There is no other way around it. My sweetest dad will no longer be making another cup of tea, wearing his slippers again, painting another picture, singing another song, dreaming another dream. His clothes still smell of him. They are still hanging by the door. The way he left them. His shoes too, with the socks rolled in them. His turban still retains some of its shape from when he wore it last. Yesterday I found how my mother had placed his summer clothes in his closet, like any other year after the end of winters. His toothbrush is in the stand. We are still using some of the grocery he last bought. I have taken to brushing my teeth regularly at night, switching off extra lights around the house, cleaning my mother’s car in the morning in his place and watering the plants. It soothes me like nothing else. In that moment, I am him. His clinic is the same. His glasses are still on the table, his last signed medical prescription for a patient, open. I feel his presence but I want him to talk back. There is no way around it. I feel like for the first time in my life, I have been completely cornered. That no amount of hard work or prayers, anger or love, can bring him back. Lately, I have been thinking of time machines and resurrection. Parallel universes. Not kidding. I am serious. I want to be an exception but everything screams that I am not. There is no way around it.

I have tried talking about him. Especially to him. I feel he is the only one who can help. Can you believe that? Only his help will do to deal with his absence. One night before my flight after I got the news, I almost called him to ask if I needed to keep any medication to deal with claustrophobia on the plane. For some reason, he always kept packing extra ORS packets for us all. I remember joking about it a week before he passed away.

We have a mango tree growing outside our home. During the lockdown, he was always taking pictures of its blossoms. This year too, he was so excited about the mangoes. Even now, as I write and look outside the window, the trees and plants seem to embody him more than anything else. This year, no one managed to pluck out the loquats. I saw squirrels with their tiny hands and birds with their small beaks biting into them. I knew he wouldn’t mind. Even before, he always left some loquats and mangoes hanging for them.

My father and I are/were different in so many ways. He was the life of the party, I see people and run in the other direction. I like to read, he didn’t. He wanted onions in his omelet, I don’t. He mixed ice cream with Gulab Jamun, and I don’t even know where to start with that.

But our souls are made of the same stuff. And though past and present tense divide us now, we continue to co-exist.

And sometimes, when I look closely at my hands, I see his hands there too.

Yesterday, while attending a meeting, I caught myself doodling and ended up drawing the first flower that my father had taught me how to draw, years back. I had not forgotten it. Four pink petals shaped like hearts around a circle. Even now when I think about the time I got angry at him for entering my room during an online meeting or got irritated with him for not understanding the simplest function of his new phone, I feel that even then my mind had stored away the memory of that first drawn flower somewhere. I just wish I could have remembered it sooner.

I recall how there was always fruit in the fruit basket on our dining table. I remember how he would come back from the office, hang the car keys by the door and put the fruit on the table which he would cut in the evening and place before us—me, my brother and my mother engrossed in a serious study session. Mostly only my mother was engrossed. We never failed to send a distress signal to dad to save us from mom’s fury that would inevitably erupt at any moment.

I remember those sunny winter days, how my father would bite off chewable pieces of the sugarcane for me and my brother. Sometimes it was oranges sprinkled with salt. Less popular was his method of splitting the banana with a knife covered with salt that would start oozing. He loved dozing under the winter sun, covering his eyes with his parna, his feet moving of their own accord at the slightest disturbance. We giggled uncontrollably at that.

As a kid, the sound of his scooter never failed to make me run to the gate, joyous that he was back. Later in life, he did not mind driving my pink scooter. Or using my old study table covered in stickers for his clinic. Or my old poster-covered closet. He was still making use of old sweet boxes to store his paint brushes. He was always utilizing what he had at hand. He even devised a way to pluck out the fruit without damaging the trees using old plastic bottles. Made a painting on blank backs of wedding cards, used old boards to create shelters for baby birds to save them from the stormy weather, made his own easel. We rarely had to call a carpenter or an electrician. He took pride in doing things on his own, silently, before a problem became apparent.

Silently too, he held the invisible burden. We did not see it. He was always behind us. Always out of sight but elemental. Our backbone.

The house too is falling apart now, without him.

I never thought he paid so much attention to what we said, offhandedly. In Canada, we usually get milk in cartons. I had forgotten about milk packets. During the course of making endless cups of tea for everyone recently, I learnt that my father always told my mom to cut the milk packets diagonally. To never cut off the tip because of what I had told him years back about the environmental concerns that could cause. And I had forgotten all about it myself. I had also told him to buy frames that opened from the back so that he could rotate paintings he wished to display every season rather than getting them all framed. He had told me they did not sell those and the ones available online were too expensive.

And there they were, incomplete wooden frames, sheets of glass still neatly wrapped that we had to send back. He was actually thinking about making them on his own! And they were looking so good. We kept the frames. There is this one painting that he made and framed fully by himself which he placed in the clinic. Now it lies at my mother’s dresser. She looks at it daily while getting ready for work. Once she asked him to paint some purple tulips for her, purple being her favorite color. We found the footage on the CCTV camera, of my father drawing something a day before. We found it later, a canvas, hidden behind the other completed paintings, meant to be a secret project. A pencil sketch of tulips. Flowers, without color.

I see it now, my father’s growth as a painter. From his painting from the initial days that is taped to the wall of our washroom to his most recent one that was still on the easel, the blue sea, the paint not even dry that got on my hands later as I was clearing his art supplies— I can see how we took his growth as an artist so non-seriously. And how he stayed with it. Kept painting. Through hours of loneliness.

Hours. Precious hours. That I could have talked to him in. Shared all that now haunts me.

But you see, I never could see him as an artist. To me he was dad.

So I love his painting pasted on the washroom wall as much as his last.

Last time, when he came to visit me, he was pensive. His knee had been troubling him. Just when he had the time to finally take long walks through the forest trails or at the beach, his legs were giving way. I sensed he was depressed and coaxed him. You are the youngest of five siblings, why are you so worried about growing old?

Looking back now, my mother thinks he knew.

I have a new winter jacket lying in my closet to keep him warm in Canadian winters. There is a new backpack with the tag still intact that I asked him to buy for traveling. There is a bag half full of clothes and things my parents were planning to use when they came to visit me and my brother. That unfinished painting of tulips that my father left behind. Packs of his favorite granola that he bought only a few days back.

If you ask me if he knew he would be gone so soon, I would say I don’t think so.

When our parents came to visit me and my brother in Canada, we were so vigilant. It seemed as if our roles were suddenly reversed. We guided them with everything, being more familiar with the country even though my father was more well-travelled than us. We hushed them when they spoke too loudly over the earphones in the bus, listening to old Hindi songs. We reprimanded them if they walked on the wrong side of the aisles or hesitated while crossing the road when the green light turned to a countdown. We chose the best time and place to buy fruits. Once, my mother broke down into tears because we told dad not to buy apples even though he had carefully handpicked the apples he wanted to buy and had placed them already in a bag. They felt it deeply. I was careful after that one incident to tread sensitively around their feelings. I began to care less about what other people would say or think. Later that year, I called dad and told him how my brother and I rode a chair home, taking turns to sit on it, pushing it down the road outside. I remember my father laughing and saying that he was so glad we were finally comfortable enough in that country to do that.

He was back in India when it happened. But for the months he lived with me in Canada, I remember him cooking for me, making roti with sabzi, waiting for me to be back from work and spending that time painting. And even when I was home with him and it was time to eat lunch, I took mine to my room so I could watch something I liked while he watched news or saw videos on his phone. I did that all the time. Why didn’t I sit with him more often? Why didn’t I eat with him more often or talk to him? Why didn’t I hug him more often?

Why didn’t I tell him I loved him more often?

Sure, I thought I had all the time in the world. But would even a 100 years be enough?

These days it is winter indoors and summer outdoors. It rains a lot too lately. Every time it rains and the breeze floats in, I miss him terribly. I know how much he relished this weather. How he had a song for every rainy day.

I ache for him when anything beautiful comes my way. I am almost grateful for the pain knowing that he will not feel it.

My father used to wake up at 5 in the morning

Smelling of muscle pain sprays and toothpaste

Covered in pads, bands and appendages of varied kinds

He went and brought back home sweat, energy

And hardened hands from playing volleyball.

My father showed me his chipped tooth

His bone injury, his finger deformities, like relics

Others with bellies like pouches, came to play,

Bringing dogs and laughter, and complaints

And I wonder what my father said in return

And though I was old enough,

My father woke me up daily

With the warmest glass of milk.

Now in lockdown,

My father wakes up at 9 to workout

His clinic has turned into an art studio

Of which come daily a stream of songs

And celebrity sketches

That he uploads on Instagram

(I showed him how)

Throughout the day, he finds nooks and corners

That need fixing

And paints discarded yogurt containers

For growing money plants

The house turns greener and the mangoes grow

Unsaid he waters all the pots and trees

Listening to the radio in the kitchen

He makes the best cup of tea

Without fail

Every evening, no matter how hot it gets

He goes to the terrace and brisk walks

And plays tennis with the wall

The house rings with the sound of the ball

And the songs grow sweeter

With the summer smelling of mangoes.

After his retirement, my father always waited for my mom to have the evening tea together. Around 4:30, he would start pacing near the gate, sometimes watering the plants. He opened the gate before her car was even in view. Taking my mother’s lunch bag in his hands, he ushered her in, listening to her narrating how her day was. Then he made tea. He loved making tea with jaggery in it. I still remember his singing voice wafting from the kitchen. The tea box is still there. Opening any containers that he had last closed makes her break down and cry. For my mother, coming back home from work is the hardest. When she walks to her car, she is no longer thinking about retiring this October to finally have some time to spend with dad. Sometimes, I call her on her way back from dad’s phone. It seems to comfort us both in some way.

Yesterday, I saw all of my old identity cards from school days, neatly packed in my father’s almirah. A note about my first school day. My first day at my job. My childhood drawings were still pasted outside the almirah. I found a list of films he had recently watched and his to-watch list noted in a diary. A list of hashtags and instructions to download his karaoke songs that I told him about on the phone. Two days before he passed away, he messaged me on WhatsApp. It was a regular cleaning day at my home. My mother and father were thinking of renting out the upper section of our home. My father sent me the picture of an old doll’s shoe, covered in dust. He wrote, “Ruhi, your doll’s shoe.” Like some of the other messages he had sent, I glanced at it briefly and forgot to reply. Two days later, I got a call that he had passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest. In the days that followed, that shoe kept coming to mind. At home, I kept looking for it subconsciously. Ultimately, I ended up asking my mother if she had seen it. She told me that most probably it had been disposed off. Before throwing it, my dad had taken that picture and sent it to me. So the picture was all I had for the moment. A few days later, there was a storm. As it started raining, I ran upstairs to retrieve the clothes that had been hung out to dry. The rain smelled different. The leaves of the vine danced and tried to shake themselves free but were subdued by the heavy drops. Something made me look closer at the base of the terrace where a few odd trinkets were always kept and there it was, my old doll’s shoe, all cleaned up. I don’t even remember the doll it belonged to. I don’t remember so many things about my childhood. All of it nestled inside my father’s heart that I was not careful with when it was still beating. All I could do was hold on to the shoe that my father was unable to throw away.

Every time I look at my mother’s closet, my heart breaks. She has a note there, pasted on top. “Ruhi and Noor are happy and doing well. Chanchal and Ruhi are happy and well.” Her notebook is filled with her prayers for us. She wonders why god did what he did. I doubt there is a god. And believe me, it is a kindness when I say so. Which god would want to take the blame for all the pain in the world? I would rather think of natural forces and their arbitrary fury. Does an earthquake analyze the religious beliefs and good deeds of people before striking? Do I look at an ant’s life’s work before stepping on it? It is simpler for me to make sense of things this way. One continues to do good not out of fear or for the rewards to come. The gift comes with the deed, in that moment. The punishment of doing bad too comes with it. The heaviness that settles within your heart, making it darker.

For me, religion was not god but looking at my mother and father from the side as I placed my head on the carpeted floor to bow, it was cuddling next to my mother and then hopping away to my father as they sat in the Gurudwara, it was walking together on the cool marble floor warmed slightly by the winter sun, it was placing the piping hot parshad in my dad’s hands till it cooled down. It was the fragrance of besan and alsi that smelt like my parents’ affection for each other and for us, wafting through the kitchen as they both stirred the pots, adding almonds, making round ladoos with their cosy hands. Even when I went to hostel, they always sent a big box for me for the winters.

My father lived entirely in the present. Always. He was always aware that life was short. That the present was all we had. And that is how he lived. But for me, I feel that my life has wrapped itself up in the past.

I feel like a multistoried house shaken to its core by the earthquake. Every day since that day, one of my room collapses. A room I did not know existed. It’s almost as if pain is taking me on a tour in my recesses. Showing me. This. This hurts. Look here, this here hurts too. Because it was real. There was love. It happened. Do you remember that time when? He was there. He is still here but not in that same way, you see? He won’t answer back. No new dad jokes. No new bad selfies. Those stern hugs that never failed to reassure me while putting me back on my feet over and over again. The way my sobs ebbed away while hugging him till I was calm like a lake. I try to imagine him back into existence. In some ways, he feels even more real now. Closer too.

My entire life seems to have been forever divided into before and after. Nothing changed on the surface. But everything changed from the inside. A world has been put to sleep inside me forever. A new one is awake now. A world that lives to self-destruct. Looking at the storm, hearing the thunder, feeling an earthquake seem closest to the new normal. It is the regular days that scare me the most. When the world continues to move on. The way I continue to eat, sleep, work and laugh. This is the actual horror story. My mother, father, brother and I were more or less the same person. I sometimes feel like we died too and this is another lifetime. I am afraid of all that spiritual bullshit. How everything becomes one. How the hell am I supposed to find him later if everything becomes one? I better be reunited with him when I die or rather get switched off completely. Till then, I want him to live through me.

I want to believe he is here, around me.

I have been reading a lot about near death experiences to learn more about death. After all, one of the people I love recently moved to that world. So of course I am invested. I want to know if he is safe and happy and at peace still. I can’t help it. For all the skepticism, I want to fervently believe. I have convinced myself that I can will him to exist. That I can create my own sense of time, reality, in my mind. That time and space can be what I want them to be, inside my mind. But I am not always so clear-headed. More often than not, I am like a baby, crying for things to be otherwise, stamping my feet, hitting my head against a wall that refuses to give way to sense and meaning. Death feels so absurd. His absence makes no sense to me. For someone who loved life so much. Our small little world. We were too ordinary. Too unremarkable. Too non-serious. For something like this to happen. You see what I mean? The things we were joking about only a few days back. It makes no sense when I lay those down next to what happened.

I think I romanticized death a lot before. Rationalized it a lot too. In reality, it is not a concept. It is far too personal. I can’t even call it death. I don’t know how to explain it except that my animal mind is losing its shit. I feel like a mouse caught in a trap. I am panicking daily. I can’t understand that the clenching of my hands and teeth, that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach in the evenings are there because dad is being awfully silent, awfully missing from conversations, awfully absent from backgrounds, no longer seen or heard around the house. I am unable to send things to him, feed him anything, watch a new movie with him, introduce him to anyone new, tell him about anything that happened today. He is no longer answering his phone, using any of his things. No longer annoying me. He is not helping us in any moments of crisis which seems so unlike him.

People come and go. Language languishes in the corner. Their words float over my skull like fruit flies. My mind is like a completed jig saw puzzle board that caught fire right before the last piece was placed— What the actual fuck?! Language does not move me anymore. I keep words at an arm’s length. Even now. I feel the uselessness of this. Except that through this, I am trying to make sense. Knowing fully well there is nothing to grab, no meaning, no fire to be made here, and no solace. It is ridiculous really. All this for what? Time will heal. What a bitch. Biology is no shit. You cannot mess with the science of the mind. All this romanticizing of life and death. Let’s make all his dreams come true. How am I supposed to disentangle my dreams from his? You have to live for your mother, your mother has to live for you. What a trap! Is there any meaning to this?

There are no answers here. No matter how hard my heart cries out. My voice is met with silence. Endless void.

I am scared of walking down the same paths through the woods. Looking at the berries he loved to pluck out and eat. Every tree, every branch will forever ring with his absence. The last song he sang minutes before leaving us continues to echo in my ears.

I think of this world as a waiting room now. I can be called at any time. Anyone around me can be called. At any time. There truly is no guarantee. What will I spend my time doing till I am called? That is all there is now. There are so many lasts that have already happened. Many lasts are happening every day. A street I will never walk on again. Things I have looked at the last time without knowing. No one knows.

It is better not to know I guess.

When I miss him so much that I can’t breathe, there is a place in my mind I always try to go to. A beautiful moment stolen from a beautifully ordinary day. In the memory, I cannot see my dad. I cannot see anything. In fact, my eyes are closed, my head on the bench. I am taking an afternoon nap outdoors. I cannot see my dad but he is there, sitting by my side, sketching the scene in front of him. The undulating hill, the road below, and the beach segueing into the gleaming blue sea. I can hear the seagulls, excited voices, cars going by, and the sound of my father’s pencil softly grazing the paper. We do not say a word. But we both know we are together.

There is a highway bridge of my dreams. The light of the scene is blue. Two people stand there in the middle, staring at the dark waters. They stand with their backs to one another. The stream flows from one to the other. Though they cannot see one another at the moment, they have never been more aware that they are not alone.

Only now I am beginning to understand the things I wrote long back. How strange is that?

My mind is real. My memories more real than the present. I know I can will him into existence.

I don’t believe in god but I do believe in love.

I know I have my father’s hands and my father’s eyes. Sometimes when I am cleaning the car in the morning, sunlight glints through the branches of the mango tree, its leaves fluttering in the breeze. It always makes me pause and look up. The blossoms keep falling. The birds keep chirruping. I whisper under my breath—

Here is the world, dad. Here is life. Look.

September 25, 2020

Though it is still September, the slight chill of October is already in the air. I can feel it early in the mornings and late in the evenings on the tips of my toes and fingers. Sometimes, some strange sights and sensations visit me, like fragments from another lifetime, pieces I have collected, first hand or not, of standing by rivers, dropping marigolds into them, the smell of incense, looking at temples lit with golden lights in the evening rain, staring at a strange path that went through the woods as I sat as a little girl in a white frock in front of my dad’s old scooter, laughing with a sister close to my age in a wooden house at a hilly place where it rained too often, as a man stepping outside my office onto a road covered in autumn leaves. I think of this vast field covered in reeds under a pale blue sky and two black horses waiting midst its windy sinews. They are my medium.

Loneliness accompanies these visions beautifully, without shattering the substance. But, in my room, loneliness floats around, sometimes like a dark shadow and at times, like the stillness of my heart, ready to listen. Anytime now. The orange light of the dying afternoon filters through a crack in the window and falls on the Kafka sketch on my wall. I believe one of these days he would speak. I stretch out my legs on the bed, trying to gather more sleep into my mind, to still it. But I am always thinking.

One of these nights, I will give myself up to the sky. I will say, this is me. This is what you get. Uncover me and see for yourself. I am surrendering. And the stars will zoom in around me and the clouds will wrap me up. I have nothing to carry that is my own and so I am in everything. Never have I felt so infinitesimal and so cosmic. Except that night on the roof.

In the darkest of nights, I have little to say. I leave myself to a prayer, if it could carry me all the way, if I am not heavy enough. I have caught myself in the mirror many times. When I see myself like that, I am touched and afraid. I would rather not.

I grow tired of the world. Words too at times. But only now, sitting at 12:25 AM, writing away, I can recall the beauty in everything. No. I have not forgotten strangeness and fear. I remember them. Like bones remember the flesh grimacing and sliding atop them. I know the potency of my mind. And I am afraid, I bow down. The mind. The neuroplastic monster. Madness. The psychedelic time machine. The dark sky, forever creating itself. Terror in a box. Tied fists. Blank.

Evenings are for the beach. I often take the driftwood for granted as I sit down. I am so busy looking at the sea. Though, as always, after a few minutes of vacantly looking at the waters, I am at loss. Am I supposed to be looking for something? I breathe easier here. Is that not enough? I feel guilty. What I am sitting on is a relic, a message, a layered poem beneath my ass. Yet I don’t really think about it. Only now, and even now, I am thinking about myself. When we say we can relate, is that a lack of imagination? I too am drifting, more or less, carrying some of the context on the way. When I listen, when I really listen, I think I can converse with all that will not speak. That chooses not to. And when I see, when I really see, I can see that the color of absence is much stronger than presence.

And so it is. When I try not to think of something, it is all I can think about.

This year I stayed away from all resolutions like a plague. I am so distrustful of it all. I feel like I need to experience time in my own way, build an extremely different relationship with it than what we have been taught since school days. I know now why I did not want to learn how to tell the time. I didn’t feel the need to. I want to see time falling all around me, malleable. I want it to expand and contract depending upon the orientation of my mind, or how rich my coffee tastes, how my feet feel as I sit in a café, my hand on my book, looking at people walking in the rain outside, re-living a random day of my childhood. I don’t need a stopwatch to examine my life, to count it, or expend it. I want my past, present and future at hand, ready.

In a way, getting older is an anachronistic acid trip. You can feel your past, present, future—all alive at once, underneath your skin.

That one summer afternoon, washing the dishes, I remembered my nani. I saw her as a girl, playing on the grass among the trees, running, happy. And I did not find it strange at all, even though I have never seen her as a little girl. But it made me think. Maybe time is not as linear as we want it to be/ thought it to be.

There is a highway bridge of my dreams. The light of the scene is blue. Two people stand there in the middle, staring at the dark waters. They stand with their backs to one another. The stream flows from one to the other. Though they cannot see one another at the moment, they have never been more aware that they are not alone.

This is a recurrent dream. The other is of two horses, one black and one white, standing among the reeds. Absence and presence.

I wish I could write a love letter—to all the erasures of the world, omissions of all kinds, absences.

As you read this, countless erasers, backspace keys, delete buttons, and forgetfulness are busy expurgating space. Things get lost. Misplaced.

This morning, I could not find any scissors around the house. No matter where I looked, I could not find them anywhere. I realized that I do not pay much attention to scissors when I use them. I find them, as a matter of fact, and use them as modes of convenience. But today, I kept finding out how much I needed such a simple thing in my life. I could not open the coffee bag without it. I used a knife instead and ended up getting a cut. I wanted to cut off a stray thread out of my sweater and tried to use the nail cutter as a replacement but it was too small. I spent the entire day looking for replacements for carrying out simplest of tasks. And when I finally found it, I had a new sense of admiration for it. The same thing happened when I could not find my earphones before going for my walk and realized that sound added an invisible layer to my walks, without which I felt too exposed when I stepped outside. Though it also allowed for the bird songs to bless my ears and I was grateful for that.

But what struck me the most about the absence of things is how it makes their presence so lucid. In their absence, their very essence stands out in relief. It is almost as if when all the blocks associated with that one thing in our day-to-day life get taken out, it ignites a series of fissures, gaps that disrupt an overall flow of our day and that is when we notice the burden that that one thing carried, the space that one thing occupied, good or bad.

Absence can do that. What presence often cannot.

The whole narrative about learning the value of something that you no longer have—there is no escaping that. And how often we color that absence within our imagination. The mind comes across absence and feels the need to create a presence out of it and inevitably ends up making it rosier or more terrible than it was.

How vivid absence often is for that very reason.

How blind we are to what is around us at the moment.

There might be a lesson here but I am in no mood to talk about lessons. For all our knowledge and understanding we are like raccoons, watching our cotton candies dissolving in the water, bamboozled by it all. (I am sure you have seen that video).

And I don’t wish anything different. Some confusions are mercies in a way.

And what about omissions? Can there be anything more present than that? What we keep to ourselves, what we do not talk aloud about, what we type and erase, what we hide—tell me but don’t we come closest to truth in those moments? The other day I ended up sending a cat video link to my father instead of the link to a government website. So of course, I deleted it to avoid confusion and sent the correct link. And as you can expect, my father was so keen to know what I had just deleted. To know what his daughter could possibly have to hide. As if that could define our relation. The same thing has happened to me a thousand times. People feel they are on the verge of finally knowing you if they catch a whiff of what you keep in the dark.

And they are not wrong.

As Fitzgerald wrote, “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

For all our communication, we have not learnt to truly unlock our seclusion. The heart of our darkness.

What you choose to omit, the words you do not write down, are the ones that are most burning.

And I wonder—

Is forgetfulness absence? Or is remembering the first condition of recognizing an absence?

And we are forgetful. I guess it depends on how this works. Can we choose to forget? For often there is so much that we want to forget and cannot. And yet we are constantly forgetting so much. Erasure evades the fringes of our memories at all times. Or maybe all those memories are not lost, simply packed away, archived for now till something triggers their revival. (People dying often get flashbacks of memories they never thought they would remember again or had even registered).

All my life I have always believed that I would magically become the woman I have dreamt of becoming one day. But not all accretion is of the nature we want it to be. And that is okay. I am gaining branches but my essence doesn’t shine any brighter. My spirit hasn’t changed. It’s like my gravity is pulling together all the grit and debris of the universe. I am turning into a big ball of ego and yet it isn’t enough. For the moment, I am drifting. Gathering layers. I have stories to tell myself on the way. Push and pull. I will play along.

After all, I am in no hurry to reach the shore.

Are you?

13/4/2020

Last night as I was reading Runaway by Munro, I happened to eavesdrop on one of the characters. She, in turn, had been reading about kings and queens who were turned into constellations for being too arrogant or beautiful. Together we thought of the gods getting jealous of those that shone with a fire too bright for this world, turning them into examples, into distant objects of our admiration, hanging them onto the skies above our heads.

These days in the evening we go to the roof of our house for our evening walk, since it is not really safe to go outside anymore. As you already know, outside is where an invisible apocalyptic reality awaits. My mother is usually on her phone. She attends her work related calls there. When she’s not doing that, she jumps like a cat over to the roof of a neighboring shop to look at the people passing by on the road. I tell on her to dad and he just smiles and lets her be. Dad usually brings his wireless radio upstairs with him. Sometimes it’s not charged and a woman’s automated voice starts interrupting the songs. And I have absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what she is saying, or the language in which she says it. It’s a daily ritual. I usually carry a Munro book along, to read. I walk and read. I find it really stimulating. And I like the evening light falling on the pages of my books. It’s not the stark sunlight of the afternoons, but softer, more gently luminescent. Everything that I read appears so much more profound in that light. I go around in circles by the mango tree that has grown tall enough to reach our roof. Often, I pause to take countless futile pictures of the sky and the growing mangoes that I fill mum’s phone with. Nothing gets captured the way I want it. Then as the sky turns blue and it gets darker, I place the bookmark where I left off and close my book. It is around seven in the evening these days when the twilight spreads across the sky and it is time for the evening news on the radio which is usually about the virus. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I don’t. The evening star appears and another ritual is performed. I have no idea how it started. I think it was my mum’s idea. Every day she asks us all to say a little prayer of gratefulness to this constant star, thanking it for another day spent safely. And we all do. Somehow when I see it, I cannot see it. When I don’t see it, I can feel it more. So I look back at it, startled for not having paid enough heed to it and it is right there, a little speck of light. I feel slightly disappointed with things I can see. I take them for granted I guess.

In any case, Venus is known to absorb the ill tempers of the more mercurial forces in the universe. Being benign, I wonder how she looks upon us. Probably, she is already sick of Mars throwing his tantrums all over space. How long before Venus has had enough? Or is her capacity to absorb the heated violence around her infinite? 

There is this story of the eagle I keep asking my dad to narrate over and over again, simply because he hates to. During the lockdown, since he could not escape me, I must have asked him to tell this story a hundred times by now.

Once upon a time, an eagle flew into my dad’s house. I don’t understand exactly where it landed or how. Even though I heard this story so many times, I am still pretty confused. He calls the exact place the ‘padchatti‘. It sounds like something I have a vague understanding of but don’t understand well enough to define it for you. Anyways, this was from before he had married mum, or we would know who would have to take care of it right away. Every time a wild creature is found in our house (for us, a wild creature would mean a rat, a mouse or a wasp), I am the first one to jump onto a chair or a bed or hide behind the curtains and dad is the first one to demand the creature’s swift banishment from our kingdom while slowly sneaking away from it. There is only one warrior who can fight these stranger beings. And that is my mother. And she comes with a broom or in case of wasps, covers herself from head to foot, marching like a fighter straight out of Star Wars with her helmet and gloves. But in any case, when the eagle got stuck at ‘that place I do not know of’ and would not leave, dad was still a bachelor and mom, who had not yet met him, could not come to the rescue in her avatar. So, he had on his hands an eagle that had somehow got trapped indoors. And on top of that, it was sick and retching. This probably had to do with the fact that somehow, it could not find its way out. Anyways, it smelt really horrible in there. That is what my dad recalls when he thinks about it. In the end, it was my grandmother who came in with a ‘dang’ (a wooden stick) and urged the eagle to fly away from the window. Somehow, I am unable to imagine a grand creature like an eagle being indoors in a congested space built by humans. It was made to roam the high skies. It fascinated me to think of such a big bird and its wonderful expanse. I was glad and relieved when every time during yet another narration, it found its way out and flew away.  And I was curious about something else. I wanted to know what it felt like, looking at it in the eye? When I asked dad to describe it to me, he said it was ‘big’. That was it. He wouldn’t tell me how big or what its eyes looked like either. I guess he was too overcome by the smell. In any case, he said, if I had been there, I would not exactly be ‘fascinated’.

15/4/2020

Every time I read Munro, I am wonderfully disturbed. I asked my mum once, what do you do when you read something that you resist but know to be true? She said I never thought about it much. And I wondered how blissful that must be, to be so preoccupied with the act of love, work, life, happiness, to not have such thoughts. But reading Munro- well- it is like, every time her heroine is on the verge of taking any step, I hold my breath and pray for her to not do it, to stay the way she is, to be safe, discontent but safe, to avoid a disaster. But she ventures forth anyway and I know she would still be discontent. And I wonder, did I? Did I venture forth? Why am I so afraid? Did something go wrong? No. That is not the question. What bothers me is, did I venture forth, if at all? And if so, when?

There is this particular part of the terrace at my house from where, if you look down, you can see the street through a frame of the mango trees, the loquat tree and the crisscrossing street wires. But the banisters are really shallow and so it is kind of a risky business. This was the very reason because of which my brother wasn’t allowed to fly kites on the terrace, though he badly wanted to. This is the spot where my mother, sometimes my dad, and sometimes I, go to peek and strangely every time one of us does so, the others pull him/her back by the arm or at least there is a verbal warning shouted from behind. It’s out of love and fear. And it made me think, how for safety and security, a family becomes that force that won’t let you venture out into those terrains, or even into a dangerous adventure of any sort. This used to happen every time I was near water. I badly wanted to go closer, an almost primitive need. I wanted to walk down the fairie roads of Scotland which were supposed to be haunted, but my mother would not allow it. Be safe and safe. Be safe. Have regrets, of not knowing, but be safe. A strange fury would take hold of my mother as she would pull me back, going as far as lashing out personal comments on how I couldn’t stay put, with everyone else and always had to venture forth on my own. Why was there this need of being isolated and hence being somewhat ‘special’ stuck in my head? Could I not enjoy with my family, like everyone else? Strangely, this need to venture out was in her too. I seemed to have bequeathed it. But years later I found myself saying the same things to those I loved. Be safe, come back.

But what happens if you are on your own? Is that preferable? Not at all. Read this excerpt from Munro’s Open Secrets (and I’ll be quoting a bit of it today). It is about this Canadian woman who is exasperated with her traveling companions who are all middle aged and easily alarmed:

After dinner they walked on the terrace but Mrs. Cozzens was afraid of the chill, so they went indoors and played cards. There was rain in the night. She woke up and listened to the rain and was full of disappointment, which gave rise to a loathing for these middle-aged people… These people ate too much and then they had to take pills. And they worried about being in strange places- what had they come for? In the morning she would have to get back on the boat with them or they would make a fuss. She would never take the road over the mountains to Cetinge, Montenegro’s capital city- they had been told that it was not wise. She would never see the bell tower where the heads of Turks used to hang, or the plane tree under which the Poet Prince held audience with the people.

Alice Munro

The next excerpt is from when her guide gets attacked by the tribe of a kula and she is herself taken in by them as she is injured and she thinks about how her absence would not be even registered:

No doubt there was some sort of search for her, after the guide’s body was found. The authorities must have been notified- whoever the authorities were. The boat must have sailed on time, her friends must have gone with it. The hotel has not taken their passports. Nobody back in Canada would think of investigating. She was not writing regularly to anyone, she had had a falling-out with her brother, her parents were dead.

Alice Munro

I read these lines and I can sense the panic rising in me for the character. No one calling you, worrying about you anymore. Even the thought of it is scary. Its natural isn’t it? We want someone to worry about us too. In Munro’s other book (Runaway), I was reading about how Juliet’s daughter Penelope goes to a retreat one day and the wait of a few days turns into weeks, weeks into months and then to years till Juliet feels like the Penelope she knew does not exist. She gets to know about her daughter indirectly from her daughter’s friend who unleashes information about her daughter on her nonchalantly, because she doesn’t know the rift between the two. And Juliet finds out that her daughter already has three kids and she was seen in a mall, unrecognizable, to get uniforms stitched for her children. I was horrified to read this. My mind cannot, by the biggest leaps of imagination, imagine such a situation. What was that big blunder that Juliet had committed for Penelope to be so unforgiving? Maybe it was some buried grief. Dysfunctional relationships. I don’t know. My Indian mind cannot comprehend. And yeah, it was at that moment when I realized how being born in a certain place can change you completely and leave its imprints. Indian families do tend to stick together, sometimes beautifully, sometimes in toxic ways. But they do. And in times of crisis, they stick together even more. I think of this as we sit together, eating mangoes. Outside, the skies continue to darken as the world inevitably ventures forth for a tryst with the morbid unknown.

I am writing this blog when humanity is sleepwalking through a pandemic. Historians are urging people to document their lives. And we are doing just that- in our own myriad ways. But there is another side to this pandemic that makes me wonder, if it is as my mum said, “nature’s way of restoring balance”. If so, nature observes us very intelligently, sentiently. This is by no means a direct cataclysmic phenomenon like the melting of the icecaps caused by climate change. This seems to be very psychological, very much politically assertive. It has changed or at least brought to a relative hold the maddening capitalistic race. And though I am feeling an enormous sense of absence, and empathy for those who have to risk their lives every single day to save others and those who grieve, I am awestruck by this force that is bigger than us. It is quite humbling really.

One morning, I had been dreaming about the aesthetics of light and shadow and I dreamt that my parents wanted the entire house to be rearranged with respect to the classical aesthetic rules. Like the crevices and the protrusions had to be alternative, everywhere. I thought of the senseless impossibility of it all, the practical impossibility. But deep inside I was amused. Maybe it’s just that. What artists do at the end of the day. They try to keep the world amused as it goes through catastrophes, together at times, at times alone in their lone rooms.

But there is more. And it is one of the reasons why I am writing today.

I think a part of me wants to resist self-reflection or a more reflexive monitoring of my own thought processes. In a way, I want to be unaware and observe other lives, so I can come to understand mine, slantingly. Maybe that’s why I like looking at the world through the window of a book. I don’t want to face the world head on. I want to learn from life without paying its heavy prices.

What triggered this? Maybe reading Alice Munro? I was reading the introduction to Alice Munro’s Runaway. It said, “What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Evil One Yourself?” Now you see, I have always felt that I was the evil one, but for different reasons. Let’s take morality, for instance. I cannot take a morally high ground because of my past thoughts, if not actions. I have no right to judge anyone else. But that’s not the evil I have in mind, the one that dwells within. It is the very fact that I can think of judging at all, irrespective of my thoughts/actions. Rather my thoughts that fell outside the realm of a morally high ground, where I admitted to being the evil one, made me human and humble. The upholding of a higher ground left me stone cold. But I don’t really know about that. For instance, I do not really know at what point our understanding gives way to conditioning. Our insecurities. The part played by a cruel economic reality. Our upbringing, education, differences, patriarchy. All I do know is that even though I understand these things and comprehend their import, but what is already inside me, has been inside me for years, how do I uproot it after decoding it? How do you stop feeling a certain way? I am talking not of being politically correct, but of our most private thoughts and feelings whose continual presence we may never admit to. How do feelings change? How do you start feeling differently about something? The mind itself is a maze. What is it that can profess to reaching its core, its depths and creating a seismic ripple? I firmly believe that this is where a reading book comes in.

It is beautiful how you begin to trust an author’s world. I trust fiction with my life. I can allow a book to look into me and slowly make me see things that I do not otherwise wish to see. And when I read the story “Dolly” in Dear Life, I just knew it, I lived that story, every word of it. And I thanked Munro with all my heart for having written it so stunningly truthfully, so stark, so honest, so cruel and yet so healing. It was what I needed. Not a reductive sympathizing of a half distracted and equally confused friend. I needed Munro’s insight. I need intelligence which does not stop being human, does not stop being cruel, does not fall short on truth to sound sweet, does not turn into a godly dictum, does not try to lift me up but sits with me in the ditch and lets me see what is happening in an entire universe inside me. And every sore that Munro masterfully touches, begins to heal in the delicate light of comprehension.

And so today, I extend my thanks to the authors. I owe it to them for having written across time and space, for reaching out without fail to those that needed to hear their guiding voice, and for creating these insightful portals to life. Now I am truly beginning to understand why it is so important to make art. Not only for what is happening inside of you but how by being true to yourself, you can make other people’s journeys less lonesome. It doesn’t matter how many people read it, see it, reward it. Even if one person does, it matters to the universal balance of things. Butterfly effect.

I think I am going to come back to this quote all my life. It is from one of Munro’s interviews:

Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work… All you really have left is the thing you’re working on now. And so you’re much more thinly clothed. You’re like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you’re doing now and the strange identification with everything you’ve done before. And this probably is why I don’t take any public role as a writer. Because I can’t see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud.

Alice Munro

This does two things distinctly for me, out of many. One, that the feeling of revulsion and distaste I get when I look at my past work, is normal. I never have to look at it. I have to look at what is happening right now. What I am making right now. What I am doing right now. That is all that is me. And that gives me immense relief. And secondly, it’s okay not to be the accumulation of all you have done. We are all moments. To say otherwise is to be fraudulent. A very dangerous territory.

And so we must, thinly clad as we are, continue to read, write and create art, while the storm rages outside. May we enjoy the tranquility offered by this shelter of words. May the catastrophe outside reveal newer undulations of the future on the horizon, forever holding its breath, waiting, yet to be explored. And yet, very often, the best of adventures happen indoors, deep within yourself. Down the rabbit hole, and into the recesses of the mind!