Hand in hand

I see your hand resting on the smooth cushioned couch – pale ivory on olive green – almost limp, but like a wild cat on the prowl, waiting and watching. You are hairy, I think, perhaps for the millionth time. The hairs near your knuckles curve around in a matted heap and they are subtly alluring. I inch my hand closer and I compare mine to yours – a harsher brown to your ivory, older looking with spidery blue veins and whiter nails. Your hand still waits in hushed confidence.

I rub my pinky slightly against your thumb, an invitation to touch. I comb out those wiry hairs and trace their length. You flex your thumb straightening the creases, an almost undetectable pulling back. I am not disheartened but rather emboldened. I coquettishly draw lines on the back of your hand with my index finger. The nail is slightly long, not manicured, and it makes a faint grating sound against your dry skin. With a sudden shake, your hand makes a fist and lies still in brooding dominance.

A little impatient, I hold your wrist firmly with my left hand and open your fingers one by one. Your little finger eases open without resistance, teasing me to move on. I prize your other fingers open too and each one leads me on, revealing just a little more, like a tantalizing treasure hunt. And my hand, the covetous hunter, the greedy pig, bumbles along, intoxicated with success and tripping over itself in eagerness. Your hand waits in mute power.

Like smoothing out a crumbled piece of paper, I iron out your hand with mine. Your hand is still obstinately lifeless, my treasure still hidden, and I am desperate. I tickle it. I pinch it. I shake it. I squeeze it. Your hand still taunts soundlessly. I am dejected. I finally give up. I place your hand quietly back on your lap and withdraw mine slowly.

And then you pounce. In one fell swoop, my hand is engulfed in yours, your broad palm rubbing the back of my hand in an almost indecent show of strength and closeness. You interlock my fingers with yours and give a tight squeeze. It is as warm as a caress, as intense as a kiss. I shudder with pleasure. Come with me, you say. My hand is ensconced in yours and happily your slave. Hand in hand, we walk, intimate and loved, in loquacious silence.

(This is in response to a tag by Usha. Sorry for taking my own sweet time with it, Usha. But then, what better time to respond to a tag on “holding hands” than Valentine’s eve?)

Words are all she has....

A four-year-old’s take on things. Sincere effort has been made to stick to the conversations as they were spoken, but a little leeway has to be given to inadvertent changes from the original, mainly due to limitations of hastily jotted records and a truant memory.

On pets:
Mom: I want a dog, a golden retriever, that is my dream.
Dad: I wouldn’t mind a fishbowl.
Daughter: I want a small alien, sweet and cuddly.

Huh what!

On beauty:
Daughter: I want you to wear that pink thing on your cheeks and that blue thing on your eyes. Mothers look beautiful that way.
Mom: I don’t think so.
Daughter: Yes, they do. All mothers wear them but you don’t.

Sigh!

On pretend play:
Daughter: Pretend this is your hand.
Mom: This is my hand.
Daughter: Pretend this is hot water.
Mom: That is hot water. (Some decibels higher) What are you going to do?
Daughter: Hot water doesn’t know this is your hand.
Mom: Put that hand shower down!

On earth:
Mom: (In a fit of love) You make my world go around, do you know that?
Daughter: World like earth?
Mom: (Rolling eyes) Yes.
Daughter: What is good earth?
Mom: Earth where there are good people.
Daughter: What is bad earth? Earth where there are bad people?
Mom: Yes.
Daughter: And super earth?
Mom: Enough.
Daughter: If you have anti-fairies, it will be anti-earth?

What the heck!!

On time:
Daughter: We are just in time.
Mom: What is just in time?
Daughter: 11 minutes and an hour.

Oh yeah?

On a pea
Mom: “Is she a real princess?” asked the prince.
Daughter: What happened to the pea?
Mom: “Yes,” said the queen, “she is a real princess.”
Daughter: Is the pea okay?
Mom: Are you listening to the story?
Daughter: Yes, yes, I am.
Mom: Tell me what is happening.
Daughter: There is a pea below all the mat-e-re-ss. Is the pea okay?
Mom: (Sigh) I guess it is.
Daughter: Okay. Fine.

On dentists
Daughter: I know how den-tist pull teeth out.
Mom: You do?
Daughter: He takes a long string.
Mom: And?
Daughter: He ties one end to the teeth.
Mom: Tooth.
Daughter: Okay tooth. The other end to the door knob.
Mom: (Eyes widening)
Daughter: And he closes the door. Bang.
Mom: Who told you this?
Daughter: I see it on TV. I want to go to a dentist too.

No way!

On moms and candies
Daughter: You are the best mom in the whole wide world.
Mom: (Gushing) Thank you darling.
Daughter: And this is the best candy in the whole wide world.

Okay. I get it.

On birthdays and wishes
Daughter: I want my birthday to be in January.
Mom: But you know when your birthday is, right?
Daughter: August. But I want it in January.
Mom: But you can never change your birthdays dear.
Daughter: I am just wishing. I wish my birthday is in January.
Mom: Oh yes, you can wish for many things.
Daughter: I wish I had wings also.
Mom: Me too (sigh).

On skin
Daughter: I don’t like my dark skin.
Mom: Black is beautiful, my dear.
Daughter: But I want to be fair like my friends.
Mom: But that is okay. Look, I am dark too.
Daughter: I want to be like you (hugs) but I want to be white.

Hoping she will understand some day….

Unequaled Music

One deceptively sunny morning, where defiant sunlight penetrated through dark matted clouds, mama decided that it was time for her little girl to start learning piano. The sun of course did not have any part to play in the larger scheme of things, other than in perhaps granting a deliberately vivacious mood to mama. She argued to papa that as they already had a piano, all they needed was a teacher to teach it. Mama knew piano was too grandiose a term. What they had in their house was just an old electronic keyboard, a present (or a hand-me-down if you will) from a generous friend, who was rich or ambitious enough to buy the authentic piano – the grandiose one – which had seven octaves, three pedals, and a shining black body. Mama painstakingly counted the five octaves on her dusty keyboard, noted the lack of pedals, and imperceptibly shook her head. But her keyboard was shaped like a piano all right. It had a wooden frame with three wooden legs and even had a top flap which opened on brass hinges. And mama knew that one didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

So mama called the piano teacher. She said she wanted her little girl to have personal piano lessons. The teacher was ready to come. They fixed the time and date.

The teacher was a soft-spoken lady. Mama liked her and the way she patiently taught the little girl. So after the first class was over, when the little girl rubbed her flexed thumbs and sore pinkies, and made faces, mama asked the teacher whether she can teach her too. The teacher was a bit surprised and asked why. Mama, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically, explained that she always wanted to play Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The teacher laughed kindly. Let us start with the C, she said.

For the next two weeks, mama and little girl practised bravely and monotonously the notes of C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. They tried it in all octaves to break the humdrum, but that was about the only variety they knew. The little girl started carrying a pillow to her practice sessions. Mama tried to sort out the intricacies of semibreves, minims, dotted minims, and crotchets, nursing an almost forgotten, two-decade-old memory of guitar classes, while the little girl took patient naps by her side.

Time to learn a song, the teacher decided after the first two weeks. Mama perked up. Teacher played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” quite brilliantly on the old keyboard. And her voice was mellifluous too. If mama was a bit disappointed at the unpretentiousness of the song, she did not show it. The next week saw mama and little girl playing the rhyme ad nauseam much to papa’s consternation. He grumbled that he did not bargain for two cacophonic renderings of a stupid nursery rhyme, or else they could have had another child. Mama asked him to stop sulking and sing along. Papa feigned deafness.

Two weeks went by and a Baa Baa Black Sheep was added to mama’s meager repertoire. She boasted to the teacher that she had played guitar when she was in college. The teacher condescendingly agreed that that training would stand in good stead while playing piano. Mama beamed. Teacher taught her another song – Mary had a Little Lamb. Mama dreamed of being a Chopin.

That evening, papa came in all exhausted from drudging work and there was mama and little girl by the keyboard. Mama was gingerly playing the strains of the newly learnt song and little girl was boisterously singing along – “And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.” Papa kept his laptop on the table and joined in, giving in finally. “He followed her to school one day” – papa sang in an affected tenor. Mama closed her ears and laughed. The little girl danced along. Music is indeed the food of love – even if papa, mama, and little girl did not have a taste for it.

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.