Reading now: Vine of Desire

Currently immersed in: " The Vine of Desire", an excellent read and a sequel to "Sister of My heart" by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
I started reading it today, imagery and sensitivity of the writer seem to
over-whelm me. Here's a glimpse.

Excerpt 1:
"There is no point torturing yourself over what's happened already," I say.
Useless words, falling between us like lopsided snowflakes. Melting.

Excerpt 2:
Her eyes fall on the slide, where the older children are playing. She crawls toward it, then tries to stand. She's on her feet, swaying precariously on the uneven sand. She takes one step then another. She's walking-its her first time...Then she loses her balance and sits down with a bump. Sudha sees none of this.
......Small tragedies, the hairline cracks in our relationships.

Back

Note: Long one to compensate for the absence. This is the beginning of something larger, so do give me your comments.

The square verandah in the center of the house was unchanged. The rusted iron grills on top filtered the sunlight seeping in. Red chilies were being dried on an old piece of white homespun cotton.
There was an unusual burst of activity, bags of mangoes were being loaded into the store-room and laid down on bright yellow hay, which lay shimmering in the bright light.
“Meera, don’t stand near the store room. It’s not good for your asthma.” It was hardly obvious that she was referring to her twenty-three year old, I sighed to myself. As the eldest daughter-in-law amma seemed to be caught in a role that defied time.
I continued walking about the house and opening the thick wooden doors, observing the long cracks and crevices that I hadn’t known when I was younger. The house had lost part of its majestic charm and grown mellow with time. The long hallway was bare most of all because of the missing massive swing. It used to support all my cousins and me.
The tall pillars that separated a portion of the hall were dull grey now. Leaning against a pillar I felt the granite cold against my skin and rested my head.
“Meera, is that you?”
I turned around to see face Lakshmi. Her oval face neatly outlined against the jet black of her hair. She was radiant in a deep blue cotton saree. I was too taken aback to respond to her, and her face drooped as she gestured animatedly that she wouldn’t speak to me. I laughed aloud and grabbed her in a bear hug. Her eyes were glistening as she blinked continually and resumed her talk.
“I thought you would become one of those snobs and forget all about me.” There was no tone of self-pity in her voice and I sat down next to her. She was slightly alarmed and looked around for a chair.
“Enough about me. I want to know what's happening with you and to your plans of opening your own shop?”
I was trying consciously not to sound patronizing, I was always aware of the lop-sided relationship we shared even when I knew I could trust her with my life.
“What are u kidding akka? I am getting married soon.” Her eyes were dark and I could not read if it was disappointment or anger in her voice.
I waited for her to say something and resisted pressing her for details.
“Do you want to get married then? Do you still want to run away with us to our house?”
I smiled to lighten her mood and draw her back to her cheerful self. She was sullen and shook her head repeatedly.
“Meera, I made payasam, and your favorite ulundu vadai. Why don’t you bring Lakshmi and come to the backyard?” I sighed reflecting on my strict diet regime, which fell apart at patti's feeblest attempts. My resolve to reprimand her for over-doing her hospitality dwindled as I approached the kitchen. The aroma of roasted elaichi and cashew wafted past me as I walked the stretch from the hall to the backyard. As I turned and looked right ahead of me, I once again marveled at the straight doors opening one after the other leading to the front porch. This queer architecture still puzzled me.
Lakshmi stood rooted for a while and joined me tucking the free end of her saree hurriedly, as though she were going to get cracking at some physical task. I smiled and she looked with a strange pre-occupation that struck me as unfamiliar.
The veranda was cleanly swept, the water tank freshly painted stark white but the garden was overgrown with weeds and hedges. I recalled the fondness with which I had planted a small neem plant. My cousin had watered it devotedly until it bloomed with age; substantial and protective with its massive shadow. The bitter smell of crushed neem sprinkled in the yard mingled with the sweetness of payasam rising from the smoke inside. Patti was skeptical of all things electrical and technical; she kept their usage to the very minimum. The firewood made her eyes water, but she beamed over a brass vessel of the sweet liquid when she saw us. Lakshmi had already busied herself clearing the kitchen.
I bent over to sit next to the wall when patti interrupted, “That’s a light colored dress, you better be careful. Now go sit on the cot outside, I will fetch the food.”
I waved my hand and insisted on helping her with the payasam, neatly pouring it into cups with small spoons in them. Lakshmi stood and watched me before following us outside.
Lakshmi sat on a low stool a little distance away and patti sat next to me. She couldn’t drink the sweet milk because of her sugar complaints, she remained quiet and distant. Suddenly she touched my hand and stroked it gently with her wrinkled fingers. I felt a lump in my throat, and sensed my awkwardness in the situation. I was still wary of intimacies and thought of myself as a independent person. Patti did not understand those terms, her love for her dozen children and their families had no bounds. Her constant complaints about the infrequent business-like visits of my father grew from an expectation of closeness and intimacy that was common in her times.
I watched the moon rising above the braches of the neem leaves and barely heard patti talk about the fields that I hadn’t visited in 10 years. Lakshmi listened and kept her head bent. When she put her bowl down patti finally spoke to her,
“Lakshmi you should help me clear the old gunny bags and drop them by the shop when you go home.”
She only nodded in reply but it wasn’t a sure yes. Or so I thought, I was beginning to see the small changes that time had brought in me and this girl, who I now felt I barely knew.
I took leave from patti to go with Lakshmi for a stroll along the fields. Her tired eyes grew smaller in disapproval, young girls that too unmarried taking a walk in the evening was still unthinkable to her. Mother seemed to be far from helpful, running accounts of payments of the mango bearers. I smiled as I found my way out, “ But Palani will be there to show us around , wont he?” I refered to the old gardener who lived a stones throw away from our fields, I still called him by name.
We spoke little along the path. The road seemed longer as we couldn’t take the short cut we often adopted from the backyard of the ice-cream man's house. There was a time when he was the sole seller of ice-creams- home made ones that dripped with syrup, making our tongues frushia pink. He was sitting on the front steps when we passed by, his hand resting on the broken edge of its cemented edges. He would have recognized my cousin, she used to visit patti more frequently than I did.
“So when is the marriage?” I taunted Lakshmi with a wink.
“They have to find a man who won’t ask too much money. They say I am much too educated.” With her high school education she was among the more educated girls of her caste.
“Lakshmi, you can tell me if there is anything I can do.” I spoke earnestly.
She was not moved, not resigned either. She was not too full of pride to refuse help, but I didn’t press her on about this.
“I don’t have many dreams, not because I shouldn’t. But because I simply don’t.” She stopped and pondered for a while. “You don’t expect me to sit and cook for my husband do you? I am going to live just like this, for myself, someday save enough money to buy a sewing machine.” She said it simply and for a moment I envied her.
I couldn’t subtract fate from my calculations, even when I was more in control of my future and decided my own choices. I wouldn’t exchange places with her, but I couldn’t stop thinking of her simple answers to adversity.
The fields were golden with dried rice plants, and we could hear the cuckoos hiding in the tall tamarind trees. The lanky frame of Palani emerged at the gate, followed by a tawny kid who carried a long stick in his little hands.

Before you came by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

(Translated fromUrdu by: Agha Shahid Ali)
Song from 99.9 FM
Singer: Zia Mohyeddin

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don't leave now that you're here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

Courtesy: Poets.org

Familiar Part -1

After leaving Geeta at the school she had to return to work, by noon she would have to go to her second job at the village mill. She stood near the gate, looking over the fence to see her young daughter running to the rope swings.
The fence was made of thorn branches cluttered in bunches that swung against the winds in fierce defiant jolts. The red earth of the play ground rose up in gusts and she squinted to see clearly.
As she walked away she looked back once again at the red tiled building, its squat structure was standing uncomfortably in the background of the greenery. The voices of the workers rose higher as she approached the broad tamarind tree under which they gathered to be instructed about the day’s work. She sat absently in a corner, not wanting to speak.
“You should rest your legs, the accident was so recent.”
Her worried friend Kamala walked up to her.
Money was not enough, the house was mortgaged twice. Work was scarce. But it wouldn’t help to discuss all this. Instead they proceeded to gossip about the new daughter-in-law in Pattammal’s house.
Then the rain started pouring, steadily drizzling at first and then, beating hard against the strong coconut branches. She could hear the hustle but she was running in another direction. Her clothes were damp, legs covered in sludge and face dripping with water when she reached the school. The roof was leaking, and the girls were hovering in corners, covering their slates with the edges of their skirts.
She carried Geeta out of the shelter with her thin cotton saree wrapped arouand her head. Her limbs were cold against her stomach.

Kafka says

"Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it."

Any thoughts on this?

Find some of Kafka's transalted works here.

Sulekha's Tale

They moved to Chennai, it used to be Madras then. Suelkha, her two younger sisters and her brother who was still a toddler now had the ground level quarter, next to the squat compound wall at the government Municipality campus. They had two big shady mango trees at the backyard but they didn’t have the perfectly shaped ripe, yellow mangoes like the trees in Tiruchy.

Today evening Amma prepared for her Friday visit to the temple. They take a small bag and place a container with oil, a box of match-sticks, alongwith some bananas and a purse full of coins. As Sulekha walks reluctantly besides her mother you can hear her mumble songs. It’s almost a habit to her, very involuntary weekly habit.

Sulekha is the eldest one; she had the almond shaped eyes, and dark ebony skin of her mother. She vividly remembers the elation in the house when her father got the job at the government office. Her father’s four sisters had gathered for a ‘farewell’, they even scripted a long list of things he was to parcel for the coming Diwali. Now he writes them long letters but he is worried he can’t send them any gifts.

She is oldest among the dozen kids stuffed into an auto-rickshaw on the way to school. She sits with her yellow ribbon fluttering; knees awkwardly bent holding a six year old in her lap. She collects their bags and holds all their tiffins, and hands them out as soon to the little ones when they reach school.

Sulekha doesn’t speak much, her teachers complain often. There is noise around her all the time maybe she doesn’t know if she will be heard.

Exceprts

From a book i really enjoyed reading:

“But even after her words were folded and put to one side, they would continue staring at each other in the knowledge that the endurers of a common fate have an association that outlives calamity and joy, strengthens over time, and deepens into a clarity that allows them to accept that love was nothing but the fragile excuse that enjoined them in the first place, and that after its cessation, after the haunting emptiness of its passing, this silence they were now sharing was, in fact, nothing short of divine eloquence.”


"There are mercies in this life so small and humble that they would
break you more easily than the cruelties ever would."

- The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Healing

They say open wounds heal faster...

Writer's Tale

The roads of my village, filled with rustic mysteries, the bustling complicated lives of the big cities I lived in, the pool of faces that drift aimlessly in this island country, all seek to be written.

I write to conceal a part of these stories, the ones you and I cannot share, like the essence of my experience that escapes you even when you read my tales.

I wander within my characters, empty of any originality, but then-is there any such thing as the quintessential individual? I am all my characters put together, maybe they are parts of me that I put together in seeking to understand me.

Ever wondered about the writer’s tale, about the torments of choosing between stories, the pleasures of living many lives, the discontent of every insufficient word? I sit by the window now trapped by the pale violet of an unknown bloom on the tree outside.

A solemn song in the backdrop is competing with the gaiety of many birds and the sluggish cars and buses revving up their engines to go uphill on the road next door. I am writing here in the moment what I have lived in parts, but never thought, now these stories are finding words, yet they get skewed by the definitive forms of words, fighting for abstraction even as they get immortalized and trapped.

There is a knock on the door, and I tentatively close the window, embarrassed at the incomplete script that solitude and I had together created. The lock on the dorm pantry has been replaced; I am reminded of the pantry regulations and informed of a new security guard who will be making rounds peering into lives, sneaking glimpses, just like me. I smile, and fidget with the doorknob, barely hiding my urge to relegate all voices outside the wooden door and return to my written world. The informer has moved on to the next door, and I am left with a morning craving for a frothy coffee, Indian style.

With the strong essence of coffee filling the limited confines of my room, I sit down to write. The world melts away, and I leave the aroma of coffee behind me as I drift into the mind of Sulekha, the little girl in a small town....

Reading

The blue Bedspread: Sublime prose, melancholic and haunting, its a book that stays with you.
Here's an excerpt of the author's interview that i find fascinatingly revealing..

q: At a book discussion for your last novel If You are Afraid of Heights, everyone else was going on about how more people should read, but you said that was an unrealistic expectation. Why?

Jha: See, the few people who are damaged enough to love reading are essentially those who are comfortable with solitude. Also, reading forces you to have both imagination and empathy – two troubling little things – so you see a bit of yourself in anything you read. And to expect all of us to be like that is ridiculous.....

Ride(revisited)

I take the same train to work everyday, and yet as I walked in I had a feeling of sudden unfamiliarity. As though I was seeing through alien eyes. Scanning my co-passengers. Thinking to myself about them. Their uncomfortable moments, their day jobs, their struggles and their drifting days. Funny we never make conversations with strangers anymore.

There was customary silence between the curt announcements being broadcasted. I could hear the ruffle of paper, strutting of high heels, even the vibrations of the base of Linkin Park from the iPod plugged into someone’s ears.

I am still taken in by the unusually flamboyant old Chinese aunties with their bright colored shoes, loose shirts with large prints, and matching cheap leather purses. They stood out in the crowd of bleak formal clothing which was sporadically jazzed up with fashionable accessories-retro-style tinted glasses, fine yet conservative jewelry, and tedious hand-bags. And then there were the anomalies, the deliberately drab or bold dresses, smiling exteriors, breaking the monotone of the sluggish days.

I gathered my bags, it was time to alight. I had forgotten to get the novel I was reading.

Chase

It’s almost palpable, this craving.
This feeling like my guts are about to spill
Frenzy of thoughts, and then stuck in doldrums, spinning, stumbling, my legs and brain.
I am chasing, this specter of a dream....

Remembering Jagada

In reply to Ammani:

She was born in 1940. The second of five children born to Vedaranyam Seshadri and Rajalakshmi ammal. She passed away after a brief illness in November 2006. How will Jagada be remembered?

Vedaranyam Sheshadri was a veteran freedom fighter, much respected in and around Srirangam. He and Rajalakshmi lived a comfortable if not luxurious life with his pension. Now Jagada was not a very normal kid in her times, she reverently read about the long struggle her father had been part of, and gave speeches on how she was going to change the course of the nation when she was 14!

But things changed when she was married away after her 19^th birthday. Her marriage was important as three other sisters were next in line for marriage in quick succession.
She accepted the decision, which also meant she had to move to Mayiladudurai and the end of any hopes of a political career.

And then one day, she created Sunanda the social activist in her story for Ananda Vikatan. The thread of sequels became her schizophrenic reality, as she penned on through languid afternoons. Jagada’s husband proof-read her stories, took notes, and added his two cents worth.

Sudandira Naadu- the youth group of political activists prided themselves with the mission of restoring freedom to ‘Free India. They mobilized public opinion, held political awareness forums and led demonstrations. Megha the founder was a well known spokesperson and devout socialist. When Megha returned one day to find a courier from her source in a local magazine, she immediately opened it. They must have sent it a month ago, but her All India tour had kept her busy.

When Megha reached Jagada’s house, there was chaotic activity everywhere. Jagada’s husband walked her to a far veranda as his grandchildren were creating a ruckus in the backyard and there was bickering in the kitchen. It was nothing like a house in mourning.

“I am looking for Mani, the writer.” Megha said after she was asked for coffee.
That would be Jagada, my wife. No one knew her real name, I am surprised you have come this far seeking Mani. But Jagada is no more.”
“Oh", she paused."I have read Sunanda’s story, infact grew up with it.”
They sat in silence for a while. The two people who would remember our Jagada, and find their courage in Sunanda’s courage.

Poster boy

Old Mahabalipuram Road was awake at 5 am, not groggy but warmed up. There was activity in all corners milk vans rushing, newspaper piling and tossing, vegetables arriving in crates, and the chattering at tea kadais. Suryan FM was blaring at the street corner and the DJs voice was competing with the Ayyapan songs playing at the temple further down. Fumes rose from the coal-black tavaas, along with the sushh of the spreading maavu. Ravi sneaked closer to it for some warmth, his eyes barely open he held out his fists and rubbed the warm fingers against his face. There was a burning feeling in his stomach, the watery black coffee his mother gave him every morning still didn’t agree with him. He fished out a piece of groundnut sweet from him pocket and munched away to the municipality office.

He was asked to wait at the steps outside, while the peon went in to fetch some posters. There were few dozens of them, big and small with huge prints and pictures of the MP. Ravi was pre-occupied with thoughts of the biryani at Kannan hotel he could buy for ten rupees. If he finished posting all the posters, he might be able to sneak in for the new Rajini movie at the theatre down the lane. He whistled aloud balancing the rolls of paper on one hand.

He mentally thanked the big man who was going to visit the locality the next day, these important events always brought many small jobs that paid well. Tomorrow he would come back and hover around the office, and see if he was needed for any chores. He didn’t know how to read the bold words on the poster. He walked from one wall to another shooing cows, and sticking the posters on lamp-posts, walls, gates and all corners. He wanted to finish the work quickly.

The clouds gathered all of a sudden and he looked at the sky with dismay. What if it rained? Will the fat man with the big purse pay him for the posters? There was bustle at the street corner as a group of youth struggled to put up the long wires studded with red bulbs on both ends of the street. The wind blew hard, and the poles where the bulbs hung began to wobble. Ravi saw the fat man shouting orders and looking at the sky with his fists folded on his waist.

Notes:
kadai- small stalls set up on roadsides
maavu- batter from which dosai a south indian dish is made