Blasting Stars

It is the 4th of July again and this year, the fireworks are spooking me. I wish for a respite from the booms that seem to resound from just behind me, from just beneath my ground, and I am afraid I am rather too worn out and skittish for loud celebrations. I love the idea of people celebrating together an ideal that many centuries and generations fought and died for; I have nothing against patriotism (though I lean towards a more global citizenship) and many a ditty has caused warm fuzziness in my ribs. So no, it is not the celebration of the ideals this country stands for that annoys me.

I have been trying to lure my ghost cat to her dinner for the past couple of hours. But I am afraid she just might not come today! We are leaving town and I worry about her dinner for the next couple of days. I worry about my other cats. I worry that I am leaving my undone house for a family party. I worry that I might not finish the ten hour drive in less than twenty hours. The fireworks are not helping; it sounds as though each worry is compounded, exaggerated, hyperbolized (if such a word exists) and blasted around my head, so I can't tell if I am sitting down or standing up.

I wonder if this annoyance I feel is caused by my displacement, my age, or both. I also wonder at what exactly is being celebrated. The only circumstance that justifies such a celebration is a beloved person home from a war, all whole and all smiles, a circumstance that is not as common as I'd like. I have friends whose children, spouses, parents, and extended families are on active duty or veterans. For them, patriotism is not a firework, but an expensive extra limb they've deliberately grown and wear with equal proportions of pain and pride. I cannot imagine them exploding fireworks for extended evenings; I can only imagine them in lawn chairs, contemplating the exploding skies and colors, and I cannot imagine what they wonder about.

I do this every year on July 4th and New Years' Eve (unless I am traveling then): I try to ignore my annoyance at the loud blasts. They make me think of wars, though I've never really seen one. I imagine a war would have these loud explosions and one would never know if one will ever hear anything beyond the last boom. The idea frightens and saddens me and I wonder who on earth thought of emulating the crash and boom of cannons and gunfire as a means of celebration.

My neighbor's nephew's eyes dance in feverish excitement in anticipation of an evening filled with sparkles, booms, and crashes, as he looks uncomprehendingly at me and exclaims, "We are celebrating Freedom, of course! Oh, yes! And All Things American!"

 I am unable to find a response to this and can only offer a smile that turns into a grimace as the world suddenly explodes behind me, showering the horizon in colored stars that diffuse and burn out before they reach the earth.

The Journey Home: The Nightmare

There should have been plaster, there should have been Progress, there should have been people working, but my forgotten little ashen house sits across from where I sit, trying to occupy as little material space as possible, dreaming of a time when it was, desparing of ever being again. It had looked more occupied, more inhabited when it had no windows, than it does now, when the windows yawn black and reflect back whoever looks at them, denying their own existence.

I was promised that no matter what, this house would be done by June; I should have asked for specifics, like year and decade. I believe the house has been forgotten by those contracted to save it; it waits there, half its walls up, half the floor gouged out, the stairs cracked, vents opening onto empty spaces. No one comes to tend it for longer than a couple of hours a week in a good week. I visit it every day, dropping thoughts of well being on the ashes in the downstairs bathroom, on the cracks on the stairs, in the empty closet that is supposed to house the a/c. However, I don't need to be told that  my good wishes are impotent, like the dust that gathers on the untended windows and pipes of my house.

Suddenly, one day, I was told to call my cable company because the house was almost ready to receive such services. In a hurricane of fumbling, orders were sorted and appointments made, promising imminent livening up of my burnt life. However, all appointments and orders are cancelled and on hold now, since no one remembers making that call to me, especially not yet, since the hosue is so far from being "done."

Maybe I dreamt it, though people who inhabit this reality assure me otherwise. When I use all my spine to pose questions about possible completion of The Project, I get shocked, vacant stares at my audacity in asking such questions, which smack of blatant greed of squatting on the house. Patience, which I do not posses, is called for, as no one can estimate any longer how long This Thing is likely to take. In fact, it seems farther away from completion than it was two months ago. Maybe six months? Maybe more?

I know there has to be a lesson in all this; however, all thinking, computing, analysis elude me. I wonder if Rama, Odysseus, Sita, or any of my guiding metaphors ever felt this way; inevitably they did. They have had to. So, patient Reader, it seems what I complain of is merely my humanity; there is no fix for this.

I just returned from my daily stroll to my abandoned home; I wanted to check if the plaster on the walls was ready to be painted. There is no plaster; as I step out in the soft rain, I wonder at my grasp on reality, especially instead of the plasatering crew, I met the plumber in my house, doing mysterious tasks that are none of my business and anyways, beyond my understanding.

I have a recurring nightmare: a gnome, or a man sits in a dark corner under a cloud of foreboding and is busy with something I cannot see. My unchanging dream-fear is that he will turn around.

Maybe the lesson is from my nightmare? Maybe I ask too many questions. Maybe I quest and thirst too much. I have alluded to her before, but today, again, I am the woman from Garcia-Marquez's short story, who has run out of heartbeats to count and the man bothered by the noise of the wheeling stars.

The only resolution to my problems is that the unreal shift definitely away from the real. After all, that is how all nightmares are resolved.

The Journey Home: Waiting for Godot

In a few days, I will have been without my home for eight months. I am afraid I am losing larger chunks of myself, more frequently now, than I did when my loss was new. This indefinite, indeterminate, interminable waiting is eating up my beating heart even as I live and try to shift to a comfortable position which would allow my breath to sigh in, to exhale expansively.

I remain in awe of those who bear their losses with grace and patience. I know there are mothers who look for their lost offspring for years, decades even, if their life span allows. I wonder at the Cosmic mechanism that regulates their heart beats, syncs up their body functions so that they can place one thought in front of another.

People offer me platitudes: I am advised to look back at how much I have already endured; I don't have a choice (or many rights) so I must endure patiently; I should teach myself to look forward to new things I will undoubtedly surround myself with and anticipate the joy of shopping, setting up, designing my abode. Worst of all is when I can see people actually sigh in exasperation and look away when they think I am going to begin my same old litany.

I am afraid I sigh and look away too, but I can't seem to stop the litany.

I am also afraid that the contractor, association, City, all are rather tired of me and wish me gone to a place from where I cannot find my way to their tired ears; they have stopped acknowledging my desparate pleas for an estimate on a finish date.

These are Cosmic Processes and I should know better than to expect mere humans to know anything.

In a couple of months, my child leaves for College. We have a couple of shorter trips coming up next month. In a couple of weeks, I am going to have to begin another quarter.

We are making all sorts of plans for all these journeys and deadlines. However, it seems to smack of inappropriate, inexcusable, unbecoming hubris of the worst kind to even begin thinking of what we might like in our home, to ask when, if my home will be finished.

In fact, today, it seems improbable that we will ever find our way across the street.

Today, it seems that my family will soon end its Summer visitation and go their own ways, and I shall still be sitting here, in this not-mine space, trying to exude undying, genuine gratitude I do not feel for having a roof of sorts over my head, still waiting for six more months before anyone can tell me anything about Progress on the Cosmic Process.

Logos

I hope my patient reader forgives my rather long silence on this blog. I won't bore with excuses or reasons, only that we have passed many milestones between the last time this blog was updated and now; although I am not home yet, my child is officially an adult and no longer a school going day scholar, an adjustment we haven't yet digested, a milestone greater than can be imagined.

However, what drives me to this space, to break through the internal torpor that inevitably accompanies the whirlwind of my child's bildungsroman, is the story.

My friend once said that my stories don't have dialogue. I told her that that was because dialogue exhausts me. I feel I must explain a little; maybe you, my reader, might suggest something?

I confess I have been taking the easy way out when I write my short stories, concentrating on plot and setting, even when the plot is character-driven. It is so much easier to describe, to sketch images, let gestures, moments, flashes of recognition speak, rather than trying to have the characters open their mouths.

After all, one can't just have the character spout any words! The character comes from a specific place, geographical, historical, social, and is subject to the spice that flavors that place; hence what she says must reflect both, her topography as well as her place in it. So as the writer, one must create an entire world behind her: construct syntax, decide on diction choices, imply inflections, work in syllable-stress, tone.

That is not all. Dialogue implies two people, and a large part of that is what is not said, the many miscommunications, the cadence of unspoken language, the rhythm of thought process, and most important of all, the coherence, since the reader must not be lost in the exchange between two characters operating from different frames of reference.

To that end, I have been trying to observe the way that people speak to each other, especially two people. Rarely do we complete sentences; rarely do we compose; mostly, we try to just catch the moment, hook it with a thought, a turn of phrase, a change in syllable-stress, so that the hooked moment can lead to what comes next. And so I see a chain of half-spoken sentences, expletives, and a whole lot of unsaid language underlining what is said, making the dialogue heavy, gravid with meaning.

And all this time, the one thing we seek to do is to convince.

How can I, as the story teller, weave all this in? How can I hope to convince my unseen reader, when most of what convinces cannot, should not be deliberately designed or composed?

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Fallow Season

This weekend has been one of the quieter ones, the kind of quiet imposed on the centers of storms, the kind that is needed to sustain, the mandatory opposite of action. I do understand the balance such days provide, the kind that force me to just sit still and wait.

Now I don't presume to evoke ghosts of Milton, where the waiting has some cosmic significance or divine directive. On the contrary, actually, this waiting has been forced on me because my constant worrying over trifles, the various, varying demands made upon my conscious mind, and the fast pace of our disjointed lives has caused a system failure of sorts in the primary circuitry of my being.

I have been primarily couch-bound for the past few days, weighed down by a fever and an exhaustion that looms by 2pm, and I have spent hours, supine beside my computer with stacks of ungraded work, surrounded by floors that need cleaning and a house that needs picking up. I have had to take many, many naps, each feeling like an infinite stretch of time, where the world outside the door shifts axis while I am held captive by whirlwinds of unresolvable worries that clutch me in their nightmare jaws.

I acknowledge the necessity of this fallow season. It reminds me of other fallow seasons which have changed my inner landscape irrefutably. The one that comes to mind is the long three weeks of enforced bed rest when I was on the brink of puberty. It was ages ago, from where I stand today, of course. But that was the season during which I realised that my true love was going to be, had always been the fictional word. My students today ask me when I had the time to read all the mythology and tales I teach and I know I have my fallow season to thank.  My inner self had used that season to adjust, fit, evaluate, and compensate for the being I was growing into, while the stories of the past ages whispered important input and sketched indelible patterns on the basic structure of the self as it moved towards a stable, crystallized form.

This fallow season is no exception. The difference is in the stories I am feeding this self. These are newer tales (though it is the same Story), woven in different hues and textures. On the one hand, I am going through the Puranas (the most ancient, contemporary, changing, iconoclastic of Hindu literature), and on the other hand, I watch all the television series that I never usually have the time to catch up on, as I nap. Squeezed between the cracks are the occassionals, like the books my book club is reading and the latest Umberto Eco I just stumbled upon at the public library.

I do not hope to have a firm grasp on why this season has been necessary, or what it is supposed to give my inner landscape. Those thoughts are nebulous and will wisp away if examined. All I know is that some sort of regeneration has been required. My house is being worked on (for the time being), my child is fluffing up her wings and checking her compasses to begin her first flight into adulthood, and even my usually clueless conscious self can clearly see that a stage of our lives is closing up.

Today is the first day that I have been able to stay up this late after 3pm, and I've had only one nap, so I know that the time for me to get up is very near. Unlike the end of the earlier fallow season, however, I do not find myself particularly looking forward to the new season that awaits around the bend; I am afraid I might not have the energy for it. These past months have, I fear, broken something in me, re-wired something essential. I am afraid I might be proven unable, lacking in whatever the new stage demands of me, that this fallow season might be sown in dry earth, incapable of bringing forth all that it used to.

I lie here, shivering, the napping cats my main heat source. I hope and pray that I find the new stage a recognizable setting, with familiar choices and realised hopes. I invoke the kind gods I read of to rudder and steer my ship; I invoke the stars to guide my compass; I invoke the fallow season to sow enough for me to recognize the axis mundi from mirages; I invoke the Story to map understandable directives; and I invoke the true horizon to steady my course.

Tales from Battlefields

My child talked of playing a game of "if only" with a friend, of things they'd do if only they had enough resources to serve their whim. Of course, cats were the first on that list, but a close second was a house for me. I am always surprised, affected, and overwhelmed when she unwittingly lets slip how much regard she holds for me. The last few disastrous months that have robbed our home have not served to bring us closer. In fact, like it happens with small families, each of us has tried to hold together separate parts of our common life, stretching our bond thin, a very logical effect of the strained circumstances we are dealing with. So every moment that reminds us of our affection feels like a gift, one of the more appreciated effects of my burnt house, like these stories I have lately found myself writing.

I have often wondered if my house burning will prove to be a blessing in retrospect. I cannot imagine it will, considering the devastation we have experienced and the constant loss that won't shift, no matter how much we toss and turn. However, I must confess that this burning has brought me an unexpected gift. My very good friend and one of my prime saviors came up with the mandate ( I will not call it a plan or suggestion, for fear that my other self might be listening and refuse to take it seriously!) that each of us would meet every 4 to 6 weeks with a new short story.

I have been writing and that has helped me maintain a recognizable mask for my day world. This writing has provided an outlet for my desolation so that it keeps away from clouding my aspect and is shut away from the routine dealings of everyday life. I am able to use coherent syntax, can update a syllabus, recognize a joke and even occasionally crack one, and everyone congratulates me on my courage and spirit in face of my circumstances, all to my amazement (don't they hear me complain all the time? Aren't they annoyed, like I am, with my unceasing desperation?).

Earlier on this blog, I have bemoaned my lack of control over my stories. Now, this doesn't seem to bother me as much: I do not have much control over anything anyways, so I am not surprised or annoyed when my stories run away from me and serve their own agendas. I do not have to think of a plot, or a theme, or a character when I begin a story anymore; it is not as deliberate a process as it used to be. I let go of my chisel and let the stories tell themselves, with minimal interference from me. Also, when one is done, I feel a kind of exhausted relief, a catharsis the ancient Greek thespians promised their audiences.

Certainly, my stories are black, like regurgitated tar, and they come from the unsettled, unhealed places that I have been consciously trying to build scabs over, but they ARE stories. They all have a plot, some characters, and most components that constitute one.

And whoever said that only bright and beautiful things should be celebrated?  After all, I have imagined my Sita most at home, most defined by her exile, and Odysseus is best known for his voyages. It is the singular unhappinesses that isolate us from our happier neighbors and friends, that make our stories interesting and worthy of a telling. In Tolstoy's tale, Anna's spiritual dismemberment is better told than Kitty's ordinary stability. Of course, unlike what Shelley points out, my saddest thoughts do not tell the sweetest songs, but I wonder if my songs would be insipid if this huge grief were not propelling them.

When I first began this blog, I had imagined it as some kind of a journal or documentation of the process of writing and all the influences that operate on the journey of the word till it is born on a blank screen.

This blog was to be one of the many paeans and celebrations of the written word, and this entry serves as my attempt to reach back towards that imperative. It goes out in gratitude to an inward self that I have long denied, a locked up, dark self that still lives in spite of me, a thriving Mrs. Rochester of a self, liberated, dancing above the flames of a burnt house, a primordial Kali in her element among corpses.

Unkindness of Hope

The thing of feathers has been playing unkind games. The idea of hope has no connotations of cruelty, except when it is accompanied by border less, undefined waiting. The greatest challenge of this month has been to escape this thing of feathers. But how does one keep it from alighting, from digging its claws into the very soul?

The electrician working on my burnt house has very kind eyes that urged me to believe when he said that they'd begin working on the walls in a week, so I'd better hurry up and buy the water heater and kitchen lights. That was three weeks ago and the cold debris in my demolished house remains undisturbed. In spite of numerous calls, no one seems to know anything about the house. I remain amazed at the unconcern my stars have for the being whose lot they decide as they whirl and spin about their celestial play grounds. Maybe there IS no design to their playing and dancing; maybe my perception of a design was my own hubris, my own need to believe in the kindness the universe must extend to me.

The hardest lesson this month has foisted on me has been the questions my mirror poses, questions to which, I find that I can fathom no position or response for. The most difficult of these questions are about all the emotional and moral frameworks I have tried to impress upon my child through nearly two decades of parenting: the importance of a long term vision, the reliable nature of a sound work ethic, the extent to which logic and planning reduce and control frightening variables. I have believed in these virtues but upon reflection, have been defeated by forces beyond imagination, and lately, by my very human nature with its tendency to give in to meaningless hopes, a false sense of control over circumstances.

So I wait still and resist the roots I tend to grow. I buy no more spoons, or safety pins, or slippers. I ration my victuals sparsely. I visit home improvement stores all over town, chase down each recommendation, each hint dropped in casual conversations, make elaborate, meticulous notes of all I see, but I buy nothing; it is too soon and these notes and researches might very well prove to be a colossal waste.

My patient reader must think of me in terms of the worst epithet my child can conceive of, a whiner, and I must confess I, too, lose patience with me. Complaining of loss can get old really fast, especially if there is no new disaster or interesting dimensions to the same loss.

The only apology I offer is my agreement of this and an acknowledgment of my awareness of how pathetic complaining sounds; however, I plead that I have been in the same limbo, stuck in the same mire that just sucks in larger parts of me, trapped under the same blinding sky whose clouds and rains bring no relief or change, in the same twilight clutching my unchanging horizon. I am unable to move on, and so, inevitably, my thoughts chase each other on an endless carousel.

My child gears up for one of the most drastic and memorable changes of her life, but I stand on the brink with her, unable to promise her anything, shaking my head at her plans for prom, graduation, and dorm visits.

I am afraid to share in her excitement and I am afraid that I concentrate too hard on maintaining a shifty status quo, that we be surrounded by the recognizable.

But most of all, I fear that thing with feathers, always fluttering and worrying the air around my head, always threatening to settle in my being and I shall find all devoured when it inevitably flies off.

The Journey Home: The Day of Demolishing

The seasons are changing, as evidenced by the falling leaves outside the door of the house I sit in, across the street from my burnt house. I have been so afraid that the past season would refuse to budge, that I would be stuck in a downward spiral of catch-22's, of hopeless self recriminations and endless "what if"s and "if only"s. However, I am reassured that that is not so: that the earth turns, and finally, at last, the truck is parked at my burnt house; it is being demolished, with a promise of a sparkling new house in its place. The vague "they," the promised people who would work on my house to heal it, finally have faces.

Of course, this has spooked the poor grey cat who was beginning to get used to the settled soot and ashes, among the debris. Her safe house is yet again invaded by strangers and noise. I do not have the language to reassure her, and she glares uncomprehendingly at the lack of any alarm as I talk to the noise-making strangers wielding hammers and masks.

Some of my village people shake their heads at my inexplicable joy at seeing my house being brought down. They know what is to come: unimaginable bureaucracy, onerous, meaningless, repititive, defeating. They tell me that I have no idea that what lies ahead is going to be much worse, much more taxing that what is past, that this journey is not going to be smooth sailing, now that work has started; it is but the beginning.

I think of Odysseus sitting at the edge of Calypso's island in the light of the setting sun, looking out to the sea, towards where he imagines Ithaca awaits. I know that he is farther from home than he thinks, that the Universe has decreed that he has miles to go before he is allowed sleep in the bed he dreams of constantly, the one he carved out of live trees. I think of Odysseus taking stock of his assets (the arguments he would use to persuade Calypso into letting him go), arranging them, sharpening his position and pleas. I wonder if his planning is marred by all that he has lost. I wonder if he will ever find the promised, reviving sleep when he reaches his bed. I remember that his trials by no means end when he reaches home: he has to convince his home to accept him again.

I think of Rama in the Dandaka Forest, sitting on the steps of the rude cottage carved out of wilderness, contemplating the moon since it reminds him of his family, the dynasty he belongs to. He deliberately avoids looking towards Ayodhya, for fear that his brothers and mothers would sense it and miss him more acutely. He is homesick and sighs his longing, but he has no idea how much farther he shall have to go, of the monstrous unknown of his lurking destiny, which awaits for him like a demon in the darkness. He knows his home awaits him with bated breath, that it, too, will not exhale until he is gathered to its bosom. I wonder if he senses the unreasonable, unimaginable demands this home will make of him.

The moon shines very brightly tonight, so brightly that sleep seems improbable, not made for a night like this. It shines right through my burnt house, which has no walls, so one can walk from west to east in the moonlight. In fact, I can see right through the house, to the street on its other side.

I wonder at the joy I had felt earlier today, when I saw the men with hammers crashing down the blackened walls, ripping off the plywood from holes in the concrete where doors and windows used to be. How could I have felt this way while my house was being demolished? But then, I remember. The house did not look as insubstantial in the day light as it does now. As I wonder at it from across the street in the light of a sickle moon, it looks like somebody's left-over dream, transparent like a grocery store bag, a hollowed husk that will blow away in the night breeze, which will melt in the morning sun.

Tonight, I shall call the grey cat out, tempt  her with treats, so she will emerge from the shadows and run towards the little front door light, the lamps of her eyes dancing bulbs, reminding me that I have not lived the house alone. I am hopeful, tonight, that my rose bush, buried as it has been these past months under debris and ashes, shall revive: I hang my hopes on a branch sporting green thorns and leaves on an otherwise browned, drooping trunk. Tonight, I shall wend my way through the epics and borrow their hope, that the sun and the moon shall guide the path of this journey.

Laxman's Everywoman

I have Laxman's Common Man on my mind. Ever since my house burned and I have been smashing my head against a variety of Systems, I have a recognized his face in my mirrors, with my pointless umbrella that cannot shelter and my incurable myopia that the desperate glasses perched on my nose fail to fix.

It has been more than 15 weeks since my house burned, and I have been given the roundabout twice as many times, and no end in sight. I am a common person, and as a common person, am never allowed to forget how little I account for.

The mortgage company, no matter how many times I try to reason with it, reiterates that since there is no house, it cannot address or acknowledge the desperation of my situation: the computer won't recognize it and the System has no gears for such an uncommon state of the common mortgagee. The City tells me that ultimately, the burnt, uninhabitable hole in this verdant, organized town continues to be my house and expresses amazement at my willingness to drag my feet in fixing it: most uncommon response in its estimation of the responsible, common citizen.

The Association, wherein lie most of my hopes of my house's healing, made up, as it is, of common men, has transformed into yet another System devised to deflate the incurably hopeful. It has shown me documented hours spent on discussion of my Situation, of revisions of Plans, of Decisions taken, but all to no avail. Days have turned to weeks, and my queries about an estimation of when the work is to begin (which, I have been repeatedly assured, is Imminent) has joined the junk pile of never-to-be-answered emails.

My neighbors, the truly patient people, bring me little nuggets of hope: they saw a truck and could be almost sure that it was supposed to come to my place; men who looked like they knew were seen measuring and making notes; two uncommon people had a tape measure when they opened my door and disappeared from view. They too, of late, have begun avoiding my ever-questioning gaze, and shake their heads, claiming their Common Man status and its attendant cluelessnesses and helplessnesses. We find boxes of donuts, little encouragement notes, and cat treats from them, and I am conscious of the silent solidarity of my ilk.

All through my growing years, I remember R. K. Laxman's Common Man cartoons in the Times of India we used to get delivered, back when people still read newspapers as a matter of course. I now wonder what the Common Woman would look like, if Laxman were to sketch her. Would she wear that vertical wrinkle in the middle of her forehead (dislocating her bindi)? Would the upturned U of her mouth resign itself to squatting on her her chin? Would her eye sight dim with searching and scrolling through the vast Web for a dusty gear forgotten by the System? Would her hair be thinned and frazzled with desperate, impotent worry? I have placed a rolling pin in her hand, to match the Common Man's umbrella, a weapon as pointless as his.

The rains have started and the ground has thrown up its insects. I avoid going near the backyard of my burnt house, as it stinks of strange smells and has a constant cloud of little gnats. As I sit here in the not-mine place and consider my house from across the street, I wonder if I will ever forget that I lived there for so long, if it will ever heal, how long I can cling to this precipice, if I will be soon persuaded to abandon the place I'd bought and made my own, if I can ever heal with this burnt, gaping, raw hole in the center of who I am, if I am even capable of abandoning.

After all, what new beginning can empower the Common Man? He is destined to trudge along the same dusty, weary roads that run among the many Systems that control them. I better put on my bi-focal glasses, and armed with a broken umbrella and an old rolling pin, begin to scour and trample the old long road on whose side I had rested awhile to write this post.

Of Nietzche and Superman: Not so Small Ville

As I wait here in the fallow wasteland across the street from my burnt house, I find caught up, yet again, by another long tale, and this post goes out as a tribute to it. It is the television series, Smallville, that holds me the way the Star Trek and Harry Potter mythologies have done in the past. I knew I was hooked when I saw the young Clark Kent sitting in his High School cafeteria reading Nietzche, and to confirm that this was a deliberate thematic thread, a character actually comes up to ask him if he is Man or Superman!

I do not get television where I live presently, and my Hindi Serials are one of the sacrifices at the altar of what I have come to think of as my fire. In absence of the Saas-Bahu sagas that used to keep my internal World Tree thriving and populated, my thirst for the Story has led me to this back-story of the Superman mythology.

I must also confess that when Christopher Reeves was struck with paralysis, I actually felt the fabric of the kind, hopeful, logical universe tear apart with a deliberate, malicious pair of shears and I almost believed in Sisyphus' condition:  is spiritual, internal strength the only kind allowed to humanity? So it has been easy for me to fall for the promise of this extremely recognizable Hercules-tale.

However, this story is no simplistic, clear-cut good and evil tale with cool labs and loud explosions, though it has plenty of both; in fact, it examines the extremely complex nature of human morality. In one of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite characters in the show, Lex Luthor sounds this theme very eloquently when he says,  "The path to darkness is a journey, not a light switch." This show goes on to examine what it means to be human by contrasting it with what it means to be super-human and addressing archetypal themes like light vs. darkness, the conflicted self, destiny vs. free will, the father-son relationship, the idea of a family, connection between the land and the people who are defined by it, and the nature of human love and its connections to justice, hate, and death.

This show is helping me come to terms with my situation. It distills and crystallizes all that is the best, all that is worst, all that is possible as well as its many alternatives, and presents my internal struggles in an easy to digest archetypal package, very much like a good Fairytale or Myth does.

Maybe it is time to re-evaluate my definition of Home as some kind of an end to my yearning, not so much to ease or to speed up my Odyssey, rather to recognize the journey as part of Home, since that is the condition, the space I inhabit. After all, the aim of the Story is to understand the ever-changing, ever-recognizable condition of being human, not a perfect, static landscape the unchanging gods would inhabit.

The Journey Home I: The Fog

This fortnight has tested my patience, understanding, fortitude and all the little washers and screws connected to these machines. No work has begun on my burnt house and my questions about it are beginning to sound whiny. I cannot imagine how many more months upon months upon months have to be lived before the healing can begin.

It seems impossible that I should agonize thus over mapping out a journey across the street where I stand. But when one is trying to map the fourth dimension of chaos, the other familiar dimensions lose their logic and designations. The main problem that I have been grappling with is the loss of my clear perspective, one of my greatest losses in the fire that robbed me of my home. A clear vision remembers the past, understands the present, and can project a few options for the future; I, on the other hand, cannot bear to remember the past, cannot fathom the present, and am too afraid to believe that all will, indeed, be well. Every day, I find new depths in the pit I inhabit now, and the light shining far above is too bright to be anything but a gyp.

One would think that 15 weeks would provide distance and perspective, since I'd have had time to reflect. However, the machine of routine allows no such luxuries: there are papers to be graded, lectures prepped for, doctors' appointments made and honored, among all the madness of a household with a High school Senior and three cats that don't exactly get along. There is no time allowed for reflection, when all thoughts and moments are dedicated to juggling immediate necessities.

I try to snatch rare half-hours of my staring-out-into-nothing time, like this half hour before the day is born, because my daughter had to reach school at 5am and I have a few moments before the Sun peeps over the blanket of fog and begins to shout contradictory directions at me.

This entry serves as a reminder to me to navigate these dark, foggy waters with patience, for even the slightest stumble is likely to sink my ship. I must remember not to look down, since there is no way marker there. I must remember to steer true and slow through elements I cannot see, and learn to recognize, understand, and heed the strategically placed cliff lights as the only guides to harbors I can only imagine.

The Journey Home 1: The Haunting

Courage, to me, feels like a four-lettered word, something one curses one's ill-wishers to have to possess and exhibit; we wish for our loved ones the unexciting, adventure-less mediocrity which keeps them safe, predictable and found. Ever since my house burned, I have been forced to wind myself tightly, to keep all parts of my self in a knot that cannot be undone by storms, strife, disease, fires, floods, or any other avatar of apocalypse. I have wanted to destroy all backups and other paraphernalia of  my essential hard drive, so no byte of me may be lost, no loose ends may break off, ricochet and end up orbiting strange realities.

This is my attempt to log the impossible Odyssey I have set upon. Since my house burned last Fall, I find myself at a loss, with extra hands and fingers that have forgotten what it is like to be me. I have stretched my arm out in front of me in this darkness, but cannot see it any longer, the darkness being so unrelenting. So I must resolve to lift up my foot and place it somewhere other than where it seems to have rooted, hopefully, somewhere forward, wherever and whatever that means.

I went back to India for ten days, and when there, as usual, I sought subconsciously to inhabit my home here. However, I found my memories haunted by what is not there any more, from the feline I lost to the fire, down to the bunch of safety pins that used to live on my bedside table. People ask me what I need, needing to help me, but I cannot answer and end up roaming dazed through the kind, generous world full of plenty, unable to own or recognize. I have been committing to nothing, refusing all need to own, even for a cup or a bottle, for fear of adding to the burden I must keep moving with. All beds I have tried to rest on have felt un-mine; they are either too high or too hard, the pillows seeking shapes that do not fit my neck or head.

I know, if I want to retain the core of who I am, that I cannot go on like this for long. So I have been making conscious efforts to exercise my lip-stretches, blink the darkness back, choose blindness to all that is not there anymore, which is the hardest, since all that is lost glares in sharp relief every time my glance falls on what I have salvaged, tried to replace, or accepted.

So I took a very frightening step this past weekend: I bought groceries to stock the fridge and larder in the house I am staying at present, hopefully until mine is ready. This chore of buying groceries, something I used to do with such familiarity, felt like exercising the awkward vowels of a forgotten language, not having indulged in it since the house burned. The act of stocking up on my child's lunch stuff, soups, breads for ledges un-mine felt like I was trying to cheat on extra, forbidden rations in a time of famine. The ultimate step was when I brought in turmeric, hing, and cumin, and lodged them on the kitchen counter, next to the salt shaker a generous friend has given us. This has changed the very topography of the counter, and I cannot decide if the familiar spices taunt me, seem forlorn, or make a statement. Now, I have to remind my fingers to navigate that counter again.

I begin and end each day with the sight of my burnt, hurting home. No one has begun work on it, even though I have signed promises, been cited by the city for owning an unsafe dwelling, and have taken residence behind it.

My familiar, the ash colored cat, refuses to abandon it and continues to live in her burnt home, haunted by all that was, all that can never be. Kind reader, if you should pass by the broken lock and barred door, where cold shadows await, where the ghost cat sits at her vigil, hang a prayer on the dried branches, that my world be verdant soon.

The Funeral

My house is dead and we had its funeral yesterday; it burned a few weeks ago and no one quite knows why, though I am sure I was responsible, somehow, for this devastation. On Diwali, my life irrevocably changed. I remember the morning with a forced clarity, since I've had to retrace it endlessly, both in my tortured solitude and verbally for various authorities who have tried to analyze and square this away neatly.

Like all deaths, however, this one defies all logic or sense of fairness, and really, it matters little how it happened: the fact remains that I came home from work one day to find a ruin, almost as though I'd wandered into an alternate multi-verse, in which I am less fortunate than in the one I inhabit, or that I'd wandered into a wrong fairytale (this was ME! This wasn't supposed to happen to ME!!). I usually don't sleep much any longer, and when I do, my vivid dream life tries to convince me that it was all a horrible nightmare, that of course my home is safe, exactly how I'd left it to go for work that Diwali morning, waiting for me to come and light the ritual lamps. But then I know exactly what that is: it's a defense mechanism construed by my shattered, shocked sense of self, and I confess to have wondered about the means by which I could lose myself in that dream and not wake up. With equal shame, I have chosen to wake up and tried to gather myself around me, like a shawl of ashes.

It amazes me how much of myself I'd stored within those charred walls. It is a strange feeling to realise that I own nothing: not a spoon, not a safety pin, not a needle or threader, not chairs or door knobs. A lot of my books, like my poor cat, did not make it either. On the other hand, I am sure I own some sheets, some photos, more clothes than the ones in that box next to me, but I couldn't say where they are. No matter how many times I try to remember what the Sufis, Saints and Poets have said, this realizing does not liberate me in any way. In fact, I am a lost soul whose horizon has either abandoned her or been erased. I have no compasses to steer my reality by!

Yesterday, my friends helped me remove, salvage, and discard the remains of my house. It felt like a funeral, and had it not been for so many kind hands holding me up, I would have been lost in yesterday, unable to find my way to today. As I considered the detritus of all that had made sane sense to me and recognized myself in each familiar arch, cadence, texture, and hue in that heap, the immensity, the impossibilities of my circumstance, my situation, stood out clearly, in relief, forcing me to meet their eyes with the same recognition I had saved for the Odyssey a student had given me, for the ceramic bowl my daughter had made for me.

Time behaves strangely for me now, and the very ground feels malicious, like quicksand, waiting to swallow me down. I think of Odysseus on his way home from Troy, never dreaming how much must be endured, conquered, travelled before reaching Ithaca and being recognized. I think of my Sita in this story under the Father Tree, slowly understanding the full implications of her impossible position. I think of the Ancient Mariner, who is left with only a harrowing tale that he must repeat endlessly.

I do not wish to seem ungrateful, of course; there have been many mercies: the worst, hopefully, is behind us, we have realized how many wonderful, generous, kind people we have always been surrounded by but had failed to realize it, and we have been lucky to have survived this with our fingers and toes intact. We shall, of course, build ourselves up from these fragments because, really, there is no other choice.

Kind Reader, please enjoy a glass of water in your own homes, in your own glass, and be grateful on my behalf for being able to do so. I, too, shall think of you, and take heart that Odysseus does find his way to Ithaca, after all, even if it takes decades. Please pray that the stars who have extinguished themselves from my skies have not gone out, but just changed their orbit, and shall be back soon to light my ship to familiar landscapes.

'Tis Almost Fairy Time!

The days have suddenly shortened. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, I watch the dwindling light, wonder and fear as at one stride comes the dark. On days like today, even as the temperature mounts in mid day, the sky never brightens and 6pm feels like 8pm, and my cat worries that I might have forgotten to feed him. My postage stamp of a backyard is alive with night rodents that scratch and screech into the hot wee hours.

Something archetypal in me recoils at the fading lights; in the dying year, I find it difficult to trust the shifting whispers of leaves. Many friends, especially the ones who live in different geographies and landscapes, claim to love Fall of all the seasons and I admire their courage to notice beauties as all things close and end. In this season of endings, mornings feel like a gyp, misnomers for the grey mists shrouding and hiding the earth in treacherous cobwebs.

I think it might be more difficult to face the Fall for those of us who nest in the Tropics, where either the day is bright or stormy or both, but never neither. I wonder if the urbane ducks, cats, and palm trees are affected similarly, if they would confess to a discomfiture with the anomaly of Autumn in the land of eternal sunshine.

I remember a really, really black Fall, many moons ago, when I used to consider 3pm and worry about where I was to be when all light was gone from the skies. That was the Fall when I first took my small daughter fairy hunting in the streets near indifferent strip malls. We would arrange rocks of broken cement and come back the following evening to exclaim amazement if they were or weren't where we'd left them. I took to spending nap hours to eek out child verses with hackneyed meter and beaten rhymes, and hiding them in hedges for us to find later that evening; those were our fairy lamps and they brightened many evenings.

Yesterday, we attended Sol's An Afternoon with the Elves, and not surprisingly, that resonated with me. The play celebrates our need to believe in the numinous in the midst of unbelievable, heartbreaking realities we often find ourselves in. In fact, the play contends that so strong is this pull towards the numinous, that often, we find ourselves upsetting the comfortable, easy status quo of the familiar and recognizable, as we race after the flickering, winking glimmers we imagine on the borders beyond our peripheral ken.

It is this very need that makes the lengthening nights sparkle with festive votive and lanterns,as the darkness is shawled in clothes of brightest hues; firecrackers and joyful music mingle with twinkling, tinkling jewelry to drown out the dusk hush; the greenest of evergreens grace lintels and mantels; the once tightly shut doors smile open in welcome, their thresholds sporting Rangoli.

Tropics do change their seasons after all, and fairies do light up the path markers of Fall. As I watch the long shadows dancing in my backyard and through my window, I am aware of a deep gratitude for the incredible, extraordinary capacity of our species to take arms against the very mantle of the sky, and by opposing, end the smothering dark.

Never-ending Story

I read a facebook post from someone who confesses to her incurable addiction to German soap operas. I can so relate: I, too, confess to this addiction and have blogged about it previously; however, besides the opulent sets, familiar cadences, and use of folklore that I've addressed in earlier blog entries, there is the matter of the story, the plot itself that beggars justice.

I am truly amazed and humbled at these contemporary epics. The plots of these serials make mazes seem tame. There are numerous subplots, an inevitability, really, considering that the typical saga begins with a rather large joint family. These plots are very wise: they know that no story is meaningful if the characters don't mean enough. So of course, there are several episodes devoted to character establishment.

The story uses an intricate embroidery of colors, costume accessories, phrases, melody strains, and amazingly, a background chorus for effective characterization. For example, if a villainous, scheming vamp archetype is being introduced to the newly married bride (our protagonist), the background music associated with the vamp would include a phrase, like her first name whispered ominously, repeatedly; or if the neighbor's good-hearted son (our clown) is about to tell a lie, the background music is woven around a phrase like "Jhoot bola!" (Jhoot= lie; bola=he spoke). And then the story begins; the central conflict is introduced, and variations on the same theme form subplots for characters that are only slightly ancillary.

The plots are convoluted, unlikely series of events that rely on their very improbability for verisimilitude! They seem to rest on the truism that truth is stranger than fiction: after all, the individuals who make the audience examine their own lives and circumstances, and think back to an earlier decade when all that has come to pass since, would have boggled their imagination then. And reality itself is such a shifty thing! One cannot rely one's senses to verify it, and human understanding is so fraught with pre-conceptions, mis-interpretations, mis-calculations and a myriad of patinas, that it seems useless to commit to a limited version.

Moreover, the characters and situations are ever so easily recognizable, so easy to relate to, that the improbability of the opulent settings and costumes becomes just an acccesory to the permutations and combinations of events, and helps in construction of archetypes.

Fiction imitates reality, like a stick figure imitates a human being: this is the first lesson to all who choose to Read Literature. The soaps, like all fiction, then, channel this truth, the truth that transcends facts; the truth of humanity made recognizable in a stick figure has an appeal that is more universal than an individual's face reflected in a mirror.

So it is with these stories. Characters die and come back to life in a different place, with a different name, among new characters, often with different faces, but they become palimpsests of their previous stories which continue with their absence at the center. These parallel plots build up to a climax when the past and present are made to co-exist, acknowledge, and recognize each other, often in presence of the future, so the story can go on once one climax  has been resolved.

I heard of a knife a family has; it's been in the family for many, many generations. Of course, sometimes, the handle has had be changed, and sometimes, the blade has had to be replaced, but the knife is still the same. This post is dedicated to unending stories that continually re-invent, re-tell, re-configure, adapt, to refract the variegated colors of the kaleidoscope that is reality.

Glass Windows and Long Stories

There is something cosmic about staring out of the glass, on level with the clouds and tree tops, looking down on parking lots and roofs. Today, I am more aware of this feeling for various reasons. The most obvious of these is, of course, that it is a clear day, with unlimited visibility, the sun spilling gold all around the world, so the sky feels like another landscape. If I wasn't so afraid of situating myself in precarious places, like high glass towers which would often be at the mercy of the frequent storms, I'd be a megalomaniac, intoxicated by this sight.

However, there is another reason for being more aware of the cosmos: some new potentially habitable planets have just been discovered. The informed ponderers postulate about the existence of water on these planets, which could host life.

This worries me; I feel like I am perched at the edge of a high, fragile glass window in the middle of an indifferent storm. How is life an accident? We assume that we are unique; doesn't that scare everyone? This assumption seems illogical at best and egoistical at worst!

My reaction, of course, like always, is to seek out stories that examine other alternatives. The ones I have been drawn to lately have been fantastical universes, even multi-verses that are not anthropocentric. I find these stories about dimensions of other lives, life-forms, realities co-existing with us, fascinating. These have been the stories that have kept me up at night (work schedules notwithstanding).

An excellent example, of course, is the Harry Potter series; I revisited the first book since it was what my book club was reading, and again, I find myself hooked. I have blogged about this elsewhere, so I shall save my patient reader the repetition. Then, Shannara kept me up till the wee hours. And now, Stroud's London, told partially from a Djinni's perspective, holds me captive.

They say Fall is the season when curtains between various worlds and states of being are at their thinnest. The falling year does bring to mind the long story told over many nights, the longer twilights and small days, when humanity holds the largest number of festivals, celebrating beings we don't really understand but are acutely aware of.  I think of this season as the least anthropocentric, when people are naturally drawn out of their shelters at night, to gaze at the large moon and sharp stars, and wonder.

So in a couple of hours, when the evening begins, I, too, shall fold up the day and settle down with the unending story that reminds me to be afraid of high glass windows. After all, I am not Sisyphus and my world is not as predictable  or  as anthropocentric as his: I do not inhabit a deserted universe, nor do I have the strength to roll this rock, or believe myself to be the only upright life form.

Against the Rains

The monsoon has definitely settled in, and the horizon has all but disappeared. Do not ask me the time; it means nothing and those numbers won't anchor the day. Summer in the flat lands is always uneasy, not because it doesn't fit well, but because once settled, it refuses to lift or shift. My colleagues and students, like me, freeze through the work week in air conditioned buildings with sealed windows and heavy doors that resist opening. Our window overlooks the bridge over the Intra-coastal Waterway and the cars crawling up and down seem unreal, somehow insubstantial and pointless through the veil of heavy rain, loud with many complaints and opinions. In fact, the rain outside the misted over window seems to be the most important personality in the room.

One of the oldest fears of the human psyche is that the sky should fall down on the earth, and there are as many versions of the World Tree as there are storytellers, and just as many devices to keep the opposites apart. Forget death, pain, becoming food; the greatest fear we all share seems to be that all shall blend indiscriminately into a primal soup,the virtuous with the ugly and common, that our belief in the absolute value of our worth, the validity of our individuality, the confidence in our undeniable cosmic relevance and ability to affect universal effects, all shall be erased, rendered irrelevant.

In the center of the year, the air begins to emanate a wet fragrance that is unlike any other smell, at the same time, feels like part of every earth-bound smell. The monsoon in des has a particularly inimitable flavor. When I miss the sights and sounds of my birth-land, thankfully, I now have the television that speaks to  me in familiar cadences I don't need to translate. However, nothing really fills in the emptiness when I miss the monsoon-fragrance. My house, like a lot of desi houses, smells of turmeric powder simmering with mustard seed cackled in vegetable oil and asafetida. So often, as I stand on the threshold of my kitchen and little backyard, I forget, and I wait for the koel's complaint when I smell the damp soil; of course, it never comes. My tongue yearns for the tang of raw mangoes marinated in salt water; but the mangoes, like the watermelon and carrots, taste different here.

Our species has evolved so that I don't really need to notice the seasons, except to nod a glance outside my window, or to ensure that my tires and wipers are adequate. The monsoon,  however, clouds over my horizon  underlined with many forgotten melodies, strains of taste, music, sounds, smells, and an indescribable anticipation as the rains arrive with the season of festivals, all culminating in Diwali.

I sit here, watching what looks like an apocalyptic, cosmic downpour that threatens to flood, swirl, and dissolve the individual thing-ness from everything beneath it, the very air trembling and booming, till the thunder seems to arise from the belly of things and the lightening illuminates nothing but the gray rain. I can see nothing outside my window, not even the palm trees, the roads, the stores I know to be there.

The Tree, then, does more than keep the opposites separate, more than keeping the earth and sky in their places; it shelters and hides creatures, offers a safe-house of sorts as the elements battle it out and the world re-arranges itself around it. For me, that Tree is crowded with remembered fragrances, tastes, rooted in the belief that the world I cannot see shall survive this rearrangement of elements, so the year may continue its festive march towards yet another battle against torrential erasure.

Tangled Weave

This one began speaking as I was driving to work. The story watched me as I followed the curve of the off ramp, watched me watching it, and leisurely lifted itself from the bole of a gulmohar where it had been perched, and I knew I'd been taken.

And now I am haunted. There is no other word for it. There is familiarity in moving shadows, an almost recognition in the pattern the unmoving leaves sketch on my desk, the scuttling just outside my vision that falls silent when concentrated upon. If I ignore it, or at least pretend to, it'll intensify, and then there'll be chills around my knuckles, numbness just beneath the left hand ring finger, the muscle under the thumb drumming to an unheard beat. That's when I shall have to do something about it. I know this of old.

This time, it is a tangled loom of a story that has stumbled upon me. I can't see the end of it and feel its unwieldy mass pouring in the pit of my stomach. I am really uncomfortable with this one because, like always, being haunted does not assure a good story at the end of exorcism. And the heaviness of this one is frightening.

The thing about largely woven patterns is that they tend to stretch so wide and far that they often get lost somewhere on the horizon. If one is lucky, they carry their creator on their roaring wave and by the time she is washed up on the shore, the project is finished, races off on an ever undulating ocean. However, I am not so fortunate. I am haunted by snippets, images, silvery strands of plot-ghosts as I chase chores, drive, grade, and wonder. I don't yet know what, if they can, will ever crystallize in a coherent tale, but judging by the increased hauntings, the prospects seem promising.

Be that as it may, I can tell that these are going to be a difficult couple of hours, several months, two years, however long the birthing might take.

Good reader, pray that the birthing be easy; light a votive in the gathering the twilight, chew a gulmohar petal for luck, and begin reading or telling a long tale tonight, to ease the season's night passage.

Winguardian Leviosa!

I just watched the last movie of the Harry Potter saga in honor of the passing of an age. I feel as though I am older for having lived this story. As I look back on what I like to call the Harry Potter decade, I am astounded at how much this story has reflected our world and how much it has helped me live it.

The world I find myself in the second decade of the new millennium has changed drastically and suddenly from the previous decades; I've had to re-define some very basic concepts, like the idea of safety, travel, friendship, communication, education, and segregation. It has been, for me, a decade of upheavals on a very basic, psychic level that has mandated that I replace my internal compass with a GPS.

I remember telling my friends scattered across the country that  get-togethers should be no problems, since no place is farther than the nearest airport; but that was before 9/11, which completely changed air travel. I remember being able to count my friends on my fingers; but that was before facebook told me that I'd need many arms and many, many fingers to count my friends. I remember always being on the look out for reliable, reasonably priced calling cards and long distance plans; but that was before oovoo and 3G phones. The list goes on.

In a world that changes so fast, where tomorrow strides and barges in before today is done, I've held on to stories that distill these complex issues into familiar archetypes, told in a way that reminds me of the familiar way of life, at the same time shows characters trying to adjust to a completely new world, having to learn very similar lessons. This story resonates with me for many reasons, but I believe my ability to relate to the characters' choices, lessons, terrors, joys, and crossroads is the main one.

I am not alone in this, of course; my child, who is putting together her college applications, was very impressed to know that one of her dream schools has a very active Quidditch team; we visited "Harry Potter Houses" on our last trip to London and Oxford; no one today is a stranger to a strange word like "muggle."

Today, the entire theatre was completely full and the whole experience to watching this movie on the opening weekend was a treat, like watching a Bollywood blockbuster on opening night. The audience actively participated in the watching: there were boos, clucks, giggles, snickers, guffaws, and outright laughter, as though we were all at a live performance, not a movie. As the light faded out on the characters we'd all come to know so well, the audience burst into a resounding applause.

This was a heartening experience. When I read bleak projections for the future, dire consequences promised for irresponsible choices made by earlier decades, I am more patient. After all, there can be no way to predict what gems of imagination await during troubled, troubling times to remind us of the richness, sweetness, and sheer beauty that is the human experience.

Like audiences emerging out of a tragedy many millennia ago, we, the audience emerging from the theatre today were definitely proud of being human, of the same ilk as the characters whom we admire, then pity and fear for, and ultimately own, so that, like the wish-figures reflected in the mirror of Erised, they keep us company when we look into our solitary looking glasses.

Un-anchored

I seem to have stumbled upon a pair of Cinderella shoes: they keep falling off my feet. My feet, in fact, have sent me on a quest for the perfect pair of shoes; but alas, like the perfect handbag, perfect footwear eludes me.
The world is full of shoes: some promise to place clouds beneath one's tread; some promise a complete metamorphosis; yet others pose in mall shops, like portals to alternate selves, selves more sophisticated than imagination could conceive, who seem serious about having fun and making bold statements about this fun.

Some months ago, my 16 year old NEEDED (capitals are deliberate) shoes and so off we went on our Odyssey. As I regarded the fare, I balked at the precariously high heels, the punishing straps strung with hard beads, the uncompromising brilliance staring me down. My child tried on many of these, exclaiming over the unimaginable comfort the shoes afforded, prancing around the store in her borrowed gait.

I crept surreptitiously out of her prancing orbit, afraid of being swooshed off and trampled upon, and found myself being stared at by a row of the improbable sandals, at the ready, seemingly awaiting orders to begin some combat, buckles glinting like weapons.

Undeniably, feet clad in dusty, stringy, un-heeled, loose sandals, feet like mine, did not belong.

Please do not misunderstand me, reader; I do not wish to appear un-groomed and grungy. However, my disagreeable feet are very particular about the kind of material that may clothe them, and they will not countenance the toes being enclosed. They cannot be made to perch any higher than the ground.

Today, I sit here, looking at my faithful sandals, worn out with fitting in, blending, trampling, all in service of my feet. I shall miss them, but like a sad Bluebeard, recognize the need for new ones to destroy.

When I was a child, I was thought of as a rather strange being, one who ran off from street play to hide in libraries, who learned to climb trees in search for an uninterrupted space to read in, who could not manage to keep herself grounded. Now, I know the real problem: I just did not have the right shoe that could convince and assure my feet of the solidness of the ground. I am still on the prowl for a good shoe, one that will not bite my feet in its arrogance and anger, one that will not squeeze my feet and spray blisters on them, one that will not feel compelled to change me into an unrecognizable self, which, instead, would make an effort to blend in with what exists, like an ideal daughter-in-law from a Hindi serial.

After all, not all feet are Cinderella feet, equally comfortable in clogs and gold slippers, and unless the shoe fits, one remains afloat, somehow unconnected to all that everyone is convinced is real, un-centered, even, like Yeats' falcon who cannot hear the falconer.

But then the alternative to Cinderella, of course, are Cinderella's sisters, with their bleeding, sliced up feet and blind eyes, stumbling cluelessly through a graceful wedding, all owing to the perverse insistence of their feet unwilling to fit the right shoe.