‘Self propelled flowers’

“Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?”

“It is if you first become a part of nature. You suppress your presence as a human being, stay very still, and convince yourself that you are a tree or grass or a flower. It takes time, but once the butterfly lets its guard down, you can become friends quite naturally.”
― Haruki Murakami

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ”
― R.H. Heinlein

“A fallen blossom
returning to the bough, I thought –
But no, a butterfly.”
― Arakida Moritake

“You can only chase a butterfly for so long.”
― Jane Yolen

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

How heartless of him!

My village

First-borns – Guinea Pigs?

Yesterday my first-born turned ten. And we (claim to have) successfully completed ten years of parenthood.

Has she been lucky or unlucky? In my opinion, for her it has been a combination of both.

How is she lucky? Usually the elder ones are the centres of attraction; they get all (or too much?) the attention from the parents and from the relatives too, if they are the first ones in a generation. They enjoy a lot of privileges – too many toys, dresses and other accessories. In fact it was we who were celebrating our new designations as papa and mama! Every achievement or turning point in the eldest ones’ lives is exaggerated and celebrated with all the pomp and vigour.

When it comes to the second one, the excitement would be slightly less. The parents have already been there and for them it is merely a repetition of the first episode. But sadly they are too busy to remember it’s the very first time for each of the younger ones. Being the second-born I have been through it all. (Eldest ones out there, I can read your thoughts.)

And there are a lot of health benefits too. They will be made of healthier and better components of life. The later ones are born to older and more tired parents.

[The given link will enlighten you more on the topic of birth order.]

But here I am more bothered about the seamy side of the first-borns’ lives. For the naive parents it is a time to experiment upon a hundred new things, certainly out of their love and eagerness. I must admit that bringing up my big girl I have committed a lot of parenting errors, mainly in the two crucial areas – health and education.

As tyros in that new phase of life we were naturally over-concerned about each and every aspect, especially her health. We surmised that every sneeze, cough or runny nose would end up in pneumonia, and rushed to the doctor who was only too eager to administer heavy doses of antibiotics. The recurrence of the ailments taught us some valuable lessons equipping us better for the second one. It made me bold and taught me how to resist temptation to grab the medicines each time.

And the second most fatal mistake I committed was the over-enthusiasm about her studies. When she got confused with P, b, d and 9, or when she flipped over certain letters, (at the age of three!) we often freaked out as if she was going to be doomed. When she could not discern the basic differences between numbers and letters, faltering at the questions like “Which is bigger – 2 or 7?” we seemed to be anxious about the Board after ‘12’ years!!  While we were passionately carrying out our duties, for her it must have been hell!

After her last PT meet (grade 5) as I was proudly looking at the 100% score in her Maths paper, I once again realized the benefits of intruding less and leaving everything to her. It was the fruit of her own hard work.

At times my younger one has to be satisfied with the used toys and dresses. However she enjoys a happier and more carefree childhood – only because her parents’ attention is divided and she has an elder sister who was already ‘guinea pig’ged!

Happy birthday dear! Thank you for all the great lessons you taught me in a decade’s time…

Not again!

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

It happened again – ending up in one more embarrassing episode.

Before that, over to some flash back. Once I was introducing a new teacher to our staff. I had already started from one end when I caught sight of my friend, one of the senior teachers, sitting at the other end, to realize with horror that I could not recollect her name! I had two options before me – either avoid her or ask her name secretly. The consequences of both would have strained our relationship. I frequently glanced at her as I nervously performed my duty, giving myself enough time to rake through my brain. Thank God, by the time I reached her, the name struck me and I heaved a sigh of relief.
That was eight years back. Now my system is older and thereby slower.

 The latest setting is the dentist’s office. The doctor was concluding the third session discussing the fate of my teeth. There came the fatal question. ‘Which toothpaste do you use?’

BOOM! System error!

In the next moment my screen went blank, as if under the ambush of some unknown bug. What is the name of the toothpaste I use every day?!!

Desperately I enabled my search engines, though, as it always happens during emergency situations, the operation was annoyingly slow. I could visualize everything – the tube of toothpaste among my toiletries, the colours on it, the racks which displayed that brand at the supermarket, its ads on TV, the gift hamper of the same product we got recently… but strangely everywhere its name seemed blurred. What a catastrophe!

I prayed for a miracle - let the phone ring, or let someone knock at the door, or at least erase the question from her! 

The doctor might have read my thoughts before she asked, ‘Is it the name of your toothpaste that you are trying to recall?’ Sluggishly I nodded.

I could hear my heart pounding surmising her thoughts – ‘Is this patient illiterate? May be she brushes rarely. No wonder her teeth are infected.’

 ‘You do brush every morning, eh?’ What can be more humiliating to a person who prides herself in the amount of time spent daily on dental hygiene? Even though I said I do, from her mischievous smile I inferred that she hadn’t swallowed my word as such. You can rightly forget the name of any other product but that of your toothpaste, the first branded thing you take into your hands on any day.

The revelation that should have dawned on me heartlessly switched sides and unveiled itself to her. ‘Is that C*****?’ Exactly! Incredible! Oh Memory, this is not fair.

Short term memory loss has vexed me many a time during the exams. Straining  my memory only worsened the condition. And once out of the exam hall, the misted answers would easily surface, but in vain!

But dear Memory, the current event is defamatory. Well, I will always bear this in mind, if you are generous enough.

I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.
Al Alvarez

And when they met again…

For years
They were one friendly flock
‘Of a feather’.

Then it was time to part -
Autographs, promises, tears,
Farewell, well fared.
And they flew away
In fifty diverse routes.

Years thence
They met again, virtually.
Longed to make it real.
Yearned to relive those days.
Planning, preparations…

Then the great day came,
Birds flocked again.

How tired and old each had grown!
Feeble smiles and hollow words
Couldn’t gloss over the chasms.

What went wrong?

They had outgrown their nest,
Moreover, they were no longer
Birds of a feather.

Time and experiences
Had painted them all different -
The dull ones with bright shades
And the bright ones with not-so-bright.
Each flaunted its hard-earned hues.
No wonder it turned irksome.

Disappointed, dispersed again,
This time, for good.

Editing Nostalgia

How do you make use of your past, I mean, your distant past whose wounds are long cauterised?

We merrily let ourselves stray to the (so-claimed) picture-perfect days of our distant past, only to dwell upon the deterioration of modern times. How many of you could solemnly assert that, in every sense your past outshines your present?

Some recent insights have gainsaid a few of my long-cherished convictions, the most striking one being those about my school life.

It’s true that my school used to obsess my thoughts as a green pasture. But ask me what I enjoyed there, and you find me groping for words. All I could dig up is hardly a handful of such jolly instances juxtaposed with a longer list of scathing or scary ones!

No resentment. No plans to pay back. Because if things went wrong for me they were merely the reflections of my attitude – years later I am mature enough to say so. Now looking at the educational system from a teacher’s standpoint, it is quite lucid why the abilities of timid students are rarely ferreted out and thereby go unsung, especially when they have no feathers of academic excellence to sport on their mortar boards. I was one of those few diffident lads later doomed to repeatedly chant “If I had been more …

Then why all the hoodwinking, while reality has always been plain as day?

This is how my conscience puts it across. “You feared getting stamped and sidelined as the black sheep when it is customary to exalt school life. The easy way out was to feign a happy teenager and keep on crooning: Oh, how I wish to be a school girl once again!”

• Nostalgia is an emotional state in which an individual yearns for an idealized or sanitized version of an earlier time period.

That well expounds it. We idealize or sanitize our past. Communication experts term it Selective Retention. We retain only what makes us happy while we connive at the bitter ones. When the present turns grim, our conscience turns to the past for solace.

But what if both past and present are equally despicable? Patch up the past, and tag it ‘nostalgia’. If you can make yourself fanatically believe in your renovated past, you are nostalgically happy. Cool!

• Nostalgia is excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

Nostalgia is the haven of the ‘excessively sentimental.’ Note that it is far from reality as it is just a yearning for something lost forever.

Even history has  repeatedly been subject to this sanitising process. So I can excuse myself, a ‘nobody’, for that fib about my school life.

What about the other places/persons in my nostalgia-list? Scrap them too?

Thank God I was not so ill-starred to go to that extent. I would rather accept my past with all its lapses, than laud them to utopian levels. We and our lives have never been perfect, so why should we strive to sanitize our past or feed ourselves on lies when that won’t, in the least, improve our present?

A wounded soul returning for revenge – that’s just fiction, I believe. The past won’t/can’t hurt forever.

Learn that nostalgia is a “sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present” (Sydney Smith).

I am not old, and I have proved it. What about you?

Caesar and My Tooth

[A true story, poignant enough to move even the toughest.]

Caesar and Tooth - both were acclaimed for their ‘true-fix’d and resting quality’ (as ‘constant as the northern star’ would be a befitting simile). They firmly believed ‘the things that threaten’ them shall vanish when their faces are seen (Titanic syndrome).

When trouble started brewing, heavens did ‘blaze forth’, foreboding the concerned parties. The augurers and well-wishers urged them to heed the unnatural incidents. Nonetheless they comforted themselves uttering, “Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

Mrs. Caesar lamented, “Alas my lord, your wisdom is consumed in confidence”. My conscience alerted Tooth, “Your wisdom(-tooth) will be consumed by your confidence.” And this is how the story went on.

An assortment of conquests, glories and triumphs were there to the credit of Caesar and to that of Tooth. Both had bravely prevailed over decades of decays, adversities, hostilities and assaults (from within and without) without any sort of weariness or grudge. How many hard nuts they had crushed down to paste!

History repeats – how true! Honourable Chips was always Tooth’s dear, trusted friend. Nobody ever suspected the integrity of that friendship.

The conspiring Sweets took Chips into confidence and made him believe the unattested stories they had cooked up against Tooth. No wonder Chips decided to join hands with them in the conspiracy to finish him off. Tooth was lured into it with the offer of a ‘crown’(which he had refused thrice!). Poor Tooth, he was not informed that the price he should pay for the crown was his own roots! What a Machiavellian ploy!

On that cursed day they stormed on my Tooth. Even when the Sweets almost stabbed him to death the great conqueror fought back with all his might.
And then it happened unawares– the ‘well-beloved’ Chips too followed suit! The bosom friend’s stab reduced him to a ‘bleeding piece’ of calcium and enamel. This act is oft referred to as the ‘most unkindest cut of all.’ Ingratitude quite vanquished him and he succumbed. What a fall!!

“Et tu Chipse’!”- these were his last words.

That happened ten years ago. And till date the enormous gap left behind by him remains VACANT! I can’t let an imposter take up his place – I have to prove my fidelity.
(Dedicated to the memory of my beloved Molar that had to be extracted after I rashly indulged in a week-long treat of sweets and banana chips during an Onam season!)

Picture courtesy: Subeka Ahmed (my student)

The Last Few Seconds of a Young Man

And in the next moment everything went blank. He sensed the severe pangs of solitude – for the first time in his life, and that was more than his flesh and blood could stand. Adding to his misery, his acumen didn’t seem to work.

Bewildered, he mistook the ordeal for his Doomsday. As if in a trance he shut the doors to faith, while the shutters automatically lifted up to the heights of unnerving fears. Even the last ray of hope had abandoned him.

He couldn’t call to mind the green pastures he came from  - the hilarious occasions at home with his brother, the kind words and the appetizing dishes of his mother, the reassuring looks of his father, the moments he spent in cloud nine with his friends, the compliments from the colleagues, the track of his glittering achievements… Alas, nothing came in handy to alleviate his distress…

The tall wall in front obscured his vision and soon his brain. He neither looked up to see the blue sky that canopied him, nor looked down to see the warm earth that bolstered him. He didn’t bother to see the twittering birds on one side, the fluttering butterflies, the capering crickets and the swaying flowers on the other. He couldn’t get a glimpse of the thriving future that was in store for him – thoroughly overwhelmed by the enormity of the deceptive wall. He did not, or was not in a position to, deem the scores of possibilities.

Had he uttered a word to someone! Had he tilted his head! Had he merely taken some rest!

No miracles happened. Instead..

He just gave up….

His father whimpered, “I could have helped him take a detour!”

His brother grieved, “I could have assisted him to climb over the wall!”

His mother wailed, “I would have carried him in my arms all the way round!”

His friends mourned, “We would have pulled it down for him!!”

After all, just a WALL it was…

Their Grandparents’ House

My parents’ house is just an ordinary place as far as we
grown-ups are concerned. But for the kids who grew up in the artificial set ups
of the desert, even a blade of grass is a matter of wonder. Every nook and
corner offered them feast for their eyes. Let me take you along to some of
those scenes.

Giants in the neighbourhood:

For our neighbour, partitioning his property might have been
a big deal as he had many ‘giants’ to divide among his two sons. Now the sons
who live uphill and downhill have chained two of their elephants on to the
rubber trees in their plots. While the Trivandrum Zoo (at the State capital)
houses just one elephant often there were many around our house!

My kids were filled with awe to see them feed on the palm
leaves, the way they curled their trunks, the prize tusks, the fanning ears,
the heaps of elephant droppings, etc. The elephants were in an angry mood and
we could hear them trumpet unceasingly. I did feel sorry for them, though they
were taken good care of by their owners.

On our way back we spotted this millipede heading along. I
had a kind of aversion for such creatures, but don’t know why, recently I have
started admiring them. They are not jumpy like the crickets or the frogs, not
fluttering like the butterflies or the dragonflies – just cool and composed. Don’t
you think it is beautiful?

The nest:

The little humming birds (or better you name it) have been
the inhabitants of our place since my student days. Earlier they used to
construct their nest under the net above the well. When the drenching rains made the nest-making a risky affair, (once the nest almost fell) my father decided to guide them to a safer place under the eaves. He made all the necessary arrangements for the shifting and luckily the birds did not ignore the good intentions.

The windows of the drawing-room open to the live show of
their life and it was so peaceful watching it. The kids learned a few
practical lessons, more than what their EVS books offer.

Attending a wedding:

The last wedding I attended was eleven years ago where I acted
bride. Since then so many of my dear and near ones (including my sister) got
married but I missed every single one of them. This time I was in the thrill of
attending a cousin’s wedding.

The wedding ceremonies in the villages have not completely
lost their charm and above all their innocence. Everyone in the family will
have some role to play, making them feel an integral part of the ceremony, and
that is the beauty of the traditions.

On the eve of the wedding the brothers-in-law
(one being my husband) twisted the threads for the wedding knot. (For the first
time I got to know the concept behind pulling out exactly seven threads from
the wedding saree for this purpose.)

Another memorable event of the eve was a traditional
Christian dance performance, which reminded me of Kalarippayattu, the martial
art form of Kerala. The powerful Kerala culture permeates all our religious
functions – slight alterations are made just for the sake of giving them a
different identity.

(Idea stolen from my daughter’s holiday homework.) Moral of the blog: Now and then go through the assignments of your kids – you will get ideas to (blog)bore your readers.

Onam

(Yesterday, 9 September, Keralites celebrated Onam, the national festival of Kerala.)

It’s all about happiness. While many of the festivals segregate people on the basis of religion, Onam has no such bars, I believe. Onam was once celebrated in a
humble but jovial way by every Malayalee family. It used to be a perfect combination of the ingredients required to make an average human (of those days) happy – perfect weather, food (the extravaganza of vegetarian food), games, and other activities like singing and dancing…!

Times have changed. We prefer staying indoors hesitating to make Onam a reality.  Nowadays the ingredients mentioned above (except the first one) are accessible to us any time of the year. Onam has nothing special to offer; we find nothing thrilling in it. We are content with the virtual Onam, listening to what the celebrities say about Onam.

Thousands of miles away from the homeland we (affected by spells of nostalgia) managed to prepare a few Onam special dishes at home. Paradoxically, our relatives back there in the land of King Mahabali purchased the readymade Ona-sadhyas (meals). May be the captivating TV programmes do not let them waste their precious holiday in the kitchen. Times have changed (repeated, with a sigh)!

This Onam has touched me deeply. Early morning I got a call from my Uncle greeting us. It truly imbued me with bliss. I decided to pass on the surprise and bliss to some others other than my close relatives. The same pulses of joy were felt when I spoke to my old friend and my cousin (who I met recently after more than twenty years). They too might have spread this spirit of Onam to somebody unknown to me, I wish.

Simple gestures of affection are enough to brighten up and enliven even an ordinary day. Life is all about these little surprises and smiles – only that we store them for special occasions. Today somebody cared and bothered to express it. The latter deed made the difference. I feel buoyant and satisfied today. Let the feeling last forever – for me, for you and for them. Happy Onam – translated as pinnacle of happiness!