My Brother and I

My brother and I

In every possible way

Chalk and Cheese,

That’s what we were

My family was my world

The world was his family.

I abhorred politics,

He thrived on it.

Matters around the world were personal to him

Nothing is ever personal to me.

Together, yet so apart.

When we learnt to speak

I chose my words carefully

His words unabridged emotions.

I never bothered to change anyone, except myself

He brought a change in everyone, except himself

 I chose Law,

Law was after him, he mused.

He chose to be a black sheep

To make me the bell weather

He mocked at me for everything he wasn’t

I admired in him for the courage I could only aspire

I eat quinoa, kale and gymmed

He eat from kethels, buharis and peepis and tipped

I counted calories, he counted on the cook

I strived to look young

He embraced aging

I always wanted more

He was content

He loved people in all shapes and forms

I demanded perfect relationships

His friends his lifeline!

We synced in our differences

Together, we were complete

Love for literature we shared

Every year he ensured to bring upon me a non-English author

To tell me English did not belong to the English

He wanted me to quit the corporate job

And take up writing

So I could copy his ideas and compositions

Which I always did and he never objected

He was critical but proud of my compositions

Promised to find me a publisher

My fighter, my Goonda, my strength

My wishes his commands

Without you, Trivandrum and Avittom Road

And the house we lived will lack the sparkle and vigour

What wont I do, to bring you bring you back?

My NorthStar now manifests cosmically

Yet life will never be the same again

All I know is a part of me is lost

Until we meet in another realm

May he find joy, peace and all answers to his questions.

Impressions

Impressions

It is that time of the year,

My soul strikes a searching tear,

Half of the one-thousand moons have gone by;

It whispers to my ear.

Gone are my forty three ;

To that I woefully agree.

Amidst the pain of infertility and joy of childbirth,

Eons filled with Meetings and Client mirth,

Years wasted in traffic,  

Learning Spanish, Astrology, Contracts and life magic,

To climb a ladder that takes you nowhere,

I have no anguish,

Yet I admit that I am truly time-famished.

As I endeavor the Lessons of Management,

Skills of Leadership to cruise a corporate battle-ship;

Question myself if I want to run the rats race

Breaking the quintessential glass ceilings

And for how many more decades?

Fanciful investments to retire,

If I am lucky, to live in a wheel chair, I aspire.

Mortgage  your liberty and count on  Property,

When none is adept at Immortality;

Can you ever find

A better joke created by human mind?

As I struggle to learn Life’s Lessons,

Stemmed from my youthful indiscretions,

Seeking to survive in this world,

Imprisoned in social expectations,

Defying my imperfections,

I realize that all along I had it all wrong

For Learning ought to be

To be eternally Liberated!

My life, is made new through these confessions

Condemned by Zeus, and in the role of Atlas

I hold my Karma to be true

What I do is often my due 

And as Birthdays go by

Like gathering cobwebs on the shelf

In the past few days I ask myself

If I  have become someone else?

Bramha

Write and Writings

During my childhood and early teen, I loved to write. Many summers were spent writing secret compositions to imaginary lovers who would have been created in my mind largely influenced by the book I read that time. When these were discovered by my sibling and then my father, I endured a lot of  smacking, only for them to conclude that I was stubborn not to reveal the name of the lover who did not exist. My teen years were thus spent reading, writing and discovering emotions in all their variety and unintended consequences. The idea of love and lover has always been more alluring than the real.

I don't know why I haven't been writing my thoughts much these days.  I must have opened a thousand new word documents in the past few months and typed my thoughts as randomly as it flowed. And then, it would inevitably stop after a few paragraphs.

I then read my words and smile at the absurdity of my own words, my ridiculous philosophy and get back to something totally alleviating to the mind of a writer ...called life.

I have been wavering between a deep personal quest for a meaning, a superficial aimlessness, a kind of obscurity than can only come from the desire to write something soul stirring.

When I look at my past writings, I see a person whose wounds are so deep, gripped by a melancholy that seeped in my words like an illness. I see a person with an inability to bear her resignation of her life, its gravity and the pain.


But it was only by writing them, I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity and the problems of life on the periphery. Writing is to acknowledge the secret wound that we carry within us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to explore them, to know them and to own them and to make them a conscious part of our own spirits in our own words.

Today I step back and reflect to the quiet affirmation of life in spite of all I must endure.  Have I become stronger that my mind not needing the writing therapy anymore?  I do not know the answer and I can only hope that my strength would not be detriment to my reflections. 

Acomadador.

June 13.

By that June 13th, I had been married to him for fifteen years, one month and 20 days. And we had been in a relationship for more than two decades. The second Saturday of that June, he walked out on me and walked out of our children, aged 4 and 7. In my mind, I was relieved to see him pack his bags and leave. But the physical dimension sensed something different.

I was sick that day, ill with severe bronchial infection, fever and my body was aching with a temperature of 105 degrees that day.  My body's indication that part of my soul was dying inside, maybe ?  That Saturday morning, I had gone to the clinic all by myself to treat my illness.  I got myself a few painful injections on my butt, and the doctor insisted that I lie down for a while and get IV fluids. I said I had no time to do that and rushed back home. As soon as I got off the taxi my knees wobbled from the antidote injection and the fever and I am not sure how much I paid the taxi, except that the taxi driver was happy. God bless him because he came running after me to return my mobile phone. I can’t remember much after that except falling into my mothers arms when she opened the door, and she walked me and laid me to the bed.

It must have been around noon.

I was delirious with fever and had weird dreams. Acha was talking to me. Acha was shouting at me to stop him. Except for the fact that my Acha, my father in law passed away 18 months ago Acha was so real that Saturday.

Someone opened the door and said that he was leaving. I could only make out a grey cloud, blinded with fever, medication and dreams et all.  But Achas image and voice was  closer to me than the grey cloud. Acha now sounded more authoritative..STOP HIM, Acha screamed.  Acha, you shouldn’t shout like that, it is not good for you. I kept telling Acha. Acha refused to listen. Acha kept trying to push me from the bed, I fell off the bed. My mother came to the room hearing my shuffle and she helped me back to bed. She said just sleep, it’s the fever, I will make Milagu Rasam. In my mothers world Rasam is the magic concoction for fever and for most ailments.  

Acha appeared to be fading and my body ached and burned at the same time. I was having difficulty to breathe normally and wished I would stop breathing altogether. Acha, don't go, let me come with you.. This time Acha was gentle. He said, no its not time for you …you should live mol, he seemed gentle and resigned by then. Get up please this time Acha begged. Wish Acha would let me sleep…and then my bedroom door opened, the grey cloud murmured something and I could hear the sound of trolley bags being dragged.

I am going.

Thanks , I said

I don’t know why I said thanks. It’s the habit.

And went back to sleep peacefully, Rasam untouched.

Achan who was haunting me from sleeping never spoke to me after that day, I have a feeling that Achan went with him and lives with him and I am glad. I slept peacefully without Achan and without  the grey cloud.

I woke up next morning, fever gone and ravishingly hungry and it was then I realized that he had left us.

The first emotion was a huge relief. 

I was relieved, as how much you would be relieved when a cancerous arm is amputated. Do you mourn the arm or rejoice the rest of the body? I chose the latter.

My life is never going to be the same, I concluded. An arm amputed. Anything and everything artificial cannot fully replace it but will do the job.

Nevertheless, I am going to live one less arm. And live happily I decided.

The next day something took over, an explicable surge of strength, because I had decided that I do not want him back in my life ever again. I had experienced a sense of loss, close to death and then survived.  I have grown resilient to it.

I felt grateful . I felt that I had lost something that I loved most dearly and maybe not just this in this life. But for many lives. I felt that karma has ended.  I felt light yet strong. And more importantly  I felt a huge sense of Freedom. Freedom not because he left and that I dint have the commitment, I felt free that I had the ability to commit myself to what was best.

Why am I writing this today ? Three years after he left.

Because ever since that day, I have grown resilient to people leaving me. Resilient to ending relationships. Resilient to friendships and resilient to broken relationships. And now I understand that it is because I have grown past the giving up point. The acomadador or  the giving up point was a term used by Paulo Coelho in his book Zahir.  There is always an event in our lives that is responsible for us failing to progress, a bitter defeat, that can prevent us from moving on.  Like the Shaman who increases his hidden powers, we must free ourselves from that giving- up point, and to do that, I must review and reflect my life, I suppose.  Somedays  you struggle to understand why people leave, why we leave. I think of my acomadador, I think of Acha. I think of what I let out of my door. I think of the vacuum inside my soul that cannot be filled by with all the opium in the world. It makes me smile. It makes me strong - I move on.  People come to your life for a reason. When the reason ends, the season changes. 


As the season changes, close the door, change the song, remove that jumper stop being who you were and discover who you are.

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

Of Ants, Antlions, lizards and crow.

“Stop day dreaming” - Girls who day dream get into trouble, strongly believed my mother pinching my arms bringing me from the dreamy world.

Like most children of age 5 and 6, I always lived in a dream world. Unlike my daughter whose dream world consists of myriads of characters from Disney and toys and movies, my dreamy existence were associations with  ants, bugs, lizards and my all-time favorite antlions or otherwise called Kuzhiyana in local language.  One never had difficulty spotting antlions hiding in the garden and ours was home to umpteen funnels in the sand indicating the presence of the little bugs.  I used to sit with my knees folded, legs behind (a seating position that was then disproved for some totally unrelated possibility of dad incurring debt) watching them religiously and patiently waiting for them to come out so I could swoop them and place them on my hands, much to the disgust of my mother.  I held the belief with my neighbor an equally dreamy boy, that singing to them helps them to come out of their hiding.   So we coined the lyrics together kuzhiyane vaa vaa;  kuzhiyane vaa vaa; paalum pazhamum vannal tharam …. 

Reasonably disgusted at our rendition, it would never show its face until its home was rummaged with our little fingers.  The destruction was saved for the days when I was being shouted to hurry back inside, which then meant I had to take them with me inside my petticoat pockets. To be kept under my bed later.  Hence the rummage. Other days and like most days when my existence was ignored by the weird adults around me, I patiently sat and watched the funnels, humming the song. The slanting funnel in the warm sands, each deeper than the previous one until the entire construction becomes a slippery, cone shaped hole about two inches deep – trap laid for the clueless ants that wander into these clever traps.

Once the Ant-lion makes the slanting funnel in the sand, its victim, the Ant, slides down the slant and is then stoned, from the bottom of the funnel, by the hunter, who turns his neck into a catapult.  There is a lot of activity that happens in the Antlion’s gazebo and you need the microscopic vision, focus and all the time in world abundantly available to a 6 year old who then hated school and the nuns in habits, to understand the antlion’s conspiracy theory early on. There were days that I took the antlions view of things and there were days when the Ant’s held my pity, depending on my mood.  But more often, I was cross with the ants, for falling into the trap over and over again, for not having the foresight to realise what lay in the soft blanket of sand.  Decades later, as I type this I understand that like the ants there are no traps as deadly as the ones you set yourself up for in life.

Often, I left a mark of some sort near the funnel, sometimes a twig or sometimes a flower, hoping to come back from school and continue the conversation or witness the activity which had ended abruptly.  But the little treacherous things they were, almost as if they feared my kathi ( relentless talking), would have moved their trap by the time I came back from school the next day teaching me early on that the traps are never set consistently. 

Inside my home, I had another friend. I was completely besotted by Lizzy the lizard and her family  who also lived with us. Lizzy constantly kept an eye on me, following me even during my private moments, watching me from the ceilings of bathrooms.  Anything that falls from a certain elevation breaks, including humans. I broke many bones as a kid.  I was living proof. But the little lizard was the wonder creature which could never hurt itself when it fell from the walls. How was that even possible ?  Unlike the bugs I had to hide underneath my bed and in my pencil boxes, the lizards were held with much more reverence in our family as it was believed that if they tch tchd whilst humans spoke, it would come true.  But mostly that seemed to be applicable only to whatever my mom said. I tried to convince her that Lizzy my pet had tch tchd that I was not well and had to be kept away from school, albeit on deaf ears. Many hours blissfully passed at me staring at the lizards, whose belly sometimes seemed to hide little baby lizards and they many days they offered me consolation on a bad school day. For a long time I thought that it was lovingly gazing at me and listening to every word I spoke to it in the bathroom.  It was only in 7 th standard I learnt that lizards did not blink and therefore you never knew whether it was gazing at you or not.

For many happy summers, I thought the Lizzy and I were best friends until I realized that I was its  unwitting butler, who brought the antillion inside home every night serving Lizzy’s dinner.  Unknowingly, I was rendering karma to the Antillion  punishing it for its trap by befriending the lizards.  Such is life, you never know how you get caught in the cycle of karma of various things and people who come into your life, knowingly or unknowingly.

And then came my best friend.  The common crow.  There were two varieties known to me during my early childhood days of keenly observing the surrounding wildlife. The crow with a grey patch on its neck and the crow which was completely jet black aka without the  grey patch.  The jet black one was a source of depression  during many days as I then completely believed “ One for sorrow and two for joy” . I would wallow in self pity and misery if I had not spotted two jet black crows and that alone would be reason for me to be depressed the rest of the day. I would search in vain and allowed myself the new rule that spotting the next one within a span of one hour would resolve the misery and bring in joy. It is a wonder that we learn from early days to make the rules and beliefs for sorrow only to emerge from them happier.  My mother had different views about the crows. A crying crow, according to her does not indicate hungry crow but brings bad news.  According to my mom, crows never cried for their food. If food was unavailable, they grabbed or snatched their food and were natural scavengers.  I believed the latter part as many times I was the gullible victim and have seen my toast blissfully carried away in its beak.  Nevertheless, I loved the crows, enjoyed playing the gullible and never resisted the food grab, a habit which got ingrained much into latter part of my life.

The ant trappers (kuzhiyana), the entrapped(ants), the anti-fragile (lizard) and finally the scavenger crow were all my childhood wild life friends teaching me various lessons with their lives.   In hindsight, I believe I should have taken onboard the lessons offered by my wild life friends with the seriousness it actually deserved as opposed to the lessons offered by the nuns with  what that deserved -contemptible mirth.    

 

 

The Final Journey !

It’s Thursday late night or wee hours of Friday morning, as you wish, whichever side you are facing the sun.

I have bid farewell to my chithi’s final journey, heaven bound.

A very beautiful soul.

The transition period from one body to another is supposedly the most difficult time for the departing and for those bidding farewell.  Prayers and rites are marked to ease the transition of energy from one space to another, said my father to me once.  That it was important, we pray and wish the soul happiness for the onward journey .. a peaceful transition.  I don’t know. Sometimes it is easier to believe than to challenge.  If anything, I have understood in these four decades that there are somethings that will always be beyond the challenge of human mind. Death- one such phenomenon.

My Susilamma passed away Saturday morning.  Exactly a week ago, we had spoken and she had encouraged me to find a suitable placement in India so she could come and live with me whenever she needed a break, she had said. I had teased her that Dubai is closer than she thinks and promised to come for the next shopping festival.  She spoke about her 40 day grandson, her own daughter’s temperament, buying a house in Madurai and reminded me to take to the hair salon next time she came to Trivandrum. 

Death was not in the agenda. Not then, not now, nor in the near future. 

Come to think of it, it is never in our agenda unless we are looking for a convenient escape. Even then, Death has its own mind.  My own days are filled with agendas; one structured for the corporate, one for home, one for health and fitness, one for retirement and so on. Those agendas mostly are full of objectives to be achieved in this world. Therefore, we put the death—the inevitable agenda as the last priority. This life is a long journey which will come to an end sooner or later. We all have got a ticket which will take us to a station unknown to us. We do not have an option not to set on a journey.

There was something about my chithi that made everyone in the family feel that they were special to her.  Everyone I know had a special bonding with her. She had the childish innocence about her and was never known to speak harsh.  She would rather be silent but not say words that word hurt anyone.  I always admired the quality of her mild temperament sweet words which could turn into the most abusive language when she was in control of the laborers and their  hundreds of families around her, who lived under them, working as labourers , solving their issues. She owned several match box units in and around sattur.

Her management skills and technical skills will bring an IIT IIM to shame.  She could calculate the quantities or bundles as she called, the cost, the quantities that were unpacked, all while simmering the rasam for her diabetic husband. She would know when someone cheated her, but would chose to ignore most times, telling me that it was the circumstances that made man do that. Just as she was catching a nap, someone would knock her house asking for food, she loved children in all sizes shapes and colors. In a village that was caste creed bound, she would play with a nigger’s child, much to the antagonism of my grandmother. My mother once said she would cry, if anyone in the hostel cried. Compassion was her soul quality.

She blamed me for being unable to complete her studies. I was born when she was 15 and had just finished her schools.  My own mother was nine months away to her 20^th birthday and was too young to tend to two children below the age of two and therefore I was under the care and custody at my grandparents’ house.  My chithi blamed me for turning her life topsy turvy.  I wouldn’t sleep unless it was she who rocked the cradle, I wouldn’t eat or drink unless fed by her. I used to call her amma and my own mother akka, according to her. A fact which my mother never denied.  I have lost the person whom I first called amma and I am shattered.

In many ways I prided that I had 4 mothers. My mother’s three sisters always were at our side when we needed. My pregnancy, mothers illness, any trouble in the family one of them always came. But it was always my susilamma who was the first to rush to come to see me. I could go on and on and it pains me terribly to type her memories. I know I should be happy for her transition. I know that the end marks a celebration of her life. An end to a life lived to love. But, I also know there will be none like her. I miss her. Terribly so.  She has left a hole in a shape where no one else can fit in.

Funny, how it has to take death to summon all the love within to surface.

I couldn’t make out much from the call that came on the fateful Saturday afternoon. I was angry that she had a fall, she was so clumsy so careless.  My mother grumbled that she often forgot her medications.  She had hyper tension.  But not in the wildest dreams, did we think she would have left for the final journey…couple of days short of her 56^th birthday.  Death is a badly timed cruel joke. Period over.

I have to accept that she is no longer living with us, and I will no longer see her giggle childishly, never have her sumptuous food, never be able to sleep on her lap, and never be able to fulfill the promise of Viji’s salon or for the Dubai Shopping festival…I have to find peace in the happy moments that we shared, in the love that she unconditionally showered. Every life has a death and her light has now gone to take care of another darkness.

I once read a Korean story where God weighed souls on a pair of scales. On one is the departed soul and the other the tears of those who wept for the soul at the time of departure. If nobody cries, the soul goes straight down to hell. If there are enough tears and they are sufficiently heartfelt, it is believed to rise to heaven. My Chithi, the one who found joy in all endeavours, even the most mundane is smiling at me from heaven, I am sure.
Death and a journey to funeral and last rites, is one unique phenomenon.  It teaches you the biggest philosophy of living is dying. But the lesson is lost as soon as you are back from the funeral. And to lose that lesson is perfectly normal and acceptable in this mundane life.  We continue to thrive in the certainty of the uncertain and philosophically lament that life has to go on!

My blackberry's cruel ringtone jolts me back into the present. I have to catch up on the myriad of emails that I have not responded for a long time, back to the corporate rat race with super celestial outlook and subterranean conduct, strive to earn those that are denominated valuable by the humans, believing that I will own a space in the world, fully aware of the futility of it all, but not knowing if I will live to live.. and so on until my own end beckons me for the next journey and how many more to go, to that I wearily bow.

When people don’t express they die one piece at a time…allow me her life in my words at least. Good day !

 

From Thee

I arise before the sun can slice,
The darkness of my sleep.
Soon as it slays
the blanket of my dreams,
I whisper to Thee, wherever He may be,
Thank you for whatever you have been
On my unconquerable soul !
Trapped I am, under the circumstance,
Care not to cry or as much wince,
Bloody in my heard but unbowed,
Remains my head abode,
For beyond wrath and tears,
are my Forty years!


You are the master of your fate
And captain of your soul, replied Thee.