Christmas at Avittom Road.

It is Christmas night and I am home.

It feels good to be here.

At the place where I have lived 21 years of an uneventful life.

Uneventful but emotionally turbulent, where my mind, thoughts and foundations for many beliefs were laid in stone between childhood and adolescence.

We moved to Avittom Road when I was four and around the age when I discovered the joys of day dreaming. There was a world I would enter into, when out of pure boredom, I pretended to be someone else and somewhere else. It was a very easy escape into this other world I concealed from everyone around me.  In my father’s study, that was scattered with Aviation Weekly, I would pretend to inside a rocket. I’d just had my first trip to the space to see an adaptation of the Mohanlal movie Manjilvirinjapookal. Mohanlal terrified me and I was too young to understand anything or illiterate to read the subtitles, but it was easier to fill in the blanks with my imagination.  A habit that hasn’t died even today. I understand a book perfectly, but I love to supplement it with my own fantasies. And one that doesn’t stop with books.

Dreams, imagination, fantasies a large part of childhood and as I grew I learnt to conceal my wanton passions with prudence.

Its full moon tonight.

I love the Moon and almost fantasize as its twin. Moon’s emotions run very deep and so its scars. She can easily dominate; passionately love but nonchalantly withdraw to create the deepest darkness ever. One who has been touched by the moon can ever be the same. 

 

The terrace, as we call it is very well unkempt with leaves from the teak trees all over.. a natural littered sight; warming my heart most unexpectedly. The gentle breeze playing with my hair, the breath of the dry leaves, and chimes I can hear from the church afar; Tonight I need no wine to draw the prose from my veins.  The stars are more intimate to me from the skies of Avittom Road than they are at Buhaira Corniche.   Here, the stars hug me tight in their arms with the brightest twinkle whilst I have to beg for a solitary gaze at the corniche.  Homecoming indeed!

But like the full moon tonight I know this state of mind will soon wane. I won’t be at home here as the sun sets into my eastern horizon tomorrow. Why can’t I be constant? I sometimes wish for a mind without thoughts. That will remain forbidden to me. Long back I realized, that some people are either a storm or a drought. Never in-between. Intense and insane by nature.  You are reading the thoughts of one such person. Some people are never intrinsic.  Not for a moment am I righteous in either attributes, however I in my view the latter are lighter hearted, the happier lot. The endless chatter of my friend Zainab, whom I have difficulty in paying attention to reminds me of how blessed they are.

When I was twelve, my sixth-grade English class teacher narrated her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Years later, I discovered that adaptations differed.  Romeo and Juliet as adapted by Shanti teacher left a storm in my mind. Age 11 when thoughts deep rooted that someday I’d meet my own Romeo. I’d marry him and I would love him with the same passion and intensity as Juliet. The fact that their marriage lasted fewer than three days before they both were dead didn’t seem to affect my fantasy. Even if they had lived, I don’t think their relationship could have survived. Let’s face it, being that emotionally aflame, sexually charged, and transcendentally eloquent every single second can really start to grate on a person’s nerves. However, my quest towards to a perfect Romeo will never cease, not in this life time. My live and its loves would probably achieve another dimension should I find someone to love just a fraction of the way that Montague loved Capulet.   

The warmth of Moon’s embrace sends a chilling shiver through my legs reminding me of the loosely clad night clothes. Why do people settle for less? I realize that people stay in a relationship because they want to avoid crucial and lifetime decisions about children, money and property. Since these decisions have to be made at a time when one is most vulnerable their own relationship in the marriage is of least importance during the life time after marriage.  Settling for a mediocre than the brilliance of quicksilver, the latter choice being rarest of rare, equivalent to hanging oneself. I mean hanging one's physical self !

I intend to visit my grandmother’s house tomorrow about 250 kms away another state, a different soil, another air.. I know the visit will bring only sorrow to see the decline of my ancestral home caught in an enduring legal dispute and to see the place where I spent many summers reading on top of haystack in the cowshed, crumble away. Property - a piece of land in this earth, owned in reality by everyone and yet one and the significance of which is attached in terms of man’s monetary value, the futility of which many fail to discover in a life time. The visit will bring me one step closer to reality, one step closer to choosing a mediocre life, I hope.

My daughter shrieks at her top note to find if I am there; shaking me from my melancholy romance with the moon and rudely transporting me back to territorial reality of a single mother … 27 and half days and until then Bid Adieu, my mate : my Moon.

Number 21 – Madras Mail

Part One

 

A recent conversation I had with my friend transported me to a time from my previous life, or so it seems to me now as a space from previous life. 

 

My Chennai days. It seems so very long ago!

 

Two decades are not as antediluvian in the scheme of time and that of life generally. But a reflection today, amidst life revolving around two kids below age of 10, a full time career, aging parents, upcoming divorce, dreams some of them shattered and others lived wiser, the two decades ago appears to me as a time from another lifetime.

I was 21 when I arrived in Chennai in June 1998.  Bright, young, naïve starry dreams that solely a 21 year old mind is entitled to patent. I had done well in my exams, interned in Vienna, represented international moot court, engaged to be married and my fiancée was in Dubai.

The world was at my feet!

 

That was the time I was working towards enrollment at Bar and slogging at one of the reputed, underpaid, overworked law firms in south India.  My apprentice involved endlessly going through the library doing research work for the senior lawyers who if given an opportunity would ogle at my breasts or try to tell me how miserable they were with their wives or how rich they were. If I were as evidently unimpressive as I actually was I was subject to a lot of ridicule in my work.  Having bred in a nun convent system, I took to ridicule as fish to water. Ridicule, nominally amusing but really an expression of hostility, was their favourite weapon—the worst possible, short of actual cruelty, in dealing with young people as the nuns had shelled out to us most magnanimously in our developing years. 

 

It was during this period that a colleague introduced me to All India Radio.  I wasn’t keen at first.  It did not appear as exciting as a VJ stint I had done previously for Asianet but had failed miserably due to my non-singing abilities.  But I took it on at her insistence and never looked back for the 18 months I was in Chennai.

 

I started off reading out a part for a Tamil play which required an English accent for 150 rupees per day and quickly moved on to reading four drama parts in a week; an interview and a few other roles too earning 500 rupees per week which was enough to sustain my newly acquired unscrupulous ways ie not sticking to hostel food; movies; telephone calls to Dubai and everything else to the extent that a South Indian girl would imagine herself to do. I must have been relatively good looking as I recall having ardent admirers all over and the surroundings at this place was no particular exception. Whenever I made mistakes, which was very often, my mentor a man in his late 40s always took my side and quickly either covered me or edited my slurs.  During this short span of time I learnt the merit of interpersonal skills over intelligence, became popular and was offered a permanent employment which I felt was like a sword over my rightful career.

 

For and during the ten hours starting at 7 am, the lawyer worked logically, methodically and as I learnt to bill and the nuances on the art of time sheet; research; draft petitions; file; stick stamps; running around to notary public. It struck and quite alarmingly on my 21 year old underdeveloped logical mind that, work outside mathematical logic, does not and need not always completely represent one’s own beliefs or one’s general outlook.  It was a startling revelation at that time! This was my career and I am doing the right thing, I constantly reminded myself during my hours of struggle. When wasn’t the right thing, painful?, I consoled myself during my hours of humiliation at the lawyer’s office.  

 

All the while, impatiently I would wait for the clock to strike 5 pm in order to rush to take a bus to AIR which was around 20 minutes from my work place. The world which had been thin and logical in the preceding hours, suddenly became rich, varied and solid. Before I knew it, it was time for me to head to the hostel where I had to report before 9 pm. I felt time was never enough at AIR. I also felt shameless earning much more than I did at the lawyers office and chagrined that it was effortless.   I felt I was thieving not working.

 

My Chennai days were lively with AIR, my apprentice, Sunday outings with my hostel mates, days of devouring the smuggled beer into the hostel, shopping at fountain plaza, bargaining at mount road..I transitioned.  I missed the naivety I possessed in my cocoon life for the last 21 years with my most inadvertent revelations.  The girls hostel I lived had a roof top overlooking the beach and as though following the general rule that all good things are to be denied to girls who are not married, we were not allowed to be enter the roof top and it was locked at all times.  The conniving girls that we were, we found a way to squeeze in quite dangerously through the racking window and you had to be extremely thin to do that to enter the roof top. The days we smuggled the beer and the beef we went to the roof top after midnight and spent a lovely hour or two often talking about men or trying to solve someone else’s love story.  My earliest realization that sharing food creates special bonding.  If one side of the hostel was the beach the presidency hostel also had a shallow wooded area, which wouldn’t classify to be a forest, from one of its gates. At the roof top both the views were beautiful and it was during one of the beer-beef-boyfriend full moon night I had the first insight into different shades of sex. While I was standing there and musing at the moon, light headed, I saw a bike with three men stop nearby the woods. They alighted and started raping one man after tying him to a tree who neither seemed to resent the entrapment nor the ensuing sodomy.  Transfixed and speechless I stood, as the rest of my mates soon joined to watch the night show. The guys sensed they had an audience and quickly exited. Shocked at my unintended exposure to homosexuality, I was consoled by my more knowledgeable friends that night with more gruesome stories, possibly a figment of their imagination.  However, for me, it was a period of startling revelations.

 

But nothing in the world could prepare me for March 1, 1999.

Prayers to Allah.

Ishaa prayers fill my space,

Resonate with the Imaam ,

Praying with such fortitude,

Granted only by abstinence.

 

My kids cling to me,

Little Stars that need no light,

Yet they pucker to moon ,

Cast off they are from Sun.

Goodnight mother! They say;

Alarms of struggle and flight,

Clashes upon me with might;

As Imam delivers Tawareeh prayer !

 

Loudly he recites the last rakht

To remind me of the duaa

Al Hasn ibn Ali was rendered solely

For He has decreed verily

There is no refuge from You

Except with You.

 

For many years the Imam’s prayers

Strayed my tears and bestowed strength

Struggled I to fathom what he cried

Some things are like that; you know

it takes pain away no excuse paved

Same are the Imaams prayers 

As I look out to the mosque

Standing in its grandeur

May Peace be with all !

 

It takes a while.

It takes a while to learn

The subtle difference between

Holding a hand and shackling a soul

That love doesn’t mean reciprocity

And company doesn’t always mean security.

 

It takes a while to learn

That kisses aren’t contracts

And promises merely artifacts  

And you begin to accept your defeats

With your head up and your eyes ahead

With the grace of a woman

Not the grief of a child

 

After a while you learn

To build all your roads on today

Because tomorrow’s ground is

Too uncertain for plans

And the futures have a plight

Of falling down stairs mid flight

 

After a while you learn

That even the Sun can shine too brightly

And burn your bones

So you plant your own garden

Instead of waiting

For someone to bring you flowers.

  

After a while you learn

That you really can endure

That you are really strong

And you really do have worth

And you learn and learn

With every lesson you have earned.