Tree #7: a picture!

Here's a lovely pic of a little chikku tree planted for me in Bombay, by my friend Jill and her three girls (yes, they're triplets)!
If there is an art to scanning, I do not know it. After trying several times to crop all the white space around this picture, I gave up in frustration.

TUCK EVERLASTING, by Natalie Babbitt

This is a most unusual children's book. It is a book about the importance of dying.

It's about the Tuck family, who is blessed with (or rather, doomed to) eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, and a ten-year-old girl who stumbles on their secret.

I often think we hide from death too much. Like babies who cover their eyes and believe that what they can't see doesn't exist. Sweet - in babies. A bit silly for the rest of us, given that the only certainty in every single person's life is that we will die one day. Most of the world likes to pretend that death doesn't walk around with them wherever they go. And then someone dies, and we are shocked, immobilised and offended by this "horrible" thing that has happened.

I suppose I think about all this more since my father was diagnosed with cancer. He's recovering now, but the experience forced me to accept that death WILL come, some day. It could come for me before it comes for him, for that matter. It nearly did, back in 2003 when I had the dengue haemmorhagic fever. Since then, I've started looking at life - and death - not just differently, but also more frequently. I decided that, like the baby, I need to keep growing. I need to uncover my eyes, end an endearing but pointless game, and dare to look, explore, find truths, and grow. I want to be ready. I want to die better, and also live better.

Finding this lovely little book, at this time of searching, was one of those pleasant coincidences that I often suspect are not coincidences at all.

Tree #6: an update

Alas. The poor thing did not make it. Well, we tried ..

"We who have no right to grieve ..

 This poem is no longer true to me. I still do feel this way at times - guilty for all that I have, judging myself and my depressive illness - far more harshly than anyone else might judge me, in fact. But I call this poem untrue because I have learnt this: EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO GRIEVE. To hurt, to cry, to want more. We are human - and rich or poor, safe or uncertain, we all have the right to our feelings.

We who have no right to grieve,
grieve the death of great ideas.

We who have no right to cry,
cry for the little we do not have.

We with everything at our feet
look at the moon with longing.

We whose lives are full,
look at the emptiness inside.

We with all the time in the world,
sit and weep so many moments away,
thinking our lives colourless and gray.

In other worlds,
there is the colour of night,
the colour of blood,
the colour of one against another.

In other worlds,
they fight for their right to smile.
Their tears are not wasted on the grief
we have the luxury to entertain.

(4.23 pm Sunday 22 Dec 1996)

HAIKU NOODLES: A dampened Diwali.

Perhaps this rain is

Lakshmi weeping for the rage
exploding "for her".

The rockets, sparklers, anars and chakras I can understand - it's possible their bright brilliance do mark the way for the goddess Lakshmi to arrive at our doors (albeit coughing a bit as she breathes in the muggy gunpowder-filled air).

But where does the concept of exploding crackers fit in with the concept of Diwali? The Festival of Light, we call it, but every year I see it is more a festival of noise. From the half-hour long rat-a-tat-tats of little red crackers unfurled down a residential street, to

i hope she doesn't look back over her shoulder to see where she's been the night before. She'll be horrified, and insulted, by the mess.

*anar - also known as flowerpots or sparkling fountains

**chakra - Hindi for Catherine Wheel

"Shadows crossed my window ..

Shadows crossed my window one night
(trees across the path of a garden light)
I thought it was the Angel of Death
(though it might have been the wind)
and in the morning I heard
women wailing next door.

Tonight he was here again
but he knocked and went away.
I think it was his way of telling me
he'd be back for me one day.

(written in Jan 92)

"Across unexplored distances ..

Across unexplored distances
part of our souls are entwined
in an intimacy that can't be explained.
We know each other,
but are strangers.
We may never meet again,
but we have come together.
A man and a woman,
but not as men and women do.

There is a bond,
and there are no bonds.
There is a kind of love that cannot be called love.
There are secrets behind each other's eyes
that we are beginning to understand,
and secrets we are too remote to share.

Finding everything my heart has longed for,
and nothing of all my body desires,
I cannot call him friend or lover.
He is both less and more.


(written for R,  on 13-3-95, 1.45 a.m.)

HAIKU NOODLE: fresh from my freshly-shaved head.

This just came to me in a blink, as I was pottering through my blog, tidying up old posts. I caught a glimpse of a picture I'd posted (see label "gardens") and ..

What is a graveyard
but just another garden
nurturing new life?

Sometimes I think that, whether or not it is true (there's only one way to find out if it is - but I'm not ready to die just yet), it's a good thing to believe in life after death. Of course, many of the world's religions, mine included (I'm a Muslim, in case you're wondering) believe that our death from this world we know, is not the end. But I am beginning to think, given the state of the world today, that it might be a good idea to believe in reincarnation. How else will we get ourselves to take responsibility for the terrible things we do to this planet and to ourselves?

Perhaps we need to give ourselves these fears: that what goes around, comes around - that the mess we leave behind today will be there abundantly for us to struggle through as the children we'd be reborn as - that the lessons we take the time to learn here, will be the bonus points that give us a head start in our next game - and that, in the end, it will be okay to die.

You complain that love is fickle

I suppose I wrote this when I finally ventured into another chance at romance. The only trouble is that I don't think it's entirely true that we can heal our hearts and move on. We always carry the scars and perhaps that is how it should be.


You complain that love is fickle.

I am thankful for this mercy.

I do not think I could have carried
a broken heart with me all my lifetime.

#

(wrote this in 93? or 94)

Edited 11 April 2014

Dear Chief Minister Yeddy

Dear Chief Minister Yeddy*,

Thank you for all the lovely smooth roads and new traffic lights that seem to be cropping up all over Bangalore. I hope this is all you meant when you said you hoped to incorporate "the Gujarat model" here in Karnataka.

Looking forward to seeing you approach the task of nurturing and enhancing secular democracy with as much enthusiasm,

Yours minoritirially,
Me.

*Mr Yeddyurappa is the current Chief Minister of India's Karnataka state, and belongs to the BJP.

Post Orifice; or All Those Letters I Stuff Away And Never Get Down to Mailing

Poetry, poetry, poetry. Seems like that's all I've been posting lately. I felt it was time to add a new flavour to the blog so here we go with a new label: Post Orifice. I'm not too sure where it fits in with this whole art, earth, ink, soul thing I have going. I suppose it qualifies under Ink.

You know how it is when someone in the news - politicians, entertainers, corporations, etc - do something that is just begging for a retort or at least a sarcastic come-back or maybe just a little pat on the head - that's what Post Orifice is going to be about.

Of course, with my non-violent leanings, I shall endeavour to make these letters as nice as I can. Should be interesting. Or not. This is the joy of blogging. As long as it interests the blogger, it gets published.

That reminds me: all you lovely affirming people who keep telling me I should publish my writing (dead-tree publishing as opposed to this virtual stuff), first let me say Thank You for your appreciation. However, if you'll note my byline reads "Clown, Poet, Warrior" and I haven't added "Writer-in-search-of-publisher" to it just yet. Several reasons.

1. I have a small readership on this blog. I'm not sure it's worth the effort or the dead trees to try and get my words in print on paper.

2. Between Clowning, Poetics and Warriorism, I really have neither time nor energy to type it all out neatly and mail it to publishers or scout for agents.

3. I'm happy. I write, I post, and some people read and like what I have to say. The words will, I hope, last longer on the web than I shall on the planet. Sure, it would be nice to publish the normal way, but if you'll re-read the first sentence of this point #3, you'll get the jist of why I don't find it necessary. I'm happy. That's enough.

But, despairing readers who feel I MUST do more, must reach this full potential or whatever it's called when one becomes a published writer - if reading all this is giving you angst, then by all means get in touch with your publisher/agent friends. Give them the link to my blog and let them have a read. If they really think the world needs to see these words of mine nicely printed out on paper and bound between the pages of a book, then they'll come to me. And I'll welcome them with a smile and say yes.

Till then, though, it's just the blog. Read it. Enjoy it. Be happy. I am.

"The promises we never make ..

The promises we never make
are the ones we never break
but the hearts we keep to ourselves
for the fear of hurt or hurting,
break anyway.

(written on 24-2-95)

DEAR ME: "Every day that I live ..

Death is something I think about, almost every day. Not in a morbid way, at least I don't think so. But I'm very aware of it, very aware - and yet I never come up with any real answers about it. Here's something I wrote back in 1993 about it. Mulling through some answers, I end with just another question.

Every day that I live
I am more alive
and closer to death.

Every day that I live
I have more left to do
and less time left.

Every day that I live I die a little
and every thought of death
brings more life to every moment of living.

Accepting life is not enough.
Accepting death is all there is.

Between life and death is a lifetime.
Between living and dying is a moment.

And when I die, will I have lived?

(written on Nov 12, 1993)

I wrote this after reading a wonderful book "Knots" by R.D. Laing, which explores contradictions.