Four months later ..

and I realised that I have not blogged for ages. I have been busy forever, mostly with taxes. I've also moved home, sort of. And I've been busy organising my high school batch's 35th year reunion (in less than a fortnight, I get to reconnect with girls I last met when we were just 16. Now we're all 50, but judging from the barrage of Whatsapp messages, we're all pretty much still a bunch of giggly girls - at least on the inside!)

Best of all, I've been planting trees!! You're going to hear a lot about them. But not today. I've been up since six and I. Am. Exhausted.

Not sure why.

I don’t know why they say it’s better to have loved and lost. The losing part is horrible. For all the beautiful memories, the loss stays with you forever.

I was in love once. Really, deeply, madly in love. We made promises about forever. I think we believed them. We would always be together. Then he decided to save my life, and so he let me go. I remember weeping in the toilet at my first job, in another country, wondering why he didn’t write. Every time I prayed, I asked God to just let him come to me in a dream, if nothing else.

I didn’t know that he read every letter, even the ones I wrote to my other friends.

Five years later, we met again. He looked at me and saw that he had saved my life, after all. The thing about saving other people’s lives, though, is that there’s always a price. And when I looked at him I saw that he hadn’t saved his own life in the process.

Was it supposed to be my turn? Could I have saved his life in some way, by letting him back into mine? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

I like to think that I did the right thing. Five years is not enough time to be able to stare the dragons in the face and be able to resist them. I looked into his heavy-lidded eyes, into the pinpricks that his pupils were, and I knew that I would drown in them, and not in a good way.

I didn’t let his five years of silence go to waste. He’d saved my life for five years. I said goodbye and made sure I kept that going.

I’ve been clean now for 25 years, 5 months, 5 days.

I dream about him now, sometimes. The dragons are always with him, even in the dreams. I tell myself I had a narrow escape. When he died, I told myself I had stopped loving him a long time ago, and I didn’t cry. I told myself I was lucky not to be the widow.

These days I tell myself that I don’t believe in love any more. And I'm sure I want nothing more to do with it. So I’m not sure why I keep a scrap of paper from 1986 with three little words scrawled in his handwriting. I’m not sure why I’ll hear an old song and feel betrayed by words we used to sing to each other, lying on a rock in Cubbon Park, stoned out of our heads, crazy in love. And I'm not sure why these things can still make me cry.

B 1965 - 1997



I will always love you, I would never leave you alone ...

We’ll live forever, knowing together that we did it all for the glory of love.

(from the song The Glory of Love, by Peter Cetera)

Satyamev Jayate.

It means 'truth stands invincible'. It's from the Upanishads. It's India's national motto. It's on all our currency notes. It's also the name of a new talk show hosted by Aamir Khan, that's creating waves all over India, and among Indians around the world.

I blogged about it recently (see Naked) and I also featured in a little clip as part of the show. I told you I'd share the link with you, so even though I'm not particularly happy with my segment which I thought was misleading, here it is:

Satyamev Jayate Episode 2

Click the link above, and when the Satyamev Jayate page comes up, select the language of your choice. The Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu versions are dubbed, the English, Marati and Bengali are subtitles on the original Hindi version. (If the link doesn't work for you, try searching for it on youtube, it's up there too).

I thought it was an excellent and much-needed show, with a message that needs to be shared with as many people as possible. I really hope you'll watch, and also share it on with more people.

P.S. Looking forward to your feedback and comments. (By the way, the box section "Made you hurt/smile/think/hope" is anonymous, so I do hope more of you will start clicking on that!)

Naked.

Next week, I am going to stand naked in front of the whole world.  That’s what it feels like, at any rate. An unpleasant cocktail has been buzzing in my head lately:  nervousness and terror, worry and panic, embarrassment and humiliation, shame and even some anger at the sympathetic responses I’m already anticipating. 

In spite of all this, I need to tell you now that when I stand naked next week, I want you to be watching.

Oh, put those erections down and turn those nipples off! I’m not talking about actual nudity. Next week, for a few minutes, I’ll be featuring in an hour-and-a-half long television talk show. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal for me, because I’ve often spoken about my childhood, both in person and in print. But this is a new talk show, hosted by one of India’s most popular and respected movie stars, Aamir Khan. It airs on the Star TV network, it gets broadcast simultaneously in eight languages, and is talked about on the news and in social media. The first episode aired yesterday and was a huge success, so I imagine even more people will tune in next week. The thought terrifies me.

I still want you to watch. Because even if my emotional cocktail turn out to be justified, this show, and all that it will carry in its one and a half hours, is too important. It needs to be seen, not just by all of India, but by the whole world.

And I think I just figured out why. That cocktail of feelings I listed – I just realized that this isn’t my first taste of it. I drank it all through childhood. And if I could survive that then, I can face this now.

All the other people with childhoods like mine need to know this:  we survived. We can face it and learn from it and grow beyond it.

And all the other children, the ones with childhoods as yet untouched, don’t need to know what we know.

So watch.

Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs) on Sunday, 13^th May at 11 a.m. Indian Standard Time on the Star TV network (Star World, Star Plus, Star Utsav, Star Vijay, Star Pravah, Star Jalsha, ETV Telugu, Asianet and Doordarshan). If you can’t catch the show, you’ll also find it on Youtube and Facebook (and I’ll post the links here, as well).

Silver linings.

I've been cooped up at home, dealing with the side-effects of my new medicines, one of which is feeling totally spaced out. As a result, I haven't driven my dear little car for about a month. So for yesterday's visit to the doctor, I travelled by auto-rickshaw, and that gave me the opportunity to look around me as I went to the doctor's and back. Not just see, but LOOK. And that gave me a lovely little bunch of snippets. Kind of like picking wildflowers, except that this is India, and the pickings are, well, Indian.

I read some interesting signs and graffiti:
"Waterproofing the nation since 1955" (proudly displayed above a small and rather nondescript establishment)
"MINDBLOGGING OFFER!" (on a shop that sold car accessories)
"We needs a republic in Nepal" (a thin sad scrawl on a wall)

I smelt some interesting smells:
The sweetness of pastries as I passed a bakery.
Somewhat disturbing and hugely overpowering odour of alcohol as I sat in the doctor's waiting room. Brought back memories of vodka.
Cigarette smoke (always delicious but not so pleasing when I am stuck in a waiting room and daren't pop out for a fag in case my turn comes up while I'm out).
Stale urine as I walked down to a bookshop after I finished with the doctor (pretty standard in this nation of men with small bladders and bad toilet training. I'm learning not to walk too close to the wall-end of pavements. )

I saw some interesting people:
A little old lady seated pillion on a scooter, resting her head on the broad shoulders of her brawny son, at a traffic light.
A Hindu priest, robed in brilliant saffron, beard, beads and all, with a nice suede pair of loafers on his feet (no socks).
Children (well, they're just plain interesting no matter what they do).

Why I am sharing this on my blog, I'm not sure. Perhaps to point out that life, even the mundane parts of it, doesn't have to be boring. And to remind myself that inspite of the inconvenience, bumpiness and pollution I encounter in an auto rickshaw - as opposed to driving myself comfortably in an air-conditioned car) - there are silver linings everywhere.

The side effects of my medicines should wear off in a few more days, and I'll soon be back to zipping around everywhere in my car. Or will I? Perhaps I should be taking an auto rickshaw once in a while, just to capture some of what I'd miss when I'm at the wheel.

I've just realised why I'm putting all this on my blog. If I'd been out picking wildflowers, I'd have come home and put them in a bowl of water, to enjoy for longer.

How the Tree-thing all started.

I remember very little of my childhood, which is a pity, because alongside the bad, I've missed out on the good. Much of my life, I've pretended to remember, nodding and laughing at stories I've put together from other people's anecdotes or old photographs. So I don't really remember the planting of the first tree. It was a magnolia of some sort, I think. The ones with those big waxy white flowers that smell so heavenly. In Urdu, it's called 'franjipani'. My father planted it just inside the gate of House 429 in Awali, Bahrain. It doesn't matter that I don't remember the planting of it, though, because over the years, every time we drove down to Awali, we would pass our old house, and seeing the tree that Daddy planted was a significant part of every drive. I'm sure I have a picture of it somewhere. I hope it is still growing. It must be around 40 years old now, just a bit younger than I am.

My father was a planter of trees. And so, every house that we've lived in, that had a patch of earth, would be home not just to us, but to the trees my father would plant and leave behind as a legacy. In Gufool, in the 80s, it was two 'gulmohars' (Flame of The Forest), one of which was still as glorious as ever the last time i saw it. In Adliya in the 90s, it was a lemon tree in the backyard and more gulmohars flanking the front gate.

At our first Indian home, the Awali township's namesake here in Bangalore, the trees have gone, replaced by a rather glossy commercial building that I'd ask you to please not begrudge - that building makes it possible for me to work full time on Askios (my voluntary job on CSA awareness). And now, at the new family home 'Dilmun', there are many new trees - a custard apple tree that's already borne two seasons of fruit, the 'kari-pattha' tree whose leaves I meet at lunch most days, a remarkable drumstick tree that has seen thousands of sticks distributed over the years to friends and neighbours - and that brings delightful little brown and yellow bee-eaters twittering to its flowers, a lime tree that gave up the ghosts just this year - and of course its heir Tree #1, the new lime tree planted a few days ago.

I've inherited my father's eyes and feet. His ability to make a great tomato jam. His artistic skills. His way with birds. And his tree-planting tendencies. Back in Abu Ghazaal in 2000, I turned a rubbishy old back yard into a fertile little garden and have left behind 6 ficuses growing in a row there, as well as a citrus tree and bougainvillea in the plots around the sides of my house. I often wonder how they grow (and would love it if a Bahrain-based friend who knows where I lived, could pop in and check on them for me!)

Barren spinster I may be, but I'm going to leave behind a hell of a lot of trees!