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

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

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