All I have is one teardrop.

Today I learnt that a friend’s father died, and I am jealous.
I am jealous of all the things he could say and do when he was
last with his father:  talking and smiling and touching and seeing
and remembering and joking and being together.  I don’t know
exactly what he said, but I know he said - and heard - the most
important thing:  I love you.

I said it too, to a heavily-sedated man with a ventilator tube
stuffed down his throat, held in place by a large unevenly cut
strip of surgical plaster across his face.

I love you. Thank you. I’ll miss you. You were wonderful. Good bye.

I said all these things, I think, to a man whose chest may only
have been moving up and down because of the machine pushing
air into his lungs. Somebody said later, that he was already gone
by the time we gathered around him in the ICU, and that
his reaction to my words might have just been a reflex,
a coincidence.

Because when I said these things, one tear gathered and rolled
from the corner of one puffy, closed eye. 

So I said a bit more. 

Don’t cry. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. I’ll manage. 
I’ll take care of things. Go in peace.

Some of it was a lie. I’m not okay. I’m not managing. I don’t know
how to take care of anything. I cry. I worry. I have very little peace.

I hope my friend will be better off. I don’t know what else he said
to his father, but I hope he got to say all the things he needed to.
All the things he will need days and months and years from now.
When the if-onlys, the should-haves, and the why-didn’ts
come calling, I’m hoping his last memories of his father
will see them off at the door.

All I have is one teardrop. Sometimes it feels like everything,
and sometimes it feels like nothing. But it's all I have.

"I want to live."

She died this morning, the young woman who was gang-raped
earlier this month. She died.

Sometimes I forget that I too have been a victim of rape. As
Nilanjana Roy said so beautifully in her blog earlier today,
"There is only so much darkness you can swallow."

(Click here to read Ms. Roy's post, For Anonymous)

I'm not a victim any more. I am a survivor. That girl, in the two
weeks she lived after her rape, she was a survivor too. But I can't
compare myself to her. With her insides ripped to pieces, with
all that had been done to her, in the raw freshness of her pain,
she still said to her mother, "I want to live."

I don't know if I could have that kind of courage. But I too,
wanted to live, and I have been able to. So her message IS
my message, although it took me many years to say it. It's
the message of so many millions around the world - generation
upon generation of women, girls and boys - who have taken
the worst kind of pain, brutality, betrayal, fear and humiliation,
but somehow manage to say, in one way or another, these four words:

"I want to live."

This is the message I'm taking forward with me tonight, into
tomorrow. Not a rant for beheading, hanging or castration.
I don't want my tomorrow to be a day where I respond to violence
with still more violence.

Tonight I lit a candle, in awe of her courage, and in grief for
her unanswered wish and her death, and in grief for everyone
who has known that pain, and for everyone who lives in fear,
and for the little child who still lives within me.

It's not easy to rein in rage, to say yes to justice without saying yes
to violence. To look at a man, any man, and not wonder if he has
the potential to rape. It's not easy, but it's possible. And I think
it's important for my humanity. So tonight, I lit a candle, and
tomorrow, I want to live. With dignity, and non-violence.

Epitaph.

When the last tree falls,
the only rain will be
in the eyes of suicidal farmers.
Their salty irrigation will make the crops cringe,
wither and die, and leave the earth barren.

But these empty fields will not be wasted.
They can be our graveyards,
and the tree stumps our tombstones.
Then one day when we finally connect,
when we ARE the earth,
perhaps something will grow again.

But none of us will be there
to witness that birth.


(edited and re-posted from 2010)

Personal autumns.

I was looking at a lovely post about autumn on 5 Precious
Things, a magical blog by artist Ruthie Redden, and it struck me
that in my life, I have never experienced the season of autumn.
In Bahrain, it was always either summer or winter. Here in
Bangalore, I have both those, plus a spring of sorts, and
a monsoon season. We also have wedding season and mango season
and several festive seasons whenever Christian, Hindu and
Muslim festivals somehow end up overlapping, and the whole city
seems to take a week off.

But no autumn.

Some of the trees here remember their heritage, though, and have
their own personal autumns. Irrespective of the local weather
they shed their leaves when they feel it's time. The mahogany trees
outside my window do it. Last month they decided winter is over.
Now they're getting ready for summer.

Their tiny, delicately fragrant spring flowers have given way to
these humongous potato-like pods,  which will soon crack open,
and send winged seeds of dark brown whirling to the ground.
And then, I think, it will be autumn. They set their seeds free,
giving them to the world, knowing that most will be swept away
or burnt, that few will ever birth into new life. And instead of
celebrating their personal autumn with yellow, orange, red or
purple, they simply drop their leaves. All of them. And stand tall
and naked, mourning with dignity through their winter. Only
for a short while, though. For the mahogany trees, spring comes quickly.

I have never thought about autumn much, perhaps because
it was a season I missed. The season that stands out for me
is winter. I despise the cold and the dryness. And I have
my personal winters, too, times of feeling stripped bare,
empty and vulnerable. But I never paid attention to
the personal autumns that must have preceded
each winter in my life.

What if there's a message in the mahogany trees' autumns?
What if they are saying to me:  winter is inevitable. Be like us. 
Let go of the past. All of it. Just let it drop away, don't linger, 
don't try and hold on to it. Don't try to paint it with colours 
of hope, cheerfulness, passion or regality. Don't let your heart 
linger over its beauty, or ache over its lost opportunities. 
Just let it go. The only colour for us is green, the colour 
of new life. Winter is inevitable, but so is spring.

It doesn't sound like a very cheerful message. But their winters
are the shortest I've seen, and then they are alive, again and again
and again. They create. They lose. They mourn. They never give up.

I think it is time for me to experience a personal autumn, a mahogany autumn.

They're all dying.

Death has really been getting up in my face, ever since that day in March
last year. I suspect death is getting up in most of my friends' faces,
at least the ones who are around my age. Why didn't the middle-aged
people TELL us these things, back when we were pompous young
adults full of energy, full of alcohol, ideas and confidence, full of
ourselves? (Well, maybe THAT's why!)

This is my newest discovery about middle age. It's worse than
the aching knees and the accidental flatulence. It's even worse than
my breasts' new love interest (gravity). It's that people are dying. Yes,
I know they're dying all the time everywhere, but somehow in
middle age it really does seem, to borrow a phrase from paragraph one,
up in my face.

I think it's because most of the people we know who are dying are in
their seventies or eighties. That's a niceish age to go, after having lived
through many of life's seasons - but this is not about them, it's about us,
the middle-agers left behind, and what it means to us. Our childhood
heroes are dying. The names we grew up with. Elizabeth Taylor.
Ray Bradbury. Rajesh Khanna. Daddy.

It goes beyond losing the person. It's also losing what they stood for:
our childhood, our dreams and aspirations, the background music for
so much of our adolescent drama. They were the foundations upon
which we grew, as we turned into the us we are today. It's scary. It tells
us that something is over. It tells us what is coming. It doesn't tell us
how to handle it, though. That's what our childhood heroes were for.

But to every thing a season, as someone said in a book I once read.
And then someone else took those words and turned them into a song,
and added the refrain, "Turn, turn, turn." It makes sense when I think
of winters and springs, of harvests and sowing. Here I am, somewhere
between summer and autumn. I need to stop looking ahead at the winter
to come, and focus instead on the springs that will follow - springs
that will depend on my fallen leaves and dried seeds and my rested,
restored, turned-over earth.

I need to keep reminding myself that somewhere there are children
for whom I could be the hero mourned one day, and that the best way
to honour my dead is to be for someone new, what my old heroes were for me.

Magnified.

Grief draws
big black lines
around my loneliness
heightens all my fears
Grief lays stark every vulnerability
and doubt
and dusts away the cobwebs
of memories both lost and hidden.

It comes again and again and again
relentlessly
an unwanted monsoon storm,
a necessary cruelty
and I keep hoping that it is just a season
that the sun will shine on me and warm me again
but the days get colder, gloomier,
and winter must first be braved.

Upside down.

It's four months since my father died. My world has turned
upside down. I've gone from being the baby of the family
to being its general manager. I've gone from reading and writing
to 'rithmetic. I've gone grey. I go home every morning to do work
that isn't mine, and I leave home every evening to sleep in a bed
that isn't mine. I go crazy once in a while, and go into the abyss
even more often. I go on. I indulge in a lot of emotional overeating,
and am intrigued by the amount of emotional weight loss. I smoke
like a salmon and cough like a cancer patient. I cry, even in front
of other people. I wake up screaming, and wish I had an Edward Cullen.
I obliviate by drowning myself in Harry-Potter-abilia, which works well
until my favourite characters die, and then all the heartache comes back,
and I cry like it's four months ago.

But .. Nature spoke to me this weekend, and this is what she said:




















So - it's been four months since my father died, and my world
has turned upside down. I'm not the baby of the family any more,
I've grown up. I'm learning new skills, like how to balance accounts
and pay taxes. I am getting to experience emotions that I've spent
most of my life running away from. And when it gets too much,
I have places to escape to, some down the road, and some
inside my head.I do smoke and I do overeat and I don't exercise,
but I haven't walked into a bar and I haven't got hooked on
sleeping pills. It's difficult closing my eyes because the nights
aren't very nice, but the mornings keep coming, and when
my eyes are open, that's when I catch such glimpses of
the loveliness of life that is always there to find if I just look.

Upside down isn't all bad. I'm growing. Just not in a direction I'd expected.

P.S. I don't know what these amazing flowers are called. They're growing on a tree 
in my next-door neighbour's garden (she calls them "trumpet flowers"). I've been 
driving past for more than a decade, but I only noticed them a few days ago.

(Edited 15 April 2014)

Once upon 2.77 acres

Once upon 2.77 acres of land, people discovered God. Some 
of the people called Him Rama. Some called Him Allah. God 
smiled at them all, because only He knew that He was in every 
name, and that He was beyond names.

Sometimes God tried to explain this to the people, but they 
could not understand. He tried to tell them through the leaves 
of trees, and through the songs of birds. He planted His truth 
in the eyes of every child, and He waited for the people to 
see it. But they would not look, and so they did not see.

The people, however, did love God. They were fascinated 
by Him. They adored and feared Him, and they chose beautiful 
ways to worship Him. They did not all choose the same way, 
of course, because God had long ago breathed into each of these 
people the gifts of self-expression and choice. So some of the people 
heard a hymn to God in the striking of a bell, and some 
heard it in the voice of a man calling them to prayer.

God heard them both. But in time, another sound started to drown 
out the hymns He loved. It was the sound of the people, quarrelling 
amongst themselves as to whose god God was.

God bowed His head and wept. And the people looked up 
and said, “Ah, rain.”

For a time, they were distracted, and they began to speak of weather 
and soil and geography. But inevitably, they returned to their arguing. 
And this time they quarrelled about whose land God’s land was.

“Mine,” said God, whispering the word through the rustle of leaves. 
But the people could not hear the word over the noise of their angers 
and their fears.

“Yours,” said God, scattering the word through the songs of birds. 
But the people were too busy gathering evidence to spare any time 
to find the word.

“Ours,” said God, shining the word through the eyes of children. 
But the people kept their eyes fixed, burning with hate, upon 
each other, and did not notice the word.

Besides, the people had found a new word, a word that felt 
powerful and reassuring. It was not a word that was as powerful 
and reassuring as God Himself, but it felt real and solid. It could 
be touched and prodded and probed, taken apart and put back together.

“Proof!” all the people cried, in a brief moment of unity. 
“Proof is what we need!”

And God wondered when proof had replaced Him. Faith was 
all He had hoped for, and all His gifts had been gifts of love. 
Proof had never been one of them.

Nobody knows the exact day when He walked quietly away 
from those 2.77 acres of land, and nobody said goodbye, 
because nobody noticed He had left.

Sometimes art heals in weird and wonderful ways.

After I lost my darling bird Gobi, it was suggested that I turn
to art or writing - about her - to "sublimate" my grief. But I couldn't.
I'm not ready to face my loss so directly, just yet. So I picked up
a book of movie star photos, and decided to try my hand at
copying that classic Audrey Hepburn picture, the one with
the loooong cigarette holder.

Somehow, I ended up with what you see here. Fortunately
for Ms Hepburn, it looks nothing like her.

I'm not healed. Grief takes its own time. But I can't help smiling
when I look at this ridiculous portrait, and for now, that'll do.

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.

"All These Tears ...

Oh I am so glad I grew up. Young people reading this, please know: LOVE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS. This is just desperate codependent angst-ridden obsession. I can't believe I actually thought like this once.

All these tears just beneath
the surface
are waiting to break through
if I'd only let them flow
if I could only let you go

But I've sworn to stay beside you
Even if you turn away
And if I have no tomorrows
At least I have had today.

I can cling to my dreams
As I cling to you now
And my dreams may never come true
But at least I have loved you

Everything has a price
And I am quite willing to pay
I would not exchange my
grey tomorrows
For the moments of ecstacy and sparkle of today.

( 9/86)