Anniamma

Anniamma tells me her life would make for a wonderful movie script and the movie would definitely be a super-hit. I try to avoid the tears and the pain as she says this.

Anniamma is 29 years old. Of all the women, I have spoken to, she was the only one who made her children people for me. She called them by their names. Arun and Mani. They were not just numbers to feed or care for in the daily routine called life.

After being thrown out of two homes where people did not want to talk to me, her inviting smile eased me as she agreed to answer my questions, terribly insignificant ones in the face of her life, as it unfolded before me.

I ask her what she does in her free time. She laughs and tells me there is no such thing. I persist. I ask her if she sat around and talked to the other women after work. No, I don't. People don't talk to me. They tell me I have lost my jati and that's why they will not talk to me.

And before I know it, I am privy to details about a life of a woman I am unlikely to ever meet or make a difference to. Anniamma is maaried, she says, to her husband's younger brother because the former died from being afflicted with HIV. And as is custom, she lost any rights she had to the house she lived in with her first husband. Her other brother-in-law took the house away, sold it and didnt pay her a penny. (Inheritance laws are not for poor women)

As she sits facing me and the road, she is constantly looking out. She wants to show me her daughter. The daughter who does not acknowledge her as mother. Who lives with her uncle across the road. Her daughter walks past us as she gets ready to do the day's cooking. Anniamma tells me that a child' heart is like stone and a mother's like a flower. I cry looking at my daughter who is no longer my daughter, she says.

I do not ask all the questions swimming in my head, despite my valiant efforts to not have them even exist. I am wondering, despite myself, about the details. How did the estrangement happen? Why did the daughter choose her uncle over her mother? Was the "sin of sexual incest" something she could not "forgive" her mother of? Or is her "unforgiving stance" because her mother left her behind when she ran away with her lover?

But I ask none of them. I keep begging her to stop, in my head. I am telling her that I cannot handle more of these stark contradictions, the injustice, my helplessness. Please stop. Anniamma asks me if I would like to see her dead husband's photo. I quickly say no. But she persists and hands me a happy photo of her, her dead husband, her estranged daughter, her dead niece and her young son. Standing in front of a bush with pink and purple flowers in Majestic. My eyes glaze over as I try desperately to maintain the distance. Her words keep chipping away at this barrier I've constructed that helps me go on with the farce called research.

I can no longer take it and I try to shift the conversation to lighter things. I ask, quite casually, if she had her dinner. Since everyone else around seemed to be eating. She tells me then that she does not have wood to light the stove, no food to eat, no money to buy them. So the fires are out today, she says.

With that, I had to leave before she could tear down my barrier anymore. I mutter my thanks and leave but not before she has this to say: "If God can't look after us and give us a good life, why does he not just end this life?"

I am told that research does not entail action. I must not hold myself to obligations. That I do my research, get out of there and help later when I can. Anniamma exposed and laid bare the fallacy of this reasoning for me.

musings 6

What do the words I love you mean?

After an unexpected conversation tonight, I am left wondering at the import of the words and what they have until now meant to me.

I discover to my tumultous surprise that these words do not come strings unattached. That like for most people, they come to me with notions and expectations of exclusivity, of fidelity in mind and body, of unrealistic love made realistic by convention and conditioning.

Words that betray these unthought expectations create strangeness inside of me. The unnaturalness of extreme heat and extreme cold colliding against each other, of a liquid that seems like water but feels as heavy as oil, of heaviness and lightness existing in the same space at the same time...

I grapple for support in identifiable emotions of anger and hurt and sadness and equanimity and composure and evenness. I fail miserably. Uttterly. And yet I try, try and try. Till I succeed. Urging for reservoirs unknown within me to come rescue me.

musings 5

wring your heart out. dry it out on the clothesline. blood drips. creating a pool of red and green feelings to drown in. try desperately to hold, latch, grab. not let the colours blind you. rationality you scream. come rescue me.

love is a hard thing.

Musings 4

It is bloody difficult to go through everyday. And it is much more bloodier to go through everyday when you know others are having fun with their everydays

Musings 3

There are some moments one must have to be able to negotiate the world of noise and demand. One night when the inaneness of what you do fills you up to the brim, you turn it off. You turn off the sounds you can and you make peace with all the sounds you cant. You let the quietness hovering around you for days and weeks and months come inside you. You wait for it to envelop you, to let out the thoughts unworded, the words unspoken and because there is no one around you, you speak them in silence to yourself.

If only it were that easy.

Quietness and silence has to fight. Fight with other thoughts that suddenly want to be thought. Schedules about what must one must do about all the work undone, the superficiality of hair styles and what changing them means to you as a person, the relationship you demand so much of, the relationships you kill actively and passively, the sudden urge to drink water and let its reinvigorating touch cleanse you, how one must sleep so that one does not screw up your body rhythm.... these and much more, much much more... drive hard to keep the quietness away.

Most often they are successful. But sometimes these poisonous thoughts scamper away.

Musings2

Well, so today was one of those watershed conversations. We had talked long and hard earlier about keeping the relationship open and today we had the chance to really feel how difficult it is.

I hated it when I first heard it. And then I kept quiet about it. I felt jealous next. None of what he said about his love for me I heard. I merely kept quiet about it. And then I told him, I felt bad. And I told him why I felt bad.

And we spoke of inequality. Of egos. Of hurt. Of separation. Of love. Of Togetherness. Of binary simplicties. Of multiple complexities. Of finding new ways.

an encounter in a bus

hurrying, i got into the bus. halted in my tracks to make it to the front end of the bus, i stood impatiently asking the conductor and the passenger with no money to allow me space to move.

in a strangeness that should have alerted me of things to come, the two did not move. not even the conductor which in my experience in bus travels is strange because conductors are always asking people to move ahead.

and then the brush against my breasts happened. the conductor did it. apart from the usual feelings of whether it was an accident (which one knows it is not), i was at sea because it was the conductor. who do you raise the issue to? the driver? other passengers? i had always assumed the conductor would conduct the scene if one raised the issue of molestation. that he would be the one to help me take the offender to the police station etc etc. so when such a man brushes his hand 'accidentally', then what?

he tried a couple more times but missed my breasts my a few inches. then he came, leaned against the seat in front of me, positioned himself in such a way that his standing legs leaned against mine. my instinct was to take it away. but i stopped myself.

i let it be. for a good half a minute, we let it be. i thought to myself, if he could get pleasure from my body, perhaps i should too. and i let it be and i enjoyed myself.

i saw that it threw him off balance. that now he was no longer the seeker. that i had asserted myself. and he did not know what to do. he moved away and never came back.

time

What is time but a state of being? 17 days could transform into two months and two months into two days. The zones we all live in are so vastly different and relative that if time was not to exist, one would imagine that the world would be chaotic.

But in the acceptance of time as absolute, have we subjugated the mind to artificiality? Do we allow for time to expand like the mouth of a giant and to contract to the eye of a needle? Why do we dismiss it as tricks of the mind or of a non-existent absolute entity such as time?

Musings 1

A calmness descends over me when I encounter people who speak of many things, coalescing the spiritual and the material. Shadow bits of anatomy, one said. Another, the beautiful one, said that her shattering accident where she had no word for pain, for hunger was her deepest invitation to inhabit her body. In all our musings about the body, while being the intimate we perceive it to be, we do not experience it, it remains in the realm of the metaphor. The schism, however unacknowledged, remains.

Love, the beautiful one said, is adoration and compassion. "two things that float into my consciousness now". It is also merciless, unremitting honesty with one self and others around you.

Of the Other that we create in our endeavours, noble and ignoble, the core of the other is within you. It is not an embodiment of everything you stand against. Unothering the other, she said, is a tool to escape the trappings set by adherence to a strain of thought.

A new world is before me. I can see it clearly for the first time.

of a relationship

Today, I found a new definition for friendship for myself. Introspecting on the relationship that I share with her, in conversation with her, I found that ever-changing answer.

For long now (time is after all a state of being) I have wondered what made us so special. What made us share each other in soulful ways that only the most softest of music, the deepest of colours and the most melodious of words could emulate it.

In the stumbling and groping, erasing and rewriting, the going back and forth- for words, she provided me the gentlest of spaces to recapture my hazy vision of me. In those minutes we spoke, I found clarity, even if only for the briefest of moments. In those words of practical wisdom we have for each other- one that draws from the core of intimate connections that women have shared with each other since history - she cleansed me of my rancour, rid me of my self-covered malaise and presented for me my life.

For the freedom from loss of self imminent in routine life, for the freedom of a constant discovery of me, she stands as my true north.

random thoughts

What makes us love understated elegance?
Is it the life it makes us suddenly live?
Is it the wisdom that it pours from within?

Quiet revolutions are possible.

A life saved is a life worth living.
Even of drudgery.

Faces can haunt you.
Codes can inspire you.

Things bigger than us have happened in the world before
Things bigger than us will happen in the world after.

The universe is you
It has many many others too.

Many universes exist
Parallel, Colliding,
Merging, Melting.

effects of a pregnant king

Boundaries. Fluid and loving.
What one must do and not do, nebulous.
Crashing, unravelling, destroying
Light is bad, dark is good.
Is good good? Is bad bad?
Left is right because right is right.
Right is right because left is left.
Questions that are answers, answers that are questions,
Questions and answers that are neither but everything.
Categories that undefine more and define less.
Man is woman is woman is man is nothing and many things and all things at once.
Man enveloped in the woman; woman part of man.
Binaries equals clarity equals chaos equals world.
Are attempts then futile?

of power and love

Power is involved you know, she said.

There are power structures.

I smiled and told myself

Not in mine.

But I nodded along.

Young, I thought.

To see everything in black.

Then the time came.

That going-into-shell time.

You know how it is

People claim your time

And you just want to leave them all

Yes, yes. Arrogance and all.

A privilege people around me have granted.

Until now.

A conversation.

Stifled. Clear.

No more talking.

For a while.

Expectation filled

That some persistence despite.

No calls.

Desperation mounts.

Not my terms.

Anger. Impotent.

Mind goes awry.

Power is involved you know.

There are power structures.

Ah.

Thatha

My grandfather died.
He was old and he died.
Like all other old men do. Die.

His eyes, unblinking, he stared at some point in infinity.
His lungs, aided by a rusty oxygen cylinder, he took in air to keep himself artificially alive.
For his son, American son, who he referred to in his diary, Dr. Shivakumar,
To be accompanied by his daughter-in-law, who he referred ironically, informally as Anu.

His grandchildren, also his grand nieces, shook him and shouted at him.
As if it was a game. To see if he would respond. Perhaps utter a sound that spoke of recognition.
He didnt. He simply took in air. Loudly. Painfully. Deathly.

His son, my father, dressed in impeccable blue and black, striding and conversing about ambulances and ventilators,
Walked in and stood behind his father.
Called out to him- Appaji, Appaji- words rarely uttered to the dying man's face in earlier years.
He gasped and suddenly it dawned that they were sobs.
Of a child, my father, crying for his Appaji's life.

A phone call, few hours later announced that Thatha was "serious".
The doctors, life-keepers, who assuredly had announced he could kept alive for a couple mpre days,
They said, "he's serious. Less than an hour he has".
Men who grew up with him burst into torrid sobs.
Passing of a familiar figure, death announcing their own sunset perhaps.

Two more cell phone updates later, my father, his son, sank into a sofa.
He held his face in his hands and sobbed. His face contorted, he wept.
While his wife and two children, not knowing a response to this unfamiliar emotion,
Sat and ate. Guiltily. Confused.

He lay there. Limp and lifeless. Sleeping his last sleep.
His mouth slighlty parted like someone sleeping a deep sleep.
Hands and wrists curled up like the paralysed man he was.
Bound to a chair with infected legs.

His son, my father, touched his face, caressed his sparse but thick hair ( a little detail perhaps no one knew till he lay there limp and lifeless).
Composed in his conversations with doctors and in his driving to the hospital,
He broke down. Loudly.
For a moment, he laid his head on his wife's shoulders.
His wife, my mother, knew not what to do.
Sensing no warmth but only confusion,
My father and his loud sobs left the sterile ICU.

My father, whose only emotions public were Indifference, Frowns, Pearly smiles and cricket happy face,
Wept his middle-aged orphaned tears. Crying his fatherless tears.
I held him and told him that he was not alone. That he had us.
But face covered, his body shook while he pulled away from me.
And I held him again, uttering consolation again and again.

Opening his face, revealing his blood-shot eyes, he wiped my tears away
"That s all he was meant to live. I must control myself"
And then he stopped. Became the man I knew.
Covering up his fatherless silences with mandatory phone calls.

It was time then to say my final goodbye.
To the man of my childhood.
The distant old Thatha who offered flowers that I picked out from the garden to the Gods.
Who wore a red panche, a linga, and worshipped in semi-darkness.
Who eagerly but distantly awaited our arrival every Deepavali
So that he could take down our marks and tally who scored the highest among us cousins
Who sat patriarch like and old man like and soaked in the lights of the festival
Through our cracker bursting and who next morning diligently swept the courtyard of the polluting remains of our fireworks.

He lay there with an old bedsheet covering up his mangled infected remains of a body
His face that of an old man, sleeping his final deep sleep.
Goodbye Thatha. The only one I knew.