May days!

This is a whirlwind month for me. My entire drab routine has gone topsy-turvy. Not a good month by my austere misoneistic standards.

First, there is this whole American dream vacation to plan for. After procrastinations and put-offs, after never-ending debates and discussions, we have finally zeroed in on June to be the month of travel. There are still interminable deliberations on what to take, what not to take, what to do, what not to do, how to do, how not to do, where to go, where not to go, where to stay, where not to stay – the whole nitty-gritty of the trip has left me cursing insomnolence at night as my overworked brain does exorbitant and probably misguided calculations on clothes and gifts to carry. That said, the entire onus of planning rests on the able shoulders of my brother-in-law who not only has to pick his way through the jumble of abbreviations that binds America together – JFK, MCO, EWR, IAD, BWI, LAS, IAH, to state a few – but also decide on hotel reservations and car rentals outside of Orlando (where he thankfully has his home) and then wait for a whimsical sister-in-law to approve or reject. Add to it the whole confusion on the practicality of carrying around car seats and strollers, and this whole dream vacation takes on nightmarish attributes.

A bigger hurdle I face is shopping. Realization dawned on me on a hot and sticky May morning that my three-year-old has somehow outgrown everything she has without growing an inch (!!!). I have never done so much shopping my entire life! It is not helped in the least by the very picky toddler who wants a jacket “with a hood amma,” no long sleeves because “they are so itchy,” and pink in color because “blue is for boys.” She does not want sturdy sneakers but a pink and white Disney contraption with a glass heel with colored beads inside. She does not listen to my futile protests and bravely hobbles the entire breadth of the shop just to show me she can walk in them. I give in as I watch my practically-oriented shopping go berserk. After six hours of intense shopping, I still have over a dozen items in my list to cover. If I haven’t said it before, I say it now – I hate shopping.

My husband dearest was in charge of buying gifts for our relatives and friends in the US. He is the knight-errant in our household and he is the one best suited to collect authentic handicrafts from the heart of our country – or so we thought. When our house started resembling an ill-sorted museum with gift rejects (rejected by me of course because of their broken, soiled, or ugly characteristics), we gave up our idea of being too authentic with the gifts. This issue still remains unresolved.

My three-year-old’s school life has gone into a theatrical overdrive this month. With their annual show approaching, there are innumerable dance practice sessions, dress rehearsals, and stage rehearsals on her calendar. As she has the all-important role of a table napkin in their production of The Beauty and The Beast, she is predictably excited and proud. And I, as a mother, have the dubious honor of assuaging her emotional outbursts when the boy behind her kicks her or when the girl next to her gets the costume and she does not.

Then my husband decides that he has to go to Dubai. “Not Dubai, we are going to the US,” I calmly explain to him. “No, I have a sugar meet in Dubai, don’t worry, I will be back in time for our US trip.” He consoles me. I rave and rant on the shopping to do, the plans to finalize, the presents to buy, the rehearsals I have to take our daughter to, my work that is pending, my dance classes, a grooming day that I had set apart for myself, and I tell him that he is leaving me on the lurch. He tells me that I am overreacting, as I always do.

To cap it all, the cook decides to go off to her village for a few days to tend to her ill mother-in-law.

I rest my case. May is simply not my month.

To mom, with love

She was a college lecturer. Our father says she was the most popular of them all. He recalls how there would be a flock of students and friends to see her off when he went to pick her up during weekends. We sketch a mental picture of his old Ambassador car parked under the trees, he waiting a bit impatiently for his newly-wedded wife, she arriving a wee bit late with her coterie, saree with an unmatched blouse, hair swept up in a becoming coiffure – that was how the old sepia-toned photographs showed her to be. Our mother, who is the protagonist of this little piece of writing, does not comment. She has never been the one to blow her own trumpet. So finally, I thought we would do the toots for her today.

We never truly understood why she gave up her career. Of course we are familiar with the circumstances that led to it because we were primarily the cause, although passive and oblivious (please regard how I don’t use the word “silent” – rumor has it that we had quite lusty cries). We were premature born and had gotten ourselves entangled in each other’s umbilical cords (forever it might seem) – another rumor has it that at least one of us resembled our arboreal kinsman rather than a human baby. The hastened delivery is, by the way, attributed to a train ride where our ever-solicitous father got down from a first class cabin in a lungi with two rupees in his shirt pocket searching for boiled drinking water to give to his pronouncedly pregnant wife and the train left the station without him. Because of timely intervention of two attentive and conscientious station masters, our mother and her luggage, both internal and external, could be safely disembarked at the next station, where she reunited with her lungi-clad husband after a not-too-long wait in a not-too-comfortable waiting room. Perhaps due to the virtue of our mother’s equanimity in dealing with the situation, we didn’t pop out immediately, but the stress might have had an effect on our premature birth.

Anyway, she never went back to teaching. She had an ever-getting-transferred husband, two needy children who always wanted the same thing at the same time (even the same breast to suckle on!), and loving but dependent parents-in-law. Her saga of motherhood started there and – well, motherhood never ends.

From a daughter’s point of view, she is a dream mother to have – a patient listener to woes real or imaginary, a healer of wounds, a firm hand while meting out justice, with a mind as broad as the skies above, there was nothing that we couldn’t tell her when we were growing up. She believed in our fantasies, had faith in our dreams, and never wanted us to be anything that we were not. She taught us everything – from nursery rhymes to table manners, from solar system to malayalam poems, honesty to discipline. She taught us that this world would be a more beautiful place if we believed in the goodness of people. She taught us how to love.

Now, she is our best friend – a great sodoku partner, a wonderful walking buddy, the most huggable person in our world. We are still needy. We still run to her for real or imaginary woes, and she dries our tears. As I said, motherhood never ends.

Attraction is a curious thing

A young man said he was attracted to me.

Let me analyze attraction. It can be ephemeral, a fleeting quickening of heartbeat, a vague rush of adrenaline, which can fade away in an hour, a day, a week. It can be a deeper, long-lasting physical yearning, that overpowering tension in your sinews to touch, feel, and experience. It can be emotional, an intangible impulse of closeness that you feel, courtesy your limbic system. It can be intellectual, where your ideas meet and hobnob, where arguments pave way to ecstasy. It can be all of this, none of this, or some more than the others.

I didn’t know how to analyze his attraction. He was a stranger, a maverick. Yes, I have talked to him many times, and I have enjoyed every minute of talking to him, but I still did not know who he was, just that he said he was attracted to me.

Still, my heart went aflutter. Rationality is a curious thing. It surmises situations, passes judgments, motivates action, but is not a custodian enough to control hearts. And my stupid heart (that same limbic system which we conversationally call “heart”) went aflutter.

Rationality asked him what his intention was. His answer was straight enough. Consummation. Rationality did not leave it at that. It questioned him on morality, scruples, integrity, commitment, respect. It warned him of the scarlet letter that would scorch not the bosom but the conscience forever. Oh! It was a prude, my rationality.

In the end, I gave him up. Not because of my rationality – or not wholly because of it. A fluttering heart was not an excuse to undo what I have built with exquisite care – my beautiful life as I know it and my unending love affair with it. I have mixed the right amount of love, lust, happiness, excitement, yearning, frustration, sadness, even boredom – all the ingredients the way I wanted them, I didn’t want to upset it now, not by my choice. I give leeway only to time and its unstoppable flow of circumstances.

And so, presumably, he gave up on me too.

Attraction, like rationality, is a curious thing.

Birds that fly – and birds that don’t

That winter is etched in my memory (to adopt a cliché). I don’t know whether I can call it winter, Palghat doesn’t have winters. It was those windy months of November, December, and January. There is an exhilaration in the air during those months of the year – a hum, a dynamic bustle, as if life cannot stop, it cannot just be. We locals endearingly call the wind “palakkadan kaattu,” in spite of our scaling skins and chapped lips. My Shelleyan mind calls it my very own West Wind.

I and Dee used to wake up to the sound of discordant loudspeaker music coming from a nearby temple. The sky would be still gray with just an inkling of red in the eastern horizon. We would gather our books – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. – and troop up to our terrace to read, reminisce, imagine, and dream. A sleepy-headed Appukuttan (our spaniel, our little partner in crime) would sometimes follow us up, burrow himself between us, and go right back to sleep. We didn’t have any choice in that matter. It was our final year MA and we had tons to read.

With the first rays of the sun, a tenacious magpie would come and sit on the lopsided TV antenna and sing for us. After about four days of listening to the same song, we realized that it was the same magpie. A bond grew between us with each passing day. He would come, sit on the antenna, sing his twoo-twoo-twi-ti-twi-ti-too-woo with the exact same lilt and modulation every day. He was a fixture during those windy mornings – our lucky magpie.

Within fifteen minutes, the other birds would pick up their own songs, from where they left off the previous day. The laughing thrushes, the seven sisters we called them, would sit on the low parapet wall and start their babble. They sure were a cantankerous lot. We would give up all pretense of reading and listen to them. On certain mornings, there would be a crow pheasant (chembothu) adding to the din with his incessant hiccups.

Our Casuarina archway and hedges were a welcome refuge to little tailor birds and bulbuls. There was a bulbul nest in our arch, much to our and our four-legged partner’s delight. His was a more selfish pleasure though. With every little chirp coming from the nest, he would be down below waiting for something or somebody to fall down. The wind was almost an unwitting accomplice. Fortunately, that bulbul family escaped our little predator’s artless tactics.

The evenings were spent looking skyward and watching the migrating storks fly in a V formation. They might be from Siberia, we thought, a trifle too enthusiastically. One windy evening, a white feather fluttered down. Dee caught it, placed it in a velvet jewelry box, and labeled it “a gift from the heavens.” We somehow felt blessed that day.

Those windy months, we identified ourselves with birds. We watched them, heard them, loved them. We were getting ready to fly.

Years later (and totally unconnected)-
We – a group of friends, colleagues – were sitting together during our coffee break, chatting away, willing our break to last a little while longer, when my handsome friend commented that his hobby was bird watching. I was excited and immediately began to wax eloquent on ornithology and offered to lend him my copy of Salim Ali’s “The Book of Indian Birds,” when I sensed a hush around the table. A three-second pause and the whole table exploded with laughter and the usual ribbings. How could I ever think that my friend would have a hobby of watching birds that flew up in the sky when there were prettier ones walking on the streets of Bangalore? Well, I can be unimaginably dumb sometimes – and that is not just confined to the topic of bird watching.

Hair-raising, literally!

I had all the temerity of walking into a lion’s den. I poked my head in, I sniffed, I blinked. Half a dozen heads turned and a dozen eyes stared at me. I almost retreated but I willed myself to step in.

A heavily mascara-ed pair of eyes questioned me from behind the desk.

“Mau gunting – rambut,” my stammer is quite pronounced when I speak Indonesian.

“Oh, cut hair,” she asked me back, her heavy accent making it almost unintelligible.

My first hurdle over, I heaved a sigh of relief. The relief was short lived because she passed me a card and asked me to choose my hairdresser.

“Expert – Rp 200000 designer – Rp 150000, professional – Rp 100000, specialist – Rp 80000.”

In the inexplicable hierarchy of hairdressers, a specialist has the lowest rung? I couldn’t make sense of that. Or maybe their English was flawed. I made a rough calculation to our user-friendly rupees. 100000 rupiah would convert to 500 rupees. I squinted. I coaxed my gray cells to make a decision. Was my hair really worth paying so much? Reading impatience through her mascara, I hastily opted for professional.

The one thing I like about Indonesian salons is that men with magic in their hands wash your hair. There is a never-before-sensed bliss in that fifteen minutes of trickling warm water and soft lather and patiently massaging fingers. I fought an impulse to drift away to a rose-bed of dreams.

Soon enough, I was transported back to reality. My destiny was waiting for me in purple-highlighted hair (!!), a pony tail, and a menacing-looking tool belt. My destiny smiled. I resigned to it.

“Layer,” I muttered. I meant that I wanted my hair cut in a layered style. He apparently understood me. He started it with a smile. They all start with smiles, but the smile would disappear soon, I clairvoyantly mused.

Let me briefly interrupt a sapless guy’s story of misfortune to enlighten my readers that my hair is resistant to anything done to it – shampooing, conditioning, combing, tying, cutting – the list goes on. It revolts and fights back. I know it, the hair stylists don’t; hence my reluctance at approaching one. They all start in earnest, tut-tut about it midway through, and start their silent curses at about three-quarters of the way. I sit through it like my hair doesn’t belong to me. Then I pay and slink back to my home.

My purple man was no different. He said something which sounded very much like swear words. His co-stylist who was hobnobbing with his petite, straight-haired client, laughed. I stared at the mirror with a stone face.

The blow dry was taking an even longer time. He tried the long metal brush and then the short round brush. He fiddled around with the hair dryer. He was trying to coax each of my hair to its assigned position. I just wanted to run out. Finally, he stood back. He was visibly tired. I said thank you.

I paid. I beat a hasty retreat. I couldn’t read the expression behind that heavy mascara. Or maybe I didn’t want to read it.

I reached home. “Ha ha, amma, you look so funny,” my little one chirped.

“What is so funny about it?” I defended my hair.

“You look like Fluffy,” she said.

“Who is Fluffy?” I asked. I had forgotten.

She rushed to her room and brought out her pink and yellow, very curly, very frizzy, extremely unkempt looking poodle soft toy.

“Ha ha, see.”

“Woof woof,” I intoned.

A Rendezvous and Thereafter

He came after the rains. It was a bright afternoon. There was nothing serendipitous or momentous about their meeting. He had just called her, said he would love to meet her and would drop in at her office on his way home from the airport. But still, she had chosen her dress with care – a black georgette salwar kameez, which was the best piece of clothing she had in her wardrobe. It was not flashy but elegant, she reassured herself.

When the office assistant called and said she had a visitor, she got up in such a hurry that her dupatta got entangled between the wheels of her chair. She cursed. She had been waiting for this moment all morning and she still had to be clumsy. She rushed to the bathroom, made faces at the mirror, pinched her taut cheeks unsuccessfully to get some healthy pink on them, and walked as calmly as she could to where he was waiting.

It might have been a coincidence, he was wearing a black shirt.

“Hi,” he said. “I am sorry I am a bit late, got delayed at the airport.” He smiled.

He was too fair, she thought, and not really tall. She liked his smile though. There was something quite open about it.

“Shall we go straight for lunch? It is quite late.” she asked in her most cultivated voice. First impressions are everything.

“Sure. Shall I call my driver to bring the car around?”

“Oh, no, it is just walking distance. Inside the gates.”

They walked down the Technopark campus. There was a stiff breeze blowing which was invigorating. She saw the lushness of Technopark with an outsider’s eyes. It was spellbinding but comforting too – the seductress and the soother. And then the massive stone man came into view, looking forever seaward – and something masculine creeps in, predicting storms and realizing dreams.

“Wow,” most people said that when they saw the statue for the first time.

They ate. They talked – and talked some more. She could not later remember what they spoke that day, however hard she tried. There were just two things fixed in her memory – a black mole on his biceps – no, just where the biceps and triceps muscles meet, the stickler in her corrected – and the way he bit his lower lip ever so slightly when he was thinking or listening. And he was a good listener.

When they parted that day, it was already evening. The sky was steamy red on the horizon, as if a master artist had painted a blazing scarlet on a whim. It looked passionate, erotic, caught unabashedly in the moment. They turned their eyes away.

“Are we meeting again?” She asked almost shyly.

“Yes, definitely. Aren’t we?” He asked back. “I have got something for you.” And he opened the car door and got out a small brown box. “They are Godiva truffles,” he explained.

“Thank you,” She said. It sounded exotic.

They met again, and again, and again. They had lunches and dinners together. She was the one who talked mostly, he listened. They typed long, meaningless e-mails. When he traveled for work, she pretended to get busy with work too. She was suffering from what she called Penelope syndrome. She claimed she was waiting for her Ulysses. She would weave and unweave imaginary tapestries. When they met again, they held hands. They dreamt of kissing each other. They argued. They wagered. If he won, he would kiss her. She lost. They kissed.

He asked, “Should we get married?”

“What do you think?” She asked back.

“I think yes.”

“Well, I think so too.” She was shy again.

“Shall we tell our parents? They would want to know.”

“Yes, I guess we should.”

That was how it happened. In a nutshell. They got married next April, on April 22 to be precise.

Afterword
Seven years have passed. He still has the mole, he still bites his lower lip. But as each day passes by, there are more things about him to add to my list of favorites. I still suffer from Penelope syndrome now and then. I still weave and unweave my tapestry, at least to kill time, forever being Penelope to my Ulysses.

My Cocoon, My World

Amrapali seldom saw beyond herself. She was the most valued asset of her nation, she was every man’s desire and every woman’s nightmare. All men craved for her, and she danced for the highest bidder – danced and did some more. She played with men’s lives and souls. She lived in her tightly woven cocoon of life and was not ready to step out – that was until Buddha’s path crossed hers.

We were practising hard for our dance drama on Amrapali, the famed courtesan of Vaishali – every poet’s dream and every philosopher’s victory. I just had a forgettable role in the whole dance drama – that of a stereotypical monk. I also had to double up as a maid-in-waiting for Amrapali (there was a clear dearth of forgettable dancers in our group). Although my role wasn’t as juicy as I wanted it to be, the whole enactment was brilliant and refreshing. We were exploring a little bit of the heroine’s psyche – an arrogant Amrapali, too sure of her worth, scheming to lure Buddha; a smitten Amrapali not quite knowing what there was in the saffron robe-clad monk that attracted her so; a bewildered Amrapali with her ever-increasing questions on life; a delirious Amrapali who saw Buddha everywhere; a surrendering Amrapali who gave up everything to claim nirvana – that holy grail for the soul.

When my whole five-minute bit practice session was over, I got back home, a question still rankling in my mind. Would I ever give up my comfortable cocoon for nirvana, just like Amrapali? Forsake the world as I know it and embrace a painless, lifeless existence? What is nirvana? Is it freedom from worries, freedom from sorrow, freedom from change, freedom from life? Would I ever step out of my concreteness for such a hard-to-define liberation?

All life is suffering. Change is suffering. Pleasure is transient. Thus spoke the enlightened Buddha. Attachment is the cause of misery. Detach yourself from the world and you will be free of suffering. Buddha charted out a gradual path of self-refinement to achieve that end. Once the suffering ends, you will attain nirvana. The four noble truths were thus born out of enlightenment.

If we could all enlighten ourselves, where would that lead the world? To human beings attuned towards higher happiness, where sensual craving gives way to monotonous bliss? To a perfectly staid society? To a lifetime of impeccable drabness?

I have built my cocoon with exquisite care. These are my walls of imperfection. This is my little niche in the vastness of an ever-changing world. My senses are my warp and weft. I lie, I cry, I suffer, I change, but those are my realities that I don’t want to trade – not for nirvana. I would rather live my life in all its transience. I decide. I don’t step out. I step back into my fortress, shut the gates, in a bungling attempt to keep myself safe.