Doggy Wonder

I was walking down a crowded lane in Pondicherry, avoiding a melee of cycles, motorbikes, rickshaws, maneuvering heaps of sand besides the road dug up here and there presumably for laying water pipes. A handicapped man on a three-wheel scooter zipped past me followed by a dog with a collar round its throat. It weaved its way through cyclists and bikers, dodged rickshaws auto rickshaws, skirted the mounds of sand, leapt over potholes, without breaking stride. I stopped to watch, captivated and full admiration at its incredible dexterity and capacity of adaptation. 

At the same moment an image rose in my mind of well brushed poodles on leashes, docilely following their masters and mistresses on clean sidewalks, peopled by a few disciplined pedestrians.  It goes without saying which dog I thought was happier. 

My always happy friend

I have this friend who is always happy. She maybe in India or France, in Tasmania or Tanzania, she is happy. She will find you  the silver lining to the darkest cloud. Sometimes this maybe exasperating and there have been incidents where such positivity stretched to its limit seemed to me obtuse. But most of the time I find it astonishing and admirable, and me like her other friends have drawn strength from her refusal to bow down to pessimism. I make her sound like a knight in shining armour, don't I? But she is as full of faults as anyone else. She is uncompromising, stubborn, argumentative, independent to the extent of being  insensitive to her close one’s worries, capable of dropping a project without any qualms if it has stopped interesting her, passionate about the weirdest things;  living without eating by simply drawing energy from the sun, or Oponopono, or life after death.   How many times I have seen her have a hearty meal and then expound on the theory of living merely on prana or energy,­­­ with great conviction.

I have heard people saying that her optimism springs from the fact that she does not have to worry about making a living. She has inherited money and can live on the returns of her investment. But this is unfair because she was not always financially comfortable and got by, by being  inventive and intrepid. For example when she was in her early thirties and back from Morocco with a young daughter to support,  she made ends meet by selling sandwiches and coffee  in the wee hours of the morning in front of night clubs. When the party goers came out , hungry and bleary, the restaurants were all closed and they were glad to fall upon a charming lady with sandwiches and hot coffee. And since they were in an expansive mood,  they were also willing to pay a little more for this unexpected luxury.. She did not have a selling license but had managed to befriend the policemen out on their beat . And they were quite happy to stop by, have a cup of hot coffee in the cold winter mornings and chat awhile before moving on. Moreover France in the 80's was not as obsessed with rules as now. Then she moved up the rung and set up a pizzeria in a seaside resort. This too was a whooping success and with her healthy disregard for unnecessary rules,  run without a license. But at one point of time when she thought it had served its purpose, she sold and moved on. I know I would have been tempted to hold on, to set down roots, but she is a light traveller and that too is her force. Today she has inherited a certain sum of money but there are many who have inherited much more, and happiness was not automatically included.

Her disregard for convention is also reflected in the way she dresses. One day she turned up in my house with a faded green bell-bottoms (I wore bell-bottoms when I was 7 years old and that was in the mid-seventies) at the end of which she had stitched a broad frill which fell around her ankles like the petals of a bellflower.  And this in a country where women are dressed from head to toe with the utmost care! “What is this?” I enquired incredulously. “Oh she replied, this was an old pair of trousers and a matching vest . The trousers had become too small and I did not want to throw it away so I cut up the vest and stitched it to the trousers.” Then there was another time in India when she was inspired by a shirt she saw in a designer magazine made out of 20 Rs rice cloth sacks with highly coloured pictures of Gods and Goddesses printed on them, and sold at 600 Rs. She bought and gifted a shirt to her companion who to please her wore it one evening when there was a power failure,  then pushed it at the back of the cupboard in spite of his great love for her . Her next step was to buy a stitching machine, piles of rice cloth bags and launch into home production. She made shirts and sleeveless blouses, gifted them to her family and friends and dressed in a grey frumpy skirt and designer blouses all through summer after which I think the rice cloth bag project was laid to rest. 

I have never travelled with her in India but I am sure she would make a lovely travelling companion, one of those who are unperturbed come what may. If for example the train from Varanasi to Calcutta were 5 hours late, she would exclaim, “How nice. It will give us enough time to explore the station, have dinner and chat with a few people.” If the catering service decided to go on strike and we had to go dinnerless, she would say, “Great, I have been overeating recently and need to rest my stomach. Fasting is always good for the system.”

And it is because of the authenticity of her optimism that I and all her friends are attracted to her, and return to her, in spite of her hardly replying to the mails you write to her , last minute cancellation of plans, eating vegetarian or vegan, or whatever fad she maybe practising at the moment you are invited to her place. But thank God for small mercies, at least she serves us food and does not ask us to fill ourselves with prana.

 Arunima Choudhury

Sunflowers

 


The sunflowers are dying,
Withered petals, drooping heads,
Row after row,
They stand defeated.

In the beginning of summer,
The plants stood lithe and tall
Their rich brown centers,
Spiked with gold.
Fields of light,
Bursts of joy.

Each day life seeped out,
Infinistemally,
Treachorous, insiduous,
The wound within.

How could they
In the prime of life
Foresee death?
Ward off
The invisible enemy?

And so they stand vanquished,
Bent earthwards,
Patiently waiting the end.


Arunima Choudhury

Of chance encounters and budding friendships

I met this young Bengali speaking French man in a village in the North of France during a music festival where I had gone to work as a translator cum facilitator for a group of singers from Bengal. One of the singers, Abbas fakir disgusted by the food that was being dished out in the canteen, (which was not that bad really but  just not cooked in the Bengali way, that is to say the chicken gravy did not have the shimmer of oil floating on top of a thick reddish-yellowish sauce,  fried aubergines and potatoes were replaced by grated carrots and boiled cauliflower with mayonnaise, and other items which were just not palatable to a seasoned Indian palate, fostered on spices and chillies and rich, thick gravies), pushed aside his plate and told me, "Didi, I cannot eat this food. Let's go to the Indian stand on the fair ground. There is dal and rice and papad.!" Abbas was the baby of the group; with a head full of dreadlocks and a luxuriant beard coming down to his chest,  he was thoroughly spoiled  by his mother and his  coterie of sister-in laws. Though everybody else in the group had eaten the same food and I was tired , I said, "Ok, come , let's go and see what we find." We walked down to the stall serving Indian food which was in full swing. I ready to translate Abbas' desire into French asked him in Bengali what he wanted to eat. Abbas regally  pointed out his choice and a handsome  young men noted down his order. Before handing him his plate heaped with rice and dal and pakodas he asked Abbas in perfect Bengali, "Ar kichu neben?" (Do you want anything else?) Abbas finding it quite natural at being spoken to in Bengali by a French man thousands of kilometers away from Bengal asked for some pickles and walked away to join some friends at a table nearby.  I ,  finding it delightfully unnatural was nicely flabbergasted and stuttered, "You speak Bengali?"

"Yes," he replied with a perfectly charming smile, "I am learning."

 "How come?"

" I spent my childhood in Bengal..",

 "Really," I said, and looking at him more closely spotted a necklace of wooden beads around his neck and a very discreet tuft of hair at the back of his head.  . I thought "the Hare Krishna movement" but did not delve into it further. In spite of the crowd milling around us we snatched a few moments  to converse  and I learnt that he played the khol. This enchanted me even further taking me back to my childhood in Bengal where each morning when the air was still cool and the sun barely up,  a group of vaishnavas winded down the streets chanting the name of Hari to the accompaniment of cymbals and khols. We exchanged names, addresses and to make the encounter even more marvellous I found that we both lived in the South of France at the foothills of the Pyrenees.

I got back home and like many addresses given and taken, it stayed in my notebook, a dormant potential. Then a couple of days ago when I was feeling ringed in by the mass of mountains, sinking into the torpor of summer heat and good food and empty days I called up Srimurti . He was as charming as ever and we decided to meet at his place in Mirepoix about 45 Km from  our house. It was also a nice opportunity for my friend and I to bike through the undulating countryside of vineyards and blue hills rearing in the distance and the solid battlements of Cathar fortresses etched against the sky. We stopped on the way in a little village to visit an old church and broke the silence by singing. Our hesitating voices  reflected and amplified by the  the ribbed vault, expanded to fill up the empty space. Then in about half an hour we were in Mirepoix at Srimurti's house.

Right from the beginning it was easy, familiar but also to a certain extent surreal because of the  unexpectedness of the situation. He introduced to his wife, a petite, charming young French woman who spoke fluent Oriya because she had  grown up in Bhuvaneshwar,  to his children who were called Vinod and Gauranga ( my cousin in Bengal is also called Gauranga ) and to  his elderly friend krishnamurti who though dressed in a shorts and a t-shirt had a  tilak  drawn on his forehead and a luxuriant tiki at the back of his head, both signs sported by Vaishnavites all over India. Though I was enchanted I must also say that I was a little wary.  I had seen quite a few films where westerners following any of the branches of Indian spirituality were portrayed as weirdos. But they were perfectly at ease and put us at ease too. We chatted and laughed and had couscous for lunch with a vegetarian stew where cubes  of paneer replaced  the usual   chunks of meat. When I laughingly pointed out that it was not very Indian Srimurti  replied that it was because his father was Kabil from Algeria and the blend of couscous with paneer gravy was his version of fusion food.   On seeing my expression of incredulity and to baffle me even further he added good-humouredly that his mother was Vietnamese. Since I went on looking at him, he  kindly explained  that his father who used to live in Paris had enlisted in the French army as a means of escaping from the narrow confines of his condition.  While he was posted in Australia he had met his mother and  come across the writings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a fifteenth century Bengali saint. The next step then had been to the saint's birthplace, a remote village in the north of Bengal.

 My journey from India to France which I have a tendency to make  much ado about now paled in comparison with the physical and spiritual journey of a man who had travelled across continents and cultures to embrace a way of life and thought so far removed from his own. I felt at home with my new friends, certainly because like me their reality consisted of reconciling vastly disparate worlds. I  also admired their courage in living according to their beliefs, and in the process being branded as freaks or marginals by many.

After lunch we spread a dhurrie in the living room, Srimurti brought out his khol and his book of Bengali songs, Krisnamurthy took up a pair of cymbals, my friend settled down comfortably in a corner to observe and take photos. Srimurti struck the first note on his khol, the cymbals joined in and we set sail on a musical journey swaying to the lilting rhythm of the khol and melodious voice of the singers    .  I could not help but join in. My friend got a few pictures of me eyes closed, grimacing like a monkey, hands raised in the air like a professional singer.

The afternoon  drew to a close, time to drive back home. We parted company joyously with the promise to meet again. 

Arunima Choudhury

Pondy Blues

I didn't know that you could miss a town like you miss your beloved: her scent, her voice, her hair, the texture of her skin, the contours of her body, the things she says and the things she doesn't. Yes, I am lovesick and I have left my dearest far behind me on the other side of the world.

Pondicherry, my love, how I miss being jolted out of my sleep at ungodly hours by the crowing of roosters,  then drifting back to sleep again, before being gently teased awake by the mouth-watering aroma of crisp dosas and spicy chutneys wafting in through the open window;  starting my scooter in the morning and riding out to the chai-shop with the breeze in my hair, the chai-master making me a cup of delicious, piping hot tea with kammi shakkara (less sugar) and the group of regulars, men mostly, tolerating my presence in their midst;  Laxmi, the temple elephant, sashaying down the wide, paved streets towards the Ganesh temple, her enormous bottom moving from side to side, keeping time with the bells jingling around her neck;  troops of school girls and boys streaming out of ugly, boxy buildings, giggling, chatting and merrily blocking the honking auto-rickshaws and motorbikes; biryani-sellers ladling out yellow rice with chunks of chicken from enormous black-bottomed pans, a dollop of fiery gravy, a scoop of chopped onions in yoghurt and presto another packet is ready for take-away; the long hot afternoons with dogs snoozing in shady corners, the sky a pitiless blue and the harsh cawing of crows shattering the drowsy silence; then come evening, a leisurely stroll down the beach road, the sky streaked with violets and pinks, the sweat dried by the cool breeze of the sea, stopping to say hello to friends and acquaintances, buying boiled peanuts sprinkled with salt and chilly powder and topped with thin slices of  raw mangoes till night falls and the street lamps are lit.

I know these are cliches. But far from my country I am like the tourist who only remembers the droll, the colorful, the touching, and whose memory has drawn a curtain over all that is dingy and unpleasant.Yet it was not always thus. In fact, when I first came to Pondy to study in 1979 from Bengal, I found it strange and disorienting after my childhood in Berhampore; an old town on the banks of the Ganges. Here, big crumbling houses and mossy terraces were packed in narrow, winding streets where men, cows, and rickshaws jostled with each other. Black-faced monkeys jumped from one terrace to another, swung dangerously from electric cables and sneaked into kitchens to steal food. In the evening, the acrid smoke rising from mud ovens caught at our throats and made our eyes water, while from all around the sound of conches being blown for the evening pooja rose in the air.

Pondicherry of wide streets, colonial houses with flowering gardens, and cyclists pedalling sedately down the road seemed too empty, too orderly, too impersonal. So it was over years that we fitted into each other; like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which do not initially go together, but whose contours have been smoothened by time and effort into the shape required. And now after thirty long years I have moved again, abandoned my love, wooed and won over with difficulty, for a new country, a new town. Perhaps it was time, because like an old couple we had grown too used to each other or, perhaps, it is I who had got jaded and let myself slip into a comfortable but uninspiring routine. So when, because of diverse circumstances, I had the option to move, move I did with a mixture of sadness and excitement, encouraged by the words of an acquaintance who said, “What? You have lived for thirty years in Pondicherry! You can move now because she will always be there in your heart.”

And from the South of India here I am in the South of France learning to adjust and appreciate another culture, another place, learning to make place in my heart and mind for new experiences. But to my delight I find that Pondicherry, Berhampore, India like strains of a favourite melody keep weaving in and out of my life, through chance encounters: a Bengali tabla player tucked away in a remote village near the Pyrenees; a Tamil bio-chemist from Ooty working as a researcher in Narbonne; a Delhiite come to present her publishing house in a literary event; through documentaries, festivals,  songs, through updates on Facebook telling me, “it’s terribly hot in Pondicherry and even hotter in Chennai.” 

Arunima Choudhury

A Musical Journey Through Eastern Europe appeared in ActuPondy. The songs were from Eastern Europe. They were sung in Pondicherry and the festival the link between the two.

 The songs of Edith Piaf were brought back to life by the singer Nathalie Mentha in Pondicherry. Entitled French Ballads on Indian Soil , this writeup also appeared in ActuPondy

A Slice of Bengal appeared in ActuPondy on the brilliant performance of the Bengali actress Rwita Dutta Chakraborty who was one of the participants of the festival.

This is the link to an interview of parvathy Baul which was published in Actupondy. Parvathy is an exceptional woman and this interview was taken in novel circumstances.

If I were an abstract painter

If I were an abstract painter,

I would paint you and me,

In the cashew grove,

Whorls of green,

Strokes of knotted brown,

Dotted here and there

With luminous red,

Blurred coins of lemon sun,

And underlying, in the centre,

A collage of squares,

Of bright orange and faded blue.

If I were a miniaturist,

I would spend hours on the composition.

Then line up the brushes side by side,

And with infinite care,

Paint the veins of leaves,

The striped roughness of the bark,

The red, smooth, pulpy fruits,

With  dark, obscene, foetus nuts.

The orange curve of a breast,

The freckled flesh of an underarm,

Glimpsed through a blue t-shirt sleeve.

Two beings caught by the painter's brush,

Brown gaze locked in green

But wait! That's like death!

To be frozen in a single mood.

And however lovely it might be,

I choose to free you and me,

To stroll out of the picture frame,

Leaving behind the central space,

For other lovers to occupy.

 Arunima Choudhury

The Other

As a child I grew up in a strangely eclectic religious atmosphere. My parents and I lived with my uncles and aunts as a large, extended family. Our household deity from several generations was Krishna. On special occasions such as on my grandfather’s death anniversary or on Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday, my youngest uncle who was a staunch Vaishnava organized devotional concerts in our house. Big, hefty men clad in white dhotis and kurtas, some with cymbals and others with khols 
( a two headed drum held horizontally while playing)  strapped around their necks and hanging down to their midriffs, gathered on our terrace. At first they sat in a circle and sang. As the night deepened and the singing got more fervent, they rose to their feet and began dancing as well. My father and uncles joined in, the music and dancing rose to a pitch of excitement and ended with a shower of exclamations , “Hari! Hari!” This was followed by the Vaishnavas throwing handfuls of sugar candies in the air which I along with other children scuttled to gather.My father though had strayed from the flock. He had become the follower of a Bengali freedom-fighter turned philosopher-saint, settled in Pondicherry, and a “French woman,” my relatives muttered amongst themselves, with revolutionary ideas on education, marriage, society and gender equality.  

I was sent to a school run by nuns where every week we went to the chapel and read colourfully illustrated books on the miracles wrought by Christ. I was particularly attracted to the picture of a gentle, bearded Christ feeding a small, fluffy lamb.There was no contradiction in all this. I bathed in the holy soup of Krishna, Jesus, Sri Aurobindo, and felt safe and protected.

There was also a Muslim servant called Chamatkar which means wonderful. Chamatkar was old. He had a white, longish beard. His face was like soft, crumpled paper with bright, laughing eyes . He always wore a dirty, white skull cap and a lungi with blue and white checks. He often carried me in his arms and the elders in the house teased me by saying, “When you grow up we will marry you to Chamatkar.” Chamatkar too found this funny and when I was unbearable, pulling his beard or wanting to wear his skull cup, he would threaten me with the same fate. I knew he had a wife but he lived alone in our house on the ground floor in a damp room with a single window. Like all devout Muslims he prayed five times a  day. I knew I was not supposed to disturb him then, but when I could I peeked in through the window to watch him spread his prayer mat, wash his feet and hands and kneel down to pray. This ritual of withdrawal into a private world which had nothing to do with the one which surrounded him, fascinated me.I don’t know if I asked him about his beliefs, maybe I refrained unconsciously because I knew there was an invisible barrier to be respected. But I do not think that I was consciously aware of the fact that he was the other.

As I grew up the outline of the others grew clearer, all those who believed in other divinities than the community I belonged to, were the others, all those whose financial and social status was inferior to ours were the others, all those whose skin colour and physical features were different than our own were the others.  My father later sent me to a school founded on the teachings of his gurus and there all those who did not belong to the same line of belief were the others. So in fact we were surrounded by others and had to define our identity by distinguishing ourselves from the others. All this happened during my teen years. And it was natural to lose the innocence of my childhood and define my self by taking into account  existing boundaries. But with growing awareness of these boundaries was also a growing revolt against them.  During my childhood the devotion that was spontaneous became fraught with obstacles. The ethical rigidity of  Rama repelled me, the elitism and intellectual snobbery of my education suffocated me, the belief of middle class families of which my family was a part, that all those who are poorer are also dirtier, less intelligent and less honest  than they,  infuriated me. I wanted a way out. I could not say to hell with religion and become a Marxist because I was fed on belief along with my mother’s milk, but accepting it was like entering into a room, locking myself in, and throwing away the key. I wanted a way out, whereby my atavistic tendencies and my personal beliefs could find a meeting ground, where poetry and philosophy fused, where humanity and divinity walked hand in hand.

Kabir showed me the way. A boyfriend who walked on the margins of heresy himself gifted me a tattered translation of Kabir’s poems translated into English by Tagore. Wallowing in a morass of confusion and disillusionment where the heaven that I had been promised had turned out to be a country divided into mined frontiers, the poems touched my being with their simplicity and courage.

... It’s just as well my prayer beads scattered

I’m free of all that holy chatter!

The burden of my head is gone.

or

Your words are sweet as sugar

Your deeds are poisoned bread.

Quit the words, walk the talk.

   Turn the poison to nectar.

or

          Some say the lord dwells in heaven.

Some say in the land of holy cows.

         Some say in the land of Shiva.

In every age they set up their shops!

                                                             Do what you must, you seekers!

There are so many more. I could keep on quoting.   Here was a voice which went directly to my heart, where all that created The Other was knocked down with frightening ease and nonchalance, mosques, temples, the Gita, the Koran, the rich, the poor and what remained was not emptiness but an infinite vastness.

So Kabir made me reconcile myself with form by being supremely irreverent to it. His words gave me the courage to be radical because he had by abandoning everything found all. The world was made whole again, the Other only an illusion.

Arunima Choudhury

Landowner for a day

My father called me up yesterday and asked me if I could come over to his house because he had something to tell me. 

"What?" I enquired. 

The line was not very clear and I thought I heard him mumbling,"You have inherited land."

"What! Where?" I exclaimed. 

"In Bhagirathpur. But I can't talk about this over the phone. Come over as soon as you can."And he hung up. 

"Bhagirathpur," I muttered to myself. Bhagirathpur is the village of my grandparents in Bengal about 1,500 km away from Pondy,  if not more. I went there once with my mother and her distant cousin twenty years ago by means of a back-breaking bus journey, through a countryside of lush  green rice fields, stagnant ponds and little girls with sticks in hands calling out in high-pitched voices to herds of waddling ducks.  To know that I , Arunima Choudhury,  who has lived in rented apartments all my life,  own a piece of land,  be it in a remote village thousands of kilometers away , sent a shiver of pleasure coursing through my veins. 

I thought about the time I had spent there two decades ago.. We had stayed for a couple of days at my mother's cousin's place, a middle-aged man with a lovely wife and two teenage daughters. They lived in an enormous, rambling , broken down house, or rather in one portion of a conglomeration of houses bound to each other by a network of narrow alleys with mossy walls looming on either side. My uncle's portion consisted of two huge rooms, one immense courtyard and a kitchen where his wife cooked on a mud oven. The  toilet was outside, more of a huge pit than a toilet. 

In the evening there was the inevitable power cut and the flickering flames of the lanterns fought valiantly with the surrounding darkness by casting pools of dim, yellow light.  I remember sitting in the room, chatting with my cousins when the elder one told me, "Do you know this year after Durga Pooja when the idol was being carried on the boat to be immersed in the river tears coursed down her cheeks. She really did not want to leave us and go."

"No!"I exclaimed incredulously.

"Yes, "her younger sister added emphatically., "many people in the village saw her crying."

'Oh," I replied weakly. I did not want to contend with what they were saying. And somehow in the semi-obscurity of the room with the lanterns casting eerie shadows on the walls, it did not seem impossible.

My cousins took pains to show me around the village. As  I walked down the mud roads we were stopped at every street corner by curious old men sitting on the porch of their houses. "Who is she?",  they asked. "Where is she from?" The answer was she is our father's third cousin's daughter. And presto! I was slotted in their heads. "Aw, she is Rekha's daughter", or by virtue of the immense network of family connections, imprinted in their minds,  "She is Ananda's daughter, Kalipada's grand-daughter. It is to be noted that my parents were not born or brought up in the village. The questions were followed by a clinching phrase which indicated their satisfaction of having done away with my strangeness and found my rightful place in the village, " It is OUR blood which flows in her veins," they declared triumphantly. I felt like royalty, blue-blooded, my honourable ancestors kings and queens of yore. 

And now,  my father had told me,  I was landowner in Bhagirathpur. The same evening I went to see him.. "So what is it you told me over the phone? How come I own land in Bhagirathpur? How come nobody ever told me?" 

My father looked at me quizically and said, "Because you didn't own it. Your maternal great-grandfather bequeathed it  to your grandmother. When your grandmother died her children inherited the land. Your aunt and uncle have sold their portions and since your mother is dead,  you and your sister have inherited her part. It is upto you now to decide if you are going to sell it or not because a buyer has contacted us from Bhagirathpur. Your sister is willing to sell."

So in the morning I had got to know I had inherited land and in the evening I was already being solicited to sell it! Ilooked at my father blankly  and fired a series of questions:

"But why should I sell it?"

"How many acres of land?"

"What kind of land is it?"

"Who is the buyer?"

"I don't know what kind of land," my father replied," I have never seen it. I suppose it's agricultural land. It mustn't be much because the land was divided into three portions. The same buyer who bought the land from your uncle and aunt would like to buy the remaining plots."

"But I don't want to sell! " I retorted indignantly . 

"Why?" my father was astonished. "Do you plan to go and live in Bhagirathpur?"

I was stumped. I obviously did not plan to go and settle in Bhagirathpur. 

To drive the nail even further my father continued, "Anyway if you don't sell someone will come and occupy it illegally. Would you then be willing to enter into litigations?"

I could feel the sense of satisfaction of owning a piece of land in the countryside with rich, loamy soil, trees with their canopy of leaves, perhaps a pond and a broken down house thrown in as well,  leaking out of me. Before despairing completely, I asked belligerently, "How much? How much is he offering?"

"Twenty-five thousand."

"What?"I yelped.

"Yes, but don't worry. I told him that my daughters would not be willing to sell for such a low price, so he has agreed to fifty thousand."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "But pa I wailed, here people in the countryside are selling one acre of land for fifty lakhs and even more." 

My father looked at me severely and said, "Pondicherry is Pondicherry and Bhagirathpur is Bhagirathpur. And anyway why are you being so greedy? Thank God instead for having been given this unexpected gift." 

Now I was truly silenced. I lay down my arms, blinked back my unshed tears and nodded meekly.

Afterwards back home, lying in my bed, the picture of a beautiful plot of grassy land rose before my eyes. I resentfully mumbled to myself, "However I have had the satisfaction of being landowner for a day. Nobody can take that away from me," then chuckled at the delightful irony of the situation.

Arunima

 

The Taming of Solitude

You may have heard of Virginia Woolf's essays called "A Room of One's Own, " where she speaks about the necessity of having a private space which women can call their own. Struck by  the literal meaning of the phrase and its underlying implications, I must say that the first time I heard it I found it deeply romantic,  and desirable. A space where one could be oneself , where one could structure time the way one likes, where one could explore one's resources and discover one's  potentials !  However I did not ponder about the flip side of the coin which amounts to solitude.

 When I eventually found myself in a room of my own, my predominant feeling was one of  panic! There was too much room, too much  echoing, empty space all around me. I did not know how to fill it up. It filled me up instead, invaded me, hollowed me out. 

 Have you observed  that when you are with family and friends time does not exist as an entity? It flows, and you only notice it because and  it has gone by. Now you are talking with your sister and now it's time to go,   in the evening you have an appointment with your boy friend, or lover and before you realize it's already midnight. However when you are alone time and space unmask themselves and terrify you with their strangeness. And you have to tame these beasts, otherwise they will chase you out of your house.  In the beginning this is exactly what they do, they bear their fangs, they open their maws, they roar. And you flee the house, call up friends, wander in the streets, drink innumerable teas in chai shops till exhausted you return to your den and curl up in a corner like a beaten dog.  

Imperceptibly though the pressure eases, you start staying more and more in your space because there is nowhere else to go, and because what the heck it's YOUR SPACE. You start looking around and discover that the nooks and crannies which held unnamed terrors are just nooks and crannies, and it is up to you to place whatever object you would like in them. You start breathing more easy. You stretch your limbs. You walk around tentatively  and then more boldly.  You even hum a little tune. You notice with pleasure that the winds howling inside your body have stopped making such a racket.You pull up a chair, put your feet up on a stool and read a good book, or watch a nice film, stroking solitude as you would a pet cat and hear it purr with contentment.

There are still times when your house turns into a den and the cat into a fearful tiger, but you have got used to these changes, and know that if you can wait it out the tiger will turn back into a kitten and the den into your home.

Arunima

Let's put perfection in its place

I have a love and hate relationship with perfection where usually hate predominates over love. Sometimes I imagine perfection to be an old, severe woman with a pallid face who is always unhappy with the result of my efforts. It's a cold, lifeless affair pertaining to Japanese dolls and distant snow-clad mountain peaks. As a child I often told myself  If the world was perfect I would have no place in it, now I know that nobody would have any place in it.

Why are we so enamoured by perfection when we are  continents of imperfections, crooked teeth, falling hair, running nose, fraying tempers, hidden jealousies, indecent desires and what we would like to present to the world is a serene exterior, well combed hair, sparkling teeth, controlled gestures like those glossy magazine models with fake backgrounds. What if you met one of those beautiful, ravishing babes and right in the middle of the conversation she farted a loud, evil- smelling one. What would you do? I know what she would do. If she was really convinced about her purityshe would carry on the conversation as if nothing had happened and you in the process would believe it too.  Or she would pause for a second and gaze at you incredulously and you would end up believing that it is you who had farted and not her!Beware of perfect beings!!

How often I have started something and not gone to the end of it because it wasn't perfect,  as if attempts had no right to exist . Maybe many of you too suffer from this overdose of self criticism whereby you set the standard so high that you give up out of a sense of helplessness right in the beginning. I know that for me when the result becomes the goal the creative joy of the process is lost. My friend once out of sheer boredom painted a canvas called " Lost Time." He was not going anywhere, he was not aiming for something , he was just doing and because he didn't set out to create something fantastic, he didn't lose time but delineated  his perception of it on  canvas.

Arunima

No options

Your musings on death lead me to think about my mothers`s death. She died when I was 26. We are taught by our elders to use euphemisms such as so and so passed away or so and so left her body , certainly to soften the blow for us and for them. But when it happened and even though I had loads of baggage to persuade myself otherwise,  it was death - a huge absence, the emotional, psychological and physical space which she had filled was suddenly empty - and that emptiness was death. It was alive and like some animal's maw seemed to swalllow up everything around me but unlike life it was  devoid of sense.How does one come to terms with death? I don`t think one comes to terms, one can`t. What happens though is that time like a clumsy  surgeon botches up your wound and sometimes the stitches can hurt awfully.

I was living in a hostel and my exams were literally around the corner when she died. After getting back to my hometown and attending her cremation I heroically went back to write my exams out of an absurd sense of duty. I was told , " Your mother would have wanted you to." I travelled back with the biggest wound that life had dealt me until then, though I must say I had not been spoilt, uncomprehending, shrouded by a sense of complete abandonment and isolation, (though my university friends had come with me to provide succour),  to study meaningless sentences such as ,  " While CLT implies the lessons are more student-centred, this does not mean they are un-structured." What are these values that society , our parents impart to us and their parents must have imparted to them whereby the importance given to things are so unequal as to be monstrously absurd ? I walked around the campus in a haze and one day while I stepped out of my room I saw a short, portly woman walking ahead of me down the verandah wearing a striped, violet Bengal cotton sari carrying a towel and a soap case.  My mother had often worn the same sari at home.  I followed her blindly until something in the blackness of my being grew conscious that the lady in front was not my mother. 

One day I broke down in front of my literary criticism lecturer, a young, intense, funny adult with a monkey like face. I told him that I had rejected abstractions and had no faith, no belief system to pull me out of this incomprehension. I didn't know where she had gone, what had happened to that life which was so dear to me.  I was drowning. He told me,  " But you don't have to have faith. You don't have to grapple with abstractions. The world is an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. The ashes of your mother's pyre has mingled with the air and the sea, it has gone back to the earth nourishing it, helping new life to germinate. Look at the grass, the plants, the trees around you. Her body helps them to grow, her life courses through their veins." And that staunched the wound, the leaching out of meaning. It is not that after this incident I stepped on an escalator and briskly rode towards relief but that I took the first painful step towards reconciliation. As I said time is a clumsy surgeon but a surgeon nevertheless.

Years have gone by since her death. I am 42 now. I can talk about her without a sense of guilt, pain, frustration giving rise to tears in my eyes. I don't wonder anymore where she has gone. Maybe there is no place to go, I don't know. I will never have answers. What I am glad about is that her death did not rob me of my love for her because had I not stopped grieving at some time the very intensity of the grief would have turned me against her. 

Arunima