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