Our Grandma's Trunk

An object gets reduced to junk when it outlives its usefulness. Today, on Earth Day, I rescued our grandmother's trunk from such a dire fate by reclaiming it from  the mafiosic violence of an overloaded and chaotic storeroom. And, by the patient process of sandpapering the rusted exterior, and applying a new coat of paint, this 60 year old 2'x1'x0.75' hunk of metal was finally accorded a new lease of life. I chose to depict a glamorous kingfisher on the lid because of the bird's pre-dawn waking habit, a routine which our grandmother too observed rigorously until the very end.

This trunk accompanied our grandma wherever she went, be it to visit one of her seven sisters, or her own grown kids. In the case of the latter, it was mainly to help them manage a newborn baby and organize the many festivities which revolve around a birth. In fact, any occasion which demanded her diligent presence, she was there. One would hardly notice her as she moved around unobtrusively like a slow, stealthy shadow, attending to a thousand and one chores.

The trunk contained all she had: a few white cotton sarees, neatly folded, some blouses, a woolen shawl for winter, and a paltry sum of money which she would have liked to invest in the stock market. Black and quite ordinary, it was a heavy little thing and it seemed almost laughable that its content should have been so lean and simple. Just the way she was.

Beyond a smile and a quick, 'Namaste Maaji', I don't think we ever indulged in any kind of  significant conversation. I can conjure up a couple of reasons which might have given way to such reticence. Firstly, I didn't understand the dialect she spoke, and secondly speech was not her forte. 

Overwrought and bent at ninety degrees, she moved around the house straightening things up, or mending a torn dress, fixing a button, hemming a skirt...folding the laundry in a way that it wouldn't need ironing...she always found something to keep herself busy. In an era where televisions did not boom across one's living room and the radio was a means to set the time on one's watch and listen to the news on AIR (All India Radio), we never found her marooned on the island of boredom, wondering what to do with all those hours of a day. She had a bag full of unshelled watermelon and cantaloupe seeds which she had collected, cleaned and sun-dried over the long summer. If nothing else, she would sit down with a pair of tweezers, gently squeezing on the seeds, popping them open, extracting the kernel inside and storing it in bottles, to be later roasted with salt, or to be used as garnish for festival sweets.

In 1930s, in the big haveli built by our grandparents, where our father and his three siblings were born and brought up, our grandmother's day began with grinding the daily quota of wheat flour in a quern-stone and weaving cloth on a spinning wheel, two disciplines which she, along with several women of her generation, had adopted, overtly as an expression of self-reliance, and covertly as a way to revolt against the British colonialism. And, this was only the wee beginning of a long day, which, for her, usually kicked off at 4 in the morning. Waking up early meant being able to sweep the house, mop the central courtyard, start the fire in the kitchen and dive into her usual set of daily tasks before the rest of the household slowly yawned and stretched itself awake from its nocturnal rêverie. 

Relentless in her pursuit of perfection, she went through the day tirelessly, yet never did she thrust any expectations on anybody. She was the epitome of a Karmayogi. Karmayoga is one of the four classical spiritual paths in Hinduism, based on the 'yoga of action/work'. To a Karmayogi, work is a form of prayer. 

Eyes sunken looking into an ever-changing timelessness, skin dark brown and wrinkled like a wise old tree, she gracefully defied the seventh stage of man as described by William Shakespeare:

"Last scene of all

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere        oblivion;

Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything"

For until she breathed her last, not only did she have all her senses together, but much much more. On this Earth Day I remember her as someone who treaded so softly upon the ground that we didn't hear her pass, nor when she passed away in her sleep...yet a small trunkful of quiet memories remain in a remote corner of the mind, lingering. 

My Journey into an Epic

The Reader's Digest's A - Z dictionary with rich red binding was our prized possession. Not only it looked royal and terribly important adorning our father's beautiful rosewood study table, but for us kids, it was a gratifying reminder that English held a prestigious status in our home. This was oddly ironic since in those days, besides our father none of us was conversant in the lingua franca. 

Sharing the space with this treasure was a rather innocuous looking book, light orange, equally thick and commanding, called 'Savitri' by the great Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo. For someone like myself, mortally afraid of the English language, and convinced of its utter incongruity, the fact that our father could read and understand this magna opus, made him superhuman in the eyes of my ignorant eight-year-old self. How could anyone read, let alone understand a book of such proportion, was beyond the orbit of my comprehension. Merely lifting it equated to a workout. Yet, everytime I was asked to fetch it, my heart swelled up with pride. To be entrusted with such a hallowed and herculean task, was no mean achievement.

I still remember the deep sonorous voice of our father reading the epic poem aloud, filling the house with its long, unending verses, pausing so often to let them roll gently and settle into the pores of our consciousness. According to him, its mantric value sufficed to bring the Great Change. I would just sit there, listening, not understanding a word; my face aglow with daughterly devotion.

Little did I know that in later years, this is what I would inherit from my father: his love of Savitri. As we traveled around the world, Savitri stayed my constant companion and guiding star. I referred to it whenever I felt lost and whenever I found myself in the din of my own confusion.
Written in iambic pentameter, and consisting of 24,000 lines, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, based on the legend from the Mahabharata is a symbol of the spiritual journey and transcendence of the human soul.

As an amateur reader of the epic, and a zealous summoner of the Muse, I recently invented an exercise in which while keeping my eyes shut, I randomly open  up a page of Savitri and let my index finger lead me to a word. Whichever word it is, I endeavor to pen down a free-verse with an 'automatic writing' kind of approach. 

1.

Word: Smiting

smiting desires
into minute bits,
stone-carved and
tumultuous,
she walked on
into the world
making an offering
of every step. she
became a shadow
of all her dreams

2.

Word : labours

life labours on
seeking meaning
in the daily chore
of mere existence;
dust settles, weighing
upon the ticking of 
the clock...slowly
suffocating its
sound, drowning its
meaningless zeal,
arresting the cadaverous
mechanicalness of its
hands -- returning life 
to its foetal silences

3.

Word: Impassive

crossing man's troubled
world with heaven's dreams
the impassive sky weaves
itself into Life's nomadic light

4.

Word: questionable

questionable all that was
felt with piercing intensity,
questionable the elation of 
a slow discovery; the gnarled 
misery of unfulfilled
yearnings sweeping across
the being with typhoonic
might and hurtling me 
beyond the vistas of my 
'self'...questionable everything
and yet it flung my soul out
of its ascetic heights
to be trampled upon by
careless feet of  love

5.

Word: turbulent

barred now by a wall of dull logic
the great wave that had inundated
my being with turbulent whirls of
strange and luciferen longings 

6.

Word: pause

while the moment flies, a
dim uncertain pause
latches on to the
leaf that falls and to the shadow
climbing  stealthily up 
towards the light

7.

Word: exultant

serene and exultant
in the inkling of
a distant love
intimate like the
sweet sound of 
koïl on this sweltering
summer day: wrenchingly 
beautiful, and seductively
treacherous...

8.

Word: anguish

all he sees is
anguish and defeat
hanging like Damocles' 
sword above his beautiful
young head; the faint call of
a kite skying up into the
unfathomable heights slips
his sight, as do the 
unwrinkling of the tender
leaves when the morning
sun scatters over them its
column of amber light...
the gentle twirling of spring 
air brushes his cheek as
the butterfly flies past

ideas and their causes sets
his mind abuzz, and he
wakes up wondering why

9. 

Word: smouldering

slow and languorous,  yet
another dawn lingers over
smouldering stones and rocks,
clambers over muted hills, and
skims across brackish oceans
to kiss the world awake and 
fill it with the flutter of
expectation and delight 

10.

flaming mouth

a flaming mouth
sweeping up celestial
verses from the etheric
gold of a hesitant 
dawn, lolling them 
around its cavernous
deep and spurting
them out into the
sputtering fire
of a raging pyre

11.

Word: ungrasped

it is the unseen our

eyes search; the unheard

our ears strive in vain to

listen, and the ungrasped

that the soul seeks 

in its aeonic meanderings

12.

Word: memory

in the haze

of memory

you and i

were made eternal;

our unspoken-ness

finding words

in the ellipsis of

Orion's belt

A terrace, and a takeoff...

 My eager feet scampered up the steps and onto the terrace...ears perked up at the lazy call of a jungle crow. Cloaked in humidity, it sounded muffled, yet somehow louder. A cluster of cumulus clouds was stilled into a bolted forward position, feigning the promise of coolness to the hot start of the day. My eyes took in the vast expanse of horizon, limned with coconut and palm trees. Everything was breathing: a nurtured, deliberate indolence kept Nature alive. 

Since an unwarranted cacophony of birds accompany the brahminy kites, this mid morning quietness should have translated into their absence. But no. There they were, beyond the lengthening and shutting off of shadows. The two of them, slowly circling around each other, in and out of the squinty summer haze. I watched them... Every widening circle brought them closer to the little shard of sky above my territory. I waved, overcome by a surge of spontaneous camaraderie. All of a sudden, the kite which was trailing behind until now, took the lead. And as the distance between the two narrowed, the tip of their wings touched. A blinding spark cleaved the air. High and heraldic, detached from their immediate surrounding, they were the world...the universe. Nothing else existed. It was the most sublime aerial dance, so wholly in sync with the blazing symphony of inner scapes.

How many like myself out there were privy to this ecstatic moment, I wondered. Brimming with gratitude, certain in the knowledge that I was amongst the few allowed to witness this mystical bonding between two beings, not just because of some supreme synchronicity, but because they had wished me to be there. I was Fire, one who hosts...and I was also  the Raven, who had dared to  steal the Fire from the immortals. Yet at that moment, more than anything, I yearned to be Icarus: thirsting for attainable light, wanting to graft wings on my mortal crawl... And maybe touch the stars.