Not forgotten

I often think of her, though we'd never met,

I know her only through our mails and blogs.

Not someone you could easily forget  - 

some strange sort of magic in the words she left

like velvet petals delivered to your inbox. 

She could weave you colour and calm, joy and peace

from the wonder in the mundane everyday,

in vivid autumn skies, in spring blooming trees,

lacy ice crystals frosting compound leaves.

Proud and glad she called me friend. What can I say?

Each of us is defined by those we love

and each of us is shaped by the ones we grieve.

She's gone, but her words are here and prized above

pearls and rubies, and maybe they'll be enough

to still spin calm. To cherish and relive.

I for one am firmly resolved to hold on

to the residues, the stardust of her words.

She'll never be forgotten though she's gone.

She lived deep and wide and truly extra strong.

I'll keep seeing her in vivid skies, blooms and birds. 

The night before Diwali, which was observed  last week, flames are lit in
honour of departed souls. Sue loved flowers. And light festivals. 

What can I tell you about Sue Goldberg? 

I’ve known Sue for a long time, over a decade certainly, though I’ve never met her face to face. We found each other through our blogs, it was so long ago that I forget exactly how and when and who found whom - I think it was through WEP, Sue read each and every entry there whether  or not she participated in the writing. We then proceeded from there to share poetry, postcards, a love of nature and skyscapes and above all, a sense of connection that transcended physical and cultural distances - she was from Australia and I was an Indian expat living in the Middle East at the time. We briefly shared a hemisphere too when I moved to Fiji and she offered to send me books as I discovered the lack of good bookshops. She herself was a voracious reader of both blogs and books and horrified at the thought of anyone being stranded without adequate reading material. She was invariably kind and she gave of herself without stopping to check the returns.

She blogged over at Elephant's Child - the title came from being insatiably curious as she said herself. She once told me she was a huge fan of Kipling's writing and I always thought she personified his poem If. 'If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue/Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch'...She had the common touch, an indefinable knack for connection and empathy that she used so well in her volunteer work with suicide prevention - a cause she was passionate about, which she shared on her blog as well. Read about her work at Lifeline here in this post  detailing her participation in the Out of the Shadows and into the Light suicide prevention awareness walk just a couple of weeks before she passed. Sue walked for the cause while battling her own terminal disease, because 'this may be my last year' she wrote - she must've known. 

She had a powerful writing voice, a searing honesty that was awe inspiring - I remember she wrote for one of the WEP prompts ('Unravelled' I think it was) where she talked about her relationship with her mother with a lack of self pity, a level of unflinching courage and frankness that totally floored me. She revealed her diagnosis this past July with that same unwavering strength, without a trace of bitterness.  She was a super special lady. A rare gem. 

She enriched my life and my blogging with her thoughtful, grounded wisdom, her courage, humour and quiet grace in the face of her health issues, her extraordinary ability to find beauty and calm in everyday life. Her Sunday Selections were a bright spot in my weekend reading, her amazing photos of birdlife, garden blooms, public artworks, sunrises, kangaroos, light and balloon festivals dialled down the noise and bother of my own life and invariably lifted my mood. She injected a dose of positivity into everything.

With her gone, my world is a whole lot dimmer, my weekends are not the same, my inbox decidedly less sparkly. No one is going to come across 'The Best Poem Ever' and think 'right, Nila will love this,' and plop it into my inbox on a random morning and transform it from drab to quietly dazzling...With her gone, entire blogland I suspect will be less sparkly. 

Today marks a month since her passing. I’m so very grateful that I was part of her virtual circle. Grateful for her friendship, support  and many kindnesses through the years. 

I will always cherish your memory, Sue. You will be deeply, deeply missed. You often ended your mails with 'buckets of love' - I'm carrying them with me now and wish you endless beauty and colour and peace. Rest easy, my dear friend. 

View her funeral service here. This will be available for the next 6+ months. 

A Strange Celebration

 

Image from Freepik

How quiet the house feels, how tidy the room!

Only your bedroom slippers still lie askew

as if they were abandoned, switched out mid run

exchanged for strong and closed from flimsy open –

airport security scans every shoe.

 

Makes sense to keep the footwear light, the sole

limber, the ties simple. I’ve told you this –

chances are you’ll have to snatch at things you want

without breaking stride, instantly pull on

your boots, be travel ready without notice.

 

Have I ever told you? - that motherhood

is an entirely strange celebration

from first baby steps to that last slip-on

each step’s a stepping away, each milestone

an emptier room, slippers flung off mid run. 

Too much has been happening, all good albeit super strange. The offspring left home for the second time yesterday so this is empty nesting 2.0...hmmm...does practice make this perfect? I'm thinking not.  

For those who may be interested, he's reached his destination safely. Which is closer than NC but still a couple of oceans and a couple of dozen borders away and well, the time zone management is marginally less challenging but I'm older and less nimble, so it all cancels out. 

It's been a monthful of celebrations - family reunions, the Durga Puja and then this sudden relocation magicked itself in exactly a week. Stress and exhilaration combined in a mindboggling mix. Strange celebrations indeed. Uber thankful for all of them. 

Hope you've got ample cause to celebrate too this autumn. 

Home and Garden

 

'Aparajita' or unvanquished. Blue pea.

 

I.

You plant something and you think – this is mine,

this bougainvillea, this blue pea vine,

this periwinkle and dwarf screw pine –

in time I’ll be calling them home.

 

Home’s a garden, a chair, a balcony,

a particular drape of a fig tree,

the end of the road and tranquility.

But bear in mind nothing’s your own.

 

The annuals bloom as per their schedules,

and the blue pea doesn’t follow your rules,

it puts out shaggy tendrils, minuscule

protests against the frame it’s grown.

 

You know the perennials – the neem and lime,

if they take root, they’ll be here a long time

and they’ll outlast you, even the blue pea vine

will grow back in springs when you’re gone.

 

Home is where my plants are – that’s what you think.

But know in the end, the red, blue and pink

will fade and regrow and you’ll leave with nothing –

there’s no garden you can call home.

This is the first part of a three part poem, 5X3, 15 stanzas in total, each with a 5,5,5,4 beat and an aaab slant rhyme scheme, with b being repeated throughout in monorhyme. I don't know why I am telling you this, because it shouldn't matter a jot to the reader anyway, however important it might feel to the writer. It's taken me two weeks to complete. Its symmetry feels like an accomplishment, it's pleasing. I'm hyperaware that it might feel boring to someone else. What do you think?

I'm still afflicted by the same old same old bee in my ancient bonnet - the prompt for this one floated up on my feed somewhere, it was one of those framed-text wall art and it read - 'Home Is Where My Plants Are' in a squiggly decorative font,  suspended over rather a lush container garden. 

Tbh, that statement in my case should read home is where my books are. Ennyhoo. My own container garden is anything but lush at the mo, incessant rains and the painters' safety tarps hung for months on end have taken their toll, but I'm happy to report the plants are now recovering. On reflection, I find that I've unconsciously put in the plants that I've seen around me growing up - hibiscus, the blue pea, periwinkle. Recreating in miniature on my balcony what was once planted in and around our home in Maiduguri many yonks ago. On further reflection, hibiscus  has been a part of my balcony/garden/home in every single country I've lived in as an adult as well. Neems and Flamboyants have been part of my microenvironment too in some unobtrusive way. Some flowers/trees just define home even when one thinks it is better defined by books or something else. 

The second and third part of the poem get into the ultimate garden, how unpossessable it is and how expulsion/exile is its defining feature. And then humans spend all their days longing for it and trying to get back in.  I guess for most of us with ordinary childhoods, that is our eden which we try to recreate and of course we fail - the past is past, there is no recreating it, there is no selective reliving it in any format whatsoever. There is only the present and the planting. And if successful, someone will enjoy the show down the line after one is gone. 

Hope you and your plantings are defining beauty, tranquility and whatever else you want them to. Have a brilliant week. 

Colours

 

The colour of distance was a kaleidoscope –

glass shards, shiny dreams mixed in with river gravel,

wildflowers flattened by raindrops, dusted with hope,

a lone evening star pierced by a mountaintop,

the primordial rhythms of footsteps, sands and travel.

 

Everything isn’t a journey, there’s standing still

to observe the intent rain trickle down your nape.

Everything isn’t colour. Endless climb uphill.

It’s picking up a seashell too, and watch it fill

with rain and ocean, reflect you and the landscape.

 

The colour of home, in contrast, was more specific

tending to terracotta – burnt clay pots and pans,

a mud-wide riverside, a wall of exposed brick,

my father’s wedding ring, my mother’s old ceramic

mug of clear black Darjeeling steaming in her hands.

Everything isn’t home and home’s not everything.

There’s being alone, a stranger, under vaster skies,

the thrill of unknown earth, unknown paths beckoning,

the bone deep peace of trees, the flash of a birdwing,

feet firmly on strange tracks with nothing recognised.

I came across this book title and a quote from it - 'you can't go home again' by Thomas Wolfe, a famous author from North Carolina. The quote's been buzzing around my head...it has permeated everything I've written subsequently, home and away, the various shades of homecoming and unhomecoming. Someday I would like to get my hands on this book. 

Amazon offered me a free audio version - but you know me, my neural pathways are paved in concrete and it's too late to change their preferences - audio isn't remotely as satisfying as a regular printed book with that crisp papery feel between thumb and fingers. It might work for a short story, but don't see how I am to manage with audio for a 700+ page novel. Hubby keeps extolling the various virtues of audiobooks - no shelfspace requirement apart from being practically free, no stress on eyes etc etc, but the heart wants what it wants. No arguments possible with that.

Which do you prefer  - audio or printed? Hope your week is filled with colours and books in your preferred avatars. Have a blissful one. 

Palace of Dreams

 

Didn’t you always crave a lemon tree,

a mango or two, the smell of summer?

A clematis trailing the exposed bricks?

Didn’t you always dream what this would be?

Less concrete and curtains and more runner

beans, citrus suns, hiraeth edging homesick.

The tides of jasmine covering for the sea.

Halfway to a sonnet, half a bit firmer

and freeing itself of every metric 

to lace into an amorphous canopy.

An empty sparrow’s nest in one corner.

A bare bulb somewhere, nothing idyllic.

Rain filling up the sky and rusting grills.

The paving dusted with hibiscus pistils.

July has run into August and I'm pedalling furiously to catch up somehow but always falling behind, always out of breath and vaguely puzzled as to why this is happening. The idea is to post the first and last Sundays/Mondays but I think the first one has slipped by without my realising it. Oh well, what's done is done, or rather what's left undone cannot be done retrospective, only done late. Anyway, better late than never.

August is always a busy month - lots of family and personal milestones, apart from the big national holiday coming up on the 15th. So offline life will muscle in and shove aside the online one - guaranteed. A few years ago this would have upset me, I'd have scheduled stuff and not missed a single Sunday...but one evolves - I no longer obsess about things I can't help, I don't know for sure if that's a good thing but it doesn't feel like a bad one. 'Do what you can with as much as you have and let the rest go' - I'm still internalising things I should have done years ago. Better late than never...

Wishing you a smooth and tranquil week ahead.

 

Common Ground

 

I do not know your music tastes,

I do not know your friends.

Both you and I are short of space,

in between continents.

And you and I are being ground down

by the acts of governments.

We don't share any talking points

but likely the same ends. 

I know you, brother, even though

your language is not mine,

your home location is on a

different meridian line.

And nowhere do our orbits touch,

nowhere our lives combine,

yet they're exactly parallel,

yet they somehow align.

I know that resolve in your eyes,

that tremor in your hands

as the ground beneath us buckles

throughout our separate lands.

I know that grimness on your lips

as you rise to take a stand -

I may not know your music tastes

but the rest I understand. 

This one is for those who carry on, who don't get discouraged, who fight for a braver, better, more equal, more just and a peaceful world.

I hope the coming week will be better than the past one for all of us. Have a good one. 

Bookmarks

 

You used to remember the exact page,

now you find yourself reaching for bookmarks

and put it down to incipient age –

the wrists a bit stiff, the spines a bit dark,

the sense somehow vague, the words somewhat blurred,

and following the plot requiring more work,

the pristine white of leaves somewhat more weathered.

 

The eyes and the wrists instinctively know

where and when to rest, where and how to stop,

what to hold steadfast and what to let go,

which ones to explore and which to just drop.

The flesh isn’t weak – it can push its limits

but it’s just plain wise, it knows to give up,

to withdraw, shut down and blindly submit.

It isn't really about bookmarks now, is it? 

It's to do with not faffing around. It's about consciously choosing the growth path of the patience quotient. Becoming patient with stuff that matters but ruthlessly uncompromising with how the minutes, even the seconds are used. Zero waste. Tomorrow is not a given, it never was, only you were having too much fun to notice. And ignorance may be bliss but it is still ignorance and it certainly ends up being wasteful. Time's limited, space is too, you are more than halfway, oh, much more than that, to using up your quotas.  

Those few seconds you've just spent in locating the exact para where you left off? Nope, they are not coming back. Therefore, no harm in being lean and mean with how the balance is spent. A little more mindfulness in cutting to the chase and cramming in as much ___ (love, food, fun, laughter, hiking, skydiving, reading, blogging, partying, catching up with friends, etc. - insert as appropriate) as possible while you're at it. If bookmarks can help with that...bring them on!

Have a lovely week ahead. 

Low profile and no frills

 

I’ve had my share of heartbreak, so I know

that extremes of emotions don’t endure, 

the pinnacles of happiness and sorrow

we reach today are left behind tomorrow

and time’s a poor healer, nature’s more sure.

 

The heart has an innate tendency to veer

back to the middle paths – plain contentment.

Not as bejewelled as joy, not as austere

as grief, just a low-profile, no-frills cheer,

easy to wear and not as quickly spent.

Well, it's hard to hang onto that low profile cheerfulness right now, mostly because I'm stressed about my friends in Bahrain, the Fifth Fleet is located there and might be a target. Palestine, Ukraine, Pahalgam and now Iran. The whole world's a massive battlefront. Not to mention flights plummeting and places of worship exploding with terrorists and sundry other disasters. 

These too will pass, everything does, but there's little comfort in that if what they will pass onto is a trainwreck. 

No time like the present. To practice the deep breathing and count to ten techniques. Look at flowers blooming, walk on hill paths, listen to the water somewhere. And of course, write/read some poetry.  Whatever calms things down inside the head and heart and ensures they carry on in spite of the chaos all around. 

Wishing you a calm, stress free week ahead. 

Stranger Earth

 

I don’t know this city without your footprints

marking out the roads, buildings, the streetlights

glinting on your glasses, your voice mapping

the terrain of neighbourhoods, days and nights.

I don’t know this place, it’s strangely different –

the waters an acrid shade of grey and white,

the neon signs of advertisements pulsing

like a news ticker from a disaster site.

Everything is where it was, yet it isn’t

as if the ground has shifted, ever so slight,

as if the earth’s somehow lost its mooring,

as if the sky’s fallen from a great height.

Grief is a half done crossword by your chair,

an absence the shape of your feet on the stairs.

Compartmentalise

 

You can watch the birds from the terrace here.

The tangle of wires slices the sky thin

and shrinks the views, but still, it’s been a good year -

the mynah’s back, so are the crow and pigeon.

The  doves and, in their season, the cuckoos.

There’s birdsong, even if you don’t get the views.

 

The drongos like beads on an abacus

the sparrows of unremarkable throats -

ordinary plumage’s all around us.

Put off that search for remote scenic spots.

Bird calls rise with the light and urban fumes,

the city ebbs from the terrace and the rooms.

~~~

Gosh, May's ending already? The months are vanishing faster than ever, I don't know if that's a good, time-flies-when-you're-happy/busy sign or an ominous one of days outstripping my capacity to keep up. Let's go for the positive one - I'm all for the feel good, steady boat themes. 

Lots happening as usual - workmen in the house, trips to the eye doctors, an antho submission, thank goodness the war noises have stopped, let's keep everything here small, personal, worm eye level. Because what's happening out in the world is kind of overwhelming, to put it mildly. I'm borrowing a line from one of my favourite fictional characters - 'I'll think about that tomorrow.'

Another line from another favourite character, real not fictional this time - 'a man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between does what he wants to do.' That's Bob Dylan, his birthday went by a couple days back, happy birthday sirji! - from this fan. 

By his definition, which I expect holds for women too, I am success enough. I listen for the birdsong. Focus on the wires, treetops, clouds. Block out the incessant noise at ground level. Read a little. Write a little. Compartmentalise. 

Have a happy-busy, time-flies type week ahead.

Choose your own title

 

View from shikara. May-June 1981. A long ago and far away Kashmir.

All night long I dozed fitfully

dreamt of elephants crossing the Alps,

of Carthage and Rome. Deep furrows of salt.

And oaks and pines, higher than gothic spires

made into Viking masts sailing cold seas.

The children kept waking, fretting, calling.

Mother. Father. What’s that? Is that shelling?

Why does the horizon glow so eerie red?

What is that horrible smell on the breeze?

I quietened them, wrapped them in my steeled arms

inches from where my heart was racing against theirs

sang them lullabies my grandmothers once crooned.

Go to sleep, the light of my eyes,

horizons get eerie just before sunrise,

thunder carries in the stillness before dawn,

they’re somewhere far over the mountains,

somewhere far from home.

 

Grandmothers used to say that everything

that you were destined for, or that was destined

for you, had your name written clear on it –

grains, cups, ganga jom’na paar, scars, bullets.

They were women gnarled by hardships, moulded

by wars, collaterally damaged inside

and out. Fault lines, frontlines and famines grew

them to formidable heights and shapes, staunch,

unflinching as fortresses. They had the right

lullabies to soothe children to sleep

during battles and in peacetimes. They could

slice fruits translucently thin and feed hundreds

from one handful of rice and two fishes.

They knew how to stare down famines, disease,

unknown, eerie red horizons. Burnt paddies

wafting in on the breeze. They rarely slept

through the night. Dreaming wasn’t an option.

 

The dawn comes in overcast. No more sound.

No birdsong, nor call to prayer, not even

the faintest shelling, nothing but the clouds

emptied of the death threats. The horizon

innocent of flashes and our senses

suspicious of this explosive silence.

The street’s pockmarked with thumbprints of conflict.

The news comes later, trickles in through phones

on grapevines of fear. There’s a ceasefire.

Is it over? Father? Shall we go back

to school? May I go fishing now, Mother?

An army vehicle clatters down the street

checking for last evacuees. I scoop up

my grandmother’s old hand knitted blanket.

She’d knitted my name in it. We step out

and I notice, as if for the first time –

the door has my name carved on it as well.

Title 1) Mother's Day 2025

Title 2) Carved names

Title 3) Ceasefire

Title 4) Compose your own

Please let me know your choice in the comments. The title is the hardest part.

I'm glad there's a ceasefire. Anything that brings peace closer is to be welcomed. Not sure it will lead to anything lasting though. And I'm gutted at the way it has come about. 

Once upon a time our PMs used to refuse to be pressurised, to let other countries, no matter how mighty their global standing, meddle in our business. We didn't have a top ten economy, but we had a spine and some respect out in the world. Now we meekly let another nation broker ceasefires and decide our tariff policies without a cheep. What can I say? I miss the sagacity, the statesmanship, the reverence for country over party, the commitment to democratic values and the political acumen of my previous leaders. 

Once you've lived in a country led by towering personalities, it is awful hard to live with petty, braggadocious, incompetent politicians who don't have a shred of self respect or give a @#*& about the very people who've elected them to the position they hold.

I hope your week has gone peacefully and that you're nowhere near any situation that requires a ceasefire to be brokered.