Write...Edit...Publish... + IWSG June 2020 : Urban Nightmare

It's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish..., I do hope all WEPers are coping and doing well.   Keeping in mind the ongoing pandemic situation and the personal challenges we are all facing, WEP is going Lite this month. I'm sticking to my comfort zone of photo-essays, aka non-fiction ramblings. I have done better this month on the wordcount control, finally! -  

Pigeon. Panic. Pandemic. 

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

~ Matsuo Basho

Right in the middle of the urban nightmare to beat all nightmares, the pigeon desperately wants to fly home. But it can’t. Borders are closed. The mind can go wherever it wants, it can think only flowers, it can think beyond the moon, it can morph into whatever it desires, but the body? The body is governed by the natural laws, physics and biology and biochemistry and abstruse electrochemistry. It is subject to boundaries both physical and geographical. There is no shaking off its shackles. There is no escape from this city. And so it burrows back into the mind, where it can devise its own escape and try on the grasshopper wings again.

Credit: View from Studio (1886)

The rise of the city is inexorably linked to settled agriculture. And art as we know it today is linked to it as well. If there were no public buildings – the monuments, the necropolis, the places of worship, the town square, the library, the parks, as also the private grounds and the sitting room, there would be no need to hang art on walls or install statues or design frescoes and fountains and what have you. The beginnings of Homo sapiens’ art, as with most other beginnings, lie in Africa, in Tan-Tan and Blombos. Some of the prehistoric art we have remnants of, were either made to decorate living humans with – beads and a mix of pigments to hang around and ornament various limbs; or were independent free standing, portable figurines. A purely nomadic hunter gatherer life does not lend itself to monumental art for obvious reasons. Rock art which dates from around 35,000-40,000 years ago or even 200,000 ya is clearly an attempt to beautify or glorify a cave/surface which humans were at for long enough to create those artworks. Therefore, we can safely assume that though art happened pre-agriculture, wall art required a surface that humans stayed put at for some time or they knew they would come back to. If there are no walls, they can’t be decorated, right?

The ancient cities rose on the back of the Neolithic Revolution – or settled agriculture, in the region commonly known as the Fertile Crescent. The oldest cities such as Jericho (9000 BCE) and Ur (6500 BCE) coalesced along its curve. The first writing and recordkeeping happened in Ur in fact, slicing off the ‘pre-‘ from prehistory in one fell swoop. Cities were predicated on an agricultural surplus and humans changed profoundly, from foragers into a society based on specialisation of labour. Not everyone needed to be growing food, so some turned their minds and skills to other things. A non-farming class of residents - that of the artists/artisans – grew as a corollary to settled agriculture.

The earliest civilisations rose out of these communities in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and China. Settled agriculture meant an exponential growth in the population, as the same piece of land could now support many times the original inhabitants. As the civilisations grew, their cities became political capitals, centres of education, trade and commerce hubs, forums for artistic and creative exchange. But there was also a price to pay for this luscious, spanking new lifestyle. An organised society meant more rigid class divisions and inequalities leading to high crime rates. Living in close proximity meant higher pollution, and last but not the least, diseases on an epidemic scale. The urban nightmare started early - from ancient times.


***

Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. 

~ Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent’s nightmares were both urban and various. The most famous of them is the ear incident in Arles. That happened after a heated debate with Paul Gauguin. But there are others as well. Let the grasshopper stop whirring about for a minute and recap his time in Paris.

In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris where his brother Theo was already working at an art dealers. Paris had acquired the reputation of being the art capital of Europe in prior centuries. By the time van Gogh moved there, it was in its artistic prime – it had some of the finest painters and the art schools associated with them. Paris was the centre where several art movements – Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Art Deco etc evolved. Van Gogh arrived in Paris splat in the middle of the Impressionist movement - Monet and Pissarro were already established. Vincent admired the old masters he saw in the Paris museums, at first he didn’t like the Impressionists much. But that changed a year on – he started experimenting with the loose brushstrokes and lighter, brighter colour palettes of the Impressionists. His art evolved at an exponential, breath-taking pace. He worked in the studio of Fernand Cormon and found inspiration from his circle of artist friends such as Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.

However, living in Paris drained him, even as it elevated his art and grew him as an artist. He smoked and drank too much, ate poorly, the pace of the big city wore him down.

It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris, unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure. Without that, you’d be bound to get utterly numbed. 

~ Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 21^st Feb 1888

I could never get used to climbing the stairs in Paris, and was always dizzy in a dreadful nightmare that has left me here, but recurred regularly there. 

~ Letter to Willemien van Gogh, Arles, June 1888

The self-portrait he painted in Paris reflected this, he looks exhausted and depressed. And he described it as such to his sister Wil ‘with…wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad.’

Credit: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Paris ultimately gave Vincent the artistic lift-off he had sought, but he had had to pay a heavy price. 

Always a heavy price. Whether as a heedless species traversing the broad arc of history; or a single, keenly aware individual, a misunderstood genius ahead of his time, trying to make a little space for his art.

WC - 1054

FCA

Read the other entries below :

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG : Caged Bird June 2019

In life nothing is constant but change, and I'm dealing with a whole slew of them. Some changes are expected, I'm okay with those - seasons, months, growth, the expected transitions...but not all. Especially discomfort-inducing are those changes which happen too fast and without reason, descend on me with a rush like a rockfall. But...thankfully, some changes are reversible. Storms in teacups, not much harm done to the cups or the tea. C'est la vie... the idea is to keep calm and carry on writing...at Write...Edit...Publish...  - where I’m continuing with my photo-essay spree, and it is strangely apt that someone who taught me the definitive lessons on navigating change, should be the subject of it. 

The original is way over word count, so my entry consists of a few sections only. To explain the title - the person was a posthumous child, his losses started even before birth and carried on from there.

Born into Loss

S.N. Maitra with two of his grandchildren at 18/68B Dover Lane in 1982.

Three things are indelibly associated with that time and place, and with him – the wall clock, the tobacco water-pipe, and the small radio with the wooden fascia. I asked about them years later, but they were gone by then. Sold off to the junk-dealers because the radio and clock had both stopped working. Not sure what happened to the water-pipe, maybe the scrap traders got it for the metal.

Unlike his wife, he left me nothing tangible. No childhood presents, no souvenirs, not even a book with his name signed on it. No photograph albums, fat chance! - no such luxury. There’s just one photo I have, with him, my little cousin and me together in one frame, the one above, I was nearly an adult then. But he did leave me three clearly enunciated names – Meghna, Machhpara, Faridpur. And he left me an example of how to calmly navigate change and carry immeasurable loss without disintegrating. Intangibles all. Nothing that I can quite close my fist around, but all worth holding on to.

He had a cigarette-holder too, small, jet-black with a filter incorporated, in which he occasionally smoked a brand called Capstan, one cigarette cut carefully into pieces, for reasons of economy rather than health. The family was hard up even then, even with his elder son working at a renowned architectural firm in the city. A decade back, the father had sold off his last valuable - his gold watch, in some vaguely grand, O’Henryesque gesture, to pay off the backlog of hostel fees of his adult child, without which the said child would not have been able to sit his final university exams. A whole cigarette in one sitting felt too extravagant still. 

  

Everything was eked out, cigarettes, coal, postcards. The last item he filled with XXS size handwriting, beautifully formed letters by a rocksteady hand, without a hint of a tremor, even when he was 90+. But again, I get ahead of myself, I was the recipient of those 15-p postcards in teenage, where an entire week’s worth of family news was written on less than 50 square inches. But then Bengali is a compact script, there are hardly any loops and flourishes below the line. There was a singular lack of loops and flourishes below the line in our lives then, his and mine.

  

The room had several windows, green louvred with straight, black, vertical wrought-iron rods - forbidding, cool to the touch. The ceiling was low, the floor was set a couple of steps down from the landing, the same polished red oxide as the rest of the house. The door frame was smaller, lower than the others in the regular rooms on the upper or ground floor. He was a tall man, very spare, very upright, he must have had to duck to get in. There is, of course, more to being caged than a cramped room and straight bars on a window. And one man’s cage can be his grandkid’s polestar.  

  

***

I once asked him why he didn’t show the papers of the village property and get due compensation that the uprooted from East Pakistan were given by the Indian government. His told me that there were other branches of the family still living in the property, the papers were with them, naturally. Besides, where was the chance? We didn’t really plan this move, we didn’t flee as refugees, we came here to work, to get our children educated. We just got trapped this side of the suddenly sprung-up border. There was no way to go back.

  

I don’t really know how that feels, I was born years after the Partition. But I can take a good guess.  From the rambling, many-roomed, haphazard homestead with four courtyards, built over centuries a wing at a time - to a new built, two-storey, tiny, suburban house with a courtyard the size of a hanky. From being one of the first families in a small village where everyone knew him by name to the huge anonymity of a city of millions. From the collective memories of generations rooted in the same patch of land to one where there was no memory to draw upon. No templates for living life - the old ways rapidly disappeared, the new ways were not yet devised. 

  

Sapta purush jethae manush shey maati mayer baRa – where seven generations have been brought up that land is greater than the mother.*  How to negotiate a change of citizenship in which your own birthplace, the land of your ‘seven-generational’ ancestors becomes foreign and forbidden to you? He lived nearly half his life in Dover Lane, away from his home and birthplace, both forever out of his reach. It must have been excruciating. Trapped on this side of the border. We are all trapped by our respective borders and yet we can never know the exact nature of anyone else’s struggles, regardless of how close they are to us. 

***

  

One Wednesday afternoon in April 1986, my father called me at work. Come to Dover Lane. By then my parents had moved back to Calcutta, my mother was in remission from cancer, I lived with them in their hastily-acquired new home and worked not too far from Dover Lane. 

  

I found the house fuller than usual, my father’s cousins had come by, my eldest aunt, Boropishi was there sat by his bed. She told him I had come – he opened his eyes, looked at me for a long moment but said nothing; and then shut them back again. My grandfather lay perfectly still, his face calm, the eyes shut, the bones of his jaw and chin very prominent, his lips thinned as if some invisible internal force was sucking them in.

  

Shortly after, he sighed  - a long drawn out, rasping groan. The usual rituals were observed, a drop of Gangajal was touched to the mouth. My father checked for a heartbeat and could not find one. The neighbours, who happened to be doctors and had treated him for years, were called in and medically confirmed the death.

  

There was no last minute rushing in and out of hospitals, no last words, no mortal agony – just a peaceful departure. One minute he was there, the next he was not. My grandfather died with the same quiet dignity with which he had conducted himself all his life.  The cage had finally broken and the captive had gone free.



WC 1075
FCA

*A line from a famous Tagore poem called Dui Bigha Jomi (Two Bighas of Land)



Read the other entries here -

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG: Jewel Box. April 2019

If you are looking for my A-Z post that’s here.  I am keeping my A-Z and WEP+IWSG posts separate.

Last month, in a response to my theme reveal for that Challenge, a commenter wrote - sounds like a great way to honour your grandmother with your theme idea for April. And the idea for this post grew from there.  


As with my January post, I am going with a photo-essay, something I hadn’t tried till this year for these challenges.  I am over wordcount here - the original was more than 3000, I just couldn't pare it down any further. My apologies.

Diptych in Progress


Three months lapsed before we came back to the red-oxide floored, two-storied house in Dover Lane. It was an ordinary homecoming, the adults were in control of themselves, everyone was calm, dry-eyed. I, a teenager, did not really know how to mourn.

Write...Edit...Publish...+IWSG: Welcome to 2019 and another year of fun Challenges!

Welcome to the first Write...Edit...Publish...+IWSG Challenge of 2019! 

The prompt for this Challenge has been picked as winner from among a host of  IWSG member generated ideas. The winning prompt is from long time WEP/IWSG member Toi Thomas. Nifty!

I'm coming in with something I've never tried at WEP before - a photo essay. Last summer I took a trip to UK, and finally learnt to use my camera phone. I have used a 28-day period  for my entry - based on the holiday and the pre-holiday prep and excitement mode, from 7th July to 3rd August 2018.  I hope you'll enjoy it.

Write...Edit...Publish...December 2018: Ribbons & Candles

It is time for the last post at Write...Edit...Publish... and to wrap up the year I have another part of the same story I posted for the last two challenges. You’ll find the previous posts here (Change of Heart) and here (Déjà vu or Voodoo) in case you wish to reread. Now, for the whole backstory of the bloodstained rug...here’s my entry for Ribbons and Candles :

Small windows 

It takes only a few years. For worlds to fall apart. For rooms to stop breathing. For windows to go blind. The climate is unforgiving. The land is too fertile for its own good. A banyan can take root anywhere. In the cracks. Beside the exposed pipes. Wherever there is a toehold.

The garden used to be fragrant with jasmine. Not any more. The squatters were here till last Monday. It took endless visits to the thana. Under the table, over the table, sunlit, bulblit negotiations.  The local AdSP finally had a word with the goons. The squatters magically left the next day. But traces remain. Ugly blue plastic awnings. The smell of stale urine and unwashed bodies. Stink pressed hard into the cracks. Bald patches on the ground. Where the lawns once were. Deep holes in the earth for bamboo. The marks of tent pegs and scaffolding. Holding together canopies of borrowed space and time.

The front door has still not been breached. It is teak gone black with age. The shutters are nearly three inches thick. The wood logged out of the forests of Burma. In some dim past when trees had solidity and girth.  And a lifespan greater than men.

But one cannot be too cautious. The sisters have got those ugly collapsible gates installed. Two heavy locks. Chains with fat links on the backdoor as well. The interiors remain secure. For now.

It used to be a happy house. Oil lamps around the porch at Diwali. Ribbons of smoke from the sugar snakes, ribbons of sparks from the Roman candles. Children in the garden messing up the beds. Paper lanterns and streamers at birthday parties. A pair of hilsa fish brought in. On the day for the worship of goddess Saraswati. The faded marks of vermilion on the walls. From the offerings to the deities. They always showed faintly through. Even after the painter's quick job of cover up. No amount of repainting seemed to help.

No-one passing by would guess. An ordinary house. Washing strung out on wire clothes lines. Pegged with wooden pegs. Little frocks and shorts gradually giving way to bigger and bigger sizes. Frocks replaced by saris.  Shorts replaced by trousers. Then a sudden fall in the feminine items. Two daughters married and moved away. No daughter-in-law to replace their presence. Only the mother’s sari flapping lonely in the wind. First in multicolour. Shading to pale pastels shading to white. A new one joined it. Both like the start of an oversized prayer bunting. All traces of red on the white ones’ borders vanished.  Then the white one vanished altogether. The coloured one billowed lonely again. But there is more heartbreak and loneliness layered into the rooms inside. The clothesline can only tell a partial tale.

The rooms are closed now. But the air stirs an uneasy dust inside.  The dining room rug has a patch of discolouration. It is an old Turkish kilim. The cleaners tried the strongest agents they dared. But they could not get the bloodstain off. The patch is quite prominent.  The sisters cannot bring themselves to throw it away. A valuable rug.  Sentimental. Brought back from Istanbul by the grandfather. They cannot agree on its disposal. But it needs to go. If they are ever to find a tenant. Or a buyer. They are not agreed on that either. One of them favours selling. The other is reluctant. 

The stories hang like the cobwebs. They are like the bloodstain. Faded but still distinct. Recognisable for what they are. No polite pretence is possible. The mésalliance. The resentment. The brother’s stubbornness. The long illness through which his wife nursed him. Losing her own balance a few times. Then the sudden heart transplant and heady hopes. Which came crashing down with the death. The killing. It was not deemed murder. She was judged ‘not criminally responsible.’ The trial was endless. So was the gossip. The family name in tatters. Splashed luridly across the tabloids.

She died later in the institution. No one claimed her body. No one performed the last rites. Given a shoddy send off by the penny-pinching government. Not exactly a tragic heroine.

The unsavoury stories still keep tenants away. Not much talked about these days. But enough to cast a shadow. It must be handled delicately. Easy to scare off prospects. Only the squatters do not scare easy.  They will probably be back in a month. There is only a small window. Always too small a window. And such a lot to address.

~~~

WC- 757

FCA

This is part of the same story I developed for Moving the Margins, a MOOC from the International Writing Program at Uni Iowa. Totally a fan. 

In this exercise I tried 'moving the margins' of my language by using parataxis. The idea was to keep it a little stark, spare. Thank you, as always for reading. 

A very happy Christmas to you who are celebrating and happy holidays/December to you if you are not. Wishing you peace, joy and love this festive season and all through 2019.

Read the other entries here and join in with your own. 

Write..Edit...Publish...October 2018 : Deja Vu or Voodoo

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven...

Time for the funnest  Write...Edit...Publish... post of the year! Also, time for the autumn festival season in India, the Navaratri-Durga Puja-Diwali month, am plonk in the middle of right now in fact, with a very special house guest visiting from Kolkata, so a little taken up with happy stuff offline... but I'll be around to read as and when...

A time to get, and a time to lose...A time to weep, and a time to laugh...

This month it's also time to say goodbye to Yolanda Renee...she has co-hosted WEP for years and I have known her since the RFW days, that's more than 6 years. So this is going to feel a little strange. Thank you for all the work and all the brilliant entries and above all, your friendship and support, Renee! I wish you all the very best for your future writing projects and hope that you'll pop into WEP with one of your done-to-a-turn flashes every challenge month, or at least as often as you can. 

Here's my entry for the Challenge -




The preference for sons


This move sucks. Big time. Even Tofu – that’s my dog, hates it. But grown-ups! They must pretend. Some crazy idea to always say it the way it should be. Everyone’s pretending they’ve been waiting to come here like, forever.

I keep hearing that our people prefer sons. Complete bullshit, man. The minute my sister gets into NUJS, the entire family comes trooping here. Why? Because her fastidious highness can’t stay PG like the rest of the world. Can’t put up with the public at the hostel. The mattress isn’t thick enough for the princess, you see. I said it over and over again. I didn’t. Want. To move. Did anyone pay any attention? So, who’s got the preference? Sons, indeed!

And my school sucks too. Except Vishal. He’s in my music class. But for the rest – oh, god. Unbelievable. No pool. The field’s half the size. The buildings are so old. Probably built when the Brits were here or something. The whole freaking city looks like it’s a smelly leftover from the Raj.

Vishal’s okay though. Magic fingers. Can work up a wicked drut. Vishal’s the one who told me about the house. Apparently, some batty lady stuck a knife into her husband here. Because she thought he was going to kill her. So she pre-empted him. Some garbled logic! – a heart transplant had apparently made him homicidal. She died too, in the end. In some asylum.

The heirs pulled the original house down and rebuilt. But they both haunt the place still. The husband and wife, I mean. That’s what Vishal said. I’m not scared of ghosts, I told him. They don’t exist anyways. Just superstitions.

I mentioned the story to Thamuli. She read me a lecture. It’s gossip. Poor taste to repeat it. Besides, don’t they teach me science at school? There are no ghosts. Why was I out to make everybody unsettled? Didn’t I want my sister to be successful? This is our home now, we can’t move back. Blah blah blah. Unbelievable.

 

Nothing computes, man. You’d have thought she’d pay attention, being so old and into antiques. Into all these rituals. She’s always fasting or rushing off to some shrine or other. Oh, no. Can’t bear to have anything said against the move. Or against her highness, her precious granddaughter - the one responsible for this whole mess.

Okay, let me tell you the whole - there’s this old, stained rug next to my bed. I don’t know where it’s come from, it’s always been there in my room. Thamuli must have got it sometime, she’s heavily into picking up tattered, second-hand things for their ‘history.’ I don’t care much for that piece of junk. Would have gladly left it back. But the packers rolled it up along with the bedding. And it was back in my room after the move. I mean, it wasn’t a big deal either way, you know?

Anyways, there’s this patchy mark right in the middle of it. A few days after Vishal spilled the story, I got up in the morning. The stain looked vaguely darker. But there was no time to check properly. And I forgot all about it at lessons. It was still there once I got back. So I looked closer. It did feel darker. I thought it was a mistake at first, eyes playing tricks. And after my last session with Thamuli, I wasn’t saying anything to anyone.

But the next Sunday when I got up, it was much darker again. And damp this time. I touched it and my fingers came away wet and smeared with weird, brownish stuff. A bit like, you know, blood.

I wasn’t scared or anything. I just mentioned it at breakfast.  Casually, like. Not to create any drama or put anybody off their food. Thamuli was there, my father, mother, her highness herself was sitting right next to me. They just laughed. Said my friend had been filling my ears. Because he was jealous or something. So Thamuli had mentioned the story to others. Talk about not repeating gossip. And why on earth would Vishal be jealous? He’s much better than me at any percussion you can dream of. Unbelievable. Grownups make no sense. I told them they could check if they liked.

But it wasn’t wet when we went back. They laughed all the harder. Ma was the only one who didn’t laugh. But was that because she believed me? No freaking way. She stayed back and read me the same lecture as Thamuli had a few days back. That I mustn’t try to make up stories. I must try and think of this place as home and so on till my ears nearly fell off my head.

The next time it happened, I didn’t wait. I got the stuff on my hands and went straightaway. That would show them. This time no one laughed. Not that they believed me either. Her highness said it looked like Cherry Blossom. That was it. They were convinced I had slathered shoe polish on the rug. To scare them into moving back. Of all the insane ideas! I got a serious grilling from my father. No music for a week. Ma put on her stern face every time she had to speak to me. Even Thamuli went around with a pained expression. Unbelievable.

So that’s it. I’ve stopped talking about it to my folks. The stain keeps filling up with blood or whatever it is, every few days. I’m not scared, I tell you. It’s just super-annoying no one believes me. So much for the preference for sons. I just wish I could go back. Like I said, this move totally sucks.

~~~

WC - 950

FCA

PG – Paying guest

NUJS – National University of Juridical Sciences

Drut – u as in put, lit ‘fast,’ a qualifier of tempo and rhythm in Indian classical music.

This is the epilogue of the same story I posted for the August WEP challenge. First developed for Moving the Margins, a MOOC at Uni Iowa this summer. 

Read the other entries here:

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG team up to write together! August 2018

This month is a milestone for Write...Edit...Publish... as it teams up with Insecure Writer's Support Group...so excited! I'm here with a flash, which is only very slightly over word count. Thank you for reading.

The Recovery

What can you do?

He comes back from the hospital after the transplant, a chance at a second life, and you are afraid even to smile, to show how happy you are in case you attract the wrath of the gods.  The post-op at home goes well, except you are still in the adrenaline-charged ultra-vigilant mode after it has stopped being necessary. You are afraid to let go of fear, that’s your comfort zone. The Lakshman Rekha beyond which you haven’t ventured for a long, long time.

At first you don’t notice anything different, if his manner is a shade brusque at times you think nothing of it, attribute it to the cascading pain that's part of recovery. But as the pain diminishes, the difference escalates. The way he brushes off your hand tucking his sheet, the way he brushes off your suggestion of sitting in the garden. But still, you make allowances. You are used to making allowances. That too is within the Lakshman Rekha, well-trodden, familiar territory. You are filled with a love that can forgive anything. You're too happy to sweat the petty stuff.

But it doesn’t stop there. The eyes on the pillow change subtly, a totally strange patina of roughness, direct, bold, searing. They follow you round the room silently and you end up feeling as if a hundred eyes were on you. They are on you those hundred-irises, a weirdly red-eyed Indra, when you are upstairs on the terrace, or in the back garden hanging out the laundry, even when you are in the bath. You feel his eyes and suddenly turn around when you are out alone at the pharmacy one morning.   

He starts speaking a language you’ve never heard before.  The characteristic laid-back gentleness is gone, its place taken by rudeness. The tone changes, peevish and complaining at the slightest perception of ill-use. You have no idea what you have done to deserve this behavior, the constant accusations of neglect. The brushing off of your hand changes to a sharp smack one day as his strength improves. He shoves you out of the way on another. In a fit of pique at some triviality he calls you a name so offensive  that you are stunned to silence.  But he denies it when you do speak up finally. Looks at you as if you are deranged.

You leave the room, he doesn’t call you back. You cry yourself to sleep that night in the spare room for the first time in years. For the first time you wonder if life before this was better? Is a precarious, medical crises-ridden life worse than this stable recovery and a future wrapped in roughness? Is this how a quarter century of love ends?

He begins moving around independently. At the follow up the doctors are pleased with progress. He speaks like his old self in the consulting rooms and you feel you must have imagined the whole thing. The atmosphere is so normal that you can’t figure how to get the consultant alone, to broach the subject at all. You both drive back home, in the car he criticises your driving nonstop, your tongue-tied demeanour at the hospital. You can’t believe the change that happens in half an hour, a complete flip.

You can’t believe it either when you come upon him in the garden, holding a pair of secateurs, running his finger along the cutting edge. He says you need to buy a new pair.  You don’t tell him that you got the odd-job man to buy one just a few weeks ago. Days later he is in the kitchen sharpening the cleavers. He looks at them and then looks at you and you don’t know what to think anymore. A new fear clutches at you, fuzzy, unfamiliar, beyond the farthest borders of all the Lakshman Rekhas you have ever known.

You stop crying yourself to sleep in the spare room, you lock the door at night. You visit a friend and talk about the problem in the vaguest possible terms. What if the donor was...a certain sort? She looks at you quite baffled and you can’t bring yourself to articulate anything more.

You finally find the courage to call the doctor privately and are less reticent with her. But she too is baffled. No, that’s impossible, she says in a tone that makes it clear she thinks you’re the one who is slightly unhinged. She suggests counselling, she knows this most discreet therapist you could consider. It’s stressful looking after someone who’s been an invalid for so long, Mrs Sen. Call if you need anything. Don’t stress yourself. Goodbye Mrs Sen.

At dinner he is more than usually irritable, questioning your whereabouts. He yells at you, nags you for being gone the whole evening when you weren’t. But you jump when he raises his voice, your hands tremble while serving the vegetables. Your nerves are shot. He smiles smugly as if the tremors prove your guilt. 

“Who are you seeing, why are you away so much?” he shouts and tears into the bread with unnecessary force, while you sit there incandescent with fury and heartbroken at the same time.

“This is insane, Mohan!” you barely manage to whisper.

He yells even louder at you. And he’s saying the same thing as the doctor only much less politely. You are the one who is insane, not him.

“No, it’s you Mohan. Stop yelling, it’s bad for you. It’s you who’ve changed. Your heart has changed towards me. I noticed it right after you came home,” you finally screw up the courage to say it. And as soon as the words are out you feel calmer.

“You crazy woman! A heart transplant doesn’t change feelings! What’s your game exactly?”

Yes, Mohan, it does. It has. They’ve put some unknown criminal’s heart into you and you’re behaving just like one. Who knows the chemistry of transplants and what affects behavior? The ancients thought the heart was the seat of reasoning and emotions, the source of all life force. But you don’t say anything. 

What can you do?

~~~

WC - 1021

FCA

A few explanations for those who are not familiar with Indian mythology

Lakshman Rekha – lit Lakshman line. Red line, a line that must not be crossed. From the epic Ramayana (composed around 500 BCE). Lakshman the younger brother of Ram, drew a ‘safe’ boundary around their cottage in the forest to protect Ram’s wife Sita, while she was alone. She stepped out of that boundary and was abducted and the whole epic hinges around the battle to rescue her.

Indra – is the king of the gods in the Hindu pantheon. While viewing a most beautiful celestial nymph called Tilottama, Indra developed a hundred red eyes on his body. From the epic Mahabharata, composed after Ramayana.

This flash is an excerpt from the story I'm developing at an ongoing MOOC from the International Writing Programme at University of Iowa - Moving the Margins : Fiction and Inclusion.  

Read the other entries here:

Poetryless and up to my eyes

Long time readers here know that I'm hooked to the A-Z, and the Write...Edit...Publish... blogfests. And I'm hooked to MOOCs, I'm a compulsive MOOC-taker, they have become a part of my summer since I did the first one in 2016. But this year was different, I knew I'd be away for a large chunk of time bang in the middle of it, moving around every 4-5-6 days without much chance of you know, writing things down...So of course I signed up, for this one here!  

Predictably, I am now up to my eyes trying to catch up. I am a retreating speck in the rear view mirrors of my coursemates, if I may borrow my own phrase from last week :) Therefore, no poetry here today. Just an excerpt from the story I'm developing over there, and a hint of what is to be my entry come Wednesday for the writing challenge at Write...Edit...Publish..., teaming up with the Insecure Writer's Support Group for an exciting partnership. 


Insomniac 

The heart never sleeps, there is no rest. And the heart of the city certainly never sleeps, even in the smallest hours of the night. You have spent your whole life here but have only now fully realised it.  Because you can’t sleep a wink tonight, can you? how can you sleep when years of a monumental struggle are finally drawing to a close? What if you close your eyes and then when they open again, the entire prospect has vanished like the dream it feels it is? You can’t take that risk. So you listen for the heartbeat of the city, imagine another heartbeat on a monitor, steady, evenly fluorescent green lines sweeping across the screen while you listen to the sounds here and now – the noises of the ever-awake, insomniac inner streets.

Everything has its own sound here, the day and the night. Nothing is perfectly silent. Especially not the night. Even the streetlights are not silent, they hum with a quiet hum as they burn, each in its own whirlpool of flying insects. You aren’t sure if that noise is the electricity changing to light, or if it is the bugs flying around them.

You have gone along with a false notion mindlessly – silent night, no, it is not silent.  Just because the cars are parked and shut away in garages, only the night buses run and the metro stops throbbing through the subterranean veins of the city - that doesn’t equal quiet. There are the cicadas. Nothing silent about them.  As the vehicular noise recedes, they come into their own, their choral songs becoming louder and more attention seeking. You notice a night jar calling, a sparrow flaps its wings at its roost, disturbed by something. Do sparrows dream, you wonder. Is there any way of knowing the dreams of birds? Does a racing heart mean the same thing in birds as it does in humans? Your heart is racing tonight, equal parts excitement and fear. You try to breathe slowly, breathe in, hold, count, breathe out. But your heart doesn’t pay any mind to your exercises in control, it beats independently at a rate of its own choosing.

The night watchman blows his whistle right under your window every half hour as he completes his beat. His stout steel tipped stick rings on the asphalt and on the pavers bordering the kerb in a steady rhythm. It recedes as he moves to the outer edge of the block and then washes in as he completes the loop again. Somewhere a leaky faucet’s dripping – drip, drip, drip-drip. It is too faint to be one of yours, but you still get up to check, it is something to do, a diversion and a relief from your relentless, intense happy-panicked state of mind. You tighten the faucets quite unnecessarily before you come back to bed. The wood creaks as you lie back on it.

A street mongrel barks at a carful of revelers retuning from some late celebration, their audio is unnaturally loud in the absence of traffic. The glow of their headlights strafes the darkened walls of your room in an eerie sweep. Someone’s grandfather clock chimes the hours – the sound wafts in weakly through your open window. You count them up first – one to eleven, one to twelve, it drops to one. And then it rises again - one two, one two three, one two three four, you hear the first tram go clanging past at half past four. Someone is chanting the Krishna-naam rather loudly on it as he goes down to the river. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare.

You pick out that chant and give in to the impulse of touching your hand to your forehead in reverence to gods till now unknown to you, because you must take every opportunity to appease them. Is this hypocrisy? Praying only at a crisis? Maybe it is, but you don’t care. The second tram clangs past. There is no-one chanting on it, you can make that out as well. You didn’t know you had this acute a sense of hearing. You are hyper-alert to each sound, and the sound of your own pulse in your ears is the loudest of them all. 

The sunlight is just tickling the window now, the curtain cracks open in a hairline smile. The sparrows are stirring in the nest they have built in your skylight.

You were gone for so many days, toing and froing from the hospital, panic-stricken and hope-stricken and disbelief-stricken by quick turns, can it really end – surely you were not destined to be this happy? Skylights and birds and the general cleanliness of the household were very far from your mind, so that by the time you returned to yourself and your balcony, and you chanced to look up, oh heavens, the female was already sitting on the eggs and the male was hovering around practicing helicopter parenting.

You have a staunch heart but it balked at having to break that nest.  So you left it there.

And all this time, with the screens of the fluorescent green lines bleeping in rooms far away, your home has been empty of you, but home to new hearts beating. Your balcony is now fouled with bird droppings and sundry other messes.  You don’t really mind, who has time for fussing when something this big is happening in your life? 

You’ll take balconies with or without birdshit now, forever. You’ll take whatever other shit the balconies have in store for you. Just let this one thing be true. Just let this not be a dream. Just let Mohan come home. 

~~~

And if I may, I'd like to ask you some of the questions that I'm facing from the TAs in the forums - does the use of vernacular terms put you off? Or does it make the writing feel more authentic? Should we as writers consider the readership we are writing for, or should we just forget about them and create the art we want to create? 

For those who write in a second language, as I do, should they be cautious about first language interference, or even first culture interference?

Thank you for your patience with this one.