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THE (UN)NICENESS OF FANS

Image Courtesy : AI generated image by Arundhati K

Some months ago there swirled a warm debate among a few of my author friends. Now that its chaleur has died down, I reflect again on its elements. It all began with the premise that celebrities may not be inclined to indulge their fans every single moment. They too have their off days when they are tired or upset or just not in the mood, when they should be excused from acquiescing to fans’ requests. A few gender-related questions got thrown up too as the particular celebrity discussed was a female film actor: she had been criticised by a corporate czar for ignoring her fans, for not reciprocating their show of affection. The take of the debate initiator, a bestselling woman author and my friend, was that women celebs more than their male counterparts are expected to be nice, to sweetly agree to photos, sign autographs, respond to everything that is said to them. Women as much as men need their own space and their defending their privacy shouldn’t be (mis)construed as hauteur or a bloated ego.

Of course, there are many who believe that once you start shining in the public domain you are obliged to satisfy all those who propelled you into that limelight. It is by virtue of their buoyant fandom that you receive adulation that could outstrip the measure of your talent and work. Be nice, always, regardless. And being nice isn’t a gender specification. It’s just plain etiquette, a prescription for all. Good manners. Common sense too if you want to retain that fan following that helps tag your name with the mega bucks that you are privileged to earn. A prerequisite of the stardom that you aspired to. Plus, you are now a role model, people are watching you, emulating you, always be mindful and behave well. That was the drift of the arguments that countered a celeb’s right to shake off unwanted attention.

Well, I have no clue as to what goes on in a celebrity’s head though I have some sympathy for them. I wouldn’t know how different their off days are from mine, how tired is their kind of tired or how exactly is their busy or lonely or frustrated or disappointed or whatever. Nor am I familiar with the complexities of the challenges they face. I suspect the higher they go up their ladder, the more rarified the common convivial air gets, plucking them further off their ground reality. Bonhomie with fans may then not come easily, though many continue with it, some from a genuine amiability, some as a pragmatic necessity.

I also wouldn’t know how to be nice, consistently, that is, unfailingly, across the spectrum of all kinds of ordinary and quirky people that come my way. I’m sure many of those who know me well would say that I have my moods, sociable at times, distant at others. I often find it difficult to be sweet and smiling with the people I am close to. Strangers? Nah. I may not be rude but I am not indulgent or fawning either. My sister would often laugh and say, Rohini, you have such a forbidding look about you, nobody would ever dare approach you! Ha! If I look forbidding, what I think about fandom today can be killing. Not that I have fans. Just saying.

I am a fan of many people: singers, authors, actors, sportspersons, teachers, philosophers, activists, some extremely famous among them, some not so much. I have a moderate appetite for news about them, for the little snippets about their idiosyncrasies as well. But I wouldn’t go dig them up. Or, if I see them at the airport or on my flight I definitely wouldn’t accost them with even an innocuous ‘Hello!’. I would hate to intrude. I do not feel entitled to their precious time or attention. Yes, if an opportunity presents itself when they are in a chatty mood, I would love to pick their brains a bit, understand the how and why of their work. Otherwise, I am content to enjoy the fruits of their excellence: the music they bring, the books they write, the lectures they give, the art they create, the sport they have conquered, the causes they espouse and the betterment they initiate. I am a fan not so much of them as persons but of their extraordinary talents, their phenomenal self-belief and passionate commitment to their work.

I remember once many, many years ago when I was a gawkish teenager, the celebrated maestro, Pt Bhimsen Joshi, had invited my parents and my uncle and aunt (the latter then settled in the UK, hosting Bhimsenji) to his home for a meal. My mother casually remarked that his true bhakt was at home. He promptly rose to drive over and fetch me. Of course, my parents would hear none of it but on his insistence my father came and took me over. I remember being painfully tongue-tied in his presence, and while he sat next to me, telling me gently to eat well, that singers need to be strong and healthy, I could barely mumble my thanks. I was overwhelmed by him, not only by his enormous stature in classical music, but also by his affectionate care, his down-to-earth-ness. I remained starstruck shy. That evening he grew so much larger than even his humongous talent. I had always loved his music and now I loved his kindness too.

But even if he had remained reserved and remote I would still have remained his loyal, adoring fan. As I was of Kishori Tai’s (Amonkar). But this diva had a notoriety of being difficult, reportedly a nightmare for concert organisers, fussy about sound systems and lights and so on. Yet, everyone was spellbound by her gayaki, transported to ecstasy, swaying with her as she floated ethereally through the Raga of the day. And by everyone I mean not only her diehard fans but also the harassed organisers! In fact, I would sympathise with her more than with them: how could we expect her to immerse herself in her art, summon her elusive muse, weave magic, if she were distracted? How could she lose herself in that refined yet abstract world of a Jhinjhoti, for example, if the mundane material world held her back in its uncomfortable constraints? Any and all of her reclusiveness and fussiness melted away when she sang, she connected us to the very fount of that divine swar, showing us paradisiacal realms that we could never imagine. However aloof or demanding or difficult, she was always our beloved Gaan Saraswati.

I would love to talk to authors past and present not only about their craft, where they get their story ideas from, how they imagine their characters and devise situations to put them in, but also to understand their views on their contemporary socio-economic-political realities. But again, I am not entitled to have my questions answered by them. I read their novels and essays, listen to their lectures and speeches, read their interviews and feel both enlightened and humbled.  

Singers, writers, painters, dancers, composers, sportspersons et al often shine brilliantly, leaving us awed by their feats, enriching our lives, inspiring us all. I am aware that without their fan following these creative giants might be shorn of their extremely privileged positions. But that doesn’t mean that they are owned by their fans. Judge their work, folks. Condemn the work if it doesn’t meet your expectations but not the worker just because she remained aloof and deaf to your selfie requests. Cricketers, footballers, tennis stars, cinema stars, pop and rock artists, have fans and followers in millions if not billions. I too would swoon if Federer appeared anywhere in my vicinity. But that doesn’t mean that I expect him to stop and pose for a selfie with me. He should feel free to go about his business without needing to accommodate his billion fans along the way. Of course, if he does, he remains a hero to them. But if he doesn’t, does that make him a villain? Hey, if he chooses to never be as charming as he normally is, he would still be the magician of tennis.

Previously it was only the paparazzi that would hound stars, publishing photographs and gossipy news about them, ad nauseum, all of it driven by insatiable fans, by the lucre promised in their frenzy. Today that is compounded by the phone in every person’s hand, its camera, and the impatient hunger to upload all on the omnipresent and omnipotent social media. A boon for those who want to cultivate their fan following, feel validated by their support; a bane for those who are reclusive, preferring to let only their work speak for itself. If you have won even a modicum of success, every little detail about you gets checked out and circulated, praised or panned, virally so. The clothes you wear, the way you walk, your speech, your silence, your choices, your entourage, your families, your babies, their names, where and with whom you eat or shop or swim or sleep, every single thing. All under a microscope, all eyes trained on it. I find that scarily unhealthy. And maybe when someone starts their career in films or cricket say, they dream of becoming famous, even to being mobbed one day. When that becomes an everyday occurrence, its novelty wears off. And then they may distance themselves a bit from fans. They may tell us, watch my film if you wish, watch me bat or bowl, read my book, listen to my songs, not if you don’t, just leave me alone. They will be trolled, hurtfully, liable to sink lower and lower in public regard. For fandom if not fed can be viciously unforgiving.

So, if we feel free to prescribe a code of conduct for celebrities, why not one for fans? Do not intrude. Respect privacy. However much the stars may need you to retain their lustre, they are not your property. You are not entitled to them being nice. When you see them at airports and restaurants, understand that they may not be happy for you to pop a camera in their faces, to be dragged into the frame with you, your hand proprietorially on their shoulder. Give them their space. Be respectful. Be nice.  

My author-friend also contended that women in general, celebrity or not, get a lot of flak if they are not nice. Apart from writing books she has a successful corporate career and speaks from experience. And I understand her point. Conventionally, being nice goes with the territory of being a woman. What is par behaviour for a male, could be viewed as unacceptable for a female. He is ambitious, rightly so, but her ambition may epitomise the b-word. If they are aloof, he must be focused on his work, she a snob. She can never be too busy to smile, to answer queries however inane they may be, mouth a million pleases and thank-yous. Perhaps serve the tea/coffee to all in a conference room or in a business discussion even when she is one of the speakers or negotiators. Wait for others to finish speaking before putting her view across and that too with gratitude for being lent an ear. Dress pleasingly, always be easy on the eyes. Be okay to let a man’s hand rest on her, accept it as nicely avuncular, understand, accommodate. Yikes! And if she can’t be and do all of that then something must be wrong with her. She must have an inflated opinion of herself. She must be undeservedly arrogant. Pray, what would be deservedly? Male, I guess.

Well, the corporate czar who condemned the female film star’s unresponsiveness to her fans may not be guilty of that prejudice. Yet he voiced an opinion. He assumed a prerogative to do so, maybe he believed that his phenomenal success in today’s meritocracy entitled him to. Take it or leave it. Yet media and fans, his and hers, raised a hullabaloo. Brickbats were traded, histories and names were raked, who’s nice, who isn’t, why and why not. People took sides, battled in earnest. That’s the age we live in, even a sneeze gets magnified into a volcanic eruption. And this was criticism. Of an idol by an idol. The idols quickly continued to go about their businesses while the idolators itched and frothed for a while. Until the next such episode, that is. Nice?

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THE EXTRAORDINARINESS OF THE ORDINARY

Like most people who go about their business without any fanfare, quietly absorbed in their daily routines, their work, their play, their rest, I too have lived my life quietly. All off the radar. Not that we are not occupied or busy enough; on the contrary, there are many among us who struggle to find enough hours and minutes to fulfil pressing responsibilities. Nor that we are sadly by ourselves, neglected or unnoticed. There are those who know us personally, those whom we call our community of friends and family, from whom we draw strength, support and solace, love and laughter, those who would probably miss us if we were to disappear. But they are mostly drawn from our pool of common folk, mostly like us, none of us claiming to leave any indelible prints on the sands of time. This is us, the vast human majority, the bustling and throbbing yet faceless multitudes. We form the bulk of humanity, are betrothed to it, gaining from and giving to it, but apart from the perishable memory of a few moments of togetherness, of strife or of joy, we leave nothing of our individual journeys behind. Effaced.

Which doesn’t mean that we are valueless. While we live, we make it all worth living, meaningful enough, important too. Not only for us individually but for the entire collective stretched across the globe, thrumming and humming like a humongous bio-machine with each of its many billion parts doing its chosen/allotted job. Since the dawn of time until eternity, or the more prosaic equivalents of those poetic extremes that would hold true for our species. If one of the parts goes rogue, or fades away or breathes its last, no matter, there are plenty more that stand up to soldier on in place. The human collective breathes on, we make that happen just by our own breathing. And yet, indispensable we are not, not as individuals.

Nor am I complaining about my anonymity. On the contrary, I find refuge in it. That the public gaze doesn’t rest on me, leaves me invisible, free from its unsparing judgement. My ignominies, if any, rest within that limited circle of known people, not flung into media to be minced, chewed, and spat out. Not that I am not judged, we all are, by those who surround us and know us and who presume to know better. The yardsticks of judgement are moulded by all those who hopefully do know better, given to us to enforce, underlain by their evolving templates of morality and codes of ethics, leaving only the glaring aberrations to the remit of judgement by the powers that be. And, of course, the world at large.

Yet, the seeming ordinariness of our lives isn’t to be construed as dull and uneventful, or uninteresting. Even though the events from one life may closely resemble those of another, they are unequivocally unique for the person who lives them in her own timeline, unmindful or even unaware of the doppelganger who matches her step for step. Every major event, every minor incident, every milestone, every daily sunrise and sunset are as exclusive and unprecedented even if they were replicated in billion other lives not only in the here and now but through the churning of time. The joy of finding love, the grief on losing it, the validation from acknowledgement by our peers, the conviviality with the like-minded, the wariness of the different, the jealousy of those who stole a march on us, the sweet vindication when we paid them back in kind, the fear of loss, the anxiety about outcomes, each of us has and lives her own. We may recognise it in others and have that uncanny sense of déjà vu, or a blasé been-there-done-that but when we experience it for ourselves it is new every single time.  

We do not shine in the celestial orbits of celebrities, but we have our own solid challenges, our shares of triumphs and defeats. We are as motivated by ambition, greed, love, lust, jealousy, curiosity, as those whose journeys and feats have catapulted them to the attention of all. Maybe our hunger to shine may not match theirs, nor certainly does our providence. Yet there are those who are as hungry, as determined and as resilient when knocked back by failure, they struggle and struggle even though success eludes them, even though they never soar into the limelight they hanker for. Hope resolutely plods on and so do they.

Which brings me to the premise of most of my writing: ordinariness matters. As much as the extraordinary. Not merely because it provides the base fodder from which the extraordinary is fed its attention, but also because hiding behind that mask of the common is a human who has as much worth and as much claim to dignity and respect as any other. A human who has probably overcome many challenges, has her own share of gifts and aptitudes, her own dreams and ambitions, her own journey with its own twists and turns. The ordinary is not necessarily placid, staid, nor negligible or contemptible. Nor is placidity contemptible. The ordinary may be obscure to our eyes that are focussed on the spectacular, on the outliers, the super-achievers, the super cons, the super-aberrations among criminals, the celebrated and notorious. And yet, the seemingly ordinary is as full of drama and intent and meaning as that which is beyond its pale.

I think of those who strive determinedly to rise from the pits of their existence, clawing and crawling their way out, from the dark to the light, only to draw level with the billions of us who already stand blessed enough, securely in the light, feet firmly on the ground. The base of our existence is their aspiration. We neither see nor hear them, but the drama of their journey is as intense and as worthy of our attention and praise as of those who rise from our midst, soar above us all, and shine for us all to applaud.

Even those among us who aren’t as gifted or as fortunate as the spectacularly successful, their journeys too are full of drama. It could be riveting drama if we could only peel away the obscurity and see these ordinary folk for what and how they are, what and how they’ve travelled through to merely remain where and how they are. They may be fed platitudes that life is short, we get to live it only once, so cherish every moment and focus on the important, the real stuff that life is made of. However true that may be in the general perspective, when they are going through the nitty-gritty of making ends meet, paying bills that show up without fail, meeting deadlines just to be able to survive, swallowing insults and injuries when they fail to deliver, staying relevant and employable in this fast-morphing world, battling disease, surfing anxiously through the uncertainties of living itself, working on and on as if without end, life might paradoxically appear arduously long. And while doing all this so much might be slipping out of their hands: time itself and all that it could gift, the company of their friends, attention to and from family, their own health both physical and mental, so many moments and experiences that they could have had, all that makes them appreciate that life is too short, there wasn’t time enough to fulfil these other things. There is remorse, frustration, anger too. Give me a break, they may scream at times, not that anyone’s listening. But they let out steam and resume their endeavours, going through all the steps that are mandated, that make a life, their life. We don’t pause to pat them on their backs. We shrug off their efforts: what’s so different about that, isn’t everyone doing the same, aren’t we? Yes, we are. Isn’t that great?

We are so caught in chasing the extraordinary that we fail to appreciate how solid and how inspiring the ordinary too may be. Special aptitudes, skills, genius, benevolent lady luck, we crave it all. If only we had that we could be that other special thing that everyone is celebrating, rewarding handsomely, we think that and our hearts and minds gloss over what we have, what we are capable of. No, we leave no footprints on sands, how can we? For we are the sand itself, that soaks it all, dries itself enough and gets ready to embrace those that walk with grace. They are because we are. And if they weren’t, we still would be. 

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THE DIWALI THAT WAS

There is something resoundingly vibrant about festivals at home, each characterised with its own unique celebration and its own quotient of enthusiasm and fervour. And while the calendar marks every month with reasons to celebrate, the one festival I look forward to the most has always been that spectacular one of lights, Diwali. Its near-week long round of festivities is underpinned by many mythological stories, stories that I learnt from my mother and grandmother, my young eyes widening as I absorbed their import, thrilling at the touch of miracle and magic that bolstered the forces of good as they vanquished evil, convinced that good would always thus prevail and until it did the story couldn’t end. Of course, I grew up and most of that innocent unquestioning belief withered under the onslaught of adult cynicism, but the nostalgia remains as does a fragile hope that good may prevail again. And now my Diwali goes beyond that, beyond the triumphant return of Ram to his rightful throne, the obliteration of the evil asuras that tormented mankind, or even the supplication to Lakshmi to bless all with abiding prosperity. For me, it is at its heart a thing of exquisite beauty, of joy and splendour, of families gathering together, of a sense of solidarity with community, of a baton of tradition passed from our elders to us, a baton we hope will be picked up by our young.

I remember my mother, Aai, waking us children much before the sun rose on Diwali day, Narakchaturdashi. It used to be densely dark outside, we would grumble in protest at surrendering the cosy warmth of our beds, reluctantly rubbing our eyes to rub out the sleep that was still crowding them, and then gradually waking up enough to be suffused with the excitement that the festival promised. Of course, Aai would be up much before us, getting everything ready. She would warm a small basin of oil and vigorously yet lovingly maalish us all in the ritual of an invigorating massage before the special abhyangasnan bath. And, of course, she would do our aukshan, her silver lamp going round our happy faces, blessing us with all good things for the year to come, for all our lives to follow. I would watch as the light from the lamp matched the light in her smiling, loving eyes and ask myself: who does her aukshan?

Duly bathed and dressed in new clothes before the celestial orange tinged the skies, we would partake of our pharaal, the sumptuous Diwali breakfast that had been in the making for several days. Aai and our old reliable, Sudhir, slaving in the kitchen frying mammoth batches of crisp and spicy chaklis and shev, golden sweet shankarpale. Scraping heaps of coconut that filled the most delectable karanjis, some of that fresh coconut roasted with semolina for her scrumptiously melt-in-the-mouth ladoos. On and on they would work, tirelessly, almost endlessly. All this along with cleaning rooms and cupboards, kitchen and pantry and storerooms. Sprucing up the terrace and lending a fresh coat of geru paint to the pots in the garden. Stitching our new dresses having first sourced the material from the few textile shops in the market of the small town we lived in. Getting the essentials for the Lakshmi pooja ready, earnestly polishing the silverware that would be used, assembling the rice flakes and battasas, piling platters with five varieties of fruits, stringing marigold and mango leaves into long wreaths that would dress the deity and go up as toran, the bunting on the doorway, going down on her haunches to make the rangoli that would welcome the goddess. The jobs were many, but her enthusiasm made light of them all.

Aai was exceptionally house proud, every little thing had to be just so, the furniture placed correctly and always dusted spotless, flowers arranged to perfection, the choice of music appropriate for the occasion. Bismillah Khan’s shehnai would always accompany our Diwali celebration. Even today, so many decades later, I still play the same shehnai recordings, a Lalit or a Todi to bring in my Diwali Pahaat, and every single time those majestically melodious strains play they bring tears to my eyes, remembering how it was back then, missing her, missing my father, missing Sudhir, missing how we all used to be together, all close and tight.

The week before Diwali, Dada, our father, would take us shopping for firecrackers. I would empty my school satchel at home and then fill it up with the most glorious anaars and chakris and sparklers and rockets and bombs. Toy guns that were loaded with rolled up strips that went phut–phut with every pull of the trigger. In the afternoon when Aai would catch a shuteye I would be out in the garden blazing my gun about. If the gun stopped working, I would extract the strips, lay them out flat and then bash them with a stone, determined to get every ounce of patakha pleasure. Aai, irritated with these noisy intrusions in her nap, would chase me off. I would sulk a little and then after a grudging lull of a few minutes slink back to the phut–phut, Aai shrugging off her rest, indulging my compulsive festival fever.

My older sisters would build a Diwali killa, a miniature mud and brick fort replete with ramparts and towers and moat, a well too somewhere in the middle. Then they would plant mustard seeds all around and watch with glee as they sprouted green the next morning. Place little clay dolls of Shivaji’s soldiers, maawle as they were called, village women in colourful nine-yard sarees, gawlan, and the Maharaj himself on top seated on his throne. Arms caked with mud right up to their elbows they would spend entire afternoons getting every little detail correct. And as the Diwali diyas were lit all through and around the house, some made their way to the killa too, lighting up not only our happy present but also our glorious past. All resplendent and shining.

I close my eyes and see it all as if it were just yesterday. My father returning home from work on Dhanteras, bowing in salutation to the lamp that had been lit outside facing south in honour of Yamdev. Getting ready the colourful paper lantern, akash kandil, hoisting it up at the front of our house, lowering an electric bulb into it, and then voila! He would let there be light! Helping Aai with her preps, scolding us for not helping her enough. Inviting the juniors in his department for our Diwali breakfast, as also our non-Hindu and non-Maharashtrian friends and neighbours, explaining how we do things according to our Marathi custom. Gifting Aai with a special saree on the Pratipada, the first day of the new month, and then proclaiming that the puranpolis she had made for lunch were, as every year, the best of the century!

I remember our cousins from Mumbai had once travelled to our far-off Jamshedpur for the Diwali holidays. Oh, the fun we all had together! Playing interminable rounds of cards while Aai and Dada succumbed to the soporific effects of the feast. Squabbling with energy but always in good spirit. Emptying the tall bottles that lay wasting around the house, packing sand within, and readying them for the rockets to take-off from, shooting up high and exploding in magnificent kaleidoscopic showers at night. I remember my cousin scurrying back to safety after he had hesitantly lit one, my sister scoffing, and then lighting hers with confident aplomb! I would gape in admiration and then emulate her. Then we sisters would shake our heads and giggle at the timidity of the boys.

Every year my parents gave us a Diwali to remember. And they did it all on a strict budget. Today we probably have more resources than they did, but we don’t do as much. Yes, we clean, decorate, shop, cook, invite, host, gift, and all of that, but with many short cuts and some purely symbolic gestures. A lot gets ordered in, guests are fewer, there are electric lights along with the terracotta diyas, and the polluting firecrackers are a strict no-no.

But it’s such joy to look outside and see the rows of Diwali lanterns dancing all through the lanes, multi-coloured beacons of hope and cheer for all to gravitate towards. That sense of community is precious, of belonging, of shared cheer and bonhomie in the good times, supportive solidarity in the not-so-good.

This year my husband and I celebrated Diwali with our daughter and her family in the US. While we decorated the house, lit all the diyas, hoisted our akash kandil, enjoyed our pharaal, I felt as though we were perched on an island in a sea of people with different affinities, for whom Diwali was merely one of the exotic things that some migrants did. I stepped out to admire our lantern and lights and toran of marigold, and my heart filled with pleasure that we could honour our tradition wherever we may be. But looking around, I felt the indifferent darkness in the neighbourhood, men and women walking their dogs or doing grocery runs or anything much the usual, all dressed in their everyday clothes, looking quizzically at us while we stood about in our dazzling finery. I sighed but returned happily to the buzz of excitement inside. Our son-in-law playing with the baby, she gurgling merrily, while our daughter put finishing touches to the elaborate array of dishes in the kitchen. And I reminded myself: my Diwali is about family, revelling in our togetherness however transient or brief it may be, taking a step back from the press of everyday life to celebrate who we are, our own ethnic roots, our history and our tradition, our long line of ancestors, all those who taught us what this festival is about. And while nothing compares to Diwali at home, we empty nesters look forward to flying out to our young whenever we can and together lighting up our souls in joy. May that light shine on.

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On Growing Older

My husband and I slipped into our senior citizenship some years ago. Yes, we are officially older than that comfortably nebulous category of middle-age though we may fight shy of regarding ourselves as properly old. Well, I don’t feel old, I don’t think old either. Of course, my body may contend otherwise, but my mind tells me that I am as sharp and sprightly as ever. Anyway, we marked the occasion quietly, without too much ado, and then carried on much as before. Adding on the days, weeks, months and years without even noticing it. 

Of course, time takes its toll. My mirror tells me that I have seen better days, though my husband very gallantly assures me otherwise. I know I can’t run as I used to. I have learned that if I fall, my bones break. I can’t digest everything as before. I need spectacles to read. I need to pick and choose my wardrobe carefully, camouflaging the bulges that I’ve acquired over the years, those tell-tale symptoms of my eternal love affair with food. Until recently I would colour my hair to mask the growing greys but I’ve abandoned that habit now, finally owning up to my silver mane, my mirror and my vanity making peace with my convenience.

But other than these inevitable changes I still feel more or less the same as I used to, say, ten or fifteen years ago. And I am optimistic enough to anticipate not feeling any different over the next ten-fifteen years either, assuming, of course, that I have that many! I know that I am as curious about people, events, places and news as I was before. I want to stay connected, in touch with everyone and everything. There are times when on the receipt of some especially happy news I still break into a child-like jig, however clumsy and unbecoming it may seem. Yeah, my joints may creak but my spontaneity is still on fire. I still laugh raucously or shout loudly on occasion, or far too often as my husband would hasten to say. I don’t feel mellow or ready to let go as yet.  I want to hear the latest songs, read the latest books, watch the latest movies. I still want to, and do, meet new people, make new friends, explore new eateries, try out that new recipe, experiment with a new bandish, chase new ideas, travel to places I have never been to before, write a new story, make a fresh memory. Learn a different language. Pick up a new hobby, a new pursuit, a new skill. My lust for life is intact. My age is just a number.

Of course, how that number is viewed is relative. Decades ago when I was in my mere teens, sixty loomed as terribly old, eighty as doddering ancient. I remember my Aji (grandmother) dragging her arthritic leg about, inhibited by the pain of movement. Diabetes had already denied her much of her pleasure in food, her craving for sweet heightening as time wore on. Towards the end dementia snared her in its cruel grip, robbing her of her past and present, robbing her of herself. I would roll my eyes at the horror that awaited me, shuddering to think that I too wouldn’t have the use of my limbs one day and worse, of my mind. But as those distant years inched closer, they didn’t portend to be as prohibitively painful or morbid. Fortunately, science too has advanced with me and has made life a lot easier.

It’s interesting how different people age differently. Some I know use their advancing years as a legitimate excuse to get out of responsibilities and jobs they’ve always hated. Some begin to shut down, cutting down on activities before their body tells them to, losing interest in life, almost meeting their mortality halfway. Some try to preserve themselves, trying to push back that eventuality, afraid of doing anything that may hasten it, obsessing about their fragile health, almost afraid to live. Some try to hold on to their vanishing youth. Some go in for cosmetic fixes while some hit the gym with a vengeance. Some are in denial, refusing to acknowledge that growing number in that one slot of their personal data. Some try to squeeze the most out of their remaining years, living each moment to its fullest, as if they were on a timer. Some are depressed, lonely. Some cantankerous while some quietly resigned. Some fiercely independent. Some senile. Some lost.

Some of that stems from how society may view the aged. Unproductive, past their use-by date. In frequent if not constant need of expensive care and tiresome attention. Frustratingly inflexible, clinging obdurately to opinions and habits that they had formed eons ago, the only ones they are still comfortable with. Dwelling in nostalgia rather than in the present, looking back fondly, wistfully at what has passed than expectantly, hopefully towards what is to come. This rapidly changing world doesn’t want to be held back by them, it doesn’t want to be dragged back into a time that it has long left behind. Then, the loneliness of those on the way out screams silently against the noisy hustle and bustle of those still firmly in. And this continues through successive generations.

There are a few examples that I can quote as exceptions to this stereotypically bleak picture. One was my husband’s aunt, Akka Attya as she was known to us. She was a breezy, happy ninety-three when she breathed her last and was, until her penultimate days, as razor sharp and full of beans as any of her young blood. She had obviously lived through generations, experienced, endured and survived a lot personally, witnessed umpteen changes, upheavals and turnarounds in her own life, as well as in the lives of her family and friends. And one would understandably have expected her to be at least a little tired, a little out of touch with people and events, a little less able to recall names, dates and instances. But, every time I met her she appeared to be as alert and animated, as keen on life and living as before.

Of course, the body told a different story. She grew progressively frail, lost all her teeth, couldn’t chew much, struggled with failing eyesight, and had a host of similar age related physical issues. But her mind was always as remarkably and vigorously present as it was the first time I met her. Her memory remained acutely faithful and her swift grasp of new issues and new developments just as impressive. I remember her learning the ropes of the then recent phenomenon of the internet to send her US settled grandson her recipe of his favourite kheer! When I met her last she had been lying down, looking thin and spent, and I had felt reluctant to intrude into her quiet, withdrawn space. I remember hesitating. But she had firmly summoned me to her side, sat me down, and holding on to my arm, sat herself up and begun chatting. Eager. Enquiring. Enthused and engrossed. Her voice was firm, as was her grip on my arm. Her face though heavily creased with wrinkles, looked fresh. Focussed and interested. Every time I met her she had a different anecdote to narrate, a special memory to relate, new information to share. And she always remembered everything I’d told her before, down to every minute detail. Endearingly so. When I rose to leave that last time, she held my hand once more and entreated me to visit her again. That one last request exposed her age and its attendant loneliness, the craving for and clinging to fresh company. I resolved and assured her that I would. Alas. 

Her brother, my father-in-law, disregarded his age completely, climbing up hills come rain or shine, travelling far and wide with friends, eating and drinking as merrily as always. Picking up piping hot and wickedly spicy batata wadas from the corner handcart, sharing them with me, our monsoon ritual together. Urging me every now and then to cook his favourite chicken curry or a flavourful, zingy matar ussal. Sitting up late chatting with dinner guests, no matter what their age or generation or calling, and still waking up at the crack of dawn, magnetically drawn to his friends, walking with them, breathing in the pure morning air. He lived life with all the robust energy of a strapping young lad and passed away suddenly while on one such morning walk. Our old Baba died young.

Most of the Sathe tribe have this zest for life. Their spirit is just as youthful as ever, infectiously so. Their age too is just a number. For them as for me, it is merely the number of years we have lived, revealing nothing at all about how we lived them. Or how we are going to live the rest. I don’t feel unhappy or disadvantaged about my growing older, my ageing. Not at all. I too mostly disregard my age until my mirror reflects my reality. But it fails utterly in sobering me! In fact, I welcome the advancement in years quite cheerfully. I find that I can process things faster than before. I feel smarter! Sharper! Wiser! I am not as naïve as I used to be, nor as trusting, I always look for the hidden catch. More perceptive, more discerning, than I ever was before. And fortunately my memory hasn’t deserted me yet. Not yet. 

Of course, it may all change tomorrow. While I know my todays, I am as ignorant of my future as anyone else. All my givens now may melt away. My body may give way, my brain may also get worn out. My faculties may diminish. But I doubt that my appetite for life will wane. I hope not. I expect that I will still be as curious as ever. I hope I will still want to and be able to learn something new. Stay connected with the world around me. Want to know the latest news, argue with as much energy and conviction as before, relish all the latest gossip, remain in touch with everyone, know everything about all the people in my life. Want to hold on to them. Want to meet them again and again. Ask them to visit again and again. Then if anyone sees in me what I used to see in Akka Attya or Baba, I would take it as a huge compliment. And be truly flattered.

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Dearest J,

It’s been more than a month, many senseless days since you left.

After your premature passing, we tried to pull ourselves together, going through the motions of our routines, working, talking, eating, sleeping, breathing as always. While still in utter disbelief, we began to reminisce about you, as if confirming your passing while our eyes still searched for you. Feeling cheated, we tried to piece together why you were snatched away from us so dastardly early. That fraudulent semblance of normalcy returned soon. The genuine one too a little later, for we humans are notoriously but thankfully resilient. We smile and sing again, laugh and dance too, quarrel and make up, do everything with vigour all over again. But equally, our eyes mist over, your smiling face looming up, now clear as sunshine, now skirting through the shadows. Our hearts sink for a moment remembering that we will never again hear you speak or sing or laugh. Whatever news we may now be eager to share, it will feel just that bit hollow without your stamp of palpable excitement, your enjoyment of it. Damn.

You came to me first as Shireesh’s friend. Jadya, he called you as I did too, the quintessential Marathi moniker for a chubby buddy. My husband’s special childhood dost, the closest one, and I had quickly recognized how precious you were to him. You guys had stood side by side with each other through thick and thin, rooting for each other, sharing equally in each other’s lives, laughing repeatedly at the same inane jokes, plotting crazy mischief, fighting common causes, charting struggles, celebrating wins, marking milestones together. Both of you had harvested a treasure chest of tales to narrate and I would listen hungrily, rapt. Then soon enough I’d grabbed you as mine. Not merely borrowed from my husband, but as my own, rightfully.

But, of course, you were so much more than just my friend. You who perceived and sensed and felt every little thing so acutely, you who were man enough to stand resolutely with me as I was forced to do unpleasant battle on occasion, man enough to cry with me too, always advising me, sharing my victories, making me lick my wounds when I’d lost and then stand up to fight again, consoling me in my recurrent bouts of grief, letting me unburden, counselling me, ever ready to rush to my side from whichever corner of the world I may call you, my dear, you were never just my friend. You were my ally.  

I remember that morning in Sydney more than thirty years ago when on hearing a loud knock on the door of our tiny flat, I had looked up with a frown, puzzled. I had been tending to the baby, warding off that pall of loneliness that would invariably creep over me every morning after Shireesh left for his training in the hospital. I remember muttering in irritation: Who can it be now, nobody knows me here, and anyway I’m busy with the baby. I opened the door and saw you standing outside, a beaming smile splayed wide across your face. As large as ruddy life. I had shrieked in joy, jumped up and down and then pulled you in. There had been no word that you were coming to us from home in Pune, nothing at all. That was your brilliant, inimitable capacity to surprise. Your precious gift to us. After I had calmed down from my euphoric jig, you had explained: wherever Shireesh may live, I visit at least once. And I had cried in gratitude. In those few days you were with us, we had roamed through Sydney’s streets, wheeling baby Uma around in her flimsy ramshackle pram, the only one we could afford then. Showing you all the gorgeous sights, Shireesh taking pictures, you posing grandly against the brilliant blue sky. You and I singing loudly, going through all the stanzas of Sawan ka mahina while riding the Tangara train, then clearing our lungs and belting O Priya outside the iconic Opera House, bemused onlookers wondering what the heck we were on. Oh, we were too high on happiness, too engrossed in it to bother about the niceties of appearance, we were uninhibitedly boisterous. You would hoist Uma high up on your shoulders and show her the airplanes flying across the sky. One after the other, your finger and hers would shoot out, and “Mmmmaaa” you would both shout, Uma’s version of viman.

The day after your passing, Uma reminded me of the small packets of Cadbury’s Gems you would give her when she was a child. And then once more on her wedding day, telling her with all earnestness that it was the best gift she would ever receive. But of course! Jadya Kaka, she would call you. But for her wedding, you stood behind her as her Maama too, my brother.

You and Jyoti, your lovely wife, my friend too, we would all meet often. We would talk late into the night, sometimes for a dozen straight hours, often arguing, sometimes hollering at each other, sometimes crying, intermittently laughing, always tightly knit. Your sharp, evergreen witticisms would send me into splits! We would shred everything to bits, people, events, attitudes, relationships, memories, governments, gods, believers, every single thing under the sun. Sometimes you would coax us to shed our ‘superciliousness’, my agnosticism, Shireesh’s atheism, to humbly embrace the beauty of our traditional religion, to understand and appreciate the complex yet simple path of spirituality laid down by all our ancestors. We would hear you out then challenge everything you’d said. You would be frustrated and start all over again, you never gave up. Not only because religion and its daily observance was a vital pivot on which your life rested, but because you wanted us to benefit from it too.

How I miss those evenings now. Those rounds of cheese-oozing pizza, crisp kanda–bhajjis, fiery missal-pavs, buttery pav bhajis, those spicy bits of gossip, those priceless anecdotes. Shireesh scolding you, stop eating that greasy stuff, stop guzzling that infernal cola, it isn’t any good. You retorting, this is me, my life, my choices, I refuse to deny myself, I refuse to die before I do.

Shireesh once told me about how you bought a last-minute air ticket and travelled with one of your school friends just to give him some company, a shoulder to lean on. The friend had lost his father a few days earlier, was still in bereavement, but constrained to head back to his job in the US. Then again once you had braved all to give safe cover for an inter-faith marriage of yet another friend. You had played negotiator, protector, warrior. You threw caution to the winds, you didn’t think about your personal safety, you just motored your way through. I doubt anyone did as much for family, you did it for your friends. But friends are family, you always said. If a friend deserted you, you would feel crushed, betrayed too, then rant about how those guys had never deserved you, how you had been a fool to invest so much of yourself in these one-way relationships. But one call from them again and you were back to rescuing them from whatever pickle they were currently steeped in. 

Once you had said to me, Rohini, I have always regarded you as one of my own. I’ve indulged every whim of yours but did you ever do as much for my wife? Anything especially for her? Nobody does anything for Jyoti, what kind of friends are you? I saw the hurt in your face, not anger, and I knew guilt. I cursed myself and tried to make amends, but I still regret my oversights.

Thirty-six years. That’s how long I’ve known you, Jads. It seems like an oh-so brief flick in time now, however colourful and full-blooded and vibrant. Six decades, you and Shireesh had been together. I guess it feels even shorter for him. As my eyes well up now I wipe them dry for I see the enduring grief in his. He would tell us, the both of you are emotional fools! You laugh madly at one instant, then weep miserably the next, then scream in anger after that. You and I would shrug it off, for we knew that that was the only way we could be. That fateful morning when you went he phoned me from the hospital, stopping all work, telling me quietly: Rohini, Milind gela. For a second I didn’t know he was referring to you, that you had gone. I have never called you or thought of you as Milind. Then it dawned upon me, and I had felt an icy coldness. How was it possible? You? We had had lunch with you barely twenty-four hours earlier. Gone? Bewildered, I had rushed to you. Jyoti was by your lifeless side, weeping, convulsing, marking it tragically real. This emotional fool kept it together, for her loss was the greatest of all.

You lived life king-size. Khain tar tupashi, nahitar upashi:if you couldn’t feast you’d rather fast, you’d say. Shireesh would caution, moderation, moderation, moderation, his golden advice that you hurled away. But you suffered too in huge proportions, no? Over the last few years, we saw you getting beaten first by this and then that, impaired vision, infected blisters and a ruthless amputation, a perennial cough and sleeplessness, increasingly compromised renal function, a vicious eruption of herpes, on and on you battled, as your diabetes wickedly gnawed through you. Sometimes you were depressed, sometimes up-beat, buoyant, that yo-yo never stopped until it did. Our Jadya had shrunk, thinner now than many. Shireesh would call you nearly every day, how are you today? And you would either sigh and complain of your latest ailment, or then laugh confidently, Arre, masta! you’d exclaim, I’m fine yaar, no worries!  Even today Shireesh picks up his phone in the morning to check on you and then shakes his head knowing that that you will never again answer that question.

I don’t know where you are now, how you are, or even if you are. But I still hold you close, remembering every word you spoke, every tear you shed, every time you smiled. I could share anything with you, no? You gave me that safe space. So, what do I do now? Who do I turn to now? Jadya, these people are nasty, I’d say, it’s scary to deal with them. Wait, you’d say, I’ll round up fifty gundas to stand behind you the next time you need to take them on. Do you really know fifty? I would ask, curious. Well, I’ll start looking them up now, you’d giggle. And I would giggle too.

Just the day before you left, you’d asked me to show you Uma’s baby’s photos. I said, I would. But then I forgot. And now I kick myself. Wait, I have an idea…when she’s old enough I’ll buy her Cadbury’s Gems, they call them Smarties there. I’ll give them from you, and with every little Gem I shall tell her a story about you. Oh, we have lots and lots of stories, I doubt I’ll run out.  

We had some really great times, didn’t we? We were high on life, drunk on it. We made sparkling memories. We left a little bit of ourselves in each other’s hearts. For you were never just my friend, my dear. In this saga of life and living, its cozy hearths, lonely wildernesses, and bloody battlefields, you were my brother in arms. Go well, dearest J.

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In Transit

It’s peculiar though paradoxically perfectly ordinary being in two places at the same time. Seated in an airplane that wings its way over the lands and oceans that separate my daughter’s place from mine, my mind straddles both worlds seamlessly. I look out of my little window and take in the ambiguous light filtering through the layer of clouds, neither here nor there. And I mark the rounds of the routine that typifies her day while anticipating the one that awaits me when I land.

She must have woken up, I think, with a smile. But then I frown, did she get enough sleep? I worry. Did the baby cry or fret or demand to be fed or coddled too often? I hope she’s had time to make her morning chai, sit sipping it at leisure, open the book she’s been trying to read. I hope those pages turn. Unknown to me, my fingers cross.

My husband must have yawned while his bleary eyes followed the Ashes on the TV at home. It mustn’t be easy being alone. But duty had called him back earlier and he had returned willingly, confident that I would do all for our daughter and her family. He will soon lock the doors, switch off the lights, make his way upstairs, browse through his social media one last time before calling it a night. It’s raining heavily, he had told me the last time we spoke. The garden must be that lovely verdant green again, I muse, tender shoots thrusting forth from the palms at the back, the lawn lush once more, wild mushrooms popping up, holding their own until the mali ruthlessly roots them out and tosses them away. The kamini must be in full bloom too, shedding its carpet of white petals every morning, their mild fragrance scenting the air, seeping into the house through the windows, bringing nature into our rooms.

Has she taken her medicines? Had breakfast? She’s a young mother, she needs her sustenance, she needs to mend all that her body endured, heal well. I hope that the day ahead isn’t too tiring for her, too demanding. Her husband shares in almost everything she does, he is as much a hands-on parent to our granddaughter as her. But, I know, for a mother it is different. What she needs to do, what she wants to do, what is expected of her, all must be weighing on her mind and body. I wish that I had stayed longer, helped her more.

I turn away from the window and nod absentmindedly at the flight attendant who has brought me my meal tray. I look at the food, my fork listlessly shuffles its way around, some mouthfuls make their way in, the rest lies uneaten. However palatable, my heart is not in food.

I think of my mother and how she flitted between four homes, her three daughters’ and her own, the one we claimed for ourselves too. Setting the tea to brew in her kitchen and wondering if we had had ours. Watching a movie on her TV and thinking of us all, how we had watched it with her when we had been young, still in her full nest. Listening rapt to a much-loved song on the radio and hoping that I had tuned in to it as well.

My daughter loves music too, passionately. Her favourites resonate through the house while she is occupied in chores. Then stealing away some time for herself she tunes in to her tanpura and goes through the paltas that she has been taught. Her Kedar is so lilting, I remember with a smile of satisfaction. So neatly yet sweetly structured. How beautifully she moves from ma to pa, tacitly enveloping the ga. I smile again.

My mother loved listening to me sing. She would sit across me in my music room, ask for this Raga, that thumri, another bhajan. I would comply sometimes. At other times I would shake off her requests impatiently. No, no, I would exclaim. I am not in the mood for that or then this is not the time for it, some other day, maybe. And she would quietly fold up her farmaish within herself, mutely accepting whatever my moulting mood summoned, with not even a whit of rancour or disappointment. I wish I had complied more.

He loves the charm of old Hindi film songs. I had sent him my playlist of Lata and Rafi and he sits listening to them, no doubt remembering how he had heard them first when growing up, when in school and college, then again with me, luxuriating in the priceless treasures I had gathered in that speciously simple keyword, playlist. Lag ja gale, the ethereal Lata sings and he sighs. The song that we both love, that incarnates love.

The flight attendant is offering dessert, I accept gratefully. I taste it, then eat some more. I wish they could have tasted it too. The view outside my window gets blurred. Has the light faded even more? My hand goes up in reflex to wipe away the treacherous tears that escape. I look around, hoping nobody has seen them, how embarrassing that would be. No, everyone else is similarly wrapped in their own secluded worlds. I nod, understanding. How discreetly private we all are, yet how we go through the same gamut of emotions, the same yearnings and fulfillments, fiercely intent on hiding them from the eyes of the world. The world that has seen it all, known it all, lived through it all and will live through it again and again. And yet clothe it in virgin newness when we experience it ourselves.

My eyelids shutter down, though the eyes go on seeing. Remembering, repeating. My mind feeds them visions and they oblige willingly. The tears roll on, I brush them off in exasperation. Why this weakness, this mushiness? It isn’t the end of the world. I will be with them again, soon. This isn’t forever. I am stern with myself.

Yes, but partings are so difficult, aren’t they? I remember the flight to their place, how eager we were, how excited. The baby was to be born. How tense we were while in the waiting room, our daughter wheeled away for a last-minute C section, my doctor husband experiencing the nerve-wracking anxiety that his patients’ relatives go through. How elated we were when the nurse had scurried to tell us of our beautiful granddaughter, how we had beamed and then laughed in joy when she said that she had cried lustily, filling her tiny lungs with an abundance of precious air. How copiously I had wept in relief when I learned that our daughter was doing fine. How I had rushed to meet them, planting a kiss on her forehead, waiting to tell her to go ahead and sleep, that I’d got it all now. How hungrily I had lifted that precious bundle and how overawed I had felt on seeing how tiny she was. Aai, I had silently called out to my mother, she’s here, ga, she sleeps soundly in my arms. She has journeyed long and well. She too needs her rest.

I browse through her photos on my phone, asleep, awake, smiling, dressed in this and in that. She will be so much bigger and older and smarter when I see her next. I sigh and put my phone away. Sleep eludes me yet. I quietly hum an old Lata lullaby, the one that I sang to her, that Aai had loved. Slowly my eyes grow heavier, my voice fades, I drift off into sleep.

I awake to darkness. I stumble out of my seat and go up to ask for a cup of tea. I pull out my book from my bag, settle down again and start reading. The words barely move, my eyes flicker over the same half-phrase again and again, I feel as though I’ve lost my powers. I shake my head vigorously, will myself to concentrate and am soon immersed in Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness. Such brilliant, acute perception, noting every aspect of the natural world and the human, recording in exquisite detail every facet of every thought and emotion that men and women are capable of. Writing as fluently as the mind travels, moving fluidly from this memory to that realization to the other question to the registering of yet another experience. Transiting from this to that as in a smooth glide, like our meend in music, like a bird taking off softly from this branch with barely a flap of its wings and perching again on that one there, its plumes caressing the intervening air gently, smoothly. Yes, that’s what transits are about. Carrying disparate points and separate spaces within them, joining them in an uninterrupted arc of sensation and sentiment, as if all naturally belonged together, flowing into each other. I am lulled again into slumber.

They bring us breakfast and I discover my appetite returning. The clouds outside have thickened. Monsoon! The sky is like a puffed-up blanket of white and grey, the first inklings of my land coming up. Turbulence rocks the craft. The pilot sends out his customary message requesting us to sit tight with our belts fastened. After the dry weather in California, this will be a welcome change, I think. My heart yearns to hear the pitter-patter of raindrops, see them wash my garden, tiny rivulets forming and flowing about. I wonder where I had left my umbrella. I smile, shaking my head. There is still time for that.

We land. My motherland. My heart fills again.

Immigration, baggage, customs, all go by in a whirl. I wheel my trolley out and see that familiar face, his eyes searching, waiting. I nearly skip my way forward. I see him smiling. I am too.

In the car on the way home, I fish out my phone from my purse and message our daughter. She calls within minutes. Her voice fills the air, I hear the baby gurgling, her dog barking. All well here, she comforts me, we miss you though. I comfort her too, tell her that we will be back soon, until then we will talk on the phone. Yes, she agrees. That must suffice for now, I know.

I turn to my husband. I know that it will be well. My torn heart will be whole again, that I will be happy, busy again. After some mandatory moping, of course, I concede and then grin. He looks quizzically at me. Yeah, yeah, good you came, I tell him. He is happy too.

Whatever I may do, think, imagine, write, sing, create, with whatever intensity and absorption and passion, I know that it doesn’t compare to what I felt back there, that agonised flux, that writhing restlessness. I know my mother felt it all too, I know many mothers and fathers have experienced it over and over again. It’s like a precious baton of love and responsibility that we carry forward from one generation to the next, knowing that this movement and all it encompasses will never cease. It’s an exquisite amalgam of all the sentience that has been accumulating in us from time immemorial, all in an ongoing stream of our human consciousness.

The car rolls forward along the Expressway to Pune. The verdure outside is drenched in rejuvenating rains. The clouds roll along above us. Monsoon fed waterfalls cascade down the Ghats, all so picturesque. We chat, we break for tea, we return to the road. We think ahead, we plan ahead. We begin listing what we must take with us the next time we visit her.

But there is time for that, I know. For now, I turn home again.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRATIMA!

She was my laughing Buddha.

Nearly seven years older than me, she never made me feel that distance. She was wiser, kinder, yes, but she was also infinite fun. Always eager for a joke, finding humour even in the most prosaic, turning a word, a person, a situation on its head and cracking up at the absurdity of it. Prone to giggles that easily escalated to peals and paroxysms of laughter. She would clutch her belly, crunch her eyes, her dimpled cheeks squished as her mouth shrieked, “Ooo-hooo-hoo-hoo!”, as if the thing that had tickled her simply could not be borne. I would laugh with her, not because that thing was funny but because she was. Incredibly funny. Blessed with laughter that was irresistibly infectious. Then it would slowly dawn upon me how that thing was funny too, only I had needed her to show it to me.

My sister, Pratima, the eldest of us three siblings. My parents’ first born. The one who helped them raise us, looking out for us, indulging us often. Tai, my mother would nudge us to call her, the Marathi name for older sister, and she would herself, leading with example, but we refused. No deference to mere seniority, Anjali and I thought, so Pratima stayed Pratima, sometimes shortened to a casual Pratu. But, of course, she was always my Tai, the one who came after Aai. And after our parents passed, she remained my image of home, embodying the stability and safety of it, its warmth and comfort. My refuge in storms. Where I could be me, simply, honestly and happily. Appreciated. Understood. Supported, unconditionally.

One of my earliest memories of school is of me flunking the admission test. I had been seated alongside a little boy who cried loudly throughout. I sat staring at him, curious about his misery, pitying him too, how his copious tears smudged all that he wrote. The task expected of me unbegun. They told my mother later that I was too little to join school yet, sort of letting her down kindly and Aai, embarrassed by my non-performance, took me away, head bowed. I remained nonchalant, sneakily happy perhaps that I was spared the grind yet. But my sisters’ friends would roll their eyes about, probably thinking that the Paranjpes had a dud in their midst. Well, I recall Pratima shutting someone up, saying loftily that school wasn’t ready for me yet. It took me years to appreciate the weight of her defence.

Oh, she was bright and bold, gutsy and strong, smart and quick-witted. Spiritedly advocating her side of any argument, but always choosing her side on steadfast principles. Espousing liberty and equality and fraternity with a boisterous energy that could easily teach les Français a thing or two. She would croon with the Beatles, “All you need is love. Love is all you need,” and the song would roll all around me, its many splendoured promise reverberating, and my head would bob in happy affirmation.

She loved her life, her family, her friends. Her room, her books, her paintbox and brushes, her notebook where she would copy down the lyrics of the songs she liked. Her cup of strong frothy coffee. Aai’s groundnut and til laddoos that made her drool, her large eyes lighting up at the mere sight of them. Her transistor radio which she would tune in to the Voice of America or the BBC. Listening to Elvis, the Beatles too and oh, so many more that I don’t remember. “Havana Nageela,” she would cry out ecstatically with Harry Belafonte, stomping about in step, her two pigtails flying. Her collections of records, books, magazines through school and college. Emsworth and Jeeves, Keats and Wordsworth, Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, Macbeth and King Lear, and her pencilled notes along the margins. Robert Redford and his buddy Paul Newman and the raindrops that kept fallin’ on his head. Usha Iyyer and R.D. All those greats that seemed greater because my Pratima had approved of them.

She moved well from one phase of her life to the next, from one role to the other, one calling to yet another. And while I got busy growing up and finding my own two feet, she moved out. Married, wife, mother, teacher, neighbour, friend. Her liberated, untethered love-is-all-you-need approach got tempered by the expectations she found she needed to fulfil, her abiding sense of duty steering her through. She shouldered all her responsibilities and did her every duty with love. Zealously guarding her trifecta of liberty-equality-fraternity for herself as for everyone else. Gradually she came to terms with her vulnerabilities too as she rode the roller coaster of her life. Ever watchful and protective of the growing fledglings in her nest, those that she was still teaching to fly.  Her heart pulled towards the ageing, withering parents, sensing their eyes peeled to the door, waiting for their girls to come, be with them. And she became that seasoned blend of sternness and compassion, motherly zeal and patient stoicism, allowing, denying, accommodating, rejecting, accepting, refuting as she was challenged by this, then that and then the other.

Pratima was Aai’s closest, most trusted confidante, probably from the moment Aai first held her. “Taidey,” Aai would call and Pratima would respond in a heartbeat. She understood every mood, worry, fear, hope, every inflexion of everything that stirred in our mother’s heart. She would patiently listen, empathise, and counsel. After our father went, she cocooned her, shielding her from pain, gently teaching her how to stay happy.

Both were deeply religious, both with an unswerving devotion to their Ram that anchored them through the trials that life brings in tow. Every time she came home to Pune, she and Aai would visit the mandir in Tulshi Baag. She would celebrate every festival, especially the Ganesh Chaturthi with gusto, calling all she knew for darshan and prasad. Fast and feast as the Hindu almanac suggested, aid, succour, donate, all with conviction.

And yet she was the most secular person I have ever known, standing up tall to fight for the rights and beliefs of all others, even through some of the hideously stressful times that Mumbai has endured. She would fearlessly call out those that spread hostility against other sects and cultures. Reasoning calmly at first and then with fiery passion, her eyes spitting fire too, her patience swiftly wearing thin. Nor did she ever question my reluctance to believe or my abstention from rituals either. She respected atheists and agnostics as she did all believers, respected my thinking, my choices. As always, she endorsed everyone’s inalienable right to liberty to choose their system of belief, equality between all choices, and fraternity between all humans of all faiths. Oh, she made me so proud!

I would call her nearly every day, checking in. Asking her what she was teaching her students, which poem, which verse, which text, whether they were exam-ready. What she was reading. What she had cooked. How we thought our parents were coping. What our kids were doing. What the government wasn’t doing or doing very badly. Cribbing about Mumbai’s unchanging sweaty weather or Pune’s premature summer heat. About people we didn’t care much for. All that exasperated us. Buoyed by those that we admired. Digging up old memories. Unknowingly making new ones. Gossiping, giggling, swearing, sharing. Sometimes a line from a poem would come to her and she would quote it in a breathless rush, then leisurely recite the entire verse verbatim, elaborating on its context, its intent. Reading her beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets to me, both of us sighing over her love for love’s sake. I would listen humbled by the profundity of her knowledge, dazzled by the translucent honesty of her emotion. Sometimes I would sing her a song I had composed. Send her everything I wrote. “Publish!” she would exhort. My sister, my rock, my anchor.

The one I took for granted, that she would sort this, fix that, mend the broken. Care, heal, soothe. Laugh away our worries. And always love. Her large heart flowing over with her immeasurable undying love. The one who held me as I flailed about in my abyss of bewildering grief on Aai’s passing. Who helped me mourn, come to terms with the finality of the loss.

One of the last few times the three of us had sat together was at Anjali’s house, reminiscing, laughing. Always laughing, uncontrollably. Both of them recalling the time many decades ago when they were first taught to swim, our grandfather sending them to a nearby facility in Pune, an old well really. The fiercely strict coach shouting at the two young girls standing shivering with fear. “Paranjpe! Udi maara! Jump!”

She didn’t. She held her ground all her life until she was rudely pushed across the edge. Swept away on the waves of cruel, treacherous fate. Much, much before her time.

I don’t know if she looks back. Not sure she can. I never had her belief.

Though I still look for her.

I see her standing large in her doorway, opening her arms to welcome me.

Humming her beloved Zhivago’s beloved Lara’s Theme.

Beaming at her pupils. Spectacles slipping to the edge of her nose, ploughing through their work sheets, showing them the correct ways to speak, write, express.

Listening patiently at the other end of the phone while I rambled on, taking her time as my own, squandering it on my silly questions and sillier grouses.

Speaking with gravitas as she reasoned with whosoever sat across her, cogently explaining her position after having noted theirs.

Sniffing out the goodies in my kitchen, pouncing on them with glee. Cooking up a storm in her own.

Sitting unfazed with her umpteenth gin and lime, Zen as ever, putting the callow youth who had challenged her to awkward shame.

Laughing. Loudly, unabashedly. Oh, I still hear her. Peals and peals of her irrepressible laughter ringing on, swirling around with the wind, echoing on through the years. What a happy riot!

It’s more than six years since you went, my dear, though it feels like yesterday, the wound in my heart still gaping, raw.

It would have been a milestone birthday today. But you had done travelling your road already.

I raise my glass to you as I wish you and yours the best. My eyes mist over, but then I hear the beginnings of a giggle and I chuckle too. Laugh on, my dear. I will too. And I will always love you. As you told me those many years ago, love is all we need.

Happy birthday, Pratima.

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OH, TO READ!

I am an inveterate reader. Committed, addicted, insatiable.

I come from a family of readers. Growing up at a time and place where television hadn’t reached us yet leave alone the powerfully addictive internet, reading was my window to the world. We siblings would quarrel about who had first claim to a new book, wait impatiently for each to have their turn with it and then discuss it to shreds. My voice in those discussions was the youngest, but as the tradition of our family had it, each voice and opinion was heard with respect, including mine. That, I believe, encouraged me to think and speak independently.

As an adolescent I spent many an idyllic afternoon in the shade of the luxuriant mango tree in our garden, sprawled on an old cane armchair, engrossed in the book in hand. I travelled the world over, learning of different lands and climes, met the most interesting people, understanding the compulsions of many kinds of human behaviour. I learned of many other vital details as well, the way other people spoke, the kinds of food they ate, the clothes they wore. The particular and peculiar dreams they chased, their challenges and struggles, their energies and fulfilments. All that and more without even putting a foot out. All from those pages that turned on their own, almost rhythmically, pages from which men and women spoke to me earnestly, passionately, sharing the stories they had unearthed, those that they had imagined, the sensibilities they had formed, the values they had learned.

The reading habit thrives on in our family and has thankfully been imbibed and refined by our gen next. They, of course, read in newer ways too, sometimes on devices and screens, tapping on an unfamiliar word to get an idea of what it means, unlike us who would perforce heave the voluminous dictionary out and then pore through those very fine pages and finer print. Sometimes I see my multitasking daughter with her earphones plugged in, listening to a narrator reading a book, while her hands continue working on something else. Yet I stay old-fashioned faithful to paper and print. For me, there is something on the printed page of a book that so magically and intimately connects me with the author that nothing else compares to it. As if those words were written expressly for me, me alone. That only the author and I  inhabit that space there, exploring worlds and ideas together, me seeing through their eyes, feeling through their beating heart and throbbing pulse. I become privy to the twists and plunges their minds take, see the thoughts appearing and the words forming as they give aesthetic shape to their creative substance. Sympathetic to their fear, anxiety, hope and belief as they transmit it all to me, trusting me and my empathy to understand and appreciate all that they had communicated. That particular private communication from author to reader cannot, I believe, be replicated in any other way. There may be audio narrations, screen and theatre adaptations of the written content, and they may be eminently successful, but then other agencies, other minds and voices intrude and that precious intimacy is lost.

I also believe that the reader completes the book. As in any communication, it is only when both ends are in matching fine fettle does the message sink in with all its intent, import and nuances. When I read I bring my perspective, my lived experience, my openness to new ideas, which might be entirely different from yours, different from the author’s too. Which is why the appeal of a book varies across readers, as also for the same reader at different stages of her life. While at times I may look forward to complexity of plot, arcs and depths to characters, a heft in the issues woven into the narrative, at others I might simply be in the mood for a mood, an ambience, its genesis, its subtleties, its heightening, perhaps with a climax and resolution.

I remain a sucker for stories. Whatever your premise, convince me through your writing and I will read it through. From mystery and crime to political sagas to espionage. Tales from wars. Histories and philosophical mullings. Dramas in families, at the workplace. Social constructs and how they changed over the centuries. The nitty gritty of race. Ethnic strife. Caste. Gender. The un-muffled cries of the planet. Translations from across the globe and from the many languages of India. The literature out there for every genre, every kind of earthly and unearthly experience is so vast and varied, it’s impossible to digest even a fraction of it in any single lifetime. Edifying, enthralling, inspiring, changing. Pushing me to read on. And on.

However, I typically read little when I’m writing. Impressionable me, I fear that my voice might imitate the one I’m reading. Of course, all that I’ve read from the very beginning has seeped and settled in me, furbished and refurbished my knowledge of the world around as also of me in it. It has questioned my hitherto givens, taught me to look differently, allow for, if not believe, the unbelievable. It has deepened my vocabulary, tweaked my expression, groomed my style, and effectively helped modulate my voice. But all only through its distilled essence. An unconscious churning through of what appeals to me, is in accord with me and myself, what challenges my thinking too but has enough value to be retained, appropriated for myself.

But what if one is so bewitched by a writer as to write like her! Like a sycophantic clone? That’s a strict no-no. I’d rather wait for the spell to pass, emerge to find myself again, question the spell and my succumbing to it however transitorily, and then begin a critique, a distillation of the writer’s appeal, their contribution to all that I know and think and feel, and then write as old dis-enchanted me. Not same old, for that magical voice I had been enthralled by has seeped in too. But again, only in its valuable residue, refining me as author without compromising the integrity of my voice.

So, books to be read pile up as the one I’m writing piles on the plot and pages. Reader friends recommend authors and their oeuvres, I look them up on the net, I sift through their reviews, I sometimes order them in. I excitedly tear through the wrappings and let my hungry eyes feast on the cover, smell the fresh pages packed with promising print. I hold them close for a minute and then stack them with the others that wait too. And I return to my computer, to what I am presently absorbed in, hoping that the thoughts and words I type are worthy to join a To-Be-Read list.  

In this world of today where the virtual is beginning to outstrip the real, my reading circles meet, and discussions, arguments and quarrels (yes, those too) happen more in the virtual space. Through the beneficence of technology and social media I have managed to reconnect with friends I went to school with decades ago, many scattered across the globe, some too busy in their lives to take time out to actually physically meet. Yet, we turn up regularly in our virtual reading room. Eagerly, expectantly. Reading, reviewing, recommending, rejecting. Curious about each other’s choices, the whys of the recommendation, the rebuttals from some about why the appeal wasn’t what it was touted to be. Those who don’t read as avidly or regularly, join in from the side-lines, adding their own telling experiences with caveats to the theme that has surfaced from a book. And as our minds continue to broaden with the diversity of material read, they also close in on each other’s minds, lives and journeys, as if we had bonded spending real time together. We are Booked for life.

I used to wonder about people who don’t read, until I accepted that they were the other sorts from the all-sorts I read about. Or about those who professed to love nothing better than curling up with a book but whined about their lack of leisure to actually do so. I would itch to remind them that they preferred and prioritised other pursuits. That reading is a compulsion not a choice. One reads. Simple. Sometimes one re-reads too, some rare times as soon as the last page is done, turning swiftly back to the first where it all began. Anyway. I meet my kind in bookstores, in libraries and reading dens, the book in their hands introducing, sometimes recommending the person. In a happy role reversal, my daughter treats me to visits to bookstores in whichever city she’s currently living in. Some stores several storeys high, bursting at the seams with treasures from across the world, contemporary and from times gone by, and the both of us browsing, sifting and gathering in as much as we can. I recognise the look on the faces around, the eyes suffused with calm excitement, soaking in the riches. I appreciate their deciding between this and that as they fit their purchases in their purses. I see a child pick a storybook, looking wistfully at yet another, and I long to give it to her. But I know she’ll be back for it as soon as she can, she’s as badly hooked as I am. And my heart sings with joy.

Well, my life seems to have returned to the basic skills I was taught as a child: reading and writing. But there are so many worlds contained within those two simple words, myriads and realms of knowledge, imagination and possibilities, all kinds of sensitivities and sophistications, ranges and depths of human experiences, so much more that I am waiting to discover…that I join in the most frequent refrain I hear from readers: so many books, such little time. And I smile as I write and add mine to them.

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O YE, OF LITTLE FAITH

I was born and raised a Hindu, embedded with a moral compass that drew largely from the Hindu religious tradition, given its pointers to the good and wholesome way to live my life, the virtues to imbibe and vices to eschew. I grew up among friends and neighbours, a mix of many religions among them: Christians, Parsis, Sikhs, Muslims and Jains, as also Hindus that came from different parts of the country and did many things differently from us. I was naturally inclined to accept and respect them all. Healthily curious, I explored their faiths and customs too, never feeling that they were alien to me or my humanity. And while I wasn’t keen on the rituals, ours or theirs, I appreciated the values that made sense to my evolving being and notched them on to my compass. The consequent melded morality sufficed for conscience while I trundled on through life.

My parents were staunch believers, as were both my sisters, both older than me. All would gather around the deities in our pooja corner, sing aartis and share the prasad on all the major festival days marked on the Hindu almanac. My mother would read the scriptures, light the diya, offer the flowers, tulsi, durva and haldi-kumkum in her daily pooja, recite the shlokas in prayer and teach them to us too, in devotion to the gods that presided over her and our existence. My father would join in with reverence, bringing the idol of Ganapati home on the Chaturthi, hoisting the beautifully decorated Gudhi on our new year, doing a Satyanarayan pooja to offer special thanks to the divine forces when they had been particularly propitious, hang up the akaash kandil or lantern on the first night of Diwali and so on. He was a ruthlessly logical scientist, demanding proof of every this, that and the other, but never disbelieving of Ganesh, Ram, Krishna, Mahadev, Lakshmi or Saraswati and their individual and combined powers over us and the universe at large. The entire pantheon of gods and goddesses sat very comfortably in his rational and inquisitively searching mind and life.

And yet they were all happily accepting of that diversity of religions that surrounded us, appreciative of the different cultural expressions they came with too. As also accepting of my choosing to remain a sceptic, often irreligiously so. I would, when I was inclined, chant the prayers with them (more often lured by their musical cadence) and listen in to the complex stories of mythology, but never with belief. I was never coerced to subscribe to their beliefs, nor disparaged as the proverbial black sheep because I didn’t. They knew that I was still searching, reluctant to conform without conviction. So, I knew which shloka to recite in the evening or which before sitting down to a meal, how to celebrate every festive day, and so on, and I did some of it as part of our shared culture. As something that grew from our roots through our line of ancestors, rather than as an attempt to connect with any form of divinity. I was loyal to my tribe, if nothing else. I was also always aware that I could just as well be lighting candles or decorating a crib for Christmas or covering my head and bowing to the west in namaz before partaking of iftar had I been born differently. That while it was all different it was all ultimately the same. And that we all knew that.

That we didn’t, became clear as I grew. The realization that everyone wasn’t as secular as my folk brought an unpleasant awakening, then disillusionment and finally a lasting frustration. That many brandished scars from hostile run-ins with others, and that many more stood up in shrill solidarity with them, didn’t gel with my innocently myopic worldview of peaceful co-existence. As I read through the newspapers that came home, I discovered that many lived but were adamantly determined to not let live. And that made me uncomfortable, shaking my faith in humanity. Then the questioning set in, searching through historical precedents, the stories of persecutions and annihilations, of terror and suffering, of wars and cruelties, holy crusades and unholy holocausts, and the genesis of it all: religion itself, in all its alternative avatars and distinctly different practices. While one’s faith may teach one of the unique universality of God, there is a wariness, if not aversion, amongst his followers if others choose to call him by another name or worship him differently.

The cynic in me suspected that if it hadn’t been religion, it would have been something else, anything else. All humans originating from the same pool of the species, migrating in waves through the millennia, appropriating different parcels of the globe, settling, evolving and brewing their own distinct ethnicities in relative isolation from others. Blinded into an arrogant belief that theirs was the only right way to live, and anyone else’s wrong as an indisputable corollary. Suspicious of others, fearful of them, rather than curious and receptive. Othering in practice, strongly and clearly, compulsively too, as if it were in our DNA. While we had exited our caves eons ago, our primal instinct to hunt and fear of being hunted remained alive and kicking, the othering then exacting its toll in human lives. As I was loyal to my tribe, others were to theirs.

The aggressive othering suits some, I am aware. Earlier it gave the imperialists and colonialists the buttressing rationale to camouflage their greed with, their condemnation of others as heathen or infidels or savage, legitimising the destruction of their settlements and heritages, and at times seeking to expunge them from the face of the earth, an earth they believed was theirs for the taking. The othering continued through the churning centuries, enabling political climbers to manipulate communities and mobs and nations, tilt them this way or that, expanding and consolidating their majoritarian power base, progressively marginalizing all others. Or conversely, stoking the minorities’ fears of persecution and wedging them further away from the mainstreams. Now, I fear it’s all brazenly out, the hatred and the fear of all others, as also the drive to redress all wrongs, past and present, real and imagined. Everyone from all edges of the unholy spectrum is fighting, hollering about the exclusive sanctity of their own particulars, their god, modus of worship, custom, language, diet and on, retrieving powers and privileges they believe were rightfully theirs, screaming to restore their original occupation rights to land and all that stands on it, including places of worship. And bidding peace and coexistence a speedy road to hell.

Redressal is the buzzword today. We are in the grip of a fervour to rewrite history, literally, resurrecting some of the forgotten, unmasking some of the hitherto admired as villainous, demolishing what was built by others as they had demolished what had been built earlier. Ripping off the band-aid of collective amnesia that covered old wounds and making us wince and writhe again, fanning our lust for the reciprocal pound of flesh. But history, as we read it, has always been pliable, written with one slant yesterday, written with another today, and waiting quietly for time and tide to turn to be written all over again.

But we were not a Hindu nation, not when we became free. Despite the blood spilled in gory Partition, we were encouraged to remain secular. To be respectful of all others, including those whose ancestors had once marched upon us, or who had converted, either influenced by their proselytizing zeal or as an expedient to secure survival. If not peaceably tolerant, then at least grudgingly so, letting me grow up in that convivial mix. That was the intent in the constitution that we chose to be governed by, that defined us to be a secular state. The secularity that was the inborn hallmark of my family and many more like ours.

I remember my Hindu family and neighbours sipping eggnogs and relishing a slice of cake, wishing everyone else, Christian or not, a happy Christmas. Or trotting over to a Muslim friend’s place and joining in their festivities on Ramzan Eid, exulting at the sliver of their moon. Waiting for our Parsee neighbour to share her aromatic dhansak with us, inviting her to partake of our feast on Diwali. Baisakhi, Papeti, Easter, Eid, were as integral to our social existence as Diwali and Dussehra. The faiths they spring from too. They still are, I would like to believe, as are their practitioners. I may not be religious, but I am respectful of everyone else’s right to believe and practice as they wish. And remain where they wish. I would rather religions be practiced only in the privacy of homes rather than in the public domain, altogether avoiding their inimical jostling. But that’s my unsolicited opinion.

Where will this end? When will all wrongs be righted and all grievances assuaged? And what then? Will we rest in quiet peace, fulfilled at last? I doubt that. I fear that we have fallen in love with hating, that we will find and legitimise avenues and targets to spew the bile that continues to bubble within us. Religion has been a major segregator, but it is not the only one. The othering is multi-pronged. And hypothetically though completely logically, after we have eliminated our present others, we could draw finer lines and other some amongst us, and then some more, until each of us is distanced from all in solitary confinement. Humanity lost.

Bah! That’s just ridiculously far-fetched, dystopian gloom and doom. The world won’t come to that because it can’t afford to. Everyone needs everyone else, especially in this globally spun web of commerce that we seek to survive in, prosper through. And won’t the good, just, truthful and merciful that all the saints, mullahs and sadhus praise to their respective heavens, and that firmly point north on my moral compass, prevail? As they do in all the mythologies scripted everywhere? Or is that merely unquestioning faith? Anyway, I hope they do.

Amen. Alhamdulillah. Tathastu.

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LEAD THE KIND INTO THE LIGHT

Kindness attracts me immensely. There is a quiet luminescent glow to it in comparison to which the brightness of wit and the radiance of genius pale.

Of course, I admire men and women of intelligence. We, of the human race, benefit from their curiosity and their inventiveness, the questions they ask and answer, pushing the frontiers of our knowledge. I wouldn’t be writing words, discerning and labelling each one of my thoughts and sentiments, typing them out on a computer and sending them to you to read, if it weren’t for the humongous advances that our gifted proponents of the sciences and the arts have made over the millennia, propelling forward that ongoing evolution of us sapiens. 

I also appreciate that genius doesn’t grow overnight. It needs accurate spotting, careful nurturing, and sometimes ruthless pruning, cultivating it along productive channels, much like that tree that bears bountiful fruit only upon the painstaking efforts of a dedicated gardener. Society invests heavily in genius for it is selfishly interested in its fruit. And that is only natural.

I find wit good company too. It is entertaining. It can also be rewardingly insightful and illuminating. A sharp pleasantry, an acerbic but apt comment may relieve many a dull moment and may alleviate an otherwise banal conversation. A chance or calculated pithy remark by the witty wise may open my eyes, opening up a person, a situation, hinting at covert agendas, and other such interesting details. Opening windows that were hitherto closed, prodding me to look beyond, probe further.

When talents are put to productive use society rewards them, handsomely at times. The size of that reward is, of course, determined by the relative scarcity of that talent: the scale and urgency of the need for its output vis-à-vis its availability. The everyday unavoidable market scissors of demand and supply that supposedly impartially decide price and thence incomes. The impartiality begins only after the initial distribution of resources, wealth and human capital, has been accepted as an unchangeable given. That could be cruelly unequal in itself. But that is a matter of discourse on equity. 

And that’s the thing. Equity, and similar goals that may render humans humane, is not the goal of unfettered market decisions. Our market and trade paradigms that explicitly or covertly hail maximisation of self-interest (read profits, incomes, utility) as the efficient guiding motive of decision making, don’t give a damn about equity. They are not supposed to. And that is only expedient. And then popular clamour to factor in humanitarian concerns prompts the powers that be to tweak the system, blunting those market scissors somewhat, trying to secure a minimum decent dispensation for the less privileged (including those that had been left out in the cold in that initial distribution of socio-economic resources). Welfare, subsidies, and so on. Beyond that the markets continue to do their work.  

So, that rare talent that could effectively carve out a monopoly of its much-in-demand produce, earns at a premium rate. A neurosurgeon will earn several multiple times what a janitor does, and that is but fair, given that the surgeon has invested that many years of sweat and money in training herself, to render herself worthy of people trusting her to do right by their ailments cerebral and neural. Maybe the janitor didn’t have the talent and/or appetite and/or opportunity for higher studies and specialised training. Though I could ask the surgeon if they have the talent and the appetite for cleaning office spaces every day for a living?

Yet, the market governed hierarchy of professions also determines the quotient of respect that they earn. More often than not, an investment banker will consider herself superior to the teacher in a municipal school. Money talks, as they say, and people listen. Respectfully. Earning that kind of money is the prime aspiration of many. And however much pastors preaching from pulpits and priests praying in temples may warn common folk about the shallowness of the lure of lucre, lucre does lure. And I am not convinced that that is sinful at all. 

But what I do question is the badge of respect it flaunts. Respect that even the most corrupt politicians command from their hapless constituents just because they are willing to flex their material muscles to squash them. Respect that celebrities earn because of the cars they drive and jets they fly, the diamonds they flash, the mansions they can afford, aspirational for so many. That allows them and their ilk to, for example, jump queues, because ordinary citizens accept that they deserve that preference and deference because their time is not to be wasted waiting, their time is money. 

It is this equation of respect and deference with material reward that I am not comfortable with. Just because my child is not as smart as yours, does not top the ranks, or win competitions, bag that to-die-for-job, invent the next life-saving medicine, search for life on a remote astral body, have that rare gift to do what you are willing to pay money for, does she not deserve to be respected? Not pitied, allowed for, consciously included, accommodated (read, lumped and dumped) in the lacklustre category of also-rans, but just plain respected for who and what she is? 

I could shout from rooftops that my child is loving, nurturing, helpful, empathetic and downright kind, but really who’s listening? Is she a professional healer? A life-counsellor? Does she have a CV or a list of achievements that define her worth? If not, well then all those attributes are near redundant. Not just because they are not accompanied with a societal certification of her merit which I accept is more valid than just my word for it, but more importantly, because none of those attributes can be monetised. 

Intelligence, genius, talent and so on are then proven to be so when there is a societally agreed reward attached to it, actual or potential. Seeing someone in need, lending them a hand to help them out of the hole they are in, giving someone a shoulder to lean on, lighting up someone’s day just by your attentive supportive presence, spotting all situations where you can help, being kind to a stranger on the street, are not slotted in the categories of recognised talents. There is no premium attached to them. They don’t command respect. 

But they are the backbone of our humanity. Of how we get through crises, swallow tragedies, heal ourselves and live fruitfully the next day and after. When an earthquake strikes, the janitor helps pull the neurosurgeon out from under the debris she may have gotten buried under. Free of charge. Maybe she was cleaning toilets when the surgeon was examining patients. And she was kind enough to risk her own life and help. Or, when the next Mumbai monsoon deluges us and we are stuck in our cars in unmoving traffic, the hand that knocks on our window and hands us that bottle of water and that pack of Glucose biscuits, is probably just the nondescript sweeper or unglamorous vegetable seller or even the failed derelict human living in a nearby hovel or hole, just trying to be of help. Or when our old helpless parents or grandparents are gasping for breath, their frail bodies blazing in a debilitating fever, and we are stuck in a frightening pandemic in a city far away from theirs, an out-of-work rickshaw-wala coaxes his vehicle back to life, braves contact with Covid and ferries them to the nearest hospital. So that they may breathe freely again and then so can we. These uncelebrated ambassadors of kindness respect us as fellow human beings and recognise our need. 

Do we respect them? Their needs? Equally? Enough?

Not just because they have been of service to us when we were in need, but because they have it intrinsically in them to be kind. They disregard the layers of neglect that their lives have been cloaked under for all those years, the wretched losers in the original distribution of socio-economic resources, and stand up for us when we need them to. How much are we willing to pay for that? 

And then when we’ve moved on from our tragedy or crisis or upheaval and are in the thick of shining things again, will we remember those kind hearts? Or will we look for them only the next time we are in need? Will they inspire us in turn to be kind? To reach out and help? Maybe, make us understand that all that we’ve learned and earned and are proud of in our happy lives is just a fraction of what this human race is about. That maybe we still have to learn that vital bit, the being humane bit. And learn to prioritise the respect we give that. 

Well, kindness and genius are not mutually exclusive. This is not a them and us situation. But the kindness that may rest in the genius even, how highly do we value it? On par with the genius itself? Not at all. In fact, the attribute of genius adds a sheen to the kindness, makes it a tad attractive. Which is why a good deed by the already celebrated is hailed whereas the same by a non-entity goes unnoticed. If the neurosurgeon from the example earlier were to rescue the janitor from the debris in an earthquake, that would make headlines. Not the vice versa.

What if it were the norm to shine the spotlight on the obscure good Samaritans amongst us? And the applause rang longer and louder for them. And these kind and nurturing humans were held up as examples to be admired and emulated. Above all else. The first among equals.

Well, every morning when I wake up, I tell myself: Be kind. Whatever else I may or may not be and do, I must try be kind. And when I see that kindness in you, my fellow human, believe you me, I become your fan. 

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The Sun That Sang

It was in the middle of the afternoon on a regular weekday. I was driving to school to pick up our daughter. Well, the car practically drove itself for I was hardly conscious of steering it. It was on its customary route, taking the usual turns this way and that with indicators flashing accordingly, stopping at traffic signals turning red, buzzing through those that were still green, honking a slow scooter out of the way. I registered none of its movements. It was as if all were on auto cruise and my car understood better than to disturb my mood. 

The sun was searing from up above, not a cloud between it and the wilting humans beneath. Pelting and melting as was its wont. But I felt it not. For I was in the land of Vrindavani Sarang, in the cooling shade of serene melody, listening hypnotised to those lilting notes and that majestic voice that called upon them with the love that only he knew, suffused with the like love and devotion that he inspired in all us acolytes. The sun was in veritable song. Tum rab, tum saheb, an ode to divinity in a languid loop of the ten beat Jhaptaal. 

I had been addicted to that voice ever since my childhood, it echoed from my earliest memories. My parents, both his ardent fans, buying their first LP with his Maru Bihag and Malkauns. Then buying another and yet another with every paycheque every month. As their record collection grew, there came more Ragas that he had sung, and then were added more voices and instruments too. A Pandit Paluskar, a Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahib and an Amir Khan Sahib. A Pandit Ravi Shankar, a Vilayat Khan Sahib and a Bismillah Khan Sahib. Our library of music grew richer over the years, my mother carefully choosing the programme for the evening, lovingly removing the jackets and carefully prising out those mysteriously shining dark discs from their sleeves, gently blowing away the rogue specks of dust she spied on them, positioning that sharp needle on the outermost edge and then with breath drawn in in expectation, lowering it to play. Aah! 

Rasiya! I would hear that voice call in earnest entreaty and I would listen as if compelled, as if nothing else mattered, as if that Maru Bihag was all that there was of any import. That stoic shuddha ma, the genteel ga, they had become my friends before I even knew them by name. Tadpat raina din, he would confess his yearning for a glimpse of his beloved and I, all of two years old then, would be in harmonious sympathy. 

The sun blazed on, my car was at the school gates, children were pouring out. Mine came too, satchel dumped on the backseat, door slammed shut and the music changed from the CD that had been playing to her favourite Radio Mirchi. I drew my car out from my parking slot and drove back home, listening to her excited chatter and the equally animated radio jockey.

Bharat Ratna Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, the lustrous and illustrious gem of India. Swar Bhaskar, the voice of the sun and the sun among voices. Estimable and knowledgeable Panditji. Fond elder Bhimanna or simply Anna. We of this prosaic material world came to know and address that musical giant amongst us according to our closeness or distance from him. I knew him as my first repository of true music, the sachha sur, my own revered musical deity and my reference for all issues melodic. My ears had been trained listening to him right from my cradle. My sensibilities musical had been defined by him, resolutely in favour of the leisurely build-up of a Raga’s ambience in its khayal, the sombre and stately alaaps progressing measuredly against the protracted dhin dhin of the favoured ektal on the tabla, graduating to a quickened tempo and traversing through all three octaves in boltaans and taans, some in blinding speed, simple or complex, rolling with rumbling gamaks or cutting through like flashes of lightning. I was already familiar with it all before my formal training in Hindustani classical music commenced. And while I enjoyed the five-minute film songs that ruled the popular roost, I found that their flavour faded soon. In contrast, the Ragas that the maestros sang sustained and endured, resounding and resonating long after their last tihai.

I remember a concert from many, many years ago, a private mehfil that I had been privileged to attend along with a few dozen invitees. Bhimsenji had begun with a Darbari Kanada. Diving in introduction into the well of the lower octave, that all important mandra saptak in Darbari, he had at once drenched us all in its thick swirling currents. Enunciating each note with polished precision, clarity and mellifluousness, then blurring and merging them in gliding meendhs and Darbari’s trademark andolans or oscillations, and then standing poised and still on the bedrock of his reverberating kharja, he had woven his magic over us all, connoisseurs and laypersons alike. Then climbing up through the middle and higher octaves, steadily approaching and gathering in every successive precious note, he had structured layers and layers to that magnificent edifice of his khayal. Regal and assured yet deeply introspective, melancholic in some phases, caressing tenderly in some others phases, supplicating piteously in yet others, it was a continuing alchemy of overwhelming emotions and I listened mesmerised. His voice, the most robust that I have ever known, would roar in command and then whisper in intimacy and then again plead in all humility. There was heroic power, abject pathos, stark asceticism, all in a glorious and wondrous mix, transporting us to rare other-worldly bliss. I had forgotten myself, forgotten my surroundings, rapturously lost in the darbar of his majestic muse. I doubt any other singer I have ever heard could match the impact of that night’s rendition. It washes over me still. Darbari was his, his alone. 

But then so were Puriya, Marwa, Shuddh Kalyan, Mian Malhar, Miyan ki Todi and many more. Yes, I enjoy and follow other classicists’ interpretations of these Ragas too but I still return to Bhimsenji, not merely from fond nostalgia but with a sure knowing that in him I will find only the Raga in its purest and most sublime form, not a projection of he himself or his prowess. Whenever he sang it seemed as if he, his voice and body as also his spontaneity and virtuosity, were all possessed by the Raga itself, commanded unto its bidding. And the bizarre contortions of his face and torso and arms that became his caricatured personality, were simply in driven blind-eyed pursuit of the next magically musical phrase. 

Some of his contemporaries and critics would denounce the limits of his repertoire: “He sings the same few Ragas everywhere! And the same thumris and abhangs.” And his loyalists would bristle in anger: “No, his repertoire is wide enough! His reach in every Raga is the most profound! And his Teerth Vitthala is matchless!” Well, all I knew was that his every performance in any given Raga would be different every single time, revealing this face of a Miya ki Todi today, for example, another tomorrow and then yet another the day after. Yes, like all other artists he probably had his share of off days too, when his heart and mind refused to apply themselves to the Raga at hand, his mood refusing to submerge into the Raga’s, when magic refused to happen. And yet there are priceless recordings of a Yamani Bilawal or a Multani or again a Komal Rishabh Asawari and many more that I play and replay again and again, for days and months on end, unable to escape that magnetic pull, unable to pack in not only the strength of his notes but also the golden honey-like Kirana gharana sweetness that he doused them in. 

Two of my uncles had been privileged to be among his friends. Doctors by profession their hearts, I suspect, beat happier in tandem with the tempo of khayals and bandishes. I would be hungry for all the interesting anecdotes that they had to share, tales of his sharp wit and mischievous humour, of historic benchmark performances, of hobbies and interests. I would read all I could lay my hands on, his interviews, the stories about his formative years, his crazed obsession with music, his scouring through the length and breadth of the country in search of a Guru. The rigorous discipline and arduous training under the famed Sawai Gandharva, the Guru he was blessed to find, his long hours of gruelling riyaz, the swallowing of personal pride and notions of privilege to be merely allowed to remain in the vicinity of a handful of melodious notes, the unswerving loyalty to his Guru. His rapport with other luminaries of the music world, his encouragement to young artists. The commitment and dedication with which he organised the annual Sawai Gandharva music festival, inviting both established maestros and upcoming artists, looking after their comfort, tuning their tanpuras, listening to them in humble attention while they performed. And then capping it all with his own magnificent performance in the last session of the last day, his resplendent homage to his departed Guru. I devoured it all. I learned of his eccentricities, his failings too, but I judged him not for his human frailties. For all I ever saw in him was his divinely sachha sur, the sur that continues to reign supreme. 

The sun still sings for me. He still propels my day forward, guiding me through its gradually changing texture and complexion, showing me the fledgling streaks of orange in a day-breaking Lalit, a little more of light and warmth in a Ramkali. At burning noon, he coaxes me into the resuscitating shade with his Sarang, then shows me the morphing world in the evening’s Puriya Dhanashri. Later, he slips away beyond the horizon leaving me the riches of a Bihag, a Yaman, a Chhaya, an Abhogi, many and much more to revel and rejoice in, to nourish my searching soul. 

Many sang after him, many stake ownership of the stage, many have won millions in audiences and admirers. Yet to me none can hold a candle to him. The singularly luminous star that burned so unbelievably bright that he lit up all firmaments, the earth, the sky and the universe beyond. The one and only Swar Bhaskar.

Photo Credits : Sateesh Paknikar

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Coping. Rebooting.

It hasn’t been easy, has it? This year and more of struggling, surviving, losing, coping, adjusting, wrapping our heads and hearts, minds and bodies around the new emerging normal. All yet fluid and floating, unsettled and undefined, allowing this today, prohibiting that tomorrow, and then perversely changing everything all over again. 

At first life threatened to stagnate or worse, disappear. It began to stand still not just within our isolated spaces but also in the stoic scenes outside the walls of our confines. Birds sang, dogs barked, bees swarmed as busily as before, but our own species seemed somewhat stifled, somewhat muted. Justifiably so. Hunkered down. Waiting. Watching. Breathing. Praying that breath would not cruelly forsake us.

Of course, there were those who still continued to scream shrilly. Out of TV boxes, on social media, in newsprint, in living rooms and, shamelessly flouting all consideration to the vulnerability of others’ lives, in indiscriminate public gatherings. At each other, with each other, sometimes at the virus itself. Go Corona! 

Corona didn’t go. But jobs went. Bread on tables dwindled. Migrants marched home, some died on the way. Shops shut. Manufacturing reduced to essentials. Construction halted. Temple and churches and mosques became silent. Buses, trains and planes hung around in their depots and sheds and hangars. Schools emptied. Play stopped. Hope flickered thin. 

Hospitals burst at their seams with the bloating influx of the infected, the coughing, the gasping, the sinking, the dying. Beleaguered and bleary eyed, doctors and nurses struggled to piece together a line of treatment to fight a brand-new unknown variable. We thanked them sincerely, profusely, bestowed upon them bouquets of gratitude. Sometimes brickbats when they could not save someone we knew, was dear to us.

Breath faded quietly. Ventilators hummed loudly. We lost some of our own, some dear, some admired. We mourned. We looked on others of our species with suspicion, would they be the harbingers of our demise, we wondered. We clung to our old trying to save them from being snatched away. Then the not so old and then the younger. 

Somewhere in between those two pandemic waves many cast their vulnerability aside, refusing to get beaten by that frightfully microscopic parasitic entity that was looking to lodge in our lungs. They stepped out as before, meeting, gathering, thronging, a token mask dangling on their chins. Breathing in and out unconstrained, daring disease, daring death. Unto themselves as unto others. We called them foolhardy, myopic, irresponsible and so on. I guess they were all of that but they were mostly fed up of being cooped in. Of being idle, unemployed, un-fed. Many did what they did to survive. What if there is no roof over one’s head or means to earn food for the belly? Starve to death in fear of the virus catching one alive? Conundrum. 

Those fortunate and privileged to remain safely ensconced in their well-equipped houses became smarter. Children and youth, students alike sat glued to their screens, “Yes, Teacher! No, Teacher!” they chorused as the teaching community tried to salvage their education, teachers retraining themselves, learning new skills so that they could still faithfully discharge their responsibilities. Many woke up in the middle of the night to record lessons in the quiet that they were denied during regular school hours. Many pined for the tea breaks on campus, the chai as hot as the gossip that was shared. Most stayed the course.

Men and women continued to work from home, hunched over their computers, tapping away on their keyboards, calling, dealing, Zooming, beaming. Protecting their incomes. Spending and shopping online. Ordering in food. Insisting on contactless deliveries. Hygiene and sanitation and safety, they demanded. Some barking at delivery boys who scurried around fulfilling customers’ orders to feed their own bellies. Some whining about the number of phone calls they had to answer to confirm addresses, some about the bungling of orders, some suspecting that their food had been contaminated, perhaps sampled on the way or worse spit into. Congratulating themselves on doing their bit to save the human race: staying home, staying safe. Outsourcing danger to deliverers.

During the first few months of the nation-wide lockdown the great Indian middle class moaned and groaned about having to clean their houses, cook their food, tend to their gardens. They believed it their birth-right to outsource all of that to the underprivileged women and men who worked in their homes for a pittance. They now cursed the necessity of picking up brooms and applying elbow grease in scrubbing the burnt bits off pots and pans. The Indian diaspora in the west sniggered about how housework was not a new burden for them, perhaps privately welcoming the denial of domestic help to the brethren they had left behind in their motherland. As soon as it was legally permitted, we opened our doors and welcomed back our maids and cooks and gardeners and drivers. We sighed with relief. Husbands who pretended to have been harassed by belligerent wives turned their backs once more on the piles of dirty dishes and laundry, expecting all to be cleaned, sorted and stored again just as before, that is without their having to lift a finger. Yet the sexist jokes on women subjugating men into domestic chains continued to abound.  

Stories of domestic violence started doing the rounds. Whispers about the shouts that came from this house and that. A wife longing for the lockdown to end so that she could get some respite from her ever-present abusive husband. Children watching in fear as they saw their parents quarrelling, sparring, fighting. Staying safe from the virus but not from the ugliness that lurked within themselves. Tempers frayed on the enforced togetherness, small homes growing smaller, noisier. Tight budgets growing tighter as each child, each adult demanded their own exclusive internet access. Bills accumulated, savings shrank, patience thinned, words and objects flew. A few searched for a stretch of rope to end it all.

One wave receded and work resumed, shops and factories opened up, labour turned up at the gates again. Temples and churches and mosques opened their arms to their believers again. Roads grew crowded again. Festivals. Weddings. Funerals. Gatherings. Rallies. Protests. Melas and melees. Another wave washed over us taking away many many more. Oxygen grew scarce. Hospital beds were scarcer. Governments and their oppositions harangued, blamed each other and this and that and then slammed rhetorical what-abouts to silence already timid lay voices. Netizen and other volunteers stepped up to steer the sick towards healing, sending ambulances to their homes, securing admissions in hospitals, medicines for recovery, oxygen to breathe, food to eat. All moved by compassion. Experts warned of a third wave that could take our children away. Fear grabbed us by our throats.

Working quietly, whisked away from the everyday drama surrounding the virus, men and women worked diligently yet speedily in labs, decoding the enemy, mapping its structure, studying its behaviour, trying this, testing that. A process that normally took a half-dozen years was heroically squeezed into months. Brave ordinary humans offered themselves as guinea pigs in trials. Success, scientists announced, the vaccines were ready. Hurrah! Their pharma patrons rejoiced too, their investment was to bear noble fruit. Vials were packed and distributed. Hope consolidated. We hurried to immunise ourselves, outsmart that evil cunning Covid. We had survived, we felt lucky. We would survive, we were confident.

I watched it all from home. I swung from hope to despair to hope and all of that all over again. I wrote. I read. I sang. All with as much conviction and energy as I could muster. I laughed, I quarrelled, I reconciled. I brooded, I introspected. I talked to myself. I unearthed old memories, made new ones. I bonded virtually with a few old and new friends, some old and new colleagues. Checking and re-checking that all was well with them. For some it was not. I learned of them suffering. I worried. I learned of their passing. I mourned, I wept. I consoled, I comforted. I longed to reach out and hug, kiss away that hurt of loss. I didn’t. I stayed at home. I stayed safe.

I survived. As did you. Of course, I am no longer the same. Nor are you. But that’s okay. For this is our new normal. Whatever the hell that means.

Photo Credit : Copyright free images Canva and Pixabay

NO COUNTRY FOR WOMEN

The past couple of months have been especially good for me. Plenty of interesting reading and ruminating, yes, but also simmering excitement about some eagerly awaited news, some personal happy tidings and immense familial joys. My cup runneth over. Of course, the world around and beyond isn’t exactly a happy one and some of its continuing wretchedness threatened to shadow my bliss however momentarily. But that’s in the natural course of things, the near mandatory mix of the good, the not so good and the outright bad. Some rain, some sunshine. And as those inclined philosophically would agree, without the one, we wouldn’t really appreciate the other.

Which doesn’t mean that one needs stoically endure the bad. I could be philosophical about my sorrows when I have a more immediately present basket of happiness to bask in. But if the bad were to gnaw away the beneficence of the good, then I wouldn’t rest until I’d set things right, at least those that fall within my ambit, those that I can.

Broadly speaking, the journey of human societies through the centuries has been marked by conscious correction of the bad for the better, for people individually and collectively. Thinkers and doers have striven assiduously to identify social and personal malaises and find remedies or ways to surmount them. Historically, some of the ways have included battles and wars, marches, protests and revolutions. As of today these struggles continue. Of course, what constitutes a betterment remains debateable. The meat-poison conundrum is mostly inescapable. 

Some of the contentious nature of ‘betterment’ featured prominently in my recent reading: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, an exquisitely written memoir about the author’s life in Iran both prior and post the  Islamic Revolution, a revolution that not only dismantled the Shah’s monarchy, but also shook the very foundations of the society she lived in. I had read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi earlier, that through the graphic novel told the story of an adolescent girl coming to understand the fallouts of the revolution. Nafisi’s account brought in many more layers and textures to the understanding of those rapidly changing times, changing perspectives, and changing people. The promise and hope, the disappointment and rancour.

Nafisi taught in the University of Tehran where she steered her class of students through some of the seminal works in literature in English. She deliberately chose texts that she considered subversive, ripping through convention and convenience, challenging settled dogmas, questioning peremptory presumptions of societal positions, and always examining the role of women in them. Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, Fitzgerald and Austen entered her class, confronting the youth that sat within, compelling them to grapple with the ideas and emotions that swirled in their books, fathom the frailties and strengths of their characters, to recognise them in themselves and people around. Willing a generation post-Revolution to step away from the very regulated Islamic Republic into the completely free Republic of Imagination. Daring them to think more, to dream more, to search for more, to never settle for less.

In tandem with her analysis of the enduring relevance of the literary works, Nafisi recounts the systematic erosion of personal and public freedoms under the new regime. The unending directives from the state seeking to regulate thought, belief, speech, dress, movement, worship, work, business, relationships, the entire spectrum of its citizens’ existence; the fearsome moral policing, the stigmatisation of the liberals and socialists, the witch-hunt of dissenters, the increasingly hostile and violently squashed standoffs between the regime and its opposition, are all described in disturbing detail. Usurping individual identities and histories and recasting them in the moulds sanctioned by the ruling clergy, banning access to the thought and customs of the world beyond, insistence on the superiority of the morally vigilant Iran over the debased, demoralised and decadent west, became routine. And all through her catalogue of her memories from back then, Nafisi pays particular attention to what it meant to be a woman in a blatantly patriarchal, brazenly misogynistic culture. A dissenting woman, in particular, one who is brusquely squashed back into her designated place of silent subservience. A place from which she may not be permitted even a whimper, but where she can still hold on faithfully to her memories and wander freely in her imagination. Clinging on to those residual arbours to rescue her sanity from the assaults on her persona.

I shudder at the abuse, deprivations and outright atrocities that women have had to suffer through the ages. The world over. The fairer sex, the weaker sex, the gentler sex and other such facetious epithets have been flippantly tossed around as labels for half  the population, propping up a rationale to confining women in closeted spaces, restraining their movements, shepherding them around under the watchful eye of their patriarchs. For their supposed protection. Being used, abused, exploited, denied, supressed, treated as mindless chattel, their actual destiny. To reach where we are today, women have had to walk a long hard road inch by painful inch, fighting with grit to be regarded and respected as equal humans. Yes, they have been supported by sane men, those who responded sympathetically to their demand for respect and parity. But those men were few and far between. The women’s movement  swelled through the ages, the baton passed on to younger and younger blood, and the struggle continued. It continues till today, as determined women the world over patiently, incrementally win back freedoms that had been malevolently eroded away or had never even been theirs to start with. The restoration of rights to education, to work and be paid, to own, inherit and bequeath property, to vote, to choose one’s own partner oneself, to divorce, to retain custody of offspring, to speak for themselves in their own voice instead of being subsumed under their patriarch’s position, to make their own decisions regarding mind, body and soul, all this and more, has been a tediously slow and excruciatingly uphill battle. A battle that continues. And while in the public domain of the free world, gender parity may now receive credence or at least lip-service as politically correct, in the harsh reality of the private so many women continue to suffer. Galling.

Well, as Nafisi says in her memoir, the revolution ominously regressed Iran back to those dark ages, effacing the cumulus of the inch-by-inch victories that women had perseveringly toted up through successive generations. They were shrouded back in the veil, prohibited from meeting men other than those in their families, their brothers, fathers, uncles and husbands, their only legitimate keepers, owned and directed as chattel, chastised, punished, imprisoned and even executed for refusing to obey the patriarchal dictates spouted by the new regime. There are chilling accounts of how a woman’s fair skin inadvertently peeping out from under her veil was cause enough for arousal, molestation, rape and even murder. Young girls on the cusp of womanhood would secretly paint their nails, style their hair, learn the skills of makeup, vie for the latest in fashion, but bury it all in an all covering chador before stepping out of their homes. Aspirations to being treated as equals were dismissed as mindless aping of the evil capitalistic west of which America was brand ambassador. Bookstores shut shop, publications confiscated, cinema and art lay desolate unless they served to mouth the regime’s propaganda. The betterment of the populace that was the promise of the revolution  was at best illusory for the likes of Nafisi.   

Reading this while sojourning in California, I cringed at the abject wretchedness of it all. And my mind went back to the uprisings in Iran a few months ago, the heavy-handedness with which the regime came down on the spontaneous protests, the consequent loss of life. Tragic. I breathed easier when I raised my head and saw my surroundings, the genteel suburb in the land of free speech, ample opportunity, and a robust espousal of the shining American dream. And then hesitated. A country that proudly holds aloft the banner of freedom has through the onerous Roe v Wade rudely clipped a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her own body. Choice, choice, choice. Free choice. The mark of a free nation. The core of democracy, the right to choose. Shouldn’t that be an inalienable right? Ask Nafisi.

Nafisi suggests in an interview that the reader bring curiosity and empathy to the book in hand. I think these are important attributes for living life itself. They would encourage us to not merely understand and respect another’s perspective regardless of our own, it would lead us to endorse the other’s equal right to choice as also their right to dissent.

I will soon be returning home, back to my land and people. A land that is lauded as the largest democracy of the world. I wonder, what about our rights back there? And the visual surfaces: a bunch of young women wrestlers, protesting against the predatory advances of their male chief, being summarily hauled away from their protest site and detained behind bars to secure the successful passage of a ceremony of the inauguration of the temple of democracy, the Indian Parliament. Women who had won medals in international arenas, who had been proudly feted as the symbol of the new successful India, now an embarrassing encumbrance, a thorny inconvenience, summarily dumped in jail while the predator walked free. Those other predators too who had raped and murdered, found guilty of these heinous crimes in a court of law, duly sentenced, but were seen winning a special pardon on the nation’s Independence Day. Who on being released were raucously felicitated and then spotted sharing the stage with politicos. Rehabilitated with respect. What of the victims, what of their safety, their independence, their respect?

I shudder again.

And then steel myself. For the battle continues. Onward and forward. Our daughter, that fine young woman with a sterling capacity for intricately nuanced reflection, deep reservoirs of empathy, and a fearless espousal of justice, is a newly minted mother. We welcome our granddaughter into this world. We promise her the moon and the stars. We will teach her to love this world too but will caution her to always be vigilant. To safeguard her rights to liberty, equality, opportunity and justice, rights that have been painstakingly won by a long, long line of women that preceded her. To never take them for granted. For here there is no country for women.

On GRIEF

This I know.

Grief is hard.

It hurts, it overwhelms, it suffocates.

From the moment it appears, it seeks to settle in. A nebulous entity at first, unformed, unknown, unarmed. That slowly begins to feed on us, our mind and memories, our love, loss and longing. Then growing at its own pace, on its own momentum, gaining definition, sharpness, power. We acknowledge it, give it its due, the space in our head and heart. It may try to take control, swamp us, and we may need to wrestle with it a bit, rein it in, and we may succeed. But there are times when it refuses to let us master it. It rises in waves, flooding us through, drenching us in misery, and we are left bewildered by its enormity. Sometimes it catches us suddenly by the throat, jerking us off our keel. Or it just hangs within us, weighing us down with its burden of sorrow. We may weep, mope, sigh, withdraw, get angry, try to bottle it in and wear a brave face over it, deny it, feign indifference, whatever. But it stays lodged within, a prerequisite to healing from the affliction of loss.

And yet there is no precise formula to it. They tell us of the stages that it needs to go through, how it mutates from shock to denial and anger and sadness and, perhaps, depression, and then finally through to acceptance, but there is no clear knowledge as to how long the process or any of its stages will take and how we will cope through. When and how we can put it behind us, reach the other side of it, be done with it, be light and dry again. Or, whether it ever goes away entirely.

It could, unknown to us, linger on, settling in a corner of our being, lying there dormant, happy to let us get on with our lives. But prodded into sudden stinging wakefulness when we least suspect, exposing our vulnerability, our fragility all over again. Perhaps, when an oft heard and favoured song plays from someone else’s playlist, and we smile at first at the serendipity of it.  We listen to the words and music again, they go straight through to the core of our heart now beating a tad heavier, rejuvenating fading memories all over again. Or a whiff of a known fragrance puckers up the nostrils and the embrace of a beloved is reincarnated, our arms wanting to reach out and curl in the air, as if that presence has returned. Or the tongue savours a morsel of once familiar, shared food, and there is a resurgent longing for the contentment that was then. The way it was then, those that were still with us then, the way we were then. With that special togetherness. Those shared confidences. Golden sunsets maybe, or pristine sunrises. The texture of the time that was. The fullness that our heart once knew. A mother’s soft lap. A father’s broad shoulders. A sister’s gleeful giggle. A lover’s tingling touch. A friend’s whispered secret. Of the travels and journeys of life and the landscapes of it that passed by then. All that had slipped through the portals of forgotten time, now hurtling back loud and clear in front of our searching, misty eyes. Reawakened senses to the reawakened memories of what once was.

Then it rises like a phantom and does its quiet mournful dance again. Wringing our hurting insides again, squeezing out residues of sadness that we believed we had cleansed away, making our breath gather quick in our throat, tightening it with its vice like grip, till we shudder and see it again, shake our head again at our own folly of forgetfulness, and acquiesce to its right to live on. It warns us that the healing was a myth, at best a facade, that this is the real thing, the ache of missing. That it will live on as long as there is breath in us, and the mind can retrieve the past at will.

Yet mercifully, it does not obliterate the present, no, nor do our feet falter on the treadmill of life to be lived yet. It doesn’t embarrass us as we smile and nod through surrounding conversations, move from this to that, these to those to others. It lets us raise our head from our pillow in the morning in healthy anticipation of all that the day may bring, go through our routines, our duties, our work, our enjoyments, returning to those that still gather lovingly and supportively around us. It rarely disrupts all or any of that. No, it isn’t that demanding, nor exacting. It’s like a shadow that follows us around, hiding when the sunshine and warmth of fulfillment holds our face aloft to the glowing sun. Stretching out as the darkness descends again, of loneliness perhaps, of half-fulfilled dreams, of promised but betrayed togetherness. We shed quiet tears into our pillow, sorry for that loss, sorrier for ourself, and it watches us, watches our ache, it takes its due and then lets go, granting us relief. However temporary. It returns to its corner, letting us be.  

The grief reminds us of our essence of being human, of having loved, nurtured, cherished other humans. Of having been loved, nurtured, cherished, wanted. Of how a face lit up when it saw ours. Or how a voice sounded happy when it spoke to us. Or a hand that held ours, steadying us through the rough. How the sorrow of parting gave way to the promised joy of meeting again, and again. Until the parting became final, cemented with loss. And loss is inevitable: we are born, we will die, ditto for all others, including those we attach ourselves to, those through whom we reference our living.

But I know this too. That the healing is equally inevitable. We are born to live, to breathe, be. We are blessed with resilience, that is the forte of our species. We hunger to be happy again, our days to be full and nights peaceful again, to love and be loved again, to argue, to squabble, to battle and win and lose again, to taste and relish more, travel afresh, talk, chat again, listen too, watch and show, feel and think, be excited, sleep unburdened. We yearn for all of that again. We rise and shuffle through the mystifying darkness of loss, our eyes straining to see better, relocate our bearings, gather ourselves, look outward, reach out and gratefully grab that hand that’s waiting to guide us through to the light of life again. That hand may be our own, our love of our own self, our own impatience to be free of the shadows. I’ve held mine several times these past years. I am ready and willing to hold others’ too.

I wear my grief unabashedly. The unconditional, unquestioning love that sealed me to those that peopled my life so far, the readiness to commit to friends, family, the hurt of others that tore my heart, the joy in their joys, that was all mine to treasure, to rejoice in, why hide it? No, I don’t flaunt it, it is mine to know and feel. Mine to allow or subdue. Yet every time I am reacquainted with it afresh, I stutter, stumble, then steady myself again. I am now an old hand at it. 

For this I know. What once was is carried through to what is and will be. It will colour our ongoing story, making it richer, finer, subtler. It will be woven into the warp and weft of the entire human experience, merging with all that was already there, wriggling to make space for more, the new, the changing, the yet to be born. It is merely a part of the growing whole.

And so, I tell myself: let not my grief crowd my horizon, shadow my tomorrows. Let me wear it lightly, know that while the loss may be permanent, it need not define the life I live. I carry my memories of those that passed and feel enriched by all I’ve known and felt. I find joy in them too, and I let that joy live on.

Live on, as well as we can. That’s all we can do, isn’t it? But that’s all that we need.