The Himalayas – Between Heaven and Earth
RIP Skipper
It was one of those dreaded early morning phone calls. Only this time it was my mother, calling from the ground floor of our 2-unit house. Her calm, tender and concerned voice said, “Skipper is gone”. We had been awaiting this moment, even praying for it in the last few days and yet when it came, it seemed too soon.
Around thirteen years ago, Skipper was brought to this house as a teeny –weeny scared puppy, to be a watchdog. But with time, she became our companion and friend, my mother’s sole- mate during the days when she was alone at home. As she grew into a beautiful, affectionate dog, who welcomed strangers and friends alike into the house; she also ruled over the house, breaking rules slyly when we were not watching. Sleeping on the bed or sofa, which she knew was out of bounds for her. Grabbing a biscuit on a plate kept for a guest who had dropped in for tea, licking the kid’s faces when they bent down to tie their shoe laces; running out of the gate and looking at us expectantly to chase her back in.
But the past few months, as she battled one health problem after another, suffering in mute silence, only her eyes belying the pain, I wondered if it was the right thing, bringing a pet home, pampering and protecting her, turning her into this soft delicate creature? On her last day, as she walked around restlessly, rejecting food, refusing to sit or be fed and at one point, when she finally rested for a few minutes at my feet giving me the look –tired, but undefeated, knowing her end was near, I knew that it was the right thing. She had lived a good life, bringing joy into ours as well as sharing our joys and woes. Now it was our turn to share her woes.
We prayed that she didn’t suffer for long and now that she’s gone, we can already feel the void which will only grow in the days to come. We won’t have to safeguard our food from her anymore or worry about her fur shedding on the sofas. But we will miss her greeting at the gate – a wag if we‘re on time or a loud bark if we’re late. We will miss the pitter-patter of her paws on our wooden floor every morning at breakfast time waiting for her share of egg. We will miss the times when she would stand in front of us, butt -facing, asking for a butt-massage!
We will miss you Skipper, you will always have a special place in our heart.
RIP!
Aptly put! A succint, spot-on article about how women are percieved.
Guest post byVEENA VENUGOPAL
To me, the most memorable scene in Dev D is the one where Paro takes a mattress from home and ties it to her cycle. When she reaches the edge of the field, she abandons the cycle, lifts the mattress on her shoulder and marches to the clearing where she lays it down and waits for her lover. There are no words spoken and the camera holds her face close. Her expression is one of intense seriousness. You can see her desire is a field force of intensity that fuels every step. She is determined to see it through, to let that desire take over herself completely; not surrender to it but to let it explode out of her. You know that when she meets Dev, the sex would be passionate and powerful. And yet, in the south Delhi multiplex where I was watching the…
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Musings at Dawn
Something struck the lamp on the wall.
I know .That doesn’t make sense. But that’s what my hand just wrote of its own accord. Its 5.45 am, not too early, but early enough for me to be groggy to write. This is the first time I’ve attempted writing at this time of the morning right after waking up. It’s still dark. I’m writing in the dark in my dairy sitting in bed. Three reasons- 1 -I like writing in bed, 2-I don’t want to switch on the light as it will disturb the rest of the family; 3- writing on the PC/laptop in the dark with the light shining into my eyes gives me a headache.
I know I will be typing all this later into the laptop, but I don’t mind the effort, I mind the headaches. So, I write in the dark in the dairy. In fact, I can even write with my eyes closed (another Arjuna in the making?); the hand familiar with the formation of letters doesn’t need light or guidance. The only challenge is to keep up with the thoughts running astray.
This is an exercise advised by an author for amateur writers. The exercise is to write down thoughts, anecdotes or stories, whatever it is that comes into one’s mind the first thing after waking up. I wonder –can writing be taught or is it an inborn talent. I should hopefully know in the next few months. I spend all day long, writing, reading and dreaming up stories. The kids have been upset with me for not spending enough time with them, not giving them enough attention. What to do, sometimes in the midst of a board game, an idea strikes and I scamper off to find my laptop just like a child who’s just spotted the ice-cream truck on a hot summer day and doesn’t want to miss it. Perhaps, I should forget the ambitions, the aspirations and make the kids happy.
I hear the pitter-patter of unclipped paw-nails on the wooden floor. Skipper is up. She’ll be sitting at the foot of the stairs, waiting eagerly for one of us to come down when she’ll start wagging her tail that will go thup-thup on the wooden floor. This wooden floor is a funny thing. One can hear the squeak or shuffle of footsteps that is characteristic of each member of the house. So one knows exactly who is going in which direction and no-one can sneak up on another. That’s a good thing I suppose.
I hear a train hooting loud and persistent, perhaps warning some errant early morning walkers. An auto is spluttering the first specks of the day’s pollution, a lone crow is plaintively crying out to another non-existent one. It’s strange that we don’t hear any crows during the day, in fact no birds at all. There was a time when the Bangalore dawn was redolent with the chirping of birds, the heady fragrance of the Sampige flower. During the summer hols in slow lazy Bangalore, walking down sankey lake, we used to admire the shaded tree-lined boulevards , sprawling houses and the cool soothing breeze carrying flowery perfumes . My cousin and I would pick a house and hope that there would be a handsome guy in there we could marry- just because we fell in love with the house. Now, of course I have my own ‘sprawling house’ with my own ‘handsome’ guy in it.
A breeze is whooshing causing some of the windows to creak (they badly need oiling- I‘ve spent many a night in disturbed sleep due to those creaking windows). I hear the clitter-clatter of vessels, the tic-tic –ticing of the automatic burner. The maid is here. She has turned on the gas to heat the milk. It’s time to end my little world of musings; time to get out of bed, get kids and their lunch-boxes ready. Another new day, another new attempt at finding voice.
My interview with author/journalist Sobha Narayan
http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/longing_to_belong
Longing to Belong
By Deepa Padmanaban 
February 2013
Shoba Narayan is living in India and loving it. Why did Narayan, a successful author who spent some of her “best years” in the United States, go back to her homeland—and what was her life like in this country? She has written about her experiences in a new book that was released in India recently. Another India returnee spoke to Narayan.
In her recently released second memoir, Return to India, renowned journalist and author Shoba Narayan poses this question to herself in a Shakespearean fashion, with an immigrant twist: “To be American or Indian, to return or stay?” She elucidates the challenges of an immigrant in America and the dilemma of wanting to return to the home country after living in the U.S. for almost two decades—a dilemma that every immigrant has probably faced at some point in her life.
Having made the trip to the homeland myself after living in the U.S. and encountering some of the questions especially as a parent, her book resonated with me on many levels. I decided to interview Narayan, partly to hear her unwritten thoughts and to validate my own experiences. Narayan, who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Time, won the MFK Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. She published her first memoir, Monsoon Diary: A Memoir of Recipes, in 2003.
For decades now, young Indians have been attracted by the ethos of the American dream, in pursuit of a better life and better opportunities. Narayan, too, starts off her book by expressing her staunch desire to go to the U.S., partly wanting to escape the influences of a traditional South Indian upbringing. In her usual honest and humorous style, she pokes fun at herself and her well-meaning but conservative family who try to dissuade her from going abroad. The trepidation and joy accompanying the process of applying for and getting the student visa, and finally arriving in the U.S. with a sense of relief and excitement are familiar terrain to most Indian immigrants who have gone ashore as students.
She states that “the best years of her life” were as a student in Mount Holyoke College, her first home away from home, where she explored a variety of subjects such as music composition, cross-country skiing, and theatre, and experimented with new cuisines. At the same time, she faced the challenges of an immigrant student—living on a tight budget and trying to make ends meet by doing odd jobs. I ask her how living in the U.S. as a student helped her personally or professionally. She replies,“As a girl growing up in India, there were too many voices in the head—too many people telling what to do and what not to do. Living geographically away allowed me to find myself. It was a liberating experience. I think that everyone should have the gift of foreign education if they can afford it, to explore different cultures and open one’s mind.”
While she embraced all aspects of American culture at Mount Holyoke, it was when she moved to Memphis for a master’s degree that she chanced upon the concept of “straddling two cultures.” As she interacted with Indian families who had assimilated into the multicultural ethos of America at work but came back to Indian homes and socialized with like-minded Indian families, she also became aware of the apparent generation gap—what she terms as a “gaping hole” between India-born parents and their America-born children.
And it was after she started her own family (after an arranged marriage) when her daughter was born that the first conflict between Indian and Western values rose in her mind. She was worried about the mixed messages her daughter was receiving from her—her role as a traditional “Indian bahu” in front of the Indian uncles and aunts and an aggressive feminist in the presence of Americans. In a bid to inculcate Indian values, she even tried to assume a sartorial identity, wearing saris every day and taking her daughter to the temple, but the phase didn’t last long. Though her husband believed that it was possible to achieve the best of both worlds, she felt one couldn’t choose both. But aren’t there many Indians in the U.S. who are able to achieve a balance between the two cultures, I ask her. She replies, “Yes, certain Indian communities do seek out cultural experiences actively for their children such as Bal Vihar or Bharatnatyam classes, mostly in areas with a large Indian base. But it’s the little things that mattered to me—the familiar sights and smells of childhood, the social fabric in India that allowed a casual interaction between friends and neighbors, and the luxury of dropping off one’s kid at a neighbor’s or aunt’s place at short notice.”
Gradually, Narayan encountered the “moving to India”question as other young Indian couples discussed the booming economy back home and their plans of returning home. She had moved to New York by then and witnessed the chaos that ensued after 9/11. So, my next question to her is: Does she think that 9/11 played a role in Indians returning? After all, until then, very few actually made the journey back though the dream of returning home remained. Narayan pauses before saying, “I think yes. America never had a Department of Homeland Security before. It was unheard of. America had tightened its borders to outsiders. But then there was the recession in the U.S. which hurt or helped depending on who or where you were. And it was also the booming economy, the buzz of entrepreneurship in India that attracted people here.”
Eventually, after years of introspection and discussions, a job opportunity for the husband brought them closer home, first to Singapore and then to India. The book ends with the author and her family making the decision to move back to India. She doesn’t touch upon her experiences on returning home, but I ask her if the journey had gone as she had expected—did the children learn Indian values? She says, “It did not happen in a structured way as I had anticipated. But rather in a nebulous but organic way, through stories narrated by grandparents, watching Grandmother drawing kolams or breaking into a classical Carnatic song. Living in India makes you realize that you’re not the center of the universe, makes you selfless and forces you to think in a multipronged fashion. Here you learn to live with a certain lack of control. Besides, here I can walk into their school wearing a sari without causing them any embarrassment!”
Narayan says her book was in the works for about 10 years. This insightful and poignant memoir, with a basic theme of family, culture, and identity, is sure to resonate among all immigrants, those who are living abroad and those who have moved back. In the end, it is also the story of a person whose ideas and opinions change with the vicissitudes of life, but whose value systems remain the same.
Belated Happy New Year!
A Belated Happy New year to my blogger friends. A month of the new year has already passed. Time flies quickly. This is my first post in the new year. I had taken a hiatus from blogging, as I was busy with stuff. Good stuff.
I was attending a writing workshop – to see if I can do something with my love for writing. Between attending classes, reading , writing and critiquing assignments and the usual routine of home and kids, blogging took a back seat.
But I’m back now. Do bear with me as I catch with your posts and slowly crawl back to my blogging schedule too.
A thought provoking tribute to the anonymous women victims.
That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper.
Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand. The Mathura rape case. The Vishaka guidelines. The Bhanwari Devi case, the Suryanelli affair, the Soni Sori allegations, the business at Kunan Pushpora. Each of these, the names of women and places, mapping a geography of pain; unspeakable damage inflicted on women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, if you want, create a constantly updating map of violence against women.
For some, amnesia becomes a way of self-defence: there is only so much darkness you can swallow. They turn away from all the places that have become shorthand for violence beyond measure…
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Let us channelise the anger
The 23 year old Delhi rape victim has succumbed after putting up a brave fight. The citizens had expressed their outrage in the last week, but we need to channelise it. Justice Verma has asked citizens for suggestions on how to deal with sexual harrasement and rape. Reblogged here from Indian homemaker’s website.Some of the suggestions by readers:
1.Make rape a non-bailable offence, 2. Create registry of sex offenders. 3. Sensitise Police force 4. Set up rape crisis centre
Laws and course of action need to change.
Photo Challenge: Changing seasons
Seasons in India aren’t as pronounced as in the America or Europe.Though, we do have the Monsoons and the scorching summers to boast about !!
Now,its officially Winter – In some places, winters can be quite harsh and mild in others. But what is common mostly are the drying branches and the thick fog or mist enveloping the morning air .
The Western Ghats – 3 weeks earlier.
This time of the year also heralds the North East monsoons , as the name suggests mainly on the East Coast, bringing to life gushing waterfalls and green vegetation.
The Eastern Ghats – last week
The Daily Post’s challenge for the week is ‘ Changing Seasons’.
Mother
Mother,
Witty and wise
You gave me a perfect life.
With your X-ray eyes
You always knew what’s inside,
Worry or Joy
You were there by my side,
With arms –a-welcoming
Be it day or night.
You were patient with me
When I couldn’t tell wrong from right.
It seems only yesterday
When you were my guiding light
But now it’s my turn
To make sure you’re alright!
Perceptions of a reluctant Homemaker 