Of Love and other Demons

Well, I must say the best thing to have happened to me all this month was to have Chaitanya decide to take a long vacation and return to Bombay for a month to absorb some 'culture' as he puts it. My friends have all been rather busy with visa interviews and moving to another city while my decision to do the same has been happily delayed. However, that left me with a bit of a void in a social calendar, that finally had more free week nights than I could count. So Chaitanya and I embarked on a mission to seek out 'culture' in the city.

This was just about as much fun as it sounded. Well, okay, it was a lot of fun admittedly. Trekking to Shivaji Park every evening in peak hour traffic has been well worth the plays we caught at the Motley Theater Festival but when C. booked tickets for an evening of Kathakali at the NCPA, I was more than a little worried. The only Kathakali performance I had previously witnessed was a rather abridged-for-tourists version at what looked like a warehouse-turned-auditorium in Kottayam in our trip to Kerala last year.

And while we were suitably impressed with the exposition on make-up and costume and the intricate and intensely meaningful hand-gestures, I never expected it to be anything more than visually enticing.

That we watched the incredibly talented Kalakshetra Foundation dancers perform an episode from the Mahabharata called Keechaka Vadham (The Killing of Keechaka) and felt deeply moved was something I really had not expected.

To have managed to take the dance from being a mere visual spectacle to being a truly nuanced piece of story-telling was to the credit of the NCPA Mudra Dance Festival organisers. Behind the dancers and the musicians and the singers were two large projection screens that translated verbatim into English every line of song that made up the story, and the translations were so perfect that we could even guess at the hand-gestures that the dancers deployed from what must have been a fabulously rich vocabulary of sign language.

Although the sentences seemed clunky at first glance, containing words like "Her hair was long and shimmered in the wind like a swarm of bees." or "Her full heavy breasts ignited his lust.", we were mesmerised when what appeared like purple prose in English turned into such graceful movements and such expressive glances.

The story itself is rather straightforward. It is set in the time of the Pandava exile, when they were in hiding at the palace of King Virata. Bhima had disguised himself as a cook in the palace kitchens while Draupadi served as handmaid to the Queen. Keechaka was the Queen's young brother who fell in love with Draupadi and tried to seduce the handmaid not knowing her real identity. When Bhima finds out about Keechaka's increasingly violent advances, he vows to protect Draupadi. He then proceeds to deceive Keechaka and then in a very inventive scene, slays him.

I realise when I type it out, that in this form, it sounds rather brief and even banal. But to watch it played out with such delicate artistry by practitioners of one of India's oldest classical dance forms is a viscerally beautiful experience.

I can't help but recount the many moments that simply took my breath away. The erotic charge in the scene when Keechaka kneels before Draupadi and offers to 'massage her lotus-like feet', the playfulness with which he mimes her gracefully swaying walk, described as 'a cross between the majestic walk of an elephant and the artfulness of a beautiful swan', the frustrated rage with which he searches for her before realising she's slipped away from him yet again. I realised I was watching something really unique when we agreed we were enjoying the villain's antics too much to want the hero of the story to show up. But when he does, Bhima thoroughly acquits himself, what with the comfort he offers his distraught wife and the single-mindedness with which he chokes the life out of Keechaka's body.

We were amazed by the sheer beauty to be found by floating lazily around a story that in these days of instant gratification would have been glossed over in instants. That sometimes love, or even lust, requires a leisurely touch. Even a villain can be charming when you watch him dance mischievously around the object of his desire. His death can also mean something when the dying blow takes a twenty-minute long and visually stunning scene to be delivered.

An old-timer watching the show with us reminisced about his childhood in Kerala when Kathakali performances lasted for days and nights together. But who had the patience for that now? Three hours must feel like a lot to some busy folks, he muttered. I looked at Chaitanya's beaming face and realised what it must feel like for him to be back after so long in a country where these epics are so deeply etched in our minds that we don't even need to be told the story to know what's happening, who wins and who dies, who gets the girl in the end. Perhaps that is why he needs to fill his days here with 'culture' because he really does miss it. He misses the Mahabharata serial from DD where people shot card-board arrows at each other, where people wore faux-gold jewelry and spouted unintentionally hilarious Hindi dialogue sprinkled with a smattering of Sanskrit words.

After the performance, we heard the acclaimed dancer Dr. Sadanam Balakrishnan whose masterful performance of the titular Keechaka has me raving right now, talk about how the Mahabharata was about real people. How the Ramayana was an idealised story about ideal men and ideal kings and ideal brothers and ideal wives but the Mahabharata was about passion-plays and emotions. He also told us about how his need to bring more of these emotions and dramatic stories to Kathakali had led him to adapt Shakespearean tragedies like Othello and Macbeth, and the Greek tragedies of Euripides to dances choreographed entirely by him.

I couldn't help but grab involuntarily at dada's arm at that. He smiled back at me. The idea of watching Othello performed by Kathakali dancers made complete sense somehow. 

Driving back home, along Marine Drive at midnight, I couldn't help but comment on Draupadi's lot in life, to be lusted after by so many men must have been tough. Dada chuckled, he reminded me of Irawati Karve's Yuganta, a fascinating collection of essays about the Mahabharata written in a shockingly detached, even clinical manner. I recalled the penultimate essay about Draupadi. How Karve believed that her great tragedy was not being staked in a game of dice, or being forced into a life of penury. It was falling in love with the wrong husband. While she loved Arjuna deeply, he never loved her back. It was always Bhima - strong, stubborn, selfless Bhima who loved her with all his heart. And she never realised the value of this love until it was too late.

I smiled at the passing lights of the Queen's Necklace at night, resolving to write this all out on my blog as soon as I got home, and wondering what a Kathakali adaptation of that particular tragedy would look like.

O Fortuna

Just one of those days when I become convinced that there is no such thing as a coincidence. That maybe people don't just get lucky. That whatever happens is for a reason - not a grand plan or anything - just a continuing chain of events with a definite purpose.

But then, on other days, perhaps it's easier to sway to the music of chance. Unbiased, unalloyed, unerring, uncaring chance. Moreso because we are all creatures shaped by the forces of random dice-throwing that is the way evolution always works.

I don't know the answer to which I would prefer was the truth. But all I believe is there is something to be said for trying to beat the odds. Always. Atleast you know you tried, right?

When we were young

"I divide my life into two parts, not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of the late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit."

- from When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman.

A big thank-you to the Book Florist for this quote. And cheers to all those out there like us! :)

Hello, I Love You

Oh, what joy it is to hear a beloved voice over the telephone after an unbearably long time! It's incredible that those familiar cadences can bring such a tidal wave of warmth sweeping over one's heart. It's like listening to a particularly intense piece of music. Without realising it, I had closed my eyes and was concentrating on every pause and every syllable as if something of significance would be lost if I did not imprint that voice on my mind. And if I did not manage to hold on to it in my memory, it would be lost to me forever. I feel so silly when I realize I am attaching this much significance to a couple of sentences that go, "Hello! How are you? Can you believe it's snowing here?"

And I happily lose myself to a voice that sounds like auditory perfection, mesmerised really. But then I relax. I smile. I can almost hear the smile in his voice and I marvel at the magic of telecommunications. I remember when I was a little kid and Dad used to attend conferences in Delhi or Calcutta and we would have to place what we called a 'trunk call' to get through to him and then it wasn't much of a real conversation but consisted mostly of yelling out niceties and assurances of safe arrival as if to someone at the other end of a small-sized football field. That scene from a Harry Potter book where Ron shouts into the phone to make sure his voice carries to Harry through the phonelines has me in splits every time I read it.

But now, I cant help exulting over how lucky I am to exist in this 'golden age' to put it in particularly purple prose. I wondered if my happiness was out-of-proportion with a mere phone call. But then, I realised I didnt care how daft my thoughts sounded, even to me. It was the most wonderful happy floaty feeling to hear G.'s crisp and clear intonations in his dear deep voice over the phone after what must have been months since we last talked. I was so overwhelmed that for the first several seconds I couldn't say anything of any real import. I think I just laughed a great deal because I felt positively giddy with joy.

It is amazing how vividly our minds can connect a unique phrase or a known peculiarity of wording with the exact expression a friend's face will bear at the time of uttering it.

M.'s text messages are much the same. I know the exact way she would scrunch her nose and screw up her eyes with that characteristic expression of puzzlement when her text contains the words "I simply dont remember where I kept my microbio journal."

And I know the exact look of cheerful delight that G.'s face wears when I hear him say, "It is wonderful to hear your laugh again." I wonder if it works both ways, this lovely little conjurer's trick our minds pull.

I once watched a rather fascinating anime film called Voices of a Distant Star that chronicled a literally very long-distance relationship between two close friends who communicate across interstellar space through their phones writing each other emails and as they move further apart from each other, the time-lag it takes for their messages to reach the other increases relentlessly, and towards the end they have 'conversations' poignantly spanning years.

And thus, there is great comfort to be derived from knowing that while those you love are distant in space, they are wonderfully immediate in time and that atleast while their touch cannot be felt, their warmth can.

I remember the same feeling flooding me years ago, when Dada made his first international phone call home and we were all so stupidly excited to learn a basic geographical fact, that while it was early evening here, it was dawn there and we spent the precious first few minutes enthusiastically acknowledging it, even forgetting to ask him about his first international airplane flight.

Thus, the vastness of our planet becomes suddenly obvious to one and the idea of a loved one sent out somewhere in that incomprehensible vastness is unnerving, even frightening. I must say, I am rather glad they invented satellites and email while I'm still alive. Carrier pigeons and smoke signals would probably just not cut it. :)

Ik Baar to yun hoga, ki Thoda sa Sukoon hoga.

We never consider some little things when we attempt to think of the big picture at times.

And that doesn't so much lead to mistakes as it does to a lot of surprises. I've been told often that you mustn't, when pursuing your passions, give in to them entirely, not so much so that they possess your mind even while you dream. Becoz it makes it that much more difficult to tell the waking world apart from those increasingly vivid dreams.

I have always wondered if I was a particularly ambitious person. And what it really meant to be a particularly ambitious person. I wondered if it made me better at this line of work, or worse.

Did it dilute that other side of me, that empathetic side, the side that really wants to believe in the motto of our hospital? That yes, all this really is, non sibi sed omnibus. Not for self, but for all.

A blogger friend repeatedly tells me about the gravely fallacious notion of being wholly philanthropic (in the literal meaning of the word). But it is not in me to be misanthropic, either.

Does ambition sit pretty alongside a clarion call to selflessness? Not selflessness in the Randian sense. In the general sense.

Does ambition not indicate a desire for improvement? An aspiration for the better?

Is that even a bad thing? Is that ever a bad thing?

Perhaps, too much of it is. But how do you know that you're crossing the line?

A month ago I remember wondering why some feel that the ugly necessity of meaningless competition is indispensable to personal success. But does competing with yourself count?

The past few weeks have been important for me. I've understood the full import of how doctors can, almost ingeniously, effect a cure. And when it happens with someone you love so dearly, that the very thought of losing them causes intense agony of body and spirit, you really appreciate, really, really appreciate what it means to be doing this.

Not studying, not watching, not observing. But Doing.

And fortunately for me, I helped. I really helped those who needed me to help them.

It is a rare and remarkable feeling. To know. To really Know. That finally, after all these years of questioning and doubting, you Know that you did not make a wrong choice. It was one of the many right ones, atleast.

Yes, this is what I want to do. I am passionate about it. It means so much. So much.

This feeling, this moment is precious to me. I want to preserve it forever. And so I keep it here. In what has turned into a slightly public trove of keepsakes.

This feeling is beautiful becoz it comes so rarely. It's called Certainty.

I'm done capitalizing initial letters of abstract nouns and throwaway verbs for effect. I have said what I needed said to me.

And this is what I was searching for, for five years. Some sign, some indication that I havent mucked up my life. I am capable of doing this, and willing to give away all that it will ask of me, and take out of me and snatch from me. I am willing to let it prey on my mind, now and forever.

Becoz that is what passion does to you. And the pleasure to be derived from surrendering to it completely, of letting it take control of me, even if it is only for as long as this feeling lasts, is indeed incredibly immense.

The Cost of Living

So often I run into her in the evenings in Odeon Market, when I dont have the patience to wait at the bus-stop and when I want to walk, when it seems better to spend time with my thoughts alone in a crowd of people than spending it trying to bargain with the laws of physics every time the bus lurches.

She always carries this old tie-n-dye red yellow cotton thaila and walks with that peculiar ramrod-straight-backed gait of hers that I can recognise her from yards away. That is when I break with my ambling and break into a jog to reach her.

"Good Evening, Ma'am!" my standard greeting never shifts to the more informal "Hello!" or even the casual "Evening!" She always smiles, her eyes turning into narrow slits before she replies in that clipped, deep voice I have grown up listening to. "Good Evening, Karishma. It's nice to see you again."

I help her carry her veggies sometimes, but mostly she refuses my offer, casting a pitying glance at my decidedly heavy-looking college bag, that tends to drag my shoulders down. "You really carry all those heavy books to college every day? My God, this generation really studies hard." She says something like that almost every time she notices my bag.

So often we walk back to Pestom Sagar together, I tell her about how I miss the warmth and closeness of school, she tells me about how our junior batches arent as sincere as we were. We both wonder if nostalgia adds dollops of rosiness to our memories of those times. And then we laugh. People here stare at anyone who laughs out loud on the road. We ignore them.

She was telling me today about her son's weird taste in music. "It's these bands. Men scream these pessimistic lyrics into the mic. There is no melody. Only noise. How does that even classify as music?" I laugh when I realise her son is into death metal. "I have to keep up with these trends and all. Otherwise, I wont have anything to say that will be interesting to him. You'll have to teach me about these rockstars, Karishma." We laugh again.

She tells me he's at the London School of Economics now. I smile appreciatively. I am truly impressed. I remember him as the plump pimply boy who walked with his mom to school and who cud barely talk to girls at fifteen without blushing violently. I've only met him a couple times after school but he has transformed into this confident charming young guy who talks about George Orwell and Mithun Chakraborty with the same measure of admiration and awe, well atleast he did in the last conversation I had with him.

But it is his mother I really admire. This woman is my eighth standard science teacher. She's also one of the most intelligent, articulate, liberal women I know. So different from all the other teachers in my school. My school is one of those non-convent, Government-run, English medium schools where Sanskrit is preferred to Hindi and they start every morning with a Saraswati prayer. She never seemed to fit in there. The other teachers wud eat lunch in the teachers' common room and I'd see her seated on the bench in our school grounds eating lunch alone a lot of times. I always thought it was unfair but later she told me she enjoyed eating alone.

Of course, this being that kind of a typical overtly middle-class Central Bombay suburb, everyone knew everyone else's history and no one really approved of hers. I didnt understand at first. But I realised it probably had something to do with the fact that she was the only person I knew who was divorced and raised a child alone.

My friends and I also fondly remember her as the woman who cud say the word "vagina" out loud without looking distinctly uncomfortable like all the other teachers did when they made those silly sex-ed classes compulsory. She was also the one who abolished the dreaded first science period when all of us just wanted to spend the first half an hour discussing the news, or a particular song, or something new we learned in another subject. She is the reason why I began to enjoy science so much in the first place, the one who introduced me to Richard Feynman in tenth standard and Ray Charles on another of these walks home. She is also the one who comforted our fears the morning after 9/11 happened. She was probably the only teacher who treated us as equal human beings and recognised that we needed somebody we cud trust, ask questions of and seek support from, outside our homes.

Everyone always has that one teacher. For me, it is she. And while I cannot write anything that will explain with any measure of eloquence or insight how wonderful I think she is, or how much I owe to her, the least I can do is acknowledge it here.

Today she tells me that she is leaving Pestom Sagar, moving in with her sister who lives in Colaba. I realise that this is pretty much the end of our enjoyable walks. She says she thinks I was one of her best students and that I cud call her whenever I wanted and that her son had started up a facebook account for her. I smile at that last bit.

But I'm still a little sad. Why is she moving away, I ask her. She says her sister's husband passed away a few months ago and that her son was grown up and gone abroad. She was alone and her sister was alone also. She was moving away so she wud have some company. We walk on.

When we reach the gate of her building, she wishes me luck with my exams. I tell her that I shall miss her. And before I can turn away, it bursts out of me.

"Ma'am, was everything worth it?" I am shocked that I have said this to her. I dont finish my thought but she understands what I am asking.

I wonder if I've made her angry or upset. But she merely shakes her head. "Remember, that the most important thing is to always to be true to yourself. Some day, Karishma, you will know the answer of that question for yourself. And until then, nothing anyone says will be enough of an answer for you."

She smiles, and gives me a hug. I walk to my building, making a mental note of the fact that one of these days I have to call her and tell her that she is a rockstar. :)

We Laugh Indoors

So I spent the last two days cleaning out stuff from my mum's room from their old house in Mapusa, this grand old crumbling structure with a well in the frontyard and coal-powered boilers and my least favourite part of all, two outhouses. I've only been here twice before, once on a hurried, last-minute trip on our way back to Bombay, and the second time for my grandfather's funeral.

I dont really have any real memory of this house that nobody really lives in for very long anymore. This house where my mother spent the first sixteen years of her life, growing up in its warm filial cacophony, an existence shared by six siblings and countless cousins and aunts and uncles and a great-grandmother even. The kind of existence that I, with my nuclear-family upbringing, wud never really understand or even particularly desire.

Therefore, it was with great excitement and trembling fingers that I held onto this old family photo-album that I found in the third drawer of my uncle's school desk, and realised this was like a lost treasure. This album had somehow been forgotten, overlooked as it were, when the rest of the black-and-white photographs had been diligently scanned and converted into digital format for posterity and committed to their future on various flash drives and hard-disks.

I knew it as soon as I had looked at the date on the very first page of the album. I think it was my grandfather's careful, spidery old-school running script that wrote "May-June, 1974, vacation trip, Miramar beach, south Goa and Bombay. " in red ink that had faded a little with time, but still allowed me to discern his forceful, speedy hand. I knew his writing from so many post-cards he'd sent me ever since I was four years old, although I only began to value them when I was 12 or so. I still regret that I didnt keep more than ten of his letters, written in the grandiose high literary style in which he spoke and wrote English. College principal that he was, my memories of my mother's father were very distinctly different from those that I had of my father's father. My maternal grandfather with his booming voice, and Konkani nasal twang was, I had always imagined, a strict disciplinarian and a somewhat more exotic personality than my earthy, jolly Bombay-bred paternal grandfather. Added to this was the fact that my maternal grandfather was fluent in five languages including Portuguese and Kannada, which were both strange alien languages to me.

I am smiling now, as my memory takes me back to my tenth birthday, for which like clockwork, he sent me his post-card written in difficult English that prompted my mom to ask me to fetch my dictionary like every year. The word that fascinated me that year was 'ineluctable'. I really cant remember anything else that was on my birthday post-card except an invitation to come visit this old house in Mapusa where only my grandfather now lived with my youngest uncle.

We never went, of course, since dad was busy and my school had started and something or the other always came up.

So now, more than a decade later, here I am, in this, my mom's old room, typing this on a laptop borrowed from my first cousin, the Tata Indicomm connection somewhat unreliable, with this album in my lap. I must have looked at it atleast ten times since finding it and showing it to mom and dad.

What I find most fascinating of all is the places. Its all the places I have seen before, but they all look so different, they all belong to another time.

Marine Drive is almost empty the afternoon my mom and her brothers are posing in front of the sea. Which is incredible by today's standards.

There are these regular b-n-w shots of various permutations and combinations of my mom's family, my mom and her sister posing with their mother, the boys posing together, my grand-dad and my grand-mom standing side-by-side smiling but not holding hands, like it was the norm for middle-class, educated people back then. Everyone looking so deliciously retro it makes us giggle to look at the clothes today.

Then towards the middle of the album, are a set of pictures that fascinate me the most.

Mom reckons they were taken by my grandfather or my eldest uncle with this old red plastic Kodak camera that she remembers.

The pictures are all of a particular afternoon on the beach at Miramar most likely. There are six photos all of my mom, then two of my grandmother, and one of my grandfather.

The one I find most striking is the one that has my mother sitting cross-legged on a rock, staring out at the sea, her eyes crinkled with the sun in them, her lips curved in a slight smile.

I am amazed most in this photograph by something I cant really describe, her expression, the way she's smiling a smile I've never seen before, not once in the dozens of photos I've seen of her childhood and youth. She seems joyful, but strangely mysterious, almost as if she knows a hilarious secret that she wont tell anyone.

I showed my mom the photo and asked her what she was thinking. She says she doesnt remember. But its incredible to see her in that photograph, looking so different from anything I have ever seen her look like.

She must have been sixteen when the photo was taken, the next year she wud leave to come to Bombay to study in Ruia college and its almost as if I see her face in the photo, filled with the possibility and the happiness of this new life stretching out ahead of her.

What I find most marvellous is that the girl in the photo is not my mother at all, she is someone I have probably never even met. Someone unfinished, yet whole. Someone vaguely familiar, but also new and strange.

My mom thinks I am imagining things when I tell her she looks like a mysterious stranger with that impish smile. But I think dad understands becoz he loves that photo immediately, like I do.

I wonder again about time and change and youth and life. I wonder if my mother was a whole other person at this stage in her life or if its just the angle of the camera lens or the photographer's skill that makes me so fascinated with that one picture of my mother as a stranger.

And before we head home to Bombay and relegate this album to picasa after scanning every single one of these memories, I just knew I had to capture this feeling in my head on my blog.

You know, for posterity, Altho, I dont think I've done a very good job of describing the exact emotion my mother's photo evokes in me. But then, that picture is worth a lot more than my words.