Strangely Selective Safai

"Maybe it's the time of year - or maybe it's the time of Man?"

Well - safai men for sure!

This is one of those archetypal posts for Diwali. Written in 2016, it could have been for just about  any recent year in this chaotic life of mine. Let's just hope that in 2020 we get to create a new archetype and provide readers with a new and far more reassuring and delightful form of entertainment. I have fought the good fight for way too long - it's time for a well-earned win!

I wonder at these discrete acts of “safai”(cleaning) that open up some zones of the house while others remain in darkness. What is it about dust and dirt that they level down so perfectly but invariably refuse to depart as one? Are they the ultimate demon or do they come to impart a profound lesson. Writing hasn’t been working as well as I wanted these past two days. My head is in a whirl as this is the fifth or sixth rapid-stream I managed to trap and lock away on the page for posterity. Even your next moment is posterity. And it is already the remote past before you can even look it in the face. But sometimes you never confront that posterity as you stay indefinitely in your freeze.

The senses are bombarded as the eye picks up the little things that need to be shifted around and put in their places. The things that need to be doled out to these boys/men for cleaning so we don’t miss out on anything. The pockets of dust Param missed because he worked in the dark and had very little time to do that stupendous task that had been waiting for him all of four months.

Today I have a kitschy table all of six feet by four and loaded to the very edges, like an Old Curiosity Shop in its own right. Come to think of it this might make a hit as installation art! There are some attractive objects on it, some intriguing ones, some nondescript and quite inappropriate on any kind of table. Some are in clusters of like colliding with like, while there are zones with more disparate contenders sparring for space. There are little pockets of dust that snuck away from the sweep of Param’s fingers. There are tell tale signs in grooves. But all’s good. And there is room and opportunity on/in this fascinating 6x4 mall for a fair amount of Diwali prep.

This storage-cum-kitchen-cum-dining-cum-study-cum-dumping table has metamorphosed over the years. It has played more roles than any table could have dreamt of. I’m sure no kid can ever come up with the autobiography of an old table for a school essay of the sort that this one seems eager to pour out every time it awakens from somnolence with a clean-up. It suddenly comes to life and I start to hear stories from the past and the future.
I have pictures of it draped in fancy cloth and set with exciting dishes and crystal goblets awaiting my mom’s 70th birthday dinner. It is whispering to me to get going so I can celebrate and organize a 60th birthday repast for myself. It tells me I don’t have a lot of time. It asks me whether I can dig out the heritage linen that has borne the brunt of many delightful feasts. It asks whether there will finally be room to set the rosewood chairs around it, with new seats fixed all over again out of some material that King Rat doesn’t feel like pouncing on and goring with his fangs.

It is dreadful to have a hand that says “don’t clean up after yourself, I am waiting for my moment of revenge”. Indeed my hand is in a continuous state of revenge. You realize how often you need to wash your hand or get it wet or dirty it up when you are the sole arbiter of your fortunes. Once in a while I sneak in my own revenge using my ingenuity and the weapons gifted by my Devas - Sailesh, Paramesh and the two Ravis. And numerous other friends and help mates who rejoice in my glory, though they may be struggling to balance their own lives.
Indeed there are times when I feel the whole world is rooting for my book, for the perceived and projected glory of my home where past meets future in a cocktail that nourishes as it excites. The battle of the table and its rescue from demons that have captured it, continues. This Kali Puja the battle will be enacted in part all over again, in the ever-recurring hope that by the next one, the battle would have been won.

Somehow, from some hidden recesses, the heritage home is emerging in slow but sure rebirth! Enjoy the pictures. I leave you to figure out just what kind of art installation/exhibit/shop/fairground/warehouse this may be. It looks a cross between Northern Park pre Puja and Northern Park post-Puja and a pantry being emptied out before the pest control arrives. Just what phase of evolution/devolution this may be is only just revealing itself. Enough to say it is an archetype, a dynamic mandala for much that has happened and much that will happen yet.

PS1 The hand that finds periodic mention, has been assailed by all manner of allergic rashes

PS2 Karan Vohra has said "The picture is so nice". Y'all had better appreciate it!

His Poochness and An Oothappam

This one was one of the early Pages from September '16

It somehow never found its way to the collection of Pages re-invented as posts on this space in '18. It seems like there's no time like now to bring this one into its own. This is for the ones who find my haphazardness and moody musings a fun ride. There are more coming up from the early days and I will pop them out in a random order. Stay and play!

26/9/16  - Pre Puja

The pages have been delayed thanks to my tucking into a massive coconut Uthappam from Anuradha. I am breaking the over-3-week abstinence from outside food, to risk it. I hope the remaining 20% of the hand-under-recovery will take it well.*1
I am a person who has a reasonable amount of stuff outside and it just doesn’t work out for me if I am forced to stop it altogether.
Part of the motivation to haul myself out into a sweaty pre-evening was the desire to sweat – yes that sounds funny but I have been struggling for so long with a dry skin that I felt it might just be the remedy to help my skin breathe and recover. Well I forgot that I had moisturized during the day and when I got back from my wanderings I was actually a slippery, dripping mess. A few minutes in the shower after drying out the sweat helped cool me down and I attacked the oothappam. On my walk home I was actually writing this post in my head.
My purpose in heading out was twin. I wanted to check out the progress of the pandals. I was deeply disappointed.

The roads are a shabby mess. Tree branches lie felled around the trees (some kind of meaningless routine to get them out of the way of electric lines and a disaster each time it repeats) and people are piling trash atop those heaps of drying wood. It isn’t raining and these could mean a fire hazard. Mahalaya is two days away but the roads are more pot holed than ever.
A bored looking man is walking – yes walking – his hen on the vast field on which a team in blue pretending to be Team India are playing some form of cricket. Meanwhile a team of workmen are dodging them and trying to assemble the grand roller coaster whose pictures and videos were on CTT last year . A few bored looking men are fiddling around with nondescript strips of board in anemic white, being used to assemble a gateway of sorts to a box like pandal that appears nothing more than a rudimentary structure - some kind of framework with plastic sheets draped all over it. It has a four sided peaked roof. I have no idea what miracles they plan to work in the seven days they have in hand to deliver a finished products. On being questioned the men shake their heads and say they have no idea what they are helping build. “I suppose it will emerge as we work” says one of them. They look weary and not welcoming in the least. I move on thinking the clumsy mess of wood and fiber is hardly photoworthy. I move past to check out another pandal that looks sad and tired but somewhat more aesthetic.
I wonder what my fair city is coming to. It hasn’t even rained. I dread to think of what will happen if it comes down.

So I leg it back home, swinging the uthuppam along in my shopping bag, purloined from Parameshwar’s Moti. He fetches these goodies for me which she rarely keeps count of. As I approach the post office, dodging stones and rubble and a pesky mail van, I come across a sight for sore eyes. Yes it’s a pooch sleeping on a jeep. I get ahead of the mail van but it just keeps tailing me like a monster and I am forced to quickly skirt around the jeep. Meanwhile pooch has stirred and I curse at the lost opportunity to click him. Guess what I see as I get in front of the jeep and turn around to get my bearings. His Poochness has dodged the disturbance from the van’s honking and revving, to jump on to the roof of the jeep and promptly fall asleep. Well that wasn’t a jeep at all but I couldn’t find a better word for that thingy – one of those non descript SUVs. A jeep had personality. My mom learnt driving in one!

Writing this has diverted me from the uthappam but fortunately coconut uthappams from Anuradha taste good cold. And their heavyweight chutney even better when fried – yes fried!!

Signing out at 6:32 and attempting for the 10th time to send the pooch from the phone.
Whew – loaded! Chloe can be such a pest.

Edit 7:07 pm
Want to add that the outing was possible also because three days of doing this exercise(Pages) has energized and motivated me. I feel more like my usual self, with my eagerness for life and writing restoring itself. Also I have friends wanting to hang out with me for Puja and that's a good sign. I had just done lamenting my loneliness and even if noone else reads these, I believe the universe is doing so. Now I hope the universe heeds my plea for household help during those Ravi-less days.

Am rushing out of here once and for all because every time I enter edit mode, I have a strong temptation to fix typos and punctuation, not to speak of redundancy in sentences. But that might defeat the purpose of the exercise. At any rate I have those basic instincts that drive a writer towards a finished product, indeed a product with finesse!

*1  Current readers will be over familiar with the dreadful allergies I have been beset with over the past 3 months. The hand I keep referring to had a major outbreak of rash in '16. Looks like '19 has turned out to be a similar year. These hands pop up in almost all my posts as does a phenomenon called The Leak. In the absence of these two monstrosities that have hounded me, I'd probably have written not 51 posts but 5.1 books in the 5 years of Unwritten's lifetime. *1

PS1 For those friends who may have missed the intro on my FB profile - "I write, therefore I am" :)

PS2 Parameshwar and Ravi Jr are the two stalwarts who keep this mad hatter's house from actually turning into a madhouse - NOT!

PS3  This has been minimally edited for readability on 20/10/19

Words Unspoken, Tears Unshed

I had written this in September '17 in response to a call for articles on World Mental Health Day. Gauri Lankesh had just been brutally murdered and the event somehow pressed a personal trigger for me to pour this out. Our lives were hardly similar except for our sharing the traits of subversiveness and irreverence - in my case a whole lot less courageous/foolhardy than hers. It has taken me a while to share this publicly - half a dozen friends have read it - because I could not bear the hate that was being hurled at Gauri by a section of the populace that were too close to me for comfort. Perhaps there is no place like here and no time like now for this share. Credit goes to Karan Vohra for pushing me to write this and for critiquing it as well. Thanks dear man! Maybe it was not meant for the Buzzfeed folks to read but I dedicate it to the folks at the Write And Beyond Group

Gauri

The shocking murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh and the two tributes that were written in her honor, triggered my writing this account. Many people including myself, met Gauri through her death. And most vividly through what - surprisingly for many - her ex-husband and his second wife wrote in her honor and is being widely shared on social media.

The tributes to Gauri brought to mind the acute post traumatic symptoms that two people I know went through - one of these, a woman called Aparna (more about her name in a bit) who grieved her brother and the other a boy Jason aged 13. I’ll share Jason’s story first as this was his first encounter with mental illness and my connection with his case, though powerful, was fleeting.

Jason

Over forty years ago, thirteen year old Jason’s mom died of cancer leaving the teen traumatized by his mom's journey through cancer and chemotherapy, in her sister’s care. Jason’s aunt adopted him and gave him the best of everything. But he retreated to the basement and began to pull out his hair. They turned to their doctor for help, and of course he was placed in a mental health unit of the local hospital for therapy and care, understanding that he was now living through his mother's illness, baldness, and death.

The family kept it hidden, as if there was something wrong with being treated for stress and mental health issues.

Happily for Jason, his time at the mental health facility helped him to understand what was happening to him and how he was mirroring the trauma he had watched his mother go through. There are many things we miss around grieving and they lead to mental illness. The case of Jason (the ending was happy and he is doing well in life) is heartbreaking but it made me sit up because it reminded me of a recent friend, Aparna, who went through a phase of self-damage that clearly came from an urge to self-destruct. Often we destroy in our bid to create anew, and the impulse behind it is an unvoiced cry to be guided in a creative direction.

Aparna

Aparna was nearly 43 when she lost her brother. She had gone through bouts of mental illness in the recent past. She had been under treatment for acute anxiety and depression that first showed itself as an episode of acute panic, disorientation and symptoms of heat exhaustion some years earlier. She had had an uneven health record, with chronic physical problems - loosely termed “psychosomatic” by physicians. They started manifesting as acute allergies - that started almost as soon as she attained financial independence. The most noteworthy symptom was psoriasis or constant shedding of skin, a process that she actively promoted in a self-destructive manner. And it would be apt to mention at this point that her name(it was the name they called her by at home and she wasn't known by it outside) Aparna, by coincidence, means “leafless.” What had gone unrecorded even by her doctors, was a long phase in her late teens when she had first shown aberrant, almost violent behavior originating in unexpressed fears and a staunch refusal to express what troubled her when attempts were made to draw her out. She revealed this towards the very end of her therapy sessions years later.

Aparna’s therapist had identified her father’s death and her sense of insecurity on losing him, as the starting point of her problems. Her worst ever symptoms manifest themselves after the shocking loss of her brother six years later, in emotionally distressing circumstances. At her worst she suffered from acute agoraphobia that touched an all time low when she was terrified of getting out of bed. On a rare good day she was reasonably functional within familiar surroundings. She consistently refused medication, but was somehow persuaded to see her former psychiatrist who resumed anti-depressant medication that she was already familiar with. The symptoms reduced and she became more functional over time. Outwardly everything seemed alright and she made tentative forays in the direction of her profession after a long hiatus.

However something was missing. And that came to light when I happened to interact with her by chance, many years later at a workshop on dealing with loss. Aparna was by now an activist and a grief counselor. And she revealed to me that her psychiatric symptoms had blown up entirely because of suppressed grief. Aparna had not let herself grieve her brother. She had turned away from grieving in a bid to protect her bereaved mother from breaking to pieces from post traumatic stress. Or rather that was what she told herself. Sadly the truth was, that Aparna’s own vulnerabilities dating back to well before her father’s death, were still in the closet. They were connected with people dear to her with whom her relationships had been not always the best. Her own hurts were unspoken and with the passing of each person from her life, the chances to speak up about them to those persons, were lost. And Aparna’s survival was dependent on her mother being highly functional for her!

Aparna’s story took an unexpectedly happy twist when she chanced upon a film called Brokeback Mountain that broke open the floodgates and turbulently released all her suppressed emotions. The survivor of the love story between two men, Ennis Del Mar, who could neither celebrate his love when he had a chance, nor expose his grief before anybody, held a mirror before her in which her untold story and her un-shed tears confronted her poignantly. The film jolted her own closets open and flung the contents out for her to pick up, lovingly hold, nurture and rearrange. Luckily for her, her highly functional mother was alive and well enough to see her through part of her healing process.

Today Aparna is almost fully healed from her mental illness. It had always been about suppressed fear, and at its peak the fear of acknowledging and venting her grief over her brother’s loss. Her mother died a few months after she watched the film. One the observations from a physician in attendance during her last hours was that she was quite clearly suffering from high functioning depression and that highly intelligent people are more prone to concealing it well. Aparna’s mother left her own unspoken grief to her daughter to process. Everything that has followed in her life has been about finding peaceful closure and reaffirmation. Her unvoiced cry found an outlet, garnered many responses and the creative direction she was struggling to find, presented itself to her. Everyone is not as fortunate as Aparna and this is why we need to be aware of the people around us and be available to those Aparnas who may never find us if we don’t find them. Just as it was vital for Jason to get the right kind of medical help which fortunately he did in that day and age.

The Message to take from this - Recognize and Support

All losses share a common core - they need to be recognized, faced and healed. Aparna had encountered many kinds and almost always kept her reactions locked away inside her, unexpressed. Here I have confined myself to talking about the symptoms following the death of a near or dear one and ways to prevent it or alleviate them. Most of all is the need to be acknowledged and validated in that grief, by others in a supportive role.

The grieving process is different for each individual but a loss needs and deserves its due of grieving. Traditional societies prescribed a format through which this grieving could be channeled to help the bereaved persons transit into a meaningful life in the wake of a loss. These formats sadly did not always evolve in keeping with changing needs. People suffering losses through death, did not find a suitable outlet for their emotions. Much of mental illness following bereavement is caused by the absence of catharsis that grieving opens the door to. My observation is that the feelings that are released through creative and celebratory channels while embracing the inevitable pain, help the healing process best. No loss ought to be trivialized - the loss of jobs, homes, relationships, a limb or an eye, or a treasured possession that can’t be replaced. They all ask to be recognized, held, soothed and made peace with even as we move to a new phase of life that follows.

Aparna’s illness was comprised of several strands, several unresolved problems, unconfronted demons that all converged to paralyze her. Like our physical health, our mental health has its ups and downs. It is not a binary of being mentally ill or well. This wavy line is interwoven with the wavy lines of physical and emotional health and there are points where there is a peak in all of them. Do they feed each other? Is one of them the "alpha" among the three that can pull the others forward or push them down. I’ve seen it vary from case to case.

I digress to mention that mental illness often takes the form of physical symptoms that can be easily confused with those of a physical disorder. The period leading to a death (often a painful losing battle with illness, sometimes a shocking accident or sudden demise) and its aftermath can be physically very demanding, leaving the people concerned with compromised immunity and a tendency to fall physically ill. That certainly happened to vulnerable 13 year old Jason, barely out of his childhood and stepping into puberty with all its attendant confusions. In the thick of post-death activities, one is usually on a high and keeps going till one fine day, exhaustion overpowers. This is when sorrow comes into its own and seizes whatever is left of the will to fight. And this is when we are alert to be on the ready to receive and hold up the one in need.

An elegy for Gauri Lankesh

I close by returning to her. The tributes to her reminded me of the unsung eulogies, the unspoken tributes for lost loved ones, frozen in my own head. While she remained the best of friends with the one from who she had technically parted ways - her ex-husband - I have lost the ability to relate to many in my family because of the absence of shared grieving, something we have consistently failed at. And her death as well as Aparna’s flourishing life are a wake up call to me to unfreeze and go forth!

Footnote: Aparna’s Name

Aparna told me that shortly after her major catharsis and her renewed confidence in her regeneration and progress, she discovered that her name literally meaning “leafless” in Sanskrit and having many related stories in mythology, could have powerful interpretations for her personally. The jolt of her mirror-moment made her shed her metaphorical leaves in one go. It was frightening and she was exposed all at once to the elements. But she swiftly felt within her, the warmth of new, strong leaves emerging like numerous wings she could fly with. The related stories in mythology too have happy endings of hope and abundant life.

PS - I leave you to interpret the leaf images as you choose. Leaves have always fascinated me in all their stages

Of Scents and Senses

Write It, I Must! 

Amazon Baba did not approve of my review of The Scent Of God and I sincerely hope Blogger Baba won't decide to emulate them. Below is the review I felt like writing and wrote.

Unwrapped

A potent, poignant and most unusual love story

 
Saikat Majumdar came to my awareness quite unexpectedly via his foreword to the anthology
 "Escape Velocity", an offering of short stories in thirteen diverse voices, compiled and published by Kiranjeet Chaturvedi. And I picked up his latest book The Scent Of God straight thereafter on Kindle because I was so very curious about the theme as well as about the author, whom I have since been honored and delighted to meet more than once at his Kolkata readings and launch. Add to all that, the tantalizing effect of the exquisitely designed cover that has its own powerful and poignant story and I was helplessly hooked.

There is so much to say about the book so I’ll start by quoting what I said to Saikat the moment I finished reading.
“The book was everything AND nothing like I thought it would be. I am recovering from two things right now - one is sensory overload and the other is my tears through the last three chapters. What an ending! The after effects are like waking from a dream. You are not quite sure you are back in reality – if there is any such thing.”

I read The Scent Of God with three of my inner eyes open - one was the eye of my inner gay boy, another the eye of my inner rebel and the third of my inner mystic-ascetic. I blanked out all reviews and conversations from my mind as I dived in. I chose a good-eye-day (I have eye problems) and consumed it in one huge gulp, non-stop. I allowed the book to take me wherever it willed and it was full of surprises. I felt this deep hum in my being when it ended.

The book is a sensory, sensual, erotic and emotional roller coaster, yet written in such a deceptively calm tone. There is so much inner turbulence that he has conveyed with his delicate Bengali sensibility – something that instantly connects with my own.

There are passages I want to go back to and savor all over again. Saikat uses words and metaphors in such unusual ways. Like this one. "What a beautiful tiffin box it was. Old, but old like a house in which families had lived for many, many years."

Anirvan’s speeches make some magnificent stand-alone pieces of writing. I would love to use them in a writing class but I'll have to start a writing class first. The book is a bold, brilliant, beautiful work of art that had me quite charged me up as it ended in a wonderfully unexpected yet appropriate non-resolution that I believe left some other readers frustrated, but me all the more excited in anticipation of the future.

And I love the way the author rips both the political parties apart, almost picking at them vulture-fashion.

There is so much I could say about the book but the less spoilers we put there for readers, the better they will connect and feel the impact of the book. My own reading experience brought a special awakening in me for which I thank the author. I eagerly await his next offering even as I plan to dive into the previous one – The Firebird.

PS1 - As always the post is replete with links. Feel free to visit them. That's why I put them there.

PS2 - Kiranjeet, late though it may be, I have not forgotten and will write about my experience of the phenomenon of Escape Velocity on this space as soon as I can.

BONUS: That Mystery Called Monastic Celibacy