The Big V

“…to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.” 

 

-Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

 

I hold Eve Ensler in very high regard.

Not only because she uses the word ‘vagina’ so easily and with such fluidity (usage that is alien to us Indians, even though as women we ought to know better than to shy away from such a crucial body part), but because what she says about The Big V too…

“The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it’s shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remember.” 

 When I first read The Vagina Monologues, I remember feeling an intense sense of wonder at all the experiences women wrote about where this most mysterious of orifices was concerned. Growing up in India, I can’t remember any female adult ever actually saying the word vagina out loud. It was too deeply steeped in taboo perhaps, or just too crude a word to say out loud. As I grew up, my fiercely outspoken and fiendishly straightforward friends changed that.

And yet I wonder to this day why the word doesn’t come easily to so many of us. I’ve seen men and women flinch at the sound of the word on someone else’s tongue. Casual banter has turned into severe awkwardness when the word has dropped like a bombshell onto a conversation. Strange, because so much of our lives as women revolves around our vaginas.

It is a defining characteristic that we share with others of our species, but it is also so much more than that. In some communities it dictates how lives will be fashioned. Whether we will bear scars or songs of our vaginas, we know how deeply it affects us as women. The blood, the pain, the tearing, the cramps, the wonders of childbirth, the very crux of life seems to have evolved from this one place. And yet we are wary of talking about it, of celebrating it, of truly embracing our forms, our bodies.

“I bet you’re worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them.” 

One, Two, Three.

At this point in my life, three things are happening. Well, actually one could say there’s nothing happening, but I suppose that would be a lie since the world and life are never very still, so here goes…

One. 

Thanks to my big brother (who I suspect may be a superhero or alternatively a benign version of Megamind), I have rekindled my awe of the internet. Why? Because I have found that one bastion that refuses to succumb to the growing insanity and clutter that is social media today: Brain Pickings. 

Although much of my time is spent reading the older posts (my one aim in life is now to read every single brainpickings post there is which may well take up my life completely considering it’s updated every often), I feel like my brain is rekindled again, just by re-reading the words of the world’s Greats. I am in awe, I feel a sense of child-like wonder, and I truly want to absorb every word on those pages.

God Bless Maria Popova. 

Two.

I have finally channeled my frustrations at being unemployed, and have attempted to make the difficult move into gainful unemployment by starting The Word Songs Project. It’s not really the most scientific blog there is, but it gives me warm fuzzies inside to see how the written word has affected so many lives, so simply, in the smallest of ways. The contributions are coming in, from absolute strangers too, and I am in love with the idea of being able to showcase how the world is a better place with a kinder word (or vice versa).

Those of you who tell me you read my blog from the shadows, please do come into the light and find the time and inclination to contribute.

Three.

I am finally learning to cook. Hallelujah.

The World of The World Book

Staring out at me each morning from the lowest shelf in my bookcase is a row of perfectly aligned books. Each time I look at them, I feel like I’m looking at what could be royalty where books are concerned.

 

With muted gold letters that have been etched into rich brown coverlets, The World Book Encyclopedia, that most distinguished and majestic of all written material available to young people in the nineties has now been relegated to the bottom shelf for some years now. Yet this entire family of books still has a stately air about it. As a child, I remember my parents sitting down  with a young salesperson to discuss the vast set of books (and their price no doubt). They’ve had to make a lot of tough decisions regarding their slightly deranged only child, but even in hindsight, this remains one of their best ones.

 

Once I got my hands on them, I was a child possessed. I pored over them, used them to feed my thirsty curiosity about Egyptian and Greek Gods, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Einstein….anything that sparked a fever in my young and impressionable mind, I would turn to the World Book to for the answers . Needless to say, probably the only pages I never looked up (willingly at least) were the ones that had anything to do with Math. For everything else, the World Book was my oyster. And I was perfectly content to revel in its pages.

 

Along with the main set of books came two other additional series. One was called The Young Scientist, and the other was titled Childcraft. The former had every possible aspect of Science within it’s ten books, perhaps more than a geeky seven-year-old like me could fathom, but I embraced it with a passion that my Science teacher would have given her left arm to witness if it were in the classroom. My favourites included Planet Earth, Investigating Light, and The Human Body. Don’t ask me why. I was fascinated by them all, but some of them stood out, calling me repeatedly and even today the well-thumbed pages are evidence of the fact that some books were more loved than others. 

 

My Childcraft favourites were Stories and Poems and Make and Do. Both of which called to the creative child in me, and I remember staring at the pages in wonder, thinking about how mixing this colour and this would actually give me THAT! To my almost baby brain, this was like the discovery of the Holy Grail. Also, the kids in the books looked really happy, and they smiled sagely as they conducted their experiments, never once letting on that the cleaning-up afterward would not be pretty. 

 

So much of who I am and what I enjoy doing comes from those wonderful hours spent thumbing lovingly through these books. As a child, I thought I’d be an astronomer, because my love of planets was absolute and I thought that outer space was the biggest, most amazing mystery there was to discover. Of course, when reality struck I realized I had no head for numbers and so that dream vanished in a few years. However, I still enjoy watching Dr. Brian Cox take me through theWonders of the Universe and I attribute that to the images I first saw in my Stars and Planets book. I also remember the beautiful illustrations in my Stories and Poems book that did far more for my imagination than Cartoon Network ever did (I love CN, but hey, it’s true.)

 

Though the main series still shines out at me every morning, my Childcraft and Young Scientist books have been packed away, giving way to other bundles of joy that take up my reading time. Of course, there is a lot more information available now than there was then, with the internet leading the way with cutting edge imagery and audio-visuals. Everything is google-able, just a click away. Being a child now is so much easier (and harder, I know) than it was then. 

 

But if I have to pack my babies up in a jute bag and smuggle them into a room and make sure they start out learning about life and the world and people and art through the latest editions of the World Book Encyclopedia (and perhaps some of the old ones too), then you can bet on all the stars and planets there are that I will do just that. And then I’ll sit back and smile as their little eyes light up in wonder at simple drawings on the page before them.

Summer Vacations

When I was a child, we lived in the Middle East, which meant that to avoid being fried to a crisp in the sweltering months of June and July, we would take our yearly vacations to India.

As that glorious time of year approached, like all healthy children I would feel a heady sense of excitement, a rush that even to this day remains unparalleled. After all the formalities and customary obligations were fulfilled, we would exit the airport. And there, without fail, every single year, our family awaited us. Overwhelmed by a flurry of hugs and kisses, we would all stand there, a small microcosm of arms and legs exuding great excitement and love. And every year, also without fail, it would pour as we drove away from the airport. This would lead to the same cheery comments each year: ‘You brought the rains with you’, and more memorably, ‘Vashi bridge is sinking’ (always to be delivered while our car was ON Vashi bridge of course). I still count those arrivals among my most cherished moments as a child.

The first morning after we’d arrived, there would be a lot of chaos in the house. I would wake to my aunts and my mother speaking in hushed voices in the kitchen, to vessels clanging, to muffled laughter and the sound of birds chirping. The landscape of the living room would resemble an obstacle course, with the long-limbed bodies of the male folk lying strewn across in various positions, angling to fit almost anywhere, under the dining table, the sofa, anywhere there was space to be found and possessed. I loved waking up to the noise and even today when we get together, though I usually wake up when the sun is high, I love listening to the sound of my family bustling about together.

Then came the beautiful sunny mornings where we ran about screaming our lungs out in a way only the most carefree children can understand. I still remember the flushed cheeks and scraped knees, the steel glasses of water gulped down in a rush to run back out, the hot evenings and the smell of the cake and crunch of the wafers at the birthday parties I tagged along to. All of this coupled with the fact that I was spoiled rotten by my aunts (something that outlasted childhood vacations into everyday adulthood), and the fact that there wasn’t any homework to do, meant I was truly in Childhood Heaven. Even the sibling rivalry with my cousins and my painful need to cry about everything (especially earthworms and ants, much to everyone else’s mirth) didn’t interfere with my peaceful sleep every night.

Our liaisons with the television were few and far between. We watched with awe as videotapes slid into VCD players and images of Tarzan, Simba and a variety of other animated beings danced across the screens. My knowledge and love of all animated characters stems from those days we spent sprawled across the floor watching them over and over till we knew all the songs. I distinctly remember spending a lot of time with my cousins’ GIJoes with brief moments of confusion when purple and yellow ponies from My Little Pony entered the fray on occasion.

When we graduated to playing Scotland Yard and Cluedo, only my eldest cousin could be the robber and the murderer respectively, because the rest of us were too undeveloped in years (my cousin would argue brains) to do anything remotely strategic. We had one pair of roller skates between three of us and fights  for the right foot would inevitably ensue (the left promising many more sinister slips and ungainly crashes than the right) and with this amazing pair we would play our version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with my eldest cousin being Phileas Fogg, hiding from the two, sometimes three annoying Passepartout(s). Birthday parties at home meant there would always be paper streamers lettering the walls with names and a slightly crooked but painstakingly created Happy Birthday somewhere. And lots of lovely homemade food.

When I think back to those times, I am grateful for a lot of things. The fact that the television wasn’t as important to living as it is now, the fact that a lot of our time was spent devising games that nobody in the world could comprehend but us, the fact that left to our own devices we perfected the art of entertaining ourselves even during the power cuts by making wax medals to give each other. My memories of those days are in muted technicolour.  So much love and beauty and naivety. We lived a charmed life.

Someday when I have children of my own, I hope they can understand this feeling. That childhood can be made beautiful almost anywhere, if you’re lucky enough to be born into a family that cares about you. That boredom can be chased away when the littlest of people put their heads together, that when you’re a child, laughter from your toes, the kind that dances through the air and settles on all the adults around is the most beautiful kind. That the memories you make when you’re a child live with you long after you grow up and grow old.

I hope that someday my children will have vacations like mine, where they feel alive with every breath, where they discover beauty, where curiosity fills their veins and adventure lies around every bend, where wonder fills their eyes and awe blooms in their hearts, where the laughter tinkles on far, far into the future.

The World Book Encyclopedia

Staring out at me each morning from the lowest shelf in my bookcase is a row of perfectly aligned books. Each time I look at them, I feel like I’m looking at what could be royalty where books are concerned.

With muted gold letters that have been etched into rich brown coverlets, The World Book Encyclopedia, that most distinguished and majestic of all written material available to young people in the nineties has now been relegated to the bottom shelf for some years now. Yet this entire family of books still has a stately air about it. As a child, I remember my parents sitting down  with a young salesperson to discuss the vast set of books (and their price no doubt). They’ve had to make a lot of tough decisions regarding their slightly deranged only child, but even in hindsight, this remains one of their best ones.

Once I got my hands on them, I was a child possessed. I pored over them, used them to feed my thirsty curiosity about Egyptian and Greek Gods, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Einstein….anything that sparked a fever in my young and impressionable mind, I would turn to the World Book to for the answers . Needless to say, probably the only pages I never looked up (willingly at least) were the ones that had anything to do with Math. For everything else, the World Book was my oyster. And I was perfectly content to revel in its pages.

Along with the main set of books came two other additional series. One was called The Young Scientist, and the other was titled Childcraft. The former had every possible aspect of Science within it’s ten books, perhaps more than a geeky seven-year-old like me could fathom, but I embraced it with a passion that my Science teacher would have given her left arm to witness if it were in the classroom. My favourites included Planet Earth, Investigating Light, and The Human Body. Don’t ask me why. I was fascinated by them all, but some of them stood out, calling me repeatedly and even today the well-thumbed pages are evidence of the fact that some books were more loved than others. 

My Childcraft favourites were Stories and Poems and Make and Do. Both of which called to the creative child in me, and I remember staring at the pages in wonder, thinking about how mixing this colour and this would actually give me THAT! To my almost baby brain, this was like the discovery of the Holy Grail. Also, the kids in the books looked really happy, and they smiled sagely as they conducted their experiments, never once letting on that the cleaning-up afterward would not be pretty. 

So much of who I am and what I enjoy doing comes from those wonderful hours spent thumbing lovingly through these books. As a child, I thought I’d be an astronomer, because my love of planets was absolute and I thought that outer space was the biggest, most amazing mystery there was to discover. Of course, when reality struck I realized I had no head for numbers and so that dream vanished in a few years. However, I still enjoy watching Dr. Brian Cox take me through the Wonders of the Universe and I attribute that to the images I first saw in my Stars and Planets book. I also remember the beautiful illustrations in my Stories and Poems book that did far more for my imagination than Cartoon Network ever did (I love CN, but hey, it’s true.)

Though the main series still shines out at me every morning, my Childcraft and Young Scientist books have been packed away, giving way to other bundles of joy that take up my reading time. Of course, there is a lot more information available now than there was then, with the internet leading the way with cutting edge imagery and audio-visuals. Everything is google-able, just a click away. Being a child now is so much easier (and harder, I know) than it was then. 

But if I have to pack my babies up in a jute bag and smuggle them into a room and make sure they start out learning about life and the world and people and art through the latest editions of the World Book Encyclopedia (and perhaps some of the old ones too), then you can bet on all the stars and planets there are that I will do just that. And then I’ll sit back and smile as their little eyes light up in wonder at simple drawings on the page before them. 

Summer Vacations

When I was a child, we lived in the Middle East, which meant that to avoid being fried to a crisp in the sweltering months of June and July, we would take our yearly vacations to India.

As that glorious time of year approached, like all healthy children I would feel a heady sense of excitement, a rush that even to this day remains unparalleled. After all the formalities and customary obligations were fulfilled, we would exit the airport. And there, without fail, every single year, our family awaited us. Overwhelmed by a flurry of hugs and kisses, we would all stand there, a small microcosm of arms and legs exuding great excitement and love. And every year, also without fail, it would pour as we drove away from the airport. This would lead to the same cheery comments each year: ‘You brought the rains with you’, and more memorably, ‘Vashi bridge is sinking’ (always to be delivered while our car was ON Vashi bridge of course). I still count those arrivals among my most cherished moments as a child. 

The first morning after we’d arrived, there would be a lot of chaos in the house. I would wake to my aunts and my mother speaking in hushed voices in the kitchen, to vessels clanging, to muffled laughter and the sound of birds chirping. The landscape of the living room would resemble an obstacle course, with the long-limbed bodies of the male folk lying strewn across in various positions, angling to fit almost anywhere, under the dining table, the sofa, anywhere there was space to be found and possessed. I loved waking up to the noise and even today when we get together, though I usually wake up when the sun is high, I love listening to the sound of my family bustling about together.

Then came the beautiful sunny mornings where we ran about screaming our lungs out in a way only the most carefree children can understand. I still remember the flushed cheeks and scraped knees, the steel glasses of water gulped down in a rush to run back out, the hot evenings and the smell of the cake and crunch of the wafers at the birthday parties I tagged along to. All of this coupled with the fact that I was spoiled rotten by my aunts (something that outlasted childhood vacations into everyday adulthood), and the fact that there wasn’t any homework to do, meant I was truly in Childhood Heaven. Even the sibling rivalry with my cousins and my painful need to cry about everything (especially earthworms and ants, much to everyone else’s mirth) didn’t interfere with my peaceful sleep every night. 

Our liaisons with the television were few and far between. We watched with awe as videotapes slid into VCD players and images of Tarzan, Simba and a variety of other animated beings danced across the screens. My knowledge and love of all animated characters stems from those days we spent sprawled across the floor watching them over and over till we knew all the songs. I distinctly remember spending a lot of time with my cousins’ GIJoes with brief moments of confusion when purple and yellow ponies from My Little Pony entered the fray on occasion. 

When we graduated to playing Scotland Yard and Cluedo, only my eldest cousin could be the robber and the murderer respectively, because the rest of us were too undeveloped in years (my cousin would argue brains) to do anything remotely strategic. We had one pair of roller skates between three of us and fights  for the right foot would inevitably ensue (the left promising many more sinister slips and ungainly crashes than the right) and with this amazing pair we would play our version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with my eldest cousin being Phileas Fogg, hiding from the two, sometimes three annoying Passepartout(s). Birthday parties at home meant there would always be paper streamers lettering the walls with names and a slightly crooked but painstakingly created Happy Birthday somewhere. And lots of lovely homemade food.

When I think back to those times, I am grateful for a lot of things. The fact that the television wasn’t as important to living as it is now, the fact that a lot of our time was spent devising games that nobody in the world could comprehend but us, the fact that left to our own devices we perfected the art of entertaining ourselves even during the power cuts by making wax medals to give each other. My memories of those days are in muted technicolour.  So much love and beauty and naivety. We lived a charmed life.

Someday when I have children of my own, I hope they can understand this feeling. That childhood can be made beautiful almost anywhere, if you’re lucky enough to be born into a family that cares about you. That boredom can be chased away when the littlest of people put their heads together, that when you’re a child, laughter from your toes, the kind that dances through the air and settles on all the adults around is the most beautiful kind. That the memories you make when you’re a child live with you long after you grow up and grow old. 

I hope that someday my children will have vacations like mine, where they feel alive with every breath, where they discover beauty, where curiosity fills their veins and adventure lies around every bend, where wonder fills their eyes and awe blooms in their hearts, where the laughter tinkles on far, far into the future.

My Million Chances

In my soul I feel a sea raging. I feel the waves ebb with a quiet serenity and then hit the shore with a ferocity that takes my breath away.

I feel a tug so strong and yet the direction is unclear. I am being pulled toward the sky, to skim over clouds and I am being ground into the earth, turning to dust, mingling with all the ages of time.

I want to move forward and I put on my cape to fly and then I feel it snag on the branch of an invisible tree, a solitary sentinel guarding against the flight of the arrogant and the naivety of youth. I feel my hands splayed over the bark, begging it, kissing it and whispering to it to let me go. To let me spell my dreams out and then have them fly me away into a mist-kissed horizon.

I feel a fire raging behind my eyes. The melting brown turns to speckled orange and then to a blinding golden yellow until it consumes my face and my body and I melt into it, singing all the while that I need to be let go of, that I need to let go. That I want to cast imprints on earth and time and be remembered. That I want to make a mark, I want to dig my feet into the soil and grow roots and search restlessly and thirstily for love and water. For anything that will give life. 

I can feel the light inside me dull and brighten. Dull. Brighten. Dull. Brighten. Dull. Until I can feel it like the throbbing of my heart. It waits for me to open my eyes to the spray of the seawater, so the salt can sting and the light can stay on and shine outward. Out of my eyes and my mouth and my fingertips and my toes. 

I want to breathe my life in.Not yours. I want to eat my dreams up until they fill me up and I find the strength to raise my voice and say this, this is what I want. When I close my eyes I want to dream my dreams, not yours, I want to find roads that lead to mine, not roundabouts that lead to yours, giving me a chance in a million to be what I can be, when all I want is all my million chances. 

Listen

Yesterday I lay on my side reading a book, and my ear folded in on itself.

In the following minute I felt a peace I haven’t felt in a long time. I shut the book, closed my eyes and lay still for a minute. I was listening to my heart beat.

The next time I have to put my life into perspective, I’m going to lie on my side and make my ear fold in on itself. Then I’m going to lie there for the next few minutes and smile to myself as my body and my heart give my mind a gentle drubbing.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Listen.

You’re alive.

The Colours Of Loss

I have always loved kurtas.

The soft, crisp and comfortable fabric, the bright colours, the mixing, matching and re-hashing to make it all your own signature style.

Yesterday I was giving my cupboard the ol’ dress-down as it threatened to spill over and take over my room and I piled all my kurtas into one corner and slid them into their home inside the closet. Then I felt a strange sense of loss.

Leaving India never has been and will never be easy for me. But it’s the little things I have to leave behind, my identity in the small ways by which I live and face each day, that is the hardest to let go of. This year, teaching opened up a new life, and when I look back, every single day was so fulfilling, I felt I had finally found my calling.

And this year, more than any other, my kurtas became my second skin. I will miss them. As I will miss being a teacher to some wonderful students. 

An Open Letter

Ma and Dadda, 

I can’t believe we’re on the other side of that one date that has kept us on our toes for so many months now. Part of me is relieved. Part of me is not so sure.

So much change lies ahead. And yes, I know that a lot of that is positive change, with so much to look forward to. But it’s the little things that will make it hard for us all. All the everyday routines and the mundane goings-on that we now hardly notice at all. 

Having watched so many weddings, and now finally having been the bride in one, I can now say for a fact that I have been lucky. Yes there were a wide number of people involved in making the process smooth from start to end. Yes, we had our differences (haha, imagine us without those). But because the two of you were always there, backing me up, and ready to listen to my version and my realities, I can look back and be grateful for so many things that went differently from the ordinary South Indian wedding.

All my life I thought I would do things differently at my wedding. I hated and still hate so much of the societal idiocy and hypocrisy that dictates our lives. And only when I walked out of that room and headed towards the mandap did I realize how little control we have over all of this idiocy. So much of it comes from people who have no connection to you or yours, and so much pointless time, energy and so many tears are wasted in the name of tradition. So many things that we did went against my beliefs, what with the pandit saying neither of us understood, and possibly don’t mean much in the large scheme of things.

But as I watched you both move around and do things that were alien to us all, with so much grace and dignity, and I couldn’t hold on to a lot of the anger and disappointment that was seething inside. You both did it effortlessly, and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride.

All along the way, even when we didn’t see eye-to-eye on things, you both chose and fought your battles wisely. Giving in so much of the time, just to make things easier for everyone. I hope that someday I can learn that skill. I have too much fire in my belly and too many strong opinions to do that just now. Can’t blame me, I get a lot of that from the two of you.

But I want you to know- though I am critical of so much that happened (this is part of my nature, you know this well, and I am working on it) when I think of the two of you, I only feel a deep sense of gratitude. All your lives you have given me everything I needed- opportunity, support, faith in my abilities (some imagined, some real), and so much of who I am today is because you have allowed me to express myself and grow into my own. Some would call me spoiled. Perhaps I am, in many ways. But if it allows us to share the kind of communication we do, and the kind of relationship we have, then I don’t particularly mind being called anything.

We have come a long way. And we have fought our own battles with one another. We must, we are all three very different people after all. But here we are, entering a new phase together. You both have come such a long way where turning the tide is concerned. You didn’t put up a fight for anything that you thought was a reasonable and sound request, you chose to change the way we did things to a large extent, you chose to pick only the most basic of traditions and do away with a lot of the show, and you backed me up each time.

I am going to miss being around you guys. Wearing comfortable and tattered clothes without worrying about what anyone will say, sleeping when I want to, eating what and when I want to, burrowing through clothes in two wardrobes, random hugs and even more random arguments, reading the morning papers and discussing strange people and stranger times, yelling at the top of my lungs and just being in our home, our little piece of earth.

Then again now the two of you can, with a reasonable amount patience, look forward to a new generation of little chubsters to dote on, finally make a trip to see the Big Ben, and just take it easy since you have no more stubborn and feisty offspring to marry off.

I love you both. Thank you for everything..