit on rocks, sighing as her gentle waters caressed our feet. At such times, I had almost believed that all was well with…

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Notes from Kedarnath, Lord of the Mountains

Three years to the day since I wrote this. Maybe it’s time to revisit those memories…

shoes 'n ships

October 7, 2015

A twilit afternoon. The sunlight that accompanied our chopper all the way from Phata abandons us just as we step down on the tarmac. The air is different here – crisp, blue and bitingly cold. Mountain peaks that appeared a friendly green from the helicopter loom intimidatingly dark from ground level, their tips lost among thick white clouds rapidly turning grey.  At a distance, you see the temple, Kedarnath, lord of the mountains – grey, ancient, majestic, aloof… and one with nature. 

A moment later it begins to drizzle – large, ice-cold drops that fall with searing randomness on exposed skin.

Despite the noise and presence of hundreds – vendors, visitors and officials stationed here – there is a prevalent silence, a solitude that urges you to speak in hushed tones. You look around in awe, suddenly, acutely aware of your own insignificance in the grand scheme of…

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Notes of a First-time Pilgrim: the Beginning

Revisiting a four-year-old trip. Because sometimes one needs to remember.

shoes 'n ships

The Himalayas as I saw it

What is it that drives a person to attempt the seemingly impossible? To step over the boundaries of their small world and venture into what can only be described as a previously unthinkable course of action?

What made me gather my non-existent time and resources, pack my bags, leave my family behind and head to the Himalayas with a group of strangers…? 

There is no answer, really. Or if there is one, it is complex. So complex that I can’t begin to comprehend it myself. 

Let’s just say that there were ghosts that needed to be laid to rest.

This earth, this beautiful earth…

Maybe it was time, as they say?

Or perhaps the Himalayas decided to be merciful to someone who urgently needed to quieten the chaos in her head, before it swallowed her whole…

The latter, most definitely… Yes. For without that…

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