Playing God

“Snap! went the fox and that was the end of the gingerbread man.” I end the story lamely. I had fielded at least a dozen questions from my 4-year-old by then – “How can the gingerbread man run?” “What is gingerbread?” “Can I make a gingerbread man?” “Can I make him run?” “How can the cow drink tea?” etc. etc. I shushed her each time not because I couldn’t answer the questions, which I might have been able to with staid matter-of-factness, but because I wanted to finish reading yet another fantastical but predictable story.

When she closes the book and runs to ride her bike, I rummage through her rack, leaf through a bunch of books, and ponder – on fairy tales and life and magic and playing god. Granting life to inanimate objects seems to be archetypical in children’s stories – just like our gingerbread man who comes to life and runs out of the oven. Fairy tales are full of them. Take a look at Pinocchio. Gestappo, an average woodcarver, makes a marionette from wood and accidentally gives it life. After many adventures, some of them as tedious as they come, Pinocchio, with his inexplicably morally conscious nose, finally comes of age and becomes a real boy. Thumbelina grows out of a magic seed given by a wise old woman. We have magic oranges that become beautiful maidens, a metal pig who can run when an innocent boy sits on it, a toy tin soldier who falls in love with a paper ballerina, and even an entire clock-work marching up to defend their clock-maker. Even in Cinderella, there is a convenient fairy godmother making horses out of mice and chariots out of pumpkins.

Making inanimate animate is not restricted to children’s stories alone. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, gives it life, and later pays a heavy price for his irresponsibility. Perhaps an allegorical novel, it nevertheless highlights our preoccupation with playing god. Or take the case of Pygmalion. The statue he carves is so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Cynics of the present day might write it off as an acute case of agalmatophilia (attraction to statues, dolls, etc.), but the fact remains that the statue did come to life because of the sculptor’s devotion.

We have our own Indian equivalent in many legends and myths. A lump of flesh can become a hundred sons and a daughter. A clay statue can transform to a god, a rock can become a beautiful lady by a touch, or trees can turn into young men.

It is intriguing that across cultures and across ages, man has searched, dreamt, and written about creating life and achieving immortality. Is the act of creating life and playing god so entertaining or is it just a rudimentary impulse in man which gives rise to these fantasies? The search for the elixir of life or that elusive philosopher’s stone is ingrained in man’s psyche. A tiniest portion of the elixir or ambrosia or amrut or dancing water or aab-e-hayat, call what you will, will rejuvenate you – nay, make you immortal. Man can be omnipotent. Man can be god.

Where miracles and fairies and magic and potions don’t work, ingenuity might. Life might still be created in a lab from nonlife. If scientists can induce life to a lab-made genome and make it grow and reproduce, how close are we to playing god? Or rather, how far? Can we, as a megalomaniac race, wait that long?

I take out my daughter’s Play-Doh. I make a clay man similar to our gingerbread man, with shining black eyes, a red nose, and a wide grin. I even make two buttons for the coat. I make him stand up and I sit back. I am waiting for him to run.

Being Janus-Faced (also a tag)

Another year has started. Time to start brewing new wine in my old bottle, inside my drab little cellar, using the same old recipe, with a bunch of sour grapes, sweet sugar, and fermenting yeast. Come, taste my wine. Smell it, sip it, roll it around your tongue. Call it light, full, round, or flat. Call it woody, earthy, soft, or complex. It might be sweet, bitter, sour, or just insipid to you. I brew it to lighten my days, and yes, I admit, for that little bit of intoxication, where reality gets smudged with illusions. But foremost, I brew it to keep you happy.

Let me start my year by playing Janus, that two-faced god who forgets to live in the present because he is always looking backward and forward – the past and future. And let me start by doing an almost-forgotten tag (tagged by Usha) about yesterdays and tomorrows.

Your oldest memories

It is a formless landscape out there in the corner of my mind. Fuzzy and hazy. More tangible are those first impressions rather than concrete memories – of stories told and fables recounted by loving voices and fertile imagination – of an ekadashi kakka (the crow that fasted during the eleventh lunar day) who fell into a well and found treasure, of a kunjattakili (a small bird?) who learnt it the tough way that only hard work pays, of Cinderella who ate dosa sandwich and who went thrice to a ball dance, or of an onion that was crowned the king among vegetables. It was a happy childhood where loneliness was a strange word impossible to relate to.

I did have a bout of nostalgia about four months ago when I raked the dried leaves in my mind and lit a bonfire. If you haven’t seen it already and would care to, you can find it here.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago – the beginning of 1999 – when I was in what I would call the prime of my life, when time still laughed at wrinkles and gray hair – I was in Pune, working as an English Language Trainer for a company. Living in my uncle’s spacious bungalow, relishing my aunt’s exemplary culinary skills, I was getting plumper. It was probably the first time in my life when I had fun – fun of the immediate, spontaneous, unthinking kind. There were four girls and four guys in our group, and we picnicked and danced and drank and gossiped and laughed those five months away. Many among us fell in and out of love. And when one of the trainees proclaimed that he had fallen in love with my eyes and thus excused himself for being the dumbest in my class, I was young and gullible enough to blush. Thinking about that life, it has a dream-like quality now. When I left Pune, my friends gave me a gold ring with a clover embossed – for love and luck. I still wear it.

Today

I don’t look at today. Remember, I am Janus. I can only reminisce and predict, I cannot just be.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

I look into that crystal ball and see a little turbulence, a little sorrow, a little boredom, amidst all that happiness and contentment that I would predict for myself. Perhaps it is a yearning rather than a prediction to let life live its course steadily and surely. It is an anticipatory bail against any forces of nature or man that might bring a disaster. I do not resist change or the passage of time. But let it just flow by slowly, unobtrusively.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

I would have a Noah’s Ark and a Library of Congress installed in the capsule. And put myself in too for good measure. When I finally disembark from it to a new civilization and a new culture, I would remake the whole world just as I know it and be the new-age Noah, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Galileo all rolled into one. That is a dream worth dreaming about :).

The tag is now done. It is open to any and all readers, whosoever wants to share his or her past, present, and future.

Santa Was Here!!!

M: Lugging around a ten-ton Christmas tree is not my idea of fun.

R: It is good exercise. Set it in that corner. That is perfect.

M: You said that about the last corner too, before we shifted. A house shouldn’t have these many corners.

R: Now all we have to do is fix the branches and get the decorations all up.

M: Well, that is work for a whole day.

R: We have nothing better to do.

M: I have.

R: Now you don’t. Okay, let us get cracking.

M: A metal and plastic Christmas tree! Where is the fun in that!

R: At least we don’t have to feel guilty about cutting all those evergreens. Anyway we don’t have a choice here, do we? We don’t get natural firs here.

M: Maybe it is ordained that people in the tropics should not decorate Christmas trees because there are no firs.

R: Who ordained it?

M: God?

R: Well, you don’t believe in God, so you can’t use that argument.

M: Okay okay. It is just pain in you-know-where.

R: I very well know where, thank you. Just a few more branches and we are done.

M: Hmmm. About time.

************************************************

(Two hours, some bad mouthing, and a couple of band-aids later……)

S: Shall I help, shall I, shall I?

R: Of course, you can, dear. Just bring those decorations one by one and hang them anywhere you want.

S: The star day-co-wa-tions?

R: All of them, one by one.

S: Do you know, Nadia has a bigger tree.

R: Hmm hmm.

S: Do you know, she has lots of presents under the tree too.

R: Okay.

S: Will we have snow?

R: It doesn’t snow here San.

S: It does snow with a snow spray.

R: Oh okay.

S: I want a snow spray.

R: That foamy stuff might be dangerous.

S: It is not it is not. I saw Praniti touch it.

R: Oh okay.

M: We will get you one, don’t worry.

S: Goody.

M: There are enough decorations here to cover a 20-foot tree!

R: Don’t exaggerate. These are all from previous years’. We didn’t spend a penny this year.

S: I want to keep the star on top.

R: You can’t reach that high, darling.

S: Acha, lift me.

M: Here you go.

R: Now we have a crooked star.

M: Matches a crooked tree.

R: Now the lights.

M: There is about of a kilometer of that here.

R: Just twist it around the tree.

M: And he said, let there be light, and there was light.

R: There wasn’t. There is a loose connection.

M: It can be fixed. All in good time.

************************************************

(Days later, on Christmas Eve…)

R: Now that San has gone to sleep, let us start wrapping presents.

M: There is no “us.” You wrap, I watch TV.

R: There are at least 20 presents to wrap. We have a party to prepare for. If you don’t switch off the TV right now, the remote goes out of the window.

M: What is all the fuss about? Do you think those Magi wrapped their presents?

R: I don’t think their presents could have been wrapped. Frankincense? Myrrh? They don’t sound very wrapping friendly, do they?

M: Nor are these cups, bags, horribly shaped pens, odd-shaped chocolate boxes – and what is this? A silly-looking mirror? A dust bin? You are crazy!

R: Those are the prizes for games. Less questions, more work. These are your set of wrapping papers, bows, scotch tape, and scissors.

M: &%$#@%&*

R: What?

M: I didn’t say anything.

R: Do we need to wrap San’s bike?

M: You must be mad!

R: I just asked. At least some tassels and ribbons?

M: No. It looks beautiful as is.

R: Okay okay.

M: I don’t think men are genetically inclined to wrap gifts.

R: Get to work, will you? Don’t blame your DNA.

************************************************

(About an hour and more bad-mouthing later….)

R: It looks beautiful, doesn’t it?

M: It does.

R: I am leaving the balcony door a crack open.

M: Why?

R: Perhaps Santa Claus will come.

M: Hmmm, I think I can hear the jingles.

R: And look, there, beyond that faintest star, do you see a red glow? That might be Rudolph’s red nose.

M: Let us get to bed.

R: Yes, let us.

************************************************

(Christmas morning, bright and early)

S: (A delighted squeal) Yippie! Santa was here!

When things really came to a -- wherever

Things really came to a head a couple of weeks ago. Well, I think I should appropriately rephrase it as “things really came to a rump,” because to be precise, the unmentionable hindquarter is where things finally came to.

It all started with M coming down with a high fever, which adamantly refused to respond to the good old acetaminophen, coupled with a certain hesitancy to sit down and bear weight on the said hindquarters. When his walk also began to resemble that of a tired and maybe slightly inebriated penguin and my overused ear thermometer refused to record anything below 102ºF, I overrode his habitual denials and took him to a doctor. The diagnosis was quick enough – an abscess on the – ahem – aforementioned rump. The surgeon was consulted, and although we had a little heated debate about the location of the abscess – perianal vs perirectal – which might have led to a misconception on his part that I am medically enlightened and which made M’s eyes roll in impatience, he was unequivocal about the treatment required – an incision and drainage of the said abscess as soon as possible.

The next day saw us at the hospital at the wake of dawn, where an I&D was performed in under an hour and M was wheeled out sleeping like a baby, still knocked out after general anesthesia. The surgeon, still under the probable misconception of my medical prowess, rattled out a series of instructions to me on how to care for the wound, which in retrospect I should have paid more attention to, while I was more interested in squeezing M’s hand in a fit of connubial love.

That night, back at home, our first hurdle loomed before us, quite literally. We looked at the mountainous pile of dressing materials in front of us – surgical alcohol, Betadine, cotton swabs, alcohol wipes, gauze, surgical tape, cotton buds, a huge box of gloves – and all we needed to do was change the dressing. I assured M that I could do it with my eyes shut and that he was in good pair of hands. About ten minutes into the process, I sincerely began to wish that I had more than a pair of them – hands, I mean. Because, as a layman, you are simply not trained in your daily life to hold the Betadine-soaked gauze on a curved space, tear the surgical tape off an excessively adhesive roll, and tape it in place without any of your fingers, hair, or items of your clothing getting stuck in between, all with just two hands. M offered to help which ended with his fingers getting in the way too. Finally, after half an hour of intense effort, a Betadine-stained sheet, half a roll of surgical tape, a very sticky – ahem – rump, and really choice expletives, we managed to change the dressing. The battle was won, but the war was to last at least for another two weeks.

The rough edges did smoothen out with each passing day. Although there were still instances of taped butt cheeks or a glove getting stuck to the end of the tape, thus giving rise to many butt jokes and extremely hilarious moments (for me at least; M stoically offered most of the jokes), things that came to a rump were slowly receding, so to say. The wound was healing, in spite of my administrations, and that was a huge deal. The war is not yet won though. We still have things to worry about – a curious four-year-old who will stop at nothing to find out what “dressing change” her mom and dad are doing behind closed doors, a bacteria which does not look to be effectively annihilated, a thermometer that still shows erratic numbers, and a woozy head – mine – that still feels faint looking at a wound.

But yesterday, the surgeon commended my nursing skills. M says he just has a crush on me. I gloat, either way.

A Butterfly to Share

I got a beautiful butterfly yesterday. It is not as much the beauty of it as the thought behind sharing it that makes it all the more treasurable. Thank you, Usha. It truly means a world to me.

Let me share it with the people whose blogs have guided and entertained me, both in more or less equal measure.

1. Ganga - My mentor in the world of blogging. My old schoolmate. She opened doors to this vast and exciting world that I never knew existed. She writes with a sensitivity that touches your heart strings. Her words flit around like butterflies, playful and enchanting. Here is a butterfly to the master butterfly-maker :).

2. Rekz - Thomas Hardy gave us Wessex, Faulkner gave us Yoknapatawpha, and Rekz gives us the extremely fascinating feline world of Moggies - a fun world of threesome, where she is the alpha cat, where mutinies, fights, victories and defeats are a way of life and rib-tickling laughter is always at hand. Here is a butterfly for making me laugh so wholeheartedly.

3. Arch - Our stations in life are a whole lot similar in that we both have impossibly naive three- to four-year-olds who make our lives as colorful as a rainbow. The only difference is that she etches that rainbow so vividly in her blog, where every hue is brilliantly painted with the mastery of an artist and the sensitivity of a mother. Here is a butterfly to you.

Now, these are the instructions I received from Usha, my patron :).

1. Put the logo on the blog. [I saved the picture first and later added it to the blog.]
2. Add a link to the person who presented it to you. [I couldn't really add the link. So I have just mentioned the name of the person who presented it to me.]
3. Pass this one, and link other bloggers that you'd like to share it with.

Hope you will accept this little token of gratitude and appreciation.

Hair Woes - A Sequel

I realized it was time for another of those unsavory experiences of my life – a haircut. My readers, who have been following my torments because of my rather insufferable keratinous growth, would remember how I detest haircuts. For those of you who are still unaware of the fact and have the time and inclination to suffer through one of my sagas, please click here.

I walked into a salon a little bravely this time because I presumed I have mastered the language enough not to be a guinea pig to an ambitious hairstylist’s restless fingers. After shampooing, again one of those heavenly experiences, I sat down and looked confident.

The hairstylist materialized out of nowhere with a trolley of dangerous-looking equipment. I looked at him in the mirror and inadvertently let out a gasp. I had an Emo character straight out of some hardcore punk band. He stared at me quizzically through his visible left eye. His right eye was quite hidden behind all that sleekly brushed bang of hair. Weren’t his T-shirt and jeans a bit too tight? Would their seams burst under the strain? How well can he cut hair seeing through just one eye? I wondered, a trifle panicky. He smiled beatifically though.

“Saya mau gunting.” (I want haircut)

“Style apa?” (What style?)

“Mau layer Pak. Tapi sedikit pendek. Saya tidak mau panjang.” (Okay. I will quit showing off my vernacular prowess. What I told him was that I wanted my hair cut in layer, a little short and not long.)

He set to work. I busied with a magazine, skimming through impossibly thin models sporting quite abhorrent hairstyles.

I looked up hearing a sympathetic clicking of the tongue.

“A lot of your hair is white,” he said dramatically.

“I know that, you dummy.” I muttered.

“You want to color your hair?” He asked hopefully.

I said a definitive no. I sulked. I didn’t obviously like that gray hair comment.

He went about his task without offering anymore comments. I risked a glance at the mirror and again let out a gasp. My hair was too short and standing up at all ends!

“My hair is too short!” I cried.

“Madam wanted it short,” he countered.

“Stop cutting,” I ordered, my voice bordering on hysterical.

He stopped. “One-eyed moron,” I cursed under my breath, which was quite unlike me. I usually reserve the choicest epithets to swear at myself.

Seemingly quite oblivious to my recalcitrant state of mind, he plugged the dryer and began blow-drying each hair of mine painstakingly. I again submerged into the obnoxious magazine, vowing not to resurface again.

“Madam hair is very thick,” he offered placatingly, after a while.

“Hmmm,” I was still non-conciliatory. “It falls terribly.”

“It is still very thick,” he affirmed.

I thawed a little.

After about half an hour into styling, he switched off the dryer. I forced myself to look up. I had two fringes on either side which he was proprietarily arranging to perfection. If I had looked like a poodle after my last haircut, I looked like an Afghan hound now. I creased my eyebrows.

“Madam is beautiful, this hairstyle is good,” he gushed.

Do you think so? I inwardly asked.

I smiled. I squinted at the mirror again. Maybe he can see what I can’t see. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, I thought conveniently. My universal bonhomie returned and I sauntered out of the salon after parting with an exorbitant tip. And if my styled bangs lost a little lissomeness by the time I reached home, predicting what lay in the immediate future for my hair, I did not blame my Emo man.

Dancing Lessons

There are things you invariably learn before, during the course of, and after a classical dance performance. Some lessons are born inside you, some are learned through painful and painstaking experience, and some – to echo a bard – are literally thrust on you. But these lessons are by nature ephemeral and quickly fade off if not penned for posterity. This is an unpretentious attempt at it.

If you are not ready to lose at least 500 hairs from your otherwise fast-depleting hair treasury, think twice before sitting down for that tight bunching up of hair to the left side of the head, where it will resist gravitational pull with the help of a bottle of mousse, hair spray, and at least two-dozen pins. The immediate side effects are a splitting headache, a crick in the neck because of all that unbalanced weight, and a permanently arched right eyebrow. And of course, the lost hairs.

Never forget to wear your bangles when you dance on stage. There is nothing as unsightly as a pair of unadorned wrists amidst all the finery.

Alta (the red ink worn on hands and feet for dance) runs and smudges when you sweat. Permanent markers in red also have the same propensity. There are two options – don’t sweat or don’t touch your white costume when your hand sweats. Or you will have a white costume with red blotches. Yes, it does disguise your cracked feet and your callused hands to perfection. But don’t forget to tell your four-year-old that it is not blood.

Backstage managers are angels in human disguise. There is obviously no other explanation to their endless toiling in the darkness of the backstage – wiping sweat off your brow, arranging props, straightening jewelry, running to get Pocari Sweat for you, listening to your constant grumbling about your hair, costume, and lights, and a thousand other unlabeled tasks – for absolutely no personal gain.

Resist the urge to stop your dance and wave when you hear a familiar trill from one of the front rows, “acha, that is amma in blue” (Dad, that is mom in blue). Remember there are 300 others watching you.

Also resist the temptation to wonder whether your husband has captured you on camera when you are posing as a sinuous vine – what you consider as your best posture in the show. You will forget your next dance move and that can end in disaster.

Always remember it takes huge talent to produce a show and only a modicum of it to dance in it – especially when you are the only adult classical dancer (self-proclaimed) other than your teacher in a 50-mile radius. Also the audience who later tell you that your dance was brilliant are genuinely nice people who are either myopic or do not want to use the word “average.” You know this because you have already seen the dance video that your husband has meticulously recorded and you know that your dance was not “brilliant”.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, you enjoy yourself tremendously. The huge success of the show somehow rubs a little on you too. And there will be some things that always make you laugh. In my case, it was this press coverage that we got for the show. I reproduce the exact quotes:

“…..with the melodies of the percussion ensemble interspersed with couple of haunting songs sung by two ladies.” (Our male singer, who has a rich baritone, went into paroxysms of frustration reading it. We are still looking for the ghosts of the two ladies who sang haunting songs.)

“…..performers took turns dancing to the music, playing with the metallic ringing produced by the bracelets on their red-striped feet.”

That alta always spelled disaster!!