Discombobulated

 My stars have been, now what is that phrase I want: out of alignment? Off-course? Off-orbit? Unbalanced? Oh. I know. All of the above!

All through the previous several weeks, I have repeatedly perched on the edge of rather dire precipices, and, thanks to the civilization I am surrounded by, I am pulled back with barely a sliver to spare. 

It all started when suddenly, as I was waiting for the promised rains that never came for me, I stumbled on an email telling me that a leg of my upcoming 6-leg journey had been canceled. Since I sleep little at night and use those hours to catch up on neglected tasks, it was a little after 2 am, an hour that lends itself seamlessly to anxiety escalating to panic. I didn't know whom to call and what to do, so, of course, I began to blame everyone and everything, from uncertain times to the stubborn pandemic, to my travel agent, to the sleeping cats, to my friend's upcoming move away from my city, all the way to the loss of my Fairytales course. The connections between these entities and events might seem yoked together with violence, but it made complete sense to me then. 

My patient Reader, had you been there, perched next to me at that hour, the circumstance might have been better appreciated. The rising sun, however, brought not only the rains but another missive from my travel agent that I was booked and confirmed on another flight that almost duplicated the lost one. 

I exhaled in immense relief, only to find that I had somehow managed to lose one of my very expensive contact lenses. I tried to retrace my actions from the previous night, but I have this daily-nightly ritual of inserting and extracting my lenses by rote. It is something I do without any deliberation or conscious thought or even awareness of the action. Hence, impossible to recall. 

I do have glasses, you know spectacles, or I would have been in an unthinkable, unimaginable state of being, wide-eyed and sightless as an owl in bright light. This situation, however, demanded immediate, decisive action from me and so I was forced to bestir myself to order the extremely expensive lens. Of course, a year had just passed since my last eye exam, so the doctor demanded another exam and fitting. This time, no matter how much I blamed the eye care facility, my insurance carriers (yes; I have plural carriers, a cautious creature like me), my mother, the cats, the mess on my work table, and my internet service, no missive, no email, no glimmer of a precious lens peeking out from beneath my bathroom cabinet saved me. 

I was condemned to part with a very decent percentage of my hard-hoarded savings and wait for several more weeks before receiving my missing lens. 

Of course, I used my improved and sharpened sight to check my email. I must remind myself to avoid doing this as much as possible next time, for waiting for me was an email that seemed to mandate my presence at a work-related event on a Sunday at 7:30 am! 

I was flabbergasted and completely outraged. I agree that this job has been growing on me and I am almost ready to acknowledge to myself that I really like going to work, but this was not what I had signed up for! Of course, I blamed my car, my vintage phone circa 2018, the messy floor, the loss of my Greek Myth course, and all the unreasonable demands that the COVID situation makes on a person. I came to work in a sort of an almost-huff and wondered if my co-workers noticed the upcoming event. Everyone looked at me strangely and mumbled something incoherent. I decided it was sympathy and immersed myself in work, which provided some relief. 

Shortly after, however, my colleague friend walked into my office with a kind look on her face. She urged me to pull up the email that caused me such discomfort. When I did, I was newly discomfited. Did she not see the date? That was a Sunday this month! Did she not mind? My kind friend let me finish and then pointed to the month. The event was for a future month, not the present one, on a date that fell on a weekday. 

This blog post is my exhalation of relief. I imagined myself all dressed for work on Sunday, haunting a deserted venue, panicked, desperately texting and emailing and WhatsApp-ing my supervisor and colleagues, asking them rather unintelligent, incoherent questions about their whereabouts and if there was some misinformation sent out about the venue. Then I imagined everyone just e-shouting at me to go back to sleep. 

This would have irritated and flummoxed me enough to blame emails, all Sundays, my water bottles, the transplant clinic, my pressure cooker, the potholes on my street, the loss of my Arthurian Literature course, and my daughter. 

Most of all, I might have been forced to blame my own idiocy. I remain ever grateful to my friend and colleague for rescuing me from such a sorry plight.    

In-Between, Not Break

 A semester ended and another began. Those are busy times. Schedules of all sorts have to be urgently and constantly updated, revised, and replaced. Chats fly on work WhatsApp groups. Meetings are convened, met, dismissed, and canceled. Workshops are mandated. Grab-and-go emergency boxes must be updated. Old flyers, handouts, and announcements must be discarded. Everybody must be welcomed back, even though one met them only a few days ago. 

This is one of the many reasons I do not understand the hullaballoo surrounding New Year's Eve. What is the fuss about? All this gets done every few months anyway! I do not mean the carpe diem parties or the horrible fireworks although I am sure that both could be part of the semester-ending celebrations in some circles. I mean the renewals, the refreshing, and the revisions. I also mean the Big Cleaning. Thankfully, I don't have to do the Big Cleaning at work, but I must get it done.

There are no classes in the few days between semesters, but unlike my wont, I still have to be at work. I appreciate the peace, but I do not appreciate the desolation that rules. When I come in, the entire section is dark. Some light filters in through the library, just enough to see where to lower oneself to be seated as one waits for security to come and unlock doors. Once in, I do switch on all lights, but even though the walls of my writing center are glass, nothing can be seen beyond them. It feels as though I am ensconced in a bulb.

Despite the desolation outside, days fly away. Before I know it, there is a knock on the door, reminding me to leave. I tend to complete most of my tasks before the in-between begins, thinking that I would bring books and read when there is no one around. However, I never get to the book; new flyers must be printed and pinned. Changes to all PowerPoint files must be made. Orientations and their schedules must be honed. 

I have been living this busy in-between for years now. Yet I have lists of movies to watch, TV series to catch up on, and books to finish during what used to be my "break." I don't think that I will ever truly realize that this in-between is no break. 

Thankfully, somehow, the in-between has been blustered through and today is the first afternoon in weeks that I can take a few minutes to reflect on the latest in-between. It is still early in the semester and just a few students are sprinkled around, working on their assignments. I think that this might be one of the easier times of the semester rather than the in-between-that-used-to-be-break. 

But hold! What do I see? A class is lining up to log into the writing center; they have an orientation in a few minutes. I must go and begin the semester for these students. 

A Good Storm

 The promised rains never came. I waited all month long, crawling along weather apps and forecast websites, searching for a glimmer of relief from the bright sunshine and high temperatures. I struggled to stay asleep at night and finally bought new sheets with the same rose print and texture of my favorite cotton blends I remember from Bombay Dyeing. This helps a little. 

Sometimes, the app promised rain, hours long, long enough for me to fall asleep. The rains, though, whenever they came, thrashed about for an hour or so and fled. They also came when I was locked in my windowless writing center, where I spend shadow-less, sky-less hours, oblivious to any changes in the endless, parched blue. By the time I emerged, the rains would have long left and the ground dry. 

We just heard some thunder a few minutes ago and looked at each other dubiously, wondering if and wishing that the rain would outlast our working hours and lull us to sleep. The rains have been promised all weekend long. 

I just shrug. Let's see. 

The hurricane season begins on June 1. I do not wish for hurricanes. I am too old to weather another one. There is no real way to feather one's nest so that one's well-being and sense of safety may be sustained through the aftermath of a hurricane. At the very least, extreme discomfort and debilitating confusion always follow such devastation. Electricity always fails and the world grinds to a stop. I wake up to some primordial landscape with the stars and satellites being the only light sources, and insects buzz and bite incessantly. 

That said, I must confess to needing a good storm. I want the storm to be strong enough to quench the unrelieved days but not strong enough to knock off the lights. I do so hate sewing and reading by candlelight. But a good storm would also give me a good night's sleep. Indeed, if it arrives on a Friday evening, I can sleep through till late Saturday. On Saturday morning, I could gulp down enough water so I am slaked for the week. 

My workday is still more than a couple of hours shy of being done. The thunder seems to have been replaced by the hum of the A/C. I am sure that all signs of moisture will have dried up by the time I walk out. 

If there are no tell-tale pawprints on my living room floor when I reach home, I will know that at least the cats enjoyed the afternoon rains by napping deeply near the open window, on cool cotton blends printed with restful promises. 

Resistance is Futile

I am, yet again, trying to find appropriate, affordable means to visit my janma bhoomi, Baroda. I crawl around the internet, trying on various fares, routes, seating arrangements, and durations. Ever since Russia barged into Ukraine, gas prices and fares have sky-rocketed: almost 50% higher! Definitely highway robbery, methinks. 

Appropriately enough, I am on the latest season of Star Trek, something I have blogged about several times. This one is called Picard. I relate to the protagonist's need to escape his janma bhoomi, his scrounging around to find adequate means of travel, and his constant yearning to return to the land of his birth.  The overarching theme of this series seems to be the importance of  overcoming the human fear of technology and incorporating it in the human world so both, organic and "synthetic" life forms can co-exist peacefully and in a manner beneficial to both. Inevitably, this includes many references and plot strains that revolve around the Borg, the terrible monsters from earlier Star Trek seasons, to whom we owe the phrase, "Resistance is futile!" The Borg tend to assimilate organic species and subsume their natural bodies by implanting machinery in their bodies, so the organic self is almost completely lost and the being becomes part of a hive, with a shared consciousness.

I think of our Borg-like world with Fit Bits, smart phones, Zoom, and WhatsApp. Who can imagine or manage life without them? I just made a colleague download WhatsApp that the team may communicate more effectively, rather than relying on primitive methods, like email. Many of our team wish that we would just have a face-to-face meeting and be done with it. However, in COVID times, that is not always possible, safe, or recommended. 

Back to traveling, in a time when I do not feel safe about visiting the inside of grocery stores, the tickets I seek are ones that promise more space between me and my fellow travelers, than the much cheaper ones I used before the pandemic. These tickets used to cost twice as much; now they cost five times as much as the ones I used earlier! Moreover, I need more comfort and hand-holding this time since I will be alone on this daunting journey to and from Baroda. My severely reduced immunity is one of the most chilling factors that require me to seek out appropriately spaced out seats.

Unlike Picard, who is one of my favorite characters, I hate traveling and would be very happy ensconced in my chosen home with the cats. I hate take-offs and landings, and I feel unanchored and claustrophobic when I think or how much removed I am from the ground. Strange airports do not offer any solace to people like me; I feel as though I hover over a worm hole of sorts and that I will be catapulted into another world, another aircraft, another time, that my feet do not touch terra firma. 

However, sooner or later, one must rejoin the rest of the active civilizations, teeming with movement, demanding movement from perfectly content still bodies.  I drive every week day, spend over 8 hours a day at work, and talk to others of my species. Yet I yearn towards my home and cats, where the only traveling I do is through the TV screen. When I try to make rather limp excuses for staying home, I get the same undeniable truth as a refrain from everyone: "You are fine! You must come!

Let me return to my creeping and crawling in search of a better fare, a better seat, a better duration for the journey I must make.

Like the Borg say, Resistance is Futile. 

My Heart Goes Mmm

 Usually, I don't enjoy conferences, meetings, townhalls, or much of what goes in the name of professional development. I participate and attend because I must, to prove that I seek self-improvement and therefore continue being worthy of being employed. Most of these events are pointless, unspeakably boring, and smack of self-congratulation and self-celebration. 

However, last Friday was an exception. Actually a couple of events were a pleasant surprise. I apologize to my patient reader for the length of this entry since I plan to include a couple of poems that emerged from a writing workshop. These poems resulted from two workshops, both part of a writing conference hosted by my college, for my college. It was a great way to get to know the very active writing community this place harbors. The members of this community sometimes publish, sometimes not and they are extremely diverse, their writing as varied as it is evocative. 

The first session I attended was on the multilingual nature of writing when one writes for oneself, not an imagined audience or publisher. A University professor who teaches creative writing facilitated this session. She used Ciserno's "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me" as a starter and suggested we each write a You Bring Out the _____ in Me poem. We had around ten minutes. We were to use at least some native language or phrases and present at least one verse to the group. I share mine below. I will hopefully re-visit it to revise and tinker with it, but here is the first draft:

You Bring Out the __ In Me

You bring out the bureaucrat in me.

My verse replaced by Excel columns,

Multicolored, swirling scarves tamed into pantyhose

My stories translated

Into skillsets,

 Appropriated to fit

The glass walls of my assigned office

 

You bring out the vanquished in me

Smothering batting onto my worn cotton sheet

“It will be much improved if you

Stitch on these words over what you just said. Use

Embroidery floss, not your cotton threads,”

You say.  I always listen

 

You bring out the wanderer in me

I wash up alone on craggy shores, hazy landscapes

Scowling, dark with bruise-purples and greens and yellows

Sunrises spill across indifferent skies

I squint myopically to recognize

Alien accents, slippery consonants, nasal vowels

But I get it. Sort of

 

You bring out the Gujjuben in me

Dal-Bhaat-Rotli-Shaak for lunch

Mung for dinner. Elaichi cha and thepla

For noon-headaches when the day heaves and slows.

Please-please, Lounge

On my swing, I bring you some, quick-quick

 

You bring out the Gujjuben in me

When the festivals loom

I scream the harder. I dance the louder

You do not listen.

Another session in the writing conference was about mining one's childhood memories for generating ideas. We were given various ideas about which we listed memories (the more sensory the better, of course!). This session was facilitated by one of our local creative writing faculty who regularly publishes children's books. Again, we were encouraged to use the phrases & languages we experienced the memories in. The next stage was to create a character, what this character sought to achieve through the plot, and what lay at stake. Of course, my character was a kite, who sought to fly with a lantern. This exercise ultimately led us to nailing the framework for a Where I Am From poem. I may flesh out the fiction piece (told from the kite's perspective) one day. However, here is my first draft of the poem:

Where I’m From

I am from Chhipwad, from its

rough roads and cows lowing and the smell

of daal dhokli in the afternoon.

 

I am from the shout of game-invites at 6 pm

Homework done, dinner too far

The clink of a thrown can

Begins the game

Of Chor-Police continued from

Summer vacations and last night

 

I am from the stink of burnt ghee

Left too long

A desperate rush to the kitchen

As the radio swirls remembered lyrics

In the sandalwood air

Cut by the hiss and slash of flour in the pan

 

I am from clanging temple bells and the Mullah’s Call

I am from Jack-and-Jill and the Saraswati Mantra

I am from sandalwood and marigolds and cow dung

 

I know this.

But I can’t find my glasses to see where I am

(Would you text or tweet if you find them?)

To say that I enjoyed this day a great deal would be an understatement. I even stayed back for the "happy hour," during which we got a beverage of our choice and read what we had come up with on that day to each other. Because the event was on Zoom, I did not have to leave my comfort zones or worry about the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. 

The wonderful day was preceded by the wRites of Spring festival the English department at my campus (North Campus) puts on every year. This year, the theme was Fantasy Tales and Why We wRite Them. Fascinating! The author featured was Kij Johnson, whom it was a pleasure to discover and Zoom-meet. One of our faculty encouraged his classes (and the attendees) to come up with 2 to 4 syllable words and phrases we were never going to be mature enough for. Pantyhose and self-improvement were some of my contributions, of course. Then our instructor converted them into poems and songs. Immense fun! However, one of my favorite sessions was the nature of fantasy tales on TV and in movies. This, too, was facilitated by one of our local professors. She examined shots from shows like True Blood and movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to point out mythemes, settings, themes, and other stock elements that constitute fantasy tales and that one must look for. 

Kij Johnson also discussed the differences between fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc. Her stories can be found on her website. It was quite the experience to see these genres from a craft person's perspective.

It is such a treat to be afforded these shining days and evenings! They provide an oasis in my daily drudgery of juggling schedules, finding and hiring staff, supporting the existing staff, and conducting workshops. I do not go on retreats and have a very generous amount of vacation time accrued, having gone almost nowhere since I started in this position. These events promised professional development credit to me. However, I cannot see how I can use any of what I learned and realized to enhance my professional performance. In fact, the vagaries of my imagination are now confined to managing my staff, colleagues, and students, garnering traffic to my writing center, and balancing schedules. 

I shall not examine these "credits" too closely. As it is, I seem to have wandered too far, not just from my janma bhoomi, but also from all that makes my heart go mmm (to paraphrase the song). 

It serves me best if I just take these events as a sort of an apology offered to me by my fortune (or misfortune) for all the compromises I make daily by genuinely trying to do my job well. I remain grateful for such apologies. 

I wonder if I can mine ideas that would frequent and multiply these apologies. Mmm . . .

Silence

 Last Wednesday, the unthinkable happened to me. No, I do not mean the COVID or Ukraine news. This is much more trivial and in the larger scheme of things, irrelevant and of no import whatsoever. 

However, to me, it felt horrible. My tv refused to work. 

I know. Some people call the tv the idiot box. Some people call it mindless corrupting of a sharp mind. Some people call it an addiction. To me, however, it is a portal to a world I remember, dream of, and in the most essential of ways, inhabit. 

When I am home, I need everything underlined with the noise of people talking, if not in Gujarati, at least in Hindi. I rarely watch television in English. When I leave home, I leave live tv on on one of the Star, Utsav, or Zee channels for the cats. The cats and I have become accustomed to this noise. When the tv is on, the cats perch on two sides of the sofa and nap or relax. But in the silent house, the cats did not know what to do with themselves and roamed around meaninglessly, sometimes through the house, sometimes outside. They felt abandoned in the silence. 

I felt abandoned in the most inexcusable manner as well! I need constant stories being told to me, even if I am not always attentive to them. I love the familiar tropes, the recognizable places, the ease of the idiom, and the comforting cadence of the language. I need the remembered tastes on my tongue and the fragrance of camphor and sandalwood of the festivals. And I am not ashamed to say that I also missed the laughably improbable plots and the outlandish caricatures.

When my tv died, I felt as though one of my anchors, indeed, the very axis of who I am were silenced. Without the familiar syntax and idiom, all that they evoked disappeared as well. Because of my work schedule, I was not able to go out and get one with haste, like I knew I needed to. On a regular week day, I barely get an hour to watch tv. But I need those minutes to re-align all my worlds so everything makes sense before I go to bed. 

My entire universe remained plunged in this dark silence for two days and two nights. 

Finally, Friday dawned and by the time I was done with work, I knew exactly the kind of tv I wanted, the amount I was ready to spend, and all the know-how I needed so I would get my life back in Eastman Technicolor instead of making do with survival in the shadow world of silence. 

By Friday evening, I had  my worlds back. The cats heard and returned to their sofa. I had found, traveled to, bought, hefted, assembled, and reconnected, all in the space of 3 hours. My family remains amazed at my prowess, especially the hefting around. 

There were times when I wondered if my life would have been easier had I a partner. The very next second, I discarded this idea with an involuntary shudder: who guarantees that a partner would help instead of commenting, faulting, taunting, sighing at my ineptitude, irritating, and generally getting in the way? Perhaps it would have taken much longer to get my tv, had I a partner. I imagine endless arguments about the merits of a certain kind of tv, a continuous sniggering at my dependence on it, a condescending dismissal of my whims, even repeated admonishments to "Get a Real Life!"  

At any rate, the absolutely wrong kind of noise. 

I have defeated this cosmic silence on my own. Besides, it always gives me a considerable boost of joy, knowing that I can make myself happy. When I talked to my family over the weekend, I casually remarked that I'd bought a new tv. Only some of the closest of my tribe understood the apocalyptic silence, the terror, the displacement, and the immense distress involved in the casual remark. They just said, "Oh. Good." The pause that followed this was pregnant with acknowledgement. 

My patient reader must excuse me now; I have a great deal of catching up to do. It will take a week to recover from this turbulence. But soon enough, my feline room mates and I will finally believe in the music, sounds, colors, and cadences of a well-loved, well-remembered universe behind the tv screen.  

Machu Picchu and Myth-Tenses

 I have been unable to return to this space for a month. Of course, as they do, many things happened that I have wanted to write about. 

For instance, my visit to the Machu Picchu exhibit remains most memorable. The ubiquitous gold was impressive but fails to leave a lasting impression; I have seen a lot of it, especially dazzling from behind untouchable cases of museums and palaces. The Machu Picchu exhibit has left a lasting impression of the epic story of Ai Apaec, the Andean hero who travels all three realms, fighting animal monsters and gaining their powers, even as he loses parts of himself. I found the idea of the fertile dead fascinating. Finally, of course, the architecture is breathtakingly innovative, symmetrical, and beautiful. 

I wished for a refresher to Incan mythology, a course a colleague teaches his middle school class. 

Again, I wish for my dream job, being part of a research team that excavates the myths of the world to create present day movies for kids or TV serials. Being a part of a plot-writers' team working on Hindi serials is a close second, of course. 

However, since I see no path, crooked or otherwise that could lead me to these destinies, it might be better to stick to the present continuous and the present perfect continuous tenses. Obsessing over using the past perfect to fuel future modals of low probabilities seems a pointless exercise. 

Yes, patient reader. The most that I have done is figured out different ways of reviewing the 12 tenses of English. I also taught a few weeks of basic Word & Power Point, much to the delight of students and amusement of my staff. 

I used to teach 6 hours of Magic in my courses (a lot of it based on The Golden Bough, Jung, and many others, of course). I miss that like a wound. In the present tenses (all 4 of them), watching the glitter in a student's eyes as she changes the design of her power point presentation is the nearest I get to the magic I used to teach. The magic of spell-casting has been replaced with the rules of spelling. The Machu Picchu exhibit, with its myths of spirals, animal hierarchies, and the many connections between spiritual realities and the transient physical world humans inhabited reminded me of the magic of the land that defines Arthuriana, in which two realities occupy and fight over a single geography.

Experiencing the Andean myths was like being suddenly aware of the subdued text that shines through a palimpsest, insisting on being read. 

Has this exhibit changed something in me? I don't know. It has, however and definitely, added to my thirsts and yearnings. Now, I yearn for more stories from a different people. 

Again, I ask myself, what use are the stories? Maybe I can use them, somehow, to teach the perfect and perfect continuous past tenses and past modals? 

Then again, facing the continuous tense of myths is like facing the ocean. And of what use can an ocean be?  

 

Unutterable Loss for the Silent Nightingale

 This Sunday, the world woke up to an unimaginable world, especially the world of South Asia and its wandering heirs, the unimaginable loss of Lata Mangeshkar.

I will not bore my patient reader with details and achievements of Lataji's life; those are easily googled. 

This news came to me on Monday, as I was getting dressed and checking on the world on my phone. I remain shocked. I could not believe it on Monday, and I don't believe it now. How can we endure a world with her singing? 

Lata Mangeshkar's voice was among the first I heard with the cacophonies that drown us at birth. We all grew up trying to emulate that sustained pitch, those true notes, that clear, clear voice and predictably, failed. That pure voice formed the background music for our lives, our moods, and expressed the way we felt the only way our feelings could be expressed. We have no greater language for who we are. 

Lataji lent her voice to the poetries of patriotism, of intense and self-erasing devotions, of the playful nature of the cosmos and its solemn rhythms, of clear nights and stormy seasons, of dreams, of apocalypse and heartbreak. Language was no barrier: Lataji sang in over 30 languages. Her voice is ubiquitous throughout the Indian subcontinent. She sang late into her life, beyond natural expectation, her voice untiring and true through decades. Hers is one of the first names children learn to lisp as they chant names. Her name needs no compacting into cute diminutives; if anything, one adds the honorific -ji to her first name to render her recognizable. 

Today, I look around me and know that I need all those poetries to anchor my world. Lataji's voice is the axis. I mourn that when I hear that voice now, it will be an echo from the past. Our life-giving nightingale is silent forever and, like the grieving emperor in the tale, we yearn for the lost voice as we yearn for life. 

This is no tale and so, unlike the emperor in the tale, we trudge on, deprived, searching the heavens, beseeching them to return the lost voice, and weeping at their stubborn silence. Our unspeakable grief is fed by the fact that the only expressions we can use remain the songs of immense loss that lost voices breathed life into. 

For the world left behind, there is to be no relief, no solace from this impoverishment.     

Willing Gods, Gods Willing!

 "Let Kanha-ji answer that!" one of my favorite Hindi serial protagonists exclaims, as the episode fades out to a prequel. 

Will the invoked divinity oblige? 

Knowing the terrain of these plots, there is little doubt that he most definitely will and without undue delay, lest the audience forget the invocation. 

Now, even the gods of all faiths seem to have found the very lucrative terrain of Hindi serials. They are the newest immigrants to this land. Previously, if a divinity were to directly affect the plot of the story, it would be in a serial specially dedicated to that deity or one with a mythological theme. The god's partiality for the protagonist and willingness to play Deus Ex Machina would be no surprise. 

Since these gods are often stock characters, it would also be easy to predict their reactions and extend of involvement. Krishna would discuss the issue with his consort in Vaikunth, his particular paradise and trace plot events to the evil intentions of a seemingly-unrelated character. Shiv could be manipulated, though his anger is to be avoided at all costs. Brahma would grant anything to almost anyone, provided they performed adequate yoga. Vishnu is the problem solver, fixing what the others mess up. Narad is the ultimate trickster, who teaches through his jests and taunts. Indra is the coward, forever afraid of his throne being usurped. The list goes on. 

Now, the gods have expanded their prowess to include the daily life of characters. No longer do we see Kanha (Krishna's diminutive name) playing the divine roundel with his milkmaids when a character invokes him. We only see what the character sees: the idol in a home temple, perhaps with a spotlight shining from behind the screen, to hint at halos. Of course, the audience sometimes needs more than just a hint and we hear temple bells clanging, an inexplicable wind hinting at apocalypse, strewing dead leaves around, circular rainbows flashing with glitter within, even the idol's eyes and face flashing and zooming large. It really depends on the desperation of the story-teller and the budget allocated to that section of the tale.

It is enough for me to invoke the gods, mimicking the characters, on the off-chance that some of this mercy and attention might spill over into my world. Of course, what I seek is nothing like what is necessary for the characters, no matter how closely I relate to them. It is the ease that solves all problems that has me glued to these plots and characters.

I can hardly wait to reach home. I am sure Kanha-ji would have answered by now and my character would have assigned another task to her favorite deity. How wonderful! No yoga needed; no horde of merit to be accumulated; no sacrifices, no pujas, no yagnas, no oblations, no offerings required. Merely the premise of being a "good" person suffices to have the world arranged according to one's preferences. 

Who wouldn't long for a world wherein gods wait upon people convinced of their "goodness," and one need only assign frequent tasks to a particular deity to show favoritism? 

I, too, shall invoke a god or perhaps a goddess and assign the task of ensuring that all feline beings be safe and well fed for the night. Let the gods prove their merit to me!

Learning the Body Dance

"Keep Safe!" she shouts in a general farewell, including everyone in the center, as she bounces to the sign off station. Her hair and skin glow with health, her eyes shine with excitement at her task (though it is routine and quite boring), and her fingers tack busily over the keyboard without doubts or hesitations in a well-remembered sequence of letters and numbers.  

It is 8 pm, closing time at my writing center.

I watch her, a useless, practiced smile sketched under my mask. 

Forgive me, Reader, I confess to lowly envy. The woman I was watching was chronologically older than I. I wondered, for the nth time, at an octogenarian's energy, enthusiasm, and verve at the end of the day, when I, decades younger, feel ready for my nap an hour after my morning shower!

I do not feel the defeating fatigue I once felt any more. But by 2 pm, I am definitely yawning and by 8 pm, my drive home looms like an eternal journey before me. I am surrounded by people who are only kind and consoling. They tell me that I am older; everyone slows down sooner or later; I am not healed yet; after all, my body is tired. It goes on. 

Today, in my lingering envy, I meander along the confusing, contradictory advise for a list of allowable foods for transplant patients. Some websites insist  that dragon fruit can be toxic, while some swear by the necessity of its nutrition; some insist on including bean sprouts while others caution me away from them; I should have complex carbohydrates, like pasta, as part of my diet and some scream at me to avoid being in the same room as pastas; all cheese is bad but some may be okay; apples should be avoided; apples are okay. 

To my extreme disappointment, my transplant center is not home to dieticians. I have no idea if what I am doing is okay or if I am causing incurable damage to my poor body. 

How do my octogenarian colleagues do it?

One such colleague winked at me and claimed that after a point, one begins getting younger; that's why old-age is often referred to as a second childhood. I thought of one of my cats, who as a kitten, would suddenly be possessed of an incredible amount of energy, more than her little body could hold, causing her to tear wildly around the house and neighborhood. I want to believe my colleague. 

Oh to climb trees and ladders! Oh to walk for hours without tiring! Oh to run down a grass covered slope! Oh to race along the beach!

And most of all, Oh to dance!

It seems to me today, that I have yet to learn effective body management. Perhaps, if I am wise and attentive, I will learn it in the next couple of decades. I must listen and re-learn my body's syntax, the music it prefers, the foods that properly nourish it, the amount of sleep it needs, and the messages it continually sends me. 

I have trotted across the globe, traveled many lands, believing that my Janma Bhoomi (land of birth) is different from my Karma Bhoomi (land of action). However, I find that I needn't have traveled at all: I needed, need to only understand the topography and language of my first and only home, my body. 

Once I learn that, perhaps, just maybe, I might find a good friend. 

Well / Unwell

 Again, long afternoons yawn before me. My body still holds me captive. I have a new kidney and one would imagine I would get my life back!

To a large extent, I no longer have the bindings confining my hours: I do not have to worry about dialysis, watch my water intake, and heave my unmanageable body around. Stairs give me pause but do not frighten me. Walking through the parking lot to my non-disabled parking spot no longer challenges me. I can eat spinach, drink as much water as I wish, eat more variety of foods, and move around with greater ease. I remain grateful for the precious gift afforded to me.

Yet my fear binds me. I am mortally afraid of catching COVID or any of its variants. I go cold at the thought of visiting the hospital or emergency rooms. And of late, I must fight and cajole my reluctant pancreas to keep my kidney safe from their pouting. They seem to have thrown in the towel, not that I blame them. 

Often, I am tempted. 

For a short while only. 

But tempted. 

Then I take up my sword and re-enter the fray with a sigh. 

I hear words swirling around me, offering assurance: my body has been much abused for far too long; I am much older than when I started; this condition is only normal and __% of post transplant patients have it; it is not my lifestyle, it is the meds; just take it in my stride; ___ has it much worse. 

Perhaps I am too hasty and my expectations of my body are unreal. I try to catch myself from complaining. I know that people are tired of me. So I don't talk of the latest saga in the battle.

My colleagues are thoughtful and patient. My family ought to be sainted. 

Perhaps I look for rewards in the wrong places. I have a job that comes with health insurance; I can hear the easy banter and laughter from students, staff, and colleagues; I enjoy longer sleep cycles; the cats have not abandoned  me.

Even Julien of Norwich and T. S. Eliot reach across oceans of time and space as they console me with "All manner of thing shall be well."

Ah the blessing and solace of the Word! How on earth are we to survive these boring earthly scrimmages with it? 

Let me go back to listening ghazals. I will find treasures in this fallow season. This broken time shall mend. All shall be well. All is well.

Roof Without Sky

 I have enforced confinements on my mind. No, patient Reader, I do not mean prisons. I just mean being limited to one's own habitat, the way a cat is confined to her cage or home "for her own good." We do not think twice before enforcing our beloved pets and snatching their skies from them. However, we have a serious problem when such a circumstance is visited upon us. 

One of the many lessons that COVID-19 has taught me has been my awareness of this confinement. On the one hand, I am grateful for the security my home affords me. I am essentially enclosed in a glass square, that is in turn surrounded by a netting, so no cooties may enter my air. Yes! Our advanced species has learned to own not just the earth but also the air. I am urged to regularly spray all surfaces with chemicals that make my cat sneeze but which keeps me safe. If I am forced out of my house to forage for fresh foods, I find myself wishing for my glass bubble, as no amount of masks and gloves make me feel protected. I smear no-rinse soap on my hands after touching anything in the store. Then, my foraging done, I again smear some more soap after ridding my fingers of gloves until I can reach my cage and wash my hands properly. 

As time goes by, I amaze myself as I come to rely on my confinement. It becomes my territory, my landscape. There have been days, even weeks when I have not left my home and I do not feel deprived. 

I wonder if our animals and birds begin to feel this way. Once used to their cage, will they ever feel safe enough to wander out under the open skies? 

However, I do know the answer to this, more is the pity. 

I have missed the betrothal that I could not have countenanced missing, ever. In no actual or alternate reality had I imagined missing this event, provided I was alive. I would not have missed my cage, had I been allowed to attend this celebration. 

I have also just begged off a Thanksgiving invitation from some of my favorite people, much to my intense disappointment and theirs. I have been sad about this but I cannot fight something I cannot even see, a virus. These days, I really hate the CDC and their recommendations. These recommendations are mandates for the immunity compromised, like me, who have had a transplant less than a year ago, I think it is strange that I feel so well, better than I have in a decade, and yet I have to treat myself as though I am still fragile. It is most distressing. Yes, we will Zoom. But I so wanted to go meet everyone in real life! I find that there is really no substitute. My cage, today, does not feel as safe as it feels like shackles.

It is also a known fact that once a cat is an outdoors cat, he can never be trained to be an indoors cat; however, the opposite is never true. An indoors cat, after a few days of apprehension, can easily get used to being an outdoors cat.

Everyone around me sighs and longs for things to go back to "normal." I do not doubt that we will, like our confined pets set free, take to the outdoors with more ferocity and enthusiasm than ever before. After all, we will have paid a steep price for these freedoms.

I doubt that we will ever again take the skies for granted again. 

The Return: A Beginning

 It is the year 2020, the best of times in the last decade for me, a bad time for humans in the new millennium.

I got a transplant, something that I have been waiting for, not so patiently and with increasing panic, trepidation, and urgency, for over a decade. I have been grateful for the support of my patient friends & family, my wonderful tutors, my thoughtful colleagues, and my accommodating supervisor for making it possible to return to my job after a just week off in the hospital. We all have been working remotely for many weeks already. 

Yes, this is the year that Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (or COVID-19 for short) went global, hitting all continents, all economies, and all populations. We have been confined to our homes, which has been a blessing for me, given my newly over-compromised immune system. I have been able to keep in touch and get tasks done while I recovered. 

While I am grateful for the peculiar circumstances that have allowed me to avoid a long recuperative leave, the very same circumstances have forced my child to travel 80 miles to pick me up and drop me off. I had to uproot myself from my comfort zone, kicking, screaming, under loud protests, and move in with my kind, patient family. I had already lost my night sleep, and missing my own bed made it impossible for me to stay asleep for longer than a few minutes. For weeks after I was returned home, I was convinced that the gods had abandoned me. More problematically, I was convinced that my body had abandoned me, leaving me frustrated, floundering, and flakey, unlike the person the people who love me remembered, changed into a being whom they did not recognize or have much patience with. 

Now, I am mostly healed from everything (almost). I do have to keep going for labs to ensure that things remain healed, but I feel better than I have in over a decade. I did not realize that kidneys can make such a huge difference in one's life. I am slowly returning to myself. 

In many ways, this process of returning to myself has been similar to returning to my burnt house once it was rebuilt.

I am finding out that there is a specific process involved in this returning to the self. First, the process started within: the constant pain and discomfort diminished slowly but increasingly, with a determination that I did not know my body possessed. Once the pain diminished, I began recognizing myself in the mirror and smiling in recognition of someone I had forgotten about. Once I recognized myself, I began the very long, painful process of forgiving my body. By now, I wear my scars with pride. There is ways to go yet before I can wear earrings and indulge in face packs. However, one more thing I have been working on is patience. I give myself a break: I start work early enough so that I can take brief  breaks for naps, snacks, even a quick face time with my family. 

I wonder how long this process will take. I long to quilt like I used to, write like I used to. This entry is the first step towards this completion. Just the fact that I look forward to a completion is proof of the thing with feathers that has woken up and fluttered its feathers, wonderingly looked around with disused, myopic eyes, not quite believing that such a world can exist.. 

Boxed

This year marks the 4th year anniversary of my dialysis. My life has changed exponentially, in ways I could not have imagined since I began dialysis in 2015, after having visited my birthplace and met all the places and people I never remember because I never forget. I had no idea (I still don't) when I will be able to visit again, or even travel to an overnight destination again. My fears have proved prophetic and I find myself frozen here.

Besides my inability to travel, my life style has been compromised in many other ways. I cannot walk for long; throwing out the garbage is one of the major chores; I cannot keep my house picked up; I fall asleep without being aware of doing it, irritated at my unawareness when I awake. It is getting frequently more rare for me to finish a movie. You could say that I am defeated by fatigue. Sometimes, I just have to close my eyes, no matter where I am, and wait for the clouds to lift away. I cannot imagine a world in which I can schedule a dinner with friends, or attend a play or any gathering that could go on beyond 7 pm. This, unfortunately, does not mean that I can reschedule my dinner to breakfasts, owing to the rigid meal times connected to my medications. 

I could go on, but anyone who has been on dialysis knows my condition and it is not my body's desertion that ultimately deflates me. 

I am defeated by boxes. 

Yes, patient reader, boxes. 

The situation with boxes is unimaginable. It is not as though I am living out of boxes, that I have to dive into a box any time I need a spoon or a scarf. This is worse. I need the boxes only to remove solutions, tubes, and paraphernalia from them; this takes me less than two minutes, and I do not have to think of locating things in my head before I reach for them. So I do not really think of boxes. But at the end of a dialysis session (by morning), I have one to two boxes emptied each day. I am always surprised to see them because they form no part of my conscious routine. These boxes squat in the middle of rooms, being of assorted shapes and dimensions, trip me up, and no matter how many boxes I deflate and throw away, there always are more left over. They stare up at me, their  mouths obscenely wide, mocking me, challenging me to guess where they are from, what action caused them to be in their present condition, and now, what I am to do about them. 

The cats, who once used to strut confidently through my living spaces, protest when I turn out the lights. They have had to learn to be even more nimble-footed to navigate the ever-changing landscape of my floors. Sometimes, they protest when I attempt to throw out a few boxes; these have been morphed into living spaces and I am not allowed to move them even an inch from where they are. It is not unusual that the dark hours in my house are punctuated with booms and splats as the cats leap and land on various boxes in the night. I tell myself that that would either be a robber or a cat and knowing my house, a cat is the more probable culprit. If it is a robber, then the prospect of human conversation glows promisingly. Perhaps the robber, being of sound limbs and not given to fatigue, might obligingly throw away a few of the boxes, even if only for ease of robbing.

This situation with the boxes becomes even more unmanageable during weeks when the rains refuse to let up. I like to think of myself as being largely benign, therefore deserving of good things and kindnesses; the idea of trudging through the rains, my hair limp and stringy, my shoulders and arms tangled up in heaps of flattened cardboard seems like an undeserved punishment. Also, it smacks too much of melodrama, even for me, who is addicted to Hindi Saas-Bahu serials. So I wait with the boxes for the rains to let up. The boxes begin to mount at an alarming rate; once, I counted eighteen of them huddled in a corner, glaring balefully at me. I seriously considered paying someone to take care of this problem for me. But then whom would I ask? Even at my most frustrated moments, I do not wish for a helpful robber; the gods know I have lost enough to keep such wishing at bay. And when I cast my glance at the lean numbers reflecting my bank balance, I know that paying someone is an improbability beyond fantasy. Now, I only fantasize about a horde of elves, birds, ants, and other helpers of fairy tales swooping in, and in a single tornado, clearing my house of all boxes, visible and otherwise.

Aye, there's the rub. Even in fairy tales, nothing is for free. What would I pay for such a wish to be realized? The answer, of course, is nothing! Not sleep, nor salt, nor coffee! My imagination is better served in accepting the protean nature of my floors. And yet, if you stop by my house of a Saturday afternoon, you will see me, Sisyphus-like, stripping and deflating boxes in never-ending piles and heaps.

Sea Change

I have been amiss in posting here. I once had a job in which I was paid good money to teach fairy tales, Greek myths, and Arthuriana. When my life dragged me away from this, I fear I lost part of my will and began to punish myself by hiding my pen.

I have decided that my punishment is done.

Now, I have another job; I coordinate a writing center. It seems that I am decent at this job; it seems to like me and I find that it is growing on me. I urge my patient reader to imagine a shawl-like moss, rather than fungus here.

One of the major duties I have in my new job is managing people. I know that I used to manage 25-30 students every three months in my old job and I had no discipline problems. But then, I had help: the magic of the tales was in charge and we all towed its line. Now, I have no magic. I have no tales that tie me to my staff, students, colleagues, or faculty. I try to manage with smiles, nods, and a genuine wish to help and improve.

It has taken me two years to get an idea of what my job entails. So in a way, I have been lost and instead of breadcrumbs, I have been gathering puzzle pieces to lead me home. Sometimes, I find undiscovered little pathways that lead to unexpected delights. Sometimes, of course, these little pathways disappear into thorny bushes.

I have learned to manage bullies. I am no longer intimidated by the idea of a confrontation. I have found ways of initiating difficult conversations. Compartmentalizing and delegating are now second nature to me. To my immense gratitude, I find that I am part of a group of people reaching for a singular goal. To my unbelieving delight, I find that I am able to start us down a new road and find my group agreeable.

Once my broken heart healed, I began to re-configure my class notes into workshops for students. Surprisingly, these are working wonderfully. I enjoy having a small group of students in my little office and workshop verbs with them. The faculty assure me that these workshops and review sessions are helping students. Hopefully, these sessions will become part of the natural landscape of my writing center.

Yes, I have begun to think of this as "my" writing center. I have sculpted it, defined its topography and geography, drew a vision for it, and peopled it with a staff that is intelligent, purposeful, and aware of itself as a team. I have taken responsibility for what happens here, whether I am present or not. I welcome the kindly intentioned and defend its boundaries from the ill-intentioned.

People are always asking me if I miss my old job. Of course I do! However, that job does not exist anymore. People ask me if I miss teaching or the classroom. Frankly, I do not. I would not retrace my steps to a classroom. That would be regressing. I have suffered a sea-change, after all, and it is impossible to go back; I might as well wish for my long-past youth!

As I sit in the little fishbowl that is my office and urge students and faculty to visit my writing center, I feel content, if recycled. This recycling has given me a different life; it is my hope that this different life will work its magic to sculpt and define me so I will once again fit into my skin.

Nothing; Again Nothing

This is one of the last couple of days of my break, and the tired, much lived year draws the closing curtains on itself, no doubt looking forward to a long sleep. I shall miss my break, of course. I had constructed a special routine, a chronology of doing nothing in a varied number of ways. I have loved it all. My Face Book showed me Spain,  Aruba, Hawaii and a number of places with my friends and kin posing against a myriad of Places to See. I applaud their willingness to stop doing nothing and pack, travel, board, disembark, and visit these places. Perhaps I, too, shall have the wherewithal to bestir myself from my nothingness, one day. Not Today, though.

Today, I am just glad to be able to stare at the cloudy day outside, bundled in my sweaters and blankets as the rest of the world enjoys a respite from the high 70's, a normal in these latitudes in this season. People wonder if I don't feel lonely and depressed being on my own during the holidays. I must confess that I do not! My nothingness occupies every minute of my waking hours and I have no time to feel at a loss or bored. I know that in two days, I will have to occupy myself with so much busyness that I will yearn for these hours. I could have filled these hours with projects, cleaning, writing, composing, planning, stitching, shopping, arranging, etc. But I cannot regret not doing all these things.

My one day trip exhausted me and it took me a few days to recover from that. Then my child visited me for a few days, which reminded me of how wonderfully full my life used to be when her agenda dictated our days. But then her own life claimed her back and she has left. So I sit here again with my nothingness. The day stretches before me like a silver ribbon, straight, sparkling, and clear. Since I do not plan to leave the house, no unpleasant wrinkles and creases threaten. There is such comfort and reassurance when one can see exactly what the day holds, especially when it holds a pregnant nothingness, promising nothing, demanding nothing.

My feline room mates, used to my presence by now, nap in their comfort-corners, no longer pacing inquiringly around my ankles. My car too naps outside my door, no doubt appreciating the rest from the endless driving that usually stitches my responsibilities during a working day  or a busy weekend. My neighbors are not home, no doubt running errands and preparing for the big change in the date that arrives every year and that no one has figured out how to properly welcome, with the due ritual it deserves. Every ritual and celebration seems just a smidgen inadequate and the moment between the years passes so quickly. This year, I plan to spend the moment in bed, doing my dialysis, reading. I need to be up since the fireworks spooks the cats and the light in my room offers them all a haven of sorts. Like last year, 2018 will find us all gathered on the same bed, watching the fireworks, or napping, waiting for the celebrations to end.

Once the new year is lodged in, there will be another breath of nothingness. Then the world will exhale a gale of busyness that will take months to wind down. At the end of it, a substantial chunk of life will have ebbed away and there might not be enough memory-pebbles left on the sands to account for having lived a year.

There is the stuff that stress is made of. I shall refrain from dwelling on such fears. I do know how rare a true nothingness, a true vacuum is; things always rush in to fill all emptinesses; true nothingness is not well-tolerated. So it makes sense to cherish and savor the few nothingnesses we are allowed. After all, the meaningless busyness of routines is equally forgettable.

I fear that I have spent a long time in writing this. I must go back to doing nothing. It is most necessary.

Of Fardles and Bon Mots

It has been a few months since I began my new job. One could say that I am settled in, though I do  remain, at heart a lit major, in spite of not having stepped into a classroom for almost a year now. I had not realized this until this past few days when a couple of events brought it to my notice. I do not yet know how I feel about it.

The first event was utter, sheer exhaustion, though one can not always call that an event. It was rather a breaking point that came on a Thursday afternoon on one of the busiest weeks my writing lab has ever seen. There were days when it would be a couple of hours before I could reach my office and check my email: I would be enveloped in student needs from the moment I'd step into my writing center. Students had the hunted, much-wept look of the lost and the displaced as they haunted the center, trying to access  their email, begging me to do some magic that would give them access to My English Lab or D2L. They hung on to their school responsibilities as though to an anchor; if their grip loosened, some sort of apocalypse would follow and they carried this desperate urgency as their most treasured cargo. If I did help them access whatever they needed, or explained a concept to them, they looked at me with gratitude of cosmic proportions, which defeated me. This is natural in a world that is left behind by a storm that closed down my State for over a week. However, we were all exhausted by the Thursday of that week. The talk was of the end of the world, how nothing was ever going to be the same. So I distributed Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" and we discussed the short story for about an hour. I had distributed the story not just to my staff but also the couple of students who remained in the writing center. Later, as I walked back to my office and the writing center began to get busy with the evening traffic, I realized that this kind of discussion was exactly what was missing from my present life. This stolen hour had adjusted my perspective and I have vowed that this would not be the last time that a story or poem is discussed in my lab. My staff, too, confessed to thinking of the story repeatedly over the next few days. Perhaps we were all lit majors at heart?

In fact, I would go far enough to say that what my colleagues and managers refer to as my managerial techniques owe their origin to my experience as faculty. Controlling discussions that do not get lost in the woods, demanding work, being intolerant of excuses yet understanding of lack of training, identifying what needs fixing, keeping records, creating schedules and planning meetings: all of these I learned as I stood alone behind the desk for decades, forever separated yet deeply connected to the people who faced me and tried to convince about twenty strangers to shift perspective and learn to analyse.

One could say that essentially, I am still doing the same job.

My friend asked me if I miss teaching and before I could even think about the question and consider it, my mouth said, "No!" The definite nature of that answer took my friend aback, I think; I, too was surprised by it. Upon reflection, in fact, I'd say that the best parts of my old job are still very much with me, while the worst, like grading, have disappeared. Yes, there are evaluations and hiring decisions, but they are nothing compared to endless oodles of ungraded assignments that had crowded my life in infinite sets of twenty each.

A couple of days ago, my Facebook newsfeed offered up a Keats ode read by Benedict Cumberbatch. I wept at the sheer beauty of the poem. I often indulge in YouTube Midsummer Night's Dream and cry at Macbeth (a play that continues to shock me). Teaching was never where I'd thought I'd end up when I decided that I was a confirmed lit major and could be nothing else. I had not really thought much about where I'd end up with a lit degree, of course. I had some nebulous idea of being a priestess in a sanctuary of words or just drinking in Prufrock under a spreading tree as the sun set behind some mountain. I had no clear idea about the actual work or ritual the routine of such a person would comprise of.

So no, I do not miss the classroom. I do miss the literature, but when I reach out for it, I find that it has not wandered away. It is right where I'd left it, beside curriculum to be assigned, files to be graded, departmental and all-school meetings to be attended, and LMS to be organized.

Ultimately, the aim of my having Read Literature seems served: it was to decorate the walls of my ivory tower so that the fardles that flesh must bear may be tolerated, conquered, and lived through.

Eating Fruit in the Dark

We are only two days away from hurricane Irma's unwelcome visit to our State. To say that it was horrible and unnerving would be a gross understatement. I feel as though I have aged a century since last Thursday, when workplaces closed down and  the declared state of emergency began to attain dimensions and reality.

I, too was carried on the wave of hysteria that washed me up before empty grocery store shelves. There was no bottled water, no paper plates or plastic ware, no bread, no canned eatables, and no sterno cans. I picked up a lot of fresh fruit (the storm was three days away, after all), some cat food, a jar of instant coffee, and the last case of eggs on the shelf. As I drove home, I wondered why the lack of bottled water bothered me. I drink tap water, do not care for the faint stale and bitter after-taste of bottled water, and I had already planned to fill up enough for me and my feline room mates. I had enough cat food for two weeks. And I knew that I would not need much food for myself.

As always, I remember the endless couple of days I had spent stuck in my grandmother's third story apartment as the city's river flowed 10 feet deep beneath our balcony. There was, of course, no electricity or running water and we spent the entire time watching broken off pieces of our familiar world stream by; a tire, tables, pots, suitcases swirled wildly in some sort of a twisted, macabre dance, refusing all recognizable functions and identities. We were not aware of the length of time spent staring. It was unreal.

This same unreality accompanied the hurricane days. This storm was larger than our State, and no one was to be spared its fury. Being so large, it moved slowly and the hours and days stretched as sheer madness churned the elements until everything outside dissolved into a primal wind soup. Inevitably, at one point, the electricity blinked off. I sat in that twilight world, in a world without time, thought, or light, not sure about what to do. I remembered the fruit in my refrigerator and began working on finishing it. This was the only focus and relevance of my entire existence. It felt bizarre, the burst of orange in my mouth, the fullness of watermelon, the richness of peach, it all felt like an undeserved, aimless gift. The relish and zing of the fruit tasted like proof of life.

Before the storm hit, I had tried to find someone to put my shutters up, but without wingnuts and a tall enough ladder, it proved to be impossible. When I found that my town was not to be a direct hit, but that we would mainly get tropical storm strength winds, I decided against boxing myself and the cats in a claustrophobic metal case; in fact, I left a window open, which kept the temperature in the house tolerable once the electricity was gone. It did feel like mad witches and ghouls dancing tornadoes outside but I think I would prefer those witches and ghouls to the sweaty, unnatural silence of shuttered up rooms. The cats and I spent the storm next to that window, on the bed, surrounded by LED torches (no candles in my home!), books, a storm radio, and the kindle. Every so often, the cell phone chirped in warning that a tornado was near. But after a while, that, too, became part of noise of the storm. The radio cackled with static and updates about feeder bands and flood warnings.

The morning never dawned but the storm turned silvery and sometimes forgot to be ferocious. It seemed that the world would never be normal, the way I remembered it. A thousand post-apocalyptic novels and settings flashed through my mind and I wondered how life would completely change once this storm was done with us. I lunched or breakfasted or dined on fruit and added some boiled eggs to my meal. I had boiled the entire case of eggs from those last frantic hours before the storm. Then I returned to the bed, returned to the waiting. Logic dictated that some time, perhaps hours, perhaps years from now, time must begin ticking again.

That was a couple of days ago, or was it yesterday? I forget. At any rate, it is past. I have not left the house in almost a week. My electricity has been restored; in fact, I did not have to miss any of my dialysis treatments and I remain unspeakably grateful for that. I am going back to work tomorrow.

As I sat at my desk, checking and responding to my email, I snacked on an orange but I did not register the zing of its taste. I could find comfort in this apparent return to normalcy. However, I wonder. The stories do not lie: can souls who have eaten chthonic fruit ever allowed a true return to the realms of the sun?

That Facebook Life

The complexity of our present times has offered us the chance to view our own realities from a veritable smorgasbord of lenses, if my patient reader will forgive the awkward synesthesia. It is possible to live an event and examine it immediately in flashback without troubling one’s memory cells.

The other day, we attended a wedding reception. The first hour of the festivities was devoted to what the hosts referred to as Recall Reels. We were treated to witty observations about the life-thus-far of first the bride, and then the groom, as various relatives of the couple took the mike to accompany the film-collage with underlying movie songs played in tandem with the pictures and live commentary. We enjoyed the first few minutes immensely. However, as the hour wore on, the pictures began to take on a monotone, not of the subject matter but of mood. These were, obviously, supposed to depict lives spent in sheer joy. Images caught people in mid-laughter, eyes sparkling at something behind or above, just out the range of our vision, hair afloat in becoming abandon. Then there were pictures of immaculately groomed children, eyes scrunched shut in concentration as they blew out birthday cake candles, flames steady, ribbons and bow ties standing to attention, adoring, clapping people surrounding the cake. Always, always, the focus of all present in the photograph seemed to be the young bride and groom. It seemed as though all through their childhood and youth, these two people’s families and friends had deliberately hoarded up a trousseau of pictures they could exhibit on their wedding day, so we would know how carefree and abundant their lives had been.

Such exhibits of perfected lives have expanded from an hour during a wedding reception, to everyday chronicles on social media sites, like Facebook. I see only exquisite views of mountains, rivers, oceans beneath a colorful sky seen through window frames; the camera always misses the sink of dirty dishes just beyond the breathtaking view. I imagine the owners of such windows as gazing out, sipping some tall, cool citrus-y drink, no dishes, floors, or counter-tops ever to be cleaned. These owners are usually accompanied in my imagination with the most perfect of friends or spouses or pets.

Most people I know, who take lots of pictures, screen their imaginary lives very carefully. Of the thousands of images they capture, only a few are deemed “Facebook-worthy.” These images do not necessarily depict a reality hitherto unsuspected by the viewer, nor do they offer an insight into the personality of the subject. On the contrary, it would seem that these images are carefully chosen to display a perfection of an imagined self, which often renders the subject unrecognizable. These people glow with satisfaction every time I exclaim at their profile picture, “Is that you? I did not even recognize you!” Apparently, this is the most appropriate reaction sought for.

I suppose it is human nature to wish to garner as much envy from one’s world as one could manage. This envy is synonymous with admiration, a trophy of some sort that assures the subjects they have arrived, worked hard and achieved the glint of I-Wish in the eyes of beholders. If, indeed, this is the aim, then it is attained. I must confess to wishing for your perfect Facebook life. I covet your excellent health, to bite a pie of the warm laughter of your gatherings, discover the exotic worlds you are always globe-trotting to; I want the top 95% you earn in all Facebook quizzes that gauge you to be among the smartest of all, hunger for all those delicious, easy-peasy recipes you share, and of course, I crave most ardently that window you gaze out of.

Beware, Perfection! As that vignette of a flawless life gets uploaded for all to see, make sure of a dot of kajal on its back (where it will not be seen) to ward off the evil eye.

The Idling Wordsmith

I was scrolling down my Facebook page, as one does, often when at a loss, and I saw many people advertising their upcoming anthologies and novels. Of late, it seems to me that the world is bursting with people publishing their work.

I wonder how they manage that.

Long ago, (four years ago, actually) an Indian publisher had suggested that I write a book, their suggestion arising from one of my short stories. I thought that I had died and attained undeserving Nirvana. Fearing the chariots of time drawing ever near, I finished the book within months, full time job, failing kidneys, and graduating child notwithstanding. Every time a revision was suggested, I attacked it, conquered it, and sent back the section before suggested deadlines. I vowed to be the most agreeable, the easiest of writers anyone could dream of working with.

However, some ornery constellation stamped its feet and rather abruptly, I was told that the publisher had lost interest. No other explanation was offered. One day I had a book contract; the following day, I was anchor-less, rudder-less.

My book has been completed, revised, re-visited for years. I had tried looking for an agent and sent out about fifty letters of inquiries to various agents, my list compiled from a variety of sources (yes, including Writers & Poets!). I got nary a bite. Not A One.

And these, mind you, are agents, not publishers that I tried to approach.

Interestingly, however, whenever I have sent in sections of the book as separate stories, they have been accepted and published in magazines, no revisions asked for.

I know my work is decent, current, and fits in with what is being read. How does one jump this huge chasm between finished project and marketed product?

The person who had published my first story offered to come out with a kindle edition of my book. Of course, I have agreed. However, that constellation is still ornery, and of late, my queries are ignored. I wonder about the value that these two experiences are supposed to convey to me, but I remain at a loss. It definitely does not hearten me to know that Moby Dick was rejected 75 times.

 I have read hundreds of blogs and articles on composing the perfect query letter, choosing the right literary agencies, paying attention to the kind of material on the market, and followed a myriad of other advice. I have tried many variants and forms of query letters. I pay attention to agents that represent writers I like and whose topics match mine. These pieces of wisdom and logic assure me that agents are interested in accepting and marketing my work; after all, that is how they make money.

Perhaps then, the ones I tried are independently rich.

Perhaps I need to be independently rich and self-advertise, self-market, self-publish, self-sell, and self-buy. After all, I write for myself, not anyone else! Alas, my rather ordinary and modest circumstances, combined with my total and complete cluelessness about this process will allow no such indulgence.

My writer friend and I have agreed that it is time for us to find a proper agent for our finished projects. Of course, we have no idea how to land one. On Facebook, I see thousands of prompts that promise to stir the Muse. Many articles offer advice about how to keep writing, the importance of it. There are suggestions about places an aspiring wordsmith could disappear to, places as impossibly beautiful as a poem from a star.

I don’t think that these articles understand: I write and will continue to write because I have no choices. Inspiration is not my problem. I do not need an ivory tower to write; my sofa is quite adequate. Finishing projects is not my problem. Accepting criticism and fixing bleeding paragraphs is also not my problem, and neither is respecting deadlines.  

If only I had a spell that moved constellations! If my patient reader commands such a spell . . . However, I realize that it would be asking for much too much to share it, like asking to spare an internal organ. I do not command the words that could frame such a thing properly.

This post goes out in hopes that it will stir the stubborn stars; perhaps, lounging and floating Vishnu-like on the Milky-Way, they might read this to idle an hour by and deign to twinkle kindly.