Six months

Modernism or modernity, one or the other of them, taught us to abhor the cliché. To resist the comfort of periodicity, to suspect sentiment on cue. And duly we detest the 14th of February and refuse to be charmed when six year olds produce mother’s day cards from classroom assignments. Emotion can be manipulated, manufactured even; it is perhaps wise to be aware of this. But I have begun to suspect that the subconscious is far more difficult to train than our minds and that it feeds off a moss-field of regularity and cliché and simple moisture and sunlight will do the trick anytime.

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It has been six months today since my mother died. Emotion has lived on the surface of my skin during this period. I cannot say the overriding emotion has been grief; there have been times when I have felt I might burst from love or pride or gratitude or loneliness. Other times, I have been hard-pressed to classify what I have felt to beyond anything more find-tuned than plain emotion. And all of this has found release through remarkably unclogged channels in tears. I have cried a lot; copiously, instantaneously, summarily, methodically and on occasion uncontrollably. It has got a point with me where far from being surprised or embarrassed by these tears I have at times failed even to notice them till I contacted the moisture on my cheek or noted puffy eyes in the mirror.

One of the subsidiary exercises in all this crying has been to study what occasions it, or what the usual triggers are. I find that these triggers are very usual indeed - beauty, courage, music, children, kindness, renditions of love and clothes. Other than these, surprisingly to me – dates. Apart from a few birthdays I am not very much in the habit of remembering dates.

But I found myself (without having given it specific previous thought) unmitigatedly emotional for the entire day when our parents’ anniversary passed us by recently. This surprised me somewhat, like I said, because I had never really marked the day particularly, and neither had my parents.

Today again, I am brittle. What does it matter that it is six months to a day? What causes this heightened awareness? Do we subliminally need to mark time? To know when to tie knots, create nodes, lock segments and release new selves?

On days like these I like to have some hand-holding and when I reach out and find a hand it is nice.

I found this today.


All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

by Jane Hirshfield

All the difficult hours and minutes

are like salted plums in a jar.

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Being, belonging

When you’ve clocked a certain number of hours in small-town /rural India you find that you are able to expect and answer entirely personal questions from complete strangers with reasonable equanimity. A personal bio-data touching on every detail of family and belonging, marital status (reasons for said status), education, modes of income generation etc is the usual expectation, which I have learnt to submit to without much rancour, and increasingly without much thought. It has now got to a point with me where I have a ready-made spiel for each question, which I deliver almost on automaton with the same inflections, pauses and smiles. I am usually able to predict the order of the questions. With me, perhaps because it is difficult to pin down my nativity by looking at me, that is usually the subject of the first round of questions.

In places where I am generally known to have come from Hyderabad the question is usually how I came to live there. Nobody seems to believe that I have a Hyderabadi face, which is a pity because I have a very Hyderabadi heart. But of course I know that the enquiry is about the land of my genes and not the land of my heart.

Here, in West Godavari the question is its own peculiar phrase. “Yekkadandi proper?” I explain that I am a Kannadiga who lives in Hyderabad. Next comes the hazarded guess-question? “ Mee ammavallu…?” The answer to this question posed in any language has always been an unequivocal, warmed- Yes! My mother-folk live there in Hyderabad. But this time I am being caught stupidly short each time. I do say yes, after a pause, but I feel a pang of subterfuge. I feel oddly that I cannot claim a Mother-folk anymore, that those of us remaining are just folk who used to belong to my mother. But I don’t talk about this. Even the most involved questioner wants only the general circumstances of my life and not the details. I surprise myself, but I seem to understand that a recently dead mother is just a detail in my social identity.

How much we are socialised into investing in the broad strokes! I don’t doubt there are several solid reasons for that. But individually we all know that pain, pleasure, beauty, variety, sameness, love, god - are all in the details.