If I had a say...

I am called Ruble. I don’t really like my name. If I had a choice, I would have called myself something less mercenary-sounding, like Tao or Buddha. Legend has it that my ancestor was a once-famous St. Bernard in Siberia, and they wanted to preserve my Russianness. They could have called me Dostoevsky or even Rasputin, I wistfully wish. But then, I really had no say in the matter.

My first memories of my childhood (or should I say puppyhood) are about this ridiculously big red bow I wore around my neck on my first trip home. My new owner had just bought me and he had tenderly placed me in a mothball-smelling wicker basket in the back seat of his car. He had miscalculated my size a little bit (by a wide margin rather) and I could barely squeeze in there. Then he flourished a flagrantly red ribbon out of nowhere and tied it quite ineptly round my neck. I must have looked silly trying to attack it with my slobbery mouth because he chuckled and ruffled my head. He gazed at me long with his kind eyes and gave me a hug. I think that must have won my heart. But if I could have had my way, I would have torn off that nasty red ribbon.

I realized soon enough that I was his present to the woman he loved, the woman of his life. I admit I was a bit skeptical initially, I think I am congenitally disinclined towards the opposite sex. But she was beautiful, tender, and so friendly. She declared in our first meeting that she loved me. She won my puppy heart too, and at first sight.

They got married that fall. It was a lavish Indian wedding with parents and relatives especially flown in all the way to LA from India. Cacophony was the theme. I had grown pretty big by then. A short-sighted, bald old man called me a cow. He couldn’t even get the genders right. I sulked. I got in everyone’s way. In retrospect, I think I enjoyed myself; although I would have enjoyed more if that bald old man had called me a bull.

I wish my story ends there with a boring happily-ever-after. But it doesn’t.

Two years went by in a lovers’ haze. Perhaps the headiness of love wears off after some time. Anyway, something went wrong somewhere. It started with arguments – on food, books, friends, parents, culture, bringing up, religion, god, dogs (!!!). I patiently sat through tears and outbursts. Then there were interminable silences, which were more difficult to handle. I said to myself that they still loved me and that was all that mattered to me. Until it struck me one fine day that they did not love each other anymore. If humans could fall out of love with each other, could they fall out of love with a dog? I panicked. I loved them so much.

Time came for that inevitable moving-on-in-life. Divorce was discussed. I hung in there, too sad to even think what would happen to me. Divorce was agreed upon. Was there going to be a custody battle for me? I did hear arguments on that. My vain heart rejoiced for an instant knowing that both of them loved me enough to fight for me. In the end, it was decided that I would stay with her. She would get the house and they did not want to take me away from my home. I was his gift to her after all.

One day, he came to say goodbye. He ruffled my head again and gazed at me long with his kind eyes. There were tears in them this time though. I wished I could cry too. He said he would come and visit me often. And he left. She hugged me and she cried.

If you ask me, they are two good people who used to love each other and who still love me. If you ask me, they could have had a lifetime of happiness, a lifetime of love, a lifetime of me (my lifetime, that is). But then, as with many things else, I really had no say in the matter.

Measuring Love

“I love you all the way to that tree,” my imaginative not-yet-4-year-old told me.

This was our game. We measured love.

“I love you all the way to the topmost branch of that tree,” I retorted.

“I love you all the way to topmost leaf,” she echoed me, with an impish smile.

“I love you all the way to the fluffy white cloud that you see much above the tree,” I wouldn’t give up.

“I love you all the way to that cloud,” she pointed to the red horizon. She has learned this game well.

“I love you all the way to the moon,” I made a mock face at her.

“I love you all the way to the sun,” she made one back.

“I love you all the way to Saturn,” I wouldn’t leave the planets alone.

“I love you all the way to Pluto,” Pluto is her favorite planet. I haven’t had the heart to tell her or myself that Pluto is not a planet after all in the more organized scheme of things. Obscurity is a scary thing.

“I love you all the way to Sirius,” I made a mental note to hone my astronomy knowledge before I play this game again.

“What is Sirius, amma?”

“It is the brightest star in the night sky,” was I becoming pedantic?

“I love you all the way to the shooting star,” she jumped up and down. This was her find.

“Shooting star is nearer to us than Sirius, darling,” I tried explaining.

“What?” She frowned, she didn’t understand.

“Just a bothersome little fact. That is okay.” I consoled her.

“You tell,” she coaxed.

“I love you all the way to – to the end of the Milky Way.” I didn’t think I could keep it up much longer.

She didn’t listen anyway. Perhaps because her little brain could comprehend only so much.

“I love you all the way to the end of the world,” she stated in a well-rehearsed manner. She was ending our little game.

“I love you to eternity,” I concluded with a smile.

“How much is that?” she questioned. She almost started giggling. She knew what was coming.

“This much,” I said as I opened my arms wide, and she rushed in to give me her tightest hug. I tickled her neck with my nose and she chortled and commented on her goose bumps. Amid her kisses, her curls, and her milky breath, funnily enough, I did get a glimpse of eternity.

Love and Life

He was young – not that young to be impressionable, but still exceedingly susceptible to matters of the heart. She was older definitely, but the number of years did not matter, it never matters in these cases. She had a laughter that would tickle your funny bone and your heart equally. She was sweet, kind, and had a dazzling vitality that made her ageless. Was he smitten? There sure were signs of it. Did she reciprocate? Not at first, but all that attention must have surely rubbed off at least some of the prudery that she must have felt.

They worked together. They sat side by side. Although the work was demanding enough to keep them busy through the day, there must have been a silent tension, a closeted anticipation that built up an aura between them, around them. Those who were intuitive enough could feel the vaguest of a tingle on their skin. But there were not many intuitive ones out there. Working in shifts, with an eye on the clock and frantic fingers on the keyboard, we just barely existed. For most of us, life just was, it had no potency to become.

Time moved on. Some of us quit. Some of us stayed. Some of us got married, became pregnant, got divorced. Some of us relocated. The pregnant ones delivered. There were maternity leaves, baby showers, wedding receptions, wedding anniversaries, coffee evenings, hackneyed stories, more work. Did their love bloom? Had there ever been a spark? We were busy honeymooning and changing diapers to notice.

There was a marriage proposal for her. She told us in a whisper when we had all gathered together. “Good for you.” We, the smug married, were proud of her. She was becoming one of us, she was conforming to undefined rules of correctness. But, she did not want to marry the man, she stated quite vehemently. He was too old, too mature. He was not interesting. We were grossly offended. Those were all part of the game called life. We tried to make her understand. But there was a dreaminess to her stubbornness that made us suspicious. Was there somebody else?

Yes, of course there was.

That was okay. We were all broadminded enough to accept that. Was he somebody we knew? Yes. With cold deliberateness, we wheedled out his name from her and then gasped at the apparent outrageousness of it. He was too young, we argued. She was too old, we claimed. We didn’t care whether we hurt her sensibility. It should never happen. She would be unhappy the rest of her life. We poked, we prodded. We raved, we ranted. We wove ethics. We wore morals. We planted a seed of confusion in her mind, a tiny kernel of self-doubt, of drab responsibility. We just could not let love be.

Later, we spun our web of practicality around him too. Labeled him callow, innocent, idealistic. We convinced him to grow up, to give up. Or so we thought.

Time moved on yet again. All of us changed jobs, had more children, became older and triter. We heard they parted. We heaved private sighs of relief. Things were as they should be.

Or were they? A new rumor has it that they never did part. In some secret world of their own, they still love each other. Love works in mysterious ways.

Or maybe they did part. Perhaps, they did not love enough. When will love be enough? When it escapes practicality and jealously-guarded narrow-mindedness?

We smugly turn our heads and finally mind our own businesses.

Millipede and Magic Wand

My daughter opened the car window and put her head out. I started admonishing her, in a well-rehearsed motherly way, but she asked me to hear her story first. “Amma, I will open window and jump out, police will catch me in a net.” In a net!!! Some imagination, I thought. But she had more of the kind. “Police will put me in jail. Then I wave my magic wand and I become a millipede. There is a hole in jail and I will crawl out. I wave my magic wand again, I become Saanya. You open window and I will jump into the car.” She stated with her eyes glowing. She was proud of having thought it through. I was proud of her knowledge. She knew – well, something about arthropods at least, that they can crawl through holes, for whatever that knowledge is worth. And more importantly, she knew what police is all about.

There is something self-effacing about a millipede. I know nothing about them, except that they seem to have a whole lot of legs, which, paradoxically enough, don’t carry them far. Do they really have 1000 legs as the name claimed? I doubted without curiosity. They don’t bite, they don’t sting. They don’t make much noise. They (at least one species of them) curl into a ball at the least provocation. That is how they defend themselves apparently. In a fetal position with all their legs well tucked in, they wait for the predator to pass. What would I do if I turned into a millipede, I wondered aimlessly. I could roll into a ball, conceal myself in a little forgotten crevice, hide from genuine and imaginary threats. There is an escapist in me who craves for it.

“Amma,” a plaintive voice broke into my random fantasies. “But my magic wand is not working. There is no light.” “Yes, that is true.” I agreed.

“We need new batteries.” She surmised from the situation. “Can we buy it from Carrefour today? Please amma…”

Should I tell her that her magic wand is a worldly contraption which cannot really do magic? That any amount of “bippity boppity boos” will not change her to a millipede? That there will never be a big enough hole for her to crawl out?

I decided not to. I took the defunct wand from her hand and did a perfunctory wave. Nothing happened. I would not have minded a little magic in my life. A little incantation that can clear the muddle in my cupboards, kitchen, and mind…. a wand that would make my mirror say “you are the fairest of them all”……a magic brew that can make my little spelling struggler (who has problems spelling C-A-T and H-A-T) be a master of R-A-T-A-T-O-U-I-L-L-E and A-P-P-O-G-G-I-A-T-U-R-A. There are no limits to magic.

“Amma, we are home.” She woke me up from my reverie again. We bundled out of the car, me, her, bag, bottle, fairy costume, magic wand, unrealized magic, etc. I opened the door and a tiny glitter of stardust preceded us home. I looked around, a little awed. Perhaps we don’t need those new battery cells after all.

The one who stepped out of line

He was sitting alone by the window in the rickety old bus we were traveling, and I don’t know what prompted me, I hardly knew him, and he was just a trainee for God’s sake and I was a manager, but I went and sat near him. He smiled, a bit surprised, and pulled himself together so that even our clothes did not touch. We were already a couple of hours into the trip and the city limits had given way to luxuriant wayside foliage of impending mountains. “It is beautiful,” I remarked. An acceptable gambit with a near total stranger. He agreed in silence. “Look at the tree lines, almost a straight line,” I tried yet again, with a clear lack of imagination, pointing to the trees that lined the road. He looked at me closely. “Do you know what is really called a tree line?” I did not know, but I hated my ignorance. Ignorance is something that catches you unawares and leaves you looking like a beached whale. “It is also called timberline,” he said unaware of my discomfiture or blatantly disregarding it. “It is the very edge of an environment beyond which trees refuse to grow.” He was sincere, he was somehow different. He caught my interest. After that, the conversation was basically about trees and – you guessed it – tree lines. In the next hour that we spent jolting inside the bus, he explained to me everything I would ever need to know about alpine tree lines and arctic tree lines. We ploughed through how the altitude differed from place to place, whether the trees ever tried to grow beyond the line, whether there was a definite line per se, and the curious thing was I never had to stifle a yawn. It was all interesting, coming from him.

He took out a cigarette. “Smoking is injurious to health,” I predictably conveyed to him. “We are all cigarettes burning away,” he retorted mystically, “to a habituated end.” But he kept the cigarette back. I respected him for it.

The journey ended, we smiled at each other, got down and mingled with our own petty little groups. There were about 40 of us, a pleasure trip, and pettiness was our second skin.

Later, somewhere along that burning distance of our cigarettes, we parted ways.

I later heard from my friend that everybody considered me and him to be a pair. “But,” I remonstrated, “we hardly knew each other. We have hardly talked.” “There was that trip when you hardly had eyes for anybody else.” She reminded me. We only talked of tree lines, I reminisced.

I later heard that he was a college dropout, a no gooder, who couldn’t keep any jobs, or girls.

I later heard that he had a lover.

I later heard that she ditched him and he took it hard.

I later heard that he died in a biking accident somewhere in the foothills of Himalayas.

Did he go there for his tree lines? Will we ever learn from a tree not to step out of line? I wondered with a pang.

Living with Thyroid

My friend called me the other day and told me in a whisper that she had all the symptoms of early pregnancy. That should be a cause for joy, not for muted tones, I advised her.

“No,” she whispered even more urgently. “But we didn’t do it at all last month.”

“Why?” I asked stupidly.

“Oh, this and that,” She hemmed and hawed, reluctant to admit the children-work-laziness-TV quartet that make our bedrooms as stimulating as a yawn. She went on to narrate that she had all the symptoms of pregnancy – her periods were late, she was feeling bloated, she has noticed a few extra pounds, she was tired all the time.

“Immaculate conception, my dear Mary,” I guffawed.

She asked me to be serious.

“Wasn’t there even one day when -- you know -- you did it?” I stuttered.

“No, there wasn’t,” she said with a finality.

She assured me that she will get back to me with updates and we went back to our things that keep us busy all day and exhausted at night.

About a week later, she called again. “I have a thyroid problem.”

“Oh, that is bad, but common enough.” I remarked. I had to explain that she was about the sixth person I know who had a thyroid issue. “Hypo or hyper?” I enquired.

That was not a trick question. This little butterfly-shaped nondescript gland is, for all intents and purposes, bipolar – to say the least. In a few fortunate some, it is normal and pleasant, does its chores without a fuss and does not complain. In a few hapless souls, it goes into a maniacal overdrive, producing hormones and fatiguing out the poor cells in a metabolic orgy. Then again, what is most common especially among us, the fairer sex (if one can call oneself so), is when the little devil switches into a stuporous mode, when it goes into a prolonged sulk and does not produce those hormones which are apparently crucial for our well-being.

Here is a checklist:
Do you feel that your strong, beating heart is all aflutter? No, you are not falling in love, you are just hyperthyroid.

Do you have hair loss that cannot be explained by postpartum, dandruff, bad hair hygiene, simply pulling out your hair, etc. etc.? Son of a gun, you might have a thyroid problem.

Do you feel depressed, downtrodden, irritable, extremely vulnerable? Don’t look any further, you are hypothyroid.

Are you constipated? Or are you going a wee bit too frequent? Your gastroenterologist has reached the end of his road? Consult your friendly neighborhood endocrinologist, it might just be your thyroid.

Decreased – ahem – libido? Searching for an aphrodisiac? Check your thyroid first.

We have our own page three celebrity in our bodies, and love it, hate it, we just cannot ignore it.

So, as I said, my question was not tricky.

“Hypo,” she said. She sounded very hyper though.

“I can understand,” I suggested although she did not sound as if she wanted anything to be understood and it was left to thin air what I really understood. “Did you start medication?”

“Oh, not yet.”

“Is Joseph back from work?”

“No, he will be late today. As usual.” Tiredness was creeping into our voices. Tiredness and boredom.

“So what is new,” I halfheartedly joked.

“Let me get going then.” She was in the clutches of her thyroid, her little procrastinations, life’s indifference. And time for me to return to my own mundaneness.

“Okay then. Bye.”

“Bye.”

“Don’t worry, everything will be all right” I said omnisciently to the stillness after the click.

Of Mars and Venus

“The glass shoe fitted Cinderella perfectly and she and the prince got married. They lived happily ever after.” I ended my story telling, stifling a huge yawn in the process. Happily-ever-afters do get boring after a while – the sour grapes factor perhaps. But my 3-year-old daughter was not bored and not a wee bit sleepy. She sat up on the bed, and despite my attempts at cajoling her back to a horizontal position and calling bluff my empty threats, she decided to clear some issues with me.

“Amma, Cinderella and prince married, you and acha (dad) married, muttacha and ammamma married, Rakhi aunty and Sunil uncle married, who I will marry?”

I told her there was enough time to worry about that after she grew up.

“But boys marry girls?” She had to be sure.

I hmmm-ed. I coaxed her back to lying down with me.

“Amma, when I marry, I wear whale?

“Whale, darling? As in blue whale?” I muttered half asleep.

“Nooooooooooo,” her voice was shrill with impatience. “That thing white they wear, yesterday we saw in TV.”

I suddenly remembered, “Veil, dear.”

“See, I told you, you forget.” She said with obvious relief. She gets a little peeved when I don’t understand her. “And I kiss the boy on lips?” My sleep-laden eyes opened a little wider. Not so soon missy, my motherly possessiveness raised its head.

“Not now, not now.” I sh-shh-ed her.

“Amma, girls don’t kiss girls on lips, girls kiss boys on lips, like how you kiss acha.” Oops!

“Yes, we kiss because we love each other, dear.” I was now fully awake. “After you become big, you love somebody, you marry him, and then you kiss him because you love him.” I explained. That was not the order in which the events worked for me, but we keep re-creating our own realities.

“I love acha,” she said quite simply. She understood love, like how children do, in its all-pervading, indispensable sense. I admired her for it.

And when I worried about the indiscreetness in our marital relationship and what her little gray cells might have gauged, she became quickly bored with the intricacies of love and lips and men and women. She got down from her bed, picked up a book from her book rack, and asked me to read it to her.

And amidst billy goats gruff and trolls, the strangeness of human affairs gave way to the sure familiarity of fantasy.