One-for-Sorrow, Two-for-Joy

The other day, I blessed a couple of deities.

 It had been that sort of a day. It was overcast and even though I drove for over an hour each way, I could not find a couple birds I could find comfort in ("One for Sorrow, Two for Joy," you know). My poor sick dying cat has left my house, startled by my house cleaner and hasn't returned, despite my desperate calling. In the story I am writing, a storm had threatened, but since the story follows a snake's perspective, I was still unsure of what a storm would mean to a snake.

And I opened my computer for the day to the horror of the Orlando Shooting. Usually, I do not follow news and if I do, I am very good at not being affected, not letting it touch any of my inner realities. But somehow, the Orlando Shooting is different; I have been feeling the need to mourn, to weep copiously, I remember trying not to notice solitary birds, like faulty punctuation against a grey sky, trying not to wonder at the sorrows that make the world so incomprehensible.

Reports of senseless terrors and violence does that; they render the world incomprehensible. Such violence shakes the very foundations of the reality we are so confident of. There are more people at casinos, more people at restaurants and the movies, for what is the point of saving up for a mirage of tomorrows? How do I keep these reports from shaking my inner worlds? I find that I have to dig deep and expend a great deal of energy to feel actively angry with people who I imagined have wronged me. I cannot imagine the kind of all-pervasive hatred against an entire group of people one doesn't know, and the amount of energy required to fuel that, an anger so huge that it would make a person commit to an act of terror so monstrous that no civilized living being would own it as natural.

They say that rage hurts the person who feels it most. I wonder, then, that I still agonize over this rage that is not mine in any form or way, that I have not felt, that is so alien that I neither condone nor condemn it. All day, I had a toad in my throat I could not swallow. At the end of this day, I was exhausted by too much feeling and my insistence on letting the day be as normal as could be. I wasn't even sure what I was mourning, After all, I know none of the people involved in the tragedy even tangentially.

Then, I suspected that it had a lot to do with my missing feline friend. I remember thinking that in a world where such senseless violence is allowed to happen, what horrors may the malevolent act out on a sick, defenseless animal?

At the end of this unending day, I sat in my room, waiting for the dialysis machine to finish priming. Somehow, I must have clicked my Pinterest and suddenly, like Wordsworth's daffodils, I saw a Raagmala print of Krishna and Radha facing each other in a dark forest of flowers, with rain clouds gathering above. The sheer power of the print, the open joy on faces, the At-Last look in the deities' eyes, the colors, all of it stabbed me with the beauty of living. Here, at last, were my Two-for-Joy! And in an arrogance of gratitude, I blessed the deities, may the gods forgive me!

Why should one try to comprehend the world, after all? If there is unimaginable ugliness and terror, like the Orlando Shooting, there is also indescribable beauty and divine harmony. One only needs
to look around for the miracle of people getting on with each other normally and ordinarily, which makes acts of terror abnormal and extraordinary. We should keep those extraordinary; we should never accept them as some kind of a norm, or part of life; we should remain angry with monsters.

This post goes out in hope that we all work hard to remember the harmony of getting along rather than senseless acts of hatred. Let us all remember the fragrance of the earth and the beauty of love that only sharpens when pitted against thunder clouds, and that the skies keep changing.

For the Love of Music, the Lure of Tale

Once upon a time, in a far away land, I used to dance Kathak. We were told that the word, Kathak, literally meant Story Teller: Katha Kahey So Kathak (The one who tells the story, or Katha, is the Kathak). It is one of the classical dances of India, and I made a conscious choice of giving it up when my Literature Reading demanded all my attention and resources, a choice I recognized, even then, as logical, and heavy with regret.

Our Guruji would arrive at the height of our after-school naps; we'd be shaken out of slumber and made to get ready for the lesson. Of course, being kids, we really hated that. This rude awakening would be followed by Tatkar, the intense footwork exercises that get increasingly complex and convoluted as the training progresses. I didn't care for it then at all, even though it got easier for me to handle the complex rhythms and beats, because this exercise did not demand any emotional involvement from me. My favorite part came almost at the end of the lesson, when we would begin teasing a thumri or thaat. We'd try to channel Radha's unrequited, helpless love for the blue skinned god, or evoke Krishna as we'd tell of the mischief the god regularly got himself into, while not missing any beats or taal.

This is the fountainhead to which I trace my love for stories: the still afternoon air, a tale as old as memory, what Amit Chaudhary calls a cultural thumbprint.

As the training advanced, new strains were woven in, and we were introduced to the basic ragas, their, personalities, the diurnal characteristics associated with them, the diversions most suited to them. Yes, this does seem like characters, and they are characters! That was the reason I found them most attractive.

In fact, to date, my favorite type of painting is the Ragmaala paintings, in which each of these ragas is depicted anthropomorphically, along with the connecting raginis. I find them rather extraordinary: they express, perfectly, the exact emotions as well as the entire range of human feelings, and there are many schools of these Ragmala paintings! Just like human emotion, these ragas have no singular composer, and one doesn't associate individual artists with the paintings. There are, of course, stories about their origins, stories that connect these ragas to divinities. The ragas, in turn, tell these stories and more, and like the self-sustaining ancient deities, birth themselves.

They remove humans from temporal designations and introduce them to their feelings; for a lover of stories, nothing could be more perfect!

I am thinking of this world I deliberately turned my face away from, since I just finished Amit Chaudhary's The Immortals, and he so faithfully depicts this denied world. I must confess to more than a twinge of regret today, and these forgotten notes suddenly stand out in relief in the Hindi movie songs I am so addicted to, almost admonishing me for not recognizing them earlier.

But then I remind myself that the music is still within me, very much a part of my day, and I have given up nothing. After all, Katha kahey so kathak, and I am told I tell stories very well, like a true Kathak. Of all the compliments I receive from my classrooms, this one is the most meaningful to me.

The new Quarter begins today; I think I shall begin it with the story of Orpheus, my paean to the gods of music.