Tuesday, February 13, 2024
fear
fear.
It stays tucked away in the pit of her stomach, never to leave after the first time he raised his hand and chased her through the rooms of their second home with the baby four months old.
The night-long thoughts of suicide clear up at dawn, impelled by visions of her child losing her mother.
28 years later, her cousin and her aunt watch him lose his temper in front of them and they intervene, asking her to leave him. He tells them it's in the past and it will be a fresh start. He removes her from the aunt's house and drives her back to his home, telling her through the six-hour drive that she will do as he says. She sits quietly, waiting for the horrific drive to reach its end, reliving similar excruciating drives over the course of their marriage.
Yet, he does not hit anymore and begins giving her money for the household after ten years. He has calculated that he has paid her 25 lakh Indian rupees for household expenses over the years. They have been back in India for ten years. She has kept no account of her incomes which she made while freelancing without inconveniencing him. She has no account how much she has spent on the household and on their daughter's wedding that year - the last straw on her back.
Fear after the physical abuse stops is like a rock; not a pesky pebble that she can kick merrily out of the way. The more she fears, the more he senses it. Like an animal, he pounces on the smell of fear in her and whips it up into thick mists of self-doubt and fear of the outside world.
There are weeks when he accuses her of eating out on her evening walks - and on some days, he tells her she doesn't walk enough. There are four full meals for which she must be present to serve hot and to clean up after. Days when he tells her, "I don't need so many dishes," and eats only one of the many she has cooked without having no way of knowing if it's a day when he will say there's nothing to eat. Days when she has forgotten to order his brand of milk early enough to boil and chill for his tea twice a day. It cannot be hot or lukewarm, but must be refrigerated. It must be heated only after it is mixed with the tea he has steeped. Days when he screams at the older maid because he senses her fear of men - the husband who tries to strangulate her when he is drunk has conditioned her into accepting the dictates of her employer. The younger maid has not yet known fear and he knows not to bully her.
For the first time in the marriage, she has gathered courage to hire two maids for two hours each, so that she would have guaranteed help every day. The poor fall ill often and rare is the month when one or the other of them don't fall prey to peculiarly third-world diseases. Gastro-enteritis, typhoid, backache for the older maid, the one with six babies, fever, beatings by husbands. She feels she can afford it now that she has built up her portfolio without his knowledge and has projects she can make a living by. She ignores his jibes at her having two maids and tries to meet her deadlines but the maids, she finds, are in straits direr than hers. After 25 years of keeping the house clean and cooking on her own without respite, she is grateful for the days when they both come to work.
Tuesday, February 05, 2019
If you had a wife...
I drew up into the driveway, silencing my phone so my mother would not hear any calls.
Scooping up the festival souvenirs I had bought for my clients, I threw them into the room by the porch that I called my office. My mother lay on the sofa watching a regional movie, and her son from the corner of her eye.
I walked past her, glancing at the empty table, knowing it had been deliberately cleared to make a statement. "No dinner for me today, hmm?" I ventured.
"Ask your wife. I am too old to wait till 11 pm for a giant tree of a son, as well as cook for him and put it in his mouth," she replied.
I glanced at her stormy face and was gentle.
"Wait. Let me guess what happened. Did pa tell you that you are too old for him today? You will never be too old for me, ma, so ignore him, live with me forever, be a sugarplum and come sit with me while I eat."
My mother sat up, gathering her sari folds, pulling them down to her toes and over her breast. She had been watching the screen from a prone position parallel to the screen which necessitated her neck be at the one particular angle which would exclude a crick. She had spent too much time calculating the angle and positioning herself to be able to change her position without regret.
"You left home at 8 o'clock this morning. And you walk in at 11, so late, without calling once. Go look at your phone and see how many missed calls you have! I have better things to do than guess whether to cook or not for you. When you are not here, I just cook some oats and we two are happy with that. Now I have made all your favourite dishes and I keep waiting like a maidservant, not knowing if I should put it away or leave it on the stove for you. You should know that food spoils fast in this heat! Of course, how would you even know all this. If you had a wife, you would have listened. Me, I am your old mother and you don't care."
She straightened up and saw my face and got louder now. "And stop laughing at me. You never know what I go through. Go heat up the chicken on the stove. Let me see if there is anything else left for you. I never know how much rice I must make because you never tell me your plans. If you would just call once, I could decide."
I couldn't stop laughing at her and decided going to the kitchen would be easier. From that safe distance, I told her something I told my parents every day.
"Ma, I am not getting married now. If you are screaming at me so I will get tired of it, and simply do what you ask, no, ma. I am married first to my business. And if I ever settle, I will tell you then so that you can get rid of me for a wife."
The presence of love in the absence of the lover is an illusion.
I kiss the large brown nipples on her pint-size breasts and then let my lips linger all over her.
My kisses are making her say my name in agony, but I don't stop. I let her writhe and arch till she will not take it lying down anymore. She flips all six feet of me over on to the bed.
With her teeth and fingers and lips, she pulls down my boxers and kisses my penis from head to root, taking it all into her mouth for one long pulse beat. She lets it go, looks up at me, into my eyes as always. I think, "What can she see that she is always looking?"
Then she goes back with her fingers and touches my testicles and the perineum, for she has read that the perineum must not be ignored. I remember her telling me that; I smile and hum a bit, and she raises her head again, so I shut up and smile back and bring her head down again.
So she goes back and forth, checking my eyes (what IS she seeing?) and my perineum and my testicles in a long-drawn conversation with them. I try not to ejaculate and abruptly, she is raising my head up. I want to see you sitting up when I have you in my mouth, she says.
She puts her head down, her ass in the air, my hands gripping it. I almost push her head hard in my frenzy, but she doesn't protest. Soon I am spent. I mechanically reach out for tissues, and she says smiling, "Well, there's nothing left to wipe. It's all inside of me."
"It is?"
"Yes," she says nonchalantly. "Why?"
She delves into my eyes again and it hits her soon enough, "No one's ever swallowed you before!"
"No," I admit.
"It could do with a spoonful of sugar next time," she laughs.
I bring her face up to my lips and say, "I love you, baby." We kiss, lips entangled, tongues not knowing or caring where they are for a long, long time. Then I lay her down on the bed, and go down to her thighs, spreading them apart while she arches her back and holds on to my fingers to keep anchored and in touch. I take her in my mouth and she is now clawing at the sheet with her free hand and at my hand with the other. I find her clit and let my tongue explore it. I lose myself for a minute and nip it gently with my teeth.
There's a high-pitched moan from the top of the bed and I stop, mildly shaken. I kiss her clit and massage it with a finger softly. She is now arching again. and I watch her while I use my tongue and fingers in a tangle of lust and then she raises herself up, arches backward, calls out my name and ...slaps me. I look up bewildered.
I am awake now, and I complete my dream alone. She is awake in another city, wishing someone would make dreams for her too.
Phones are the devil's spawn
She knew she must drink water, and the family must too. She stocked bubbletop cans so her family would not be thirsty. She knew she must eat, and their son must eat better, so she found the recipes and the resources to feed him. She tried not to think how much more she could do. She stopped knowing the could-dos so that she would not implode. She remembered the musts, she remembered the to-dos, and she remembered the nothings.
She got up from her sleep-deprived bed in the mornings; she found dishes to wash that took a long number of comforting hours, and tiles to clean. Lunches to pack, clothes to sort into dark and light, smiles to dispense into their son's world.
Dust she did not care about for there was no one to see it; no one who cared about dust was invited anymore. Still she dusted sometimes, when she remembered their son must not fall sick. She did not remember why she cleaned, or dressed. She tried to revive the memory of why she bought clothes or looked in mirrors. Glimmers of remembrances like ice picks tried to lodge in her veins. She removed them and cooked on. Her memory was her bane, so she let it go sometimes without remembering.
She had watched desultorily her Chinese-made phone crash and be stamped upon by the man who had fathered her children. Picked up and thrown again. A phone her children had had delivered for one of her birthdays.
+++++
Eight years ago, on another birthday, a computer was delivered to their home. And she began her career online.
The phone and the computer were windows to worlds he resented her having. He reviled both till she plucked out of herself any desires for worlds he did not want for her. But she learnt new skills when he was not looking.
++++++
She had watched other phones being flung for other reasons.
Like, for being left plugged into the charger after it was done charging.
It was the eve of yet another of her birthdays, and the phone belonged to the other woman in her family, their pre-teen daughter who was then a day scholar at the same school as their ten-year-old son.
It was a night when their son held her tight in the dark, while his older sister and his father sparred with each other over the girl's phone left plugged into the charger.
She pretended she was the mother protecting the son, knowing all the while that it was the son trying to comfort the mother.
Perhaps he was holding for her a birthday wish without his father's knowledge, clutching his mother in the darkness while his sister's phone flew toward the wall and landed softly on the carpet without breaking.
The carpet was an advantage of circumstance that her own Chinese-made phone did not have six years later.
The girl loudly protested the flinging of her phone. That led to one more unsuccessful flinging.
The next morning, the girl and the boy and their mother woke up to paternal frost. It was made more pronounced because it was a ritual to be cheerful, even if you were not, on family birthdays. Still, she chirped at every dark face merrily, in an attempt to sweep the night under the carpet.
Together the four of them got into the car to mark their attendance at a lunch. Her chirps fell into a void, and at one unintelligent moment, she took resort to sentiment. It's my birthday, she suggested. Could we all talk to each other and forget hate?
The car screeched sharply towards the median. I will kill us all, he told her, while the children continued to sit unmoved and morose in the rear. She checked on their seat belts, turned her eyes to the trees whistling by, and willed that her memories of feeling would dry up a little quicker.
Together they had lunch at her friend's new home with men and women who moved naturally among each other. She sat in an inner room with her children and their friends, unable to be an adult with the adults that afternoon.
+++
They drove in silence everywhere they had to go the rest of that day, the car a dreaded family reunion.
+++
The evening was Easter Eve, and together they dressed for church. In the years past, a group of them went to dinner after every Easter Mass. It was the same this Easter, and she put on last year's wifely facade. She found her fingers and toes clenching for fear that the friends would remember it was her birthday and rile him about a "treat" or a gift.
Someone did at last ask for a birthday treat while they discussed which restaurant to go to. He directed the conversation deftly away while the women admired his witty comeback. No one that night knew that he had threatened to kill his family that morning.
The bill they split equally. The friends did not mention her birthday again. She restrained herself from agonizing over whether they had sensed his anger at his family. She wiped her birthday from his memory by ignoring it herself.
+++
Then one year when her children grew up a bit and he had pinned her down with her hands and feet together, their son told him that he was moving out with his mother. He apologized tenderly: "like a princess" he said she was. And she trod on fewer eggshells. "I regained a non-violent world," she said to her friend.
But it returned, and then it was the turn of her Chinese-made phone to die under his duress. It was a moment when unintelligent sentiment again took her down, so the moment does not deserve a pity party or story. It only meant a new SIM card had to be bought and inserted in an old-gen phone she found in their storeroom, so that she could make calls and order bubbletops and prawns and lamb and gas cylinder refills. She remembered some numbers; some essential ones she found on his phone; some service numbers she found on the Internet.
For he had thrown away, into the garbage collector's van, the SIM card and all the bits of her world outside of himself.
+++
6 pm is her anxiety alarm. When work is done and family time traditionally begins in many other homes, her lungs constrict and her toes clench. The man with whom she had signed up to seed her family sits in the study carved out of the living room of their six-bathroom apartment.
With wooden louvre panelling, the study created the illusion of being a private space. It had the effect of shushing the house because the master worked in it on weekdays, weekends, evenings and mornings unless he was travelling. She had to close the kitchen door so that the powerful men he called would not hear the clang of pots or the whistle of pressure cookers while she prepared two kinds of meals: one like his mother made, and one for her children and a different palate. There would have to be rice at all meals and there would be one dal, one vegetable and one meat. Fish had to be fried, then roasted in an oven with as many as two dozen shallots which took her maid most of the one and a half hours she was hired for each day. She did the rest of the housework on roast fish days,
Scooping up the festival souvenirs I had bought for my clients, I threw them into the room by the porch that I called my office. My mother lay on the sofa watching a regional movie, and her son from the corner of her eye.
I walked past her, glancing at the empty table, knowing it had been deliberately cleared to make a statement. "No dinner for me today, hmm?" I ventured.
"Ask your wife. I am too old to wait till 11 pm for a giant tree of a son, as well as cook for him and put it in his mouth," she replied.
I glanced at her stormy face and was gentle.
"Wait. Let me guess what happened. Did pa tell you that you are too old for him today? You will never be too old for me, ma, so ignore him, live with me forever, be a sugarplum and come sit with me while I eat."
My mother sat up, gathering her sari folds, pulling them down to her toes and over her breast. She had been watching the screen from a prone position parallel to the screen which necessitated her neck be at the one particular angle which would exclude a crick. She had spent too much time calculating the angle and positioning herself to be able to change her position without regret.
"You left home at 8 o'clock this morning. And you walk in at 11, so late, without calling once. Go look at your phone and see how many missed calls you have! I have better things to do than guess whether to cook or not for you. When you are not here, I just cook some oats and we two are happy with that. Now I have made all your favourite dishes and I keep waiting like a maidservant, not knowing if I should put it away or leave it on the stove for you. You should know that food spoils fast in this heat! Of course, how would you even know all this. If you had a wife, you would have listened. Me, I am your old mother and you don't care."
She straightened up and saw my face and got louder now. "And stop laughing at me. You never know what I go through. Go heat up the chicken on the stove. Let me see if there is anything else left for you. I never know how much rice I must make because you never tell me your plans. If you would just call once, I could decide."
I couldn't stop laughing at her and decided going to the kitchen would be easier. From that safe distance, I told her something I told my parents every day.
"Ma, I am not getting married now. If you are screaming at me so I will get tired of it, and simply do what you ask, no, ma. I am married first to my business. And if I ever settle, I will tell you then so that you can get rid of me for a wife."
The presence of love in the absence of the lover is an illusion.
I kiss the large brown nipples on her pint-size breasts and then let my lips linger all over her.
My kisses are making her say my name in agony, but I don't stop. I let her writhe and arch till she will not take it lying down anymore. She flips all six feet of me over on to the bed.
With her teeth and fingers and lips, she pulls down my boxers and kisses my penis from head to root, taking it all into her mouth for one long pulse beat. She lets it go, looks up at me, into my eyes as always. I think, "What can she see that she is always looking?"
Then she goes back with her fingers and touches my testicles and the perineum, for she has read that the perineum must not be ignored. I remember her telling me that; I smile and hum a bit, and she raises her head again, so I shut up and smile back and bring her head down again.
So she goes back and forth, checking my eyes (what IS she seeing?) and my perineum and my testicles in a long-drawn conversation with them. I try not to ejaculate and abruptly, she is raising my head up. I want to see you sitting up when I have you in my mouth, she says.
She puts her head down, her ass in the air, my hands gripping it. I almost push her head hard in my frenzy, but she doesn't protest. Soon I am spent. I mechanically reach out for tissues, and she says smiling, "Well, there's nothing left to wipe. It's all inside of me."
"It is?"
"Yes," she says nonchalantly. "Why?"
She delves into my eyes again and it hits her soon enough, "No one's ever swallowed you before!"
"No," I admit.
"It could do with a spoonful of sugar next time," she laughs.
I bring her face up to my lips and say, "I love you, baby." We kiss, lips entangled, tongues not knowing or caring where they are for a long, long time. Then I lay her down on the bed, and go down to her thighs, spreading them apart while she arches her back and holds on to my fingers to keep anchored and in touch. I take her in my mouth and she is now clawing at the sheet with her free hand and at my hand with the other. I find her clit and let my tongue explore it. I lose myself for a minute and nip it gently with my teeth.
There's a high-pitched moan from the top of the bed and I stop, mildly shaken. I kiss her clit and massage it with a finger softly. She is now arching again. and I watch her while I use my tongue and fingers in a tangle of lust and then she raises herself up, arches backward, calls out my name and ...slaps me. I look up bewildered.
I am awake now, and I complete my dream alone. She is awake in another city, wishing someone would make dreams for her too.
Phones are the devil's spawn
She knew she must drink water, and the family must too. She stocked bubbletop cans so her family would not be thirsty. She knew she must eat, and their son must eat better, so she found the recipes and the resources to feed him. She tried not to think how much more she could do. She stopped knowing the could-dos so that she would not implode. She remembered the musts, she remembered the to-dos, and she remembered the nothings.
She got up from her sleep-deprived bed in the mornings; she found dishes to wash that took a long number of comforting hours, and tiles to clean. Lunches to pack, clothes to sort into dark and light, smiles to dispense into their son's world.
Dust she did not care about for there was no one to see it; no one who cared about dust was invited anymore. Still she dusted sometimes, when she remembered their son must not fall sick. She did not remember why she cleaned, or dressed. She tried to revive the memory of why she bought clothes or looked in mirrors. Glimmers of remembrances like ice picks tried to lodge in her veins. She removed them and cooked on. Her memory was her bane, so she let it go sometimes without remembering.
She had watched desultorily her Chinese-made phone crash and be stamped upon by the man who had fathered her children. Picked up and thrown again. A phone her children had had delivered for one of her birthdays.
+++++
Eight years ago, on another birthday, a computer was delivered to their home. And she began her career online.
The phone and the computer were windows to worlds he resented her having. He reviled both till she plucked out of herself any desires for worlds he did not want for her. But she learnt new skills when he was not looking.
++++++
She had watched other phones being flung for other reasons.
Like, for being left plugged into the charger after it was done charging.
It was the eve of yet another of her birthdays, and the phone belonged to the other woman in her family, their pre-teen daughter who was then a day scholar at the same school as their ten-year-old son.
It was a night when their son held her tight in the dark, while his older sister and his father sparred with each other over the girl's phone left plugged into the charger.
She pretended she was the mother protecting the son, knowing all the while that it was the son trying to comfort the mother.
Perhaps he was holding for her a birthday wish without his father's knowledge, clutching his mother in the darkness while his sister's phone flew toward the wall and landed softly on the carpet without breaking.
The carpet was an advantage of circumstance that her own Chinese-made phone did not have six years later.
The girl loudly protested the flinging of her phone. That led to one more unsuccessful flinging.
The next morning, the girl and the boy and their mother woke up to paternal frost. It was made more pronounced because it was a ritual to be cheerful, even if you were not, on family birthdays. Still, she chirped at every dark face merrily, in an attempt to sweep the night under the carpet.
Together the four of them got into the car to mark their attendance at a lunch. Her chirps fell into a void, and at one unintelligent moment, she took resort to sentiment. It's my birthday, she suggested. Could we all talk to each other and forget hate?
The car screeched sharply towards the median. I will kill us all, he told her, while the children continued to sit unmoved and morose in the rear. She checked on their seat belts, turned her eyes to the trees whistling by, and willed that her memories of feeling would dry up a little quicker.
Together they had lunch at her friend's new home with men and women who moved naturally among each other. She sat in an inner room with her children and their friends, unable to be an adult with the adults that afternoon.
+++
They drove in silence everywhere they had to go the rest of that day, the car a dreaded family reunion.
+++
The evening was Easter Eve, and together they dressed for church. In the years past, a group of them went to dinner after every Easter Mass. It was the same this Easter, and she put on last year's wifely facade. She found her fingers and toes clenching for fear that the friends would remember it was her birthday and rile him about a "treat" or a gift.
Someone did at last ask for a birthday treat while they discussed which restaurant to go to. He directed the conversation deftly away while the women admired his witty comeback. No one that night knew that he had threatened to kill his family that morning.
The bill they split equally. The friends did not mention her birthday again. She restrained herself from agonizing over whether they had sensed his anger at his family. She wiped her birthday from his memory by ignoring it herself.
+++
Then one year when her children grew up a bit and he had pinned her down with her hands and feet together, their son told him that he was moving out with his mother. He apologized tenderly: "like a princess" he said she was. And she trod on fewer eggshells. "I regained a non-violent world," she said to her friend.
But it returned, and then it was the turn of her Chinese-made phone to die under his duress. It was a moment when unintelligent sentiment again took her down, so the moment does not deserve a pity party or story. It only meant a new SIM card had to be bought and inserted in an old-gen phone she found in their storeroom, so that she could make calls and order bubbletops and prawns and lamb and gas cylinder refills. She remembered some numbers; some essential ones she found on his phone; some service numbers she found on the Internet.
For he had thrown away, into the garbage collector's van, the SIM card and all the bits of her world outside of himself.
+++
6 pm is her anxiety alarm. When work is done and family time traditionally begins in many other homes, her lungs constrict and her toes clench. The man with whom she had signed up to seed her family sits in the study carved out of the living room of their six-bathroom apartment.
With wooden louvre panelling, the study created the illusion of being a private space. It had the effect of shushing the house because the master worked in it on weekdays, weekends, evenings and mornings unless he was travelling. She had to close the kitchen door so that the powerful men he called would not hear the clang of pots or the whistle of pressure cookers while she prepared two kinds of meals: one like his mother made, and one for her children and a different palate. There would have to be rice at all meals and there would be one dal, one vegetable and one meat. Fish had to be fried, then roasted in an oven with as many as two dozen shallots which took her maid most of the one and a half hours she was hired for each day. She did the rest of the housework on roast fish days,
Monday, July 18, 2016
Phones are the devil's spawn
There was a woman without a world.
She knew she must drink water, and the family must too. She stocked bubbletop cans so her family would not be thirsty. She knew she must eat, and their son must eat better, so she found the recipes and the resources to feed him. She was afraid to know how much more she could do. She stopped knowing the could-dos so that she would not implode. She remembered the musts, she remembered the to-dos, and she remembered the nothings.
She got up from her sleep-deprived bed in the mornings; she found dishes to wash that took a long number of comforting hours, and tiles to clean. Lunches to pack, clothes to sort into dark and light, smiles to dispense into their son's world. Dust she did not care about for there was no one to see it; no one who cared about dust was invited anymore. Still she dusted sometimes, when she remembered their son must not fall sick. She did not remember why she cleaned, or dressed. She tried to revive the memory of why she bought clothes or looked in mirrors. Glimmers of remembrances like ice picks tried to lodge in her veins. She removed them and cooked on. Her memory was her bane, so she let it go sometimes without remembering.
She had watched desultorily her Chinese-made phone crash and be stamped upon by the man who had fathered her children. Picked up and thrown again. A phone her children had had delivered for one of her birthdays.
+++++
Eight years ago, on another birthday, a computer was delivered to their home. And she began her career online.
The phone and the computer were windows to worlds he resented her having. He reviled both till she plucked out of herself any desires for worlds he did not want for her. But she learnt new skills when he was not looking.
++++++
She had watched other phones being flung for other reasons.
Like, for being left plugged into the charger after it was done charging.
It was the eve of yet another of her birthdays, and the phone belonged to the other woman in her family, their pre-teen daughter who was then a day scholar at the same school as their ten-year-old son.
It was a night when their son held her tight in the dark, while his older sister and his father sparred with each other over the girl's phone left plugged into the charger.
She pretended she was the mother protecting the son, knowing all the while that it was the son trying to comfort the mother.
Perhaps he was holding for her a birthday wish without his father's knowledge, clutching his mother in the darkness while his sister's phone flew toward the wall and landed softly on the carpet without breaking.
The carpet was an advantage of circumstance that her own Chinese-made phone did not have six years later.
The girl loudly protested the flinging of her phone. That led to one more unsuccessful flinging.
The next morning, the girl and the boy and their mother woke up to paternal frost. It was made more pronounced because it was a ritual to be cheerful, even if you were not, on family birthdays. Still, she chirped at every dark face merrily, in an attempt to sweep the night under the carpet.
Together the four of them got into the car to mark their attendance at a lunch. Her chirps fell into a void, and at one unintelligent moment, she took resort to sentiment. It's my birthday, she suggested. Could we all talk to each other and forget hate?
The car screeched sharply towards the median. I will kill us all, he told her, while the children continued to sit unmoved and morose in the rear. She checked on their seat belts, turned her eyes to the trees whistling by, and willed that her memories of feeling would dry up a little quicker.
Together they had lunch at her friend's new home with men and women who moved naturally among each other. She sat in an inner room with her children and their friends, unable to be an adult with the adults that afternoon.
+++
They drove in silence everywhere they had to go the rest of that day, the car a dreaded family reunion.
+++
The evening was Easter Eve, and together they dressed for church. In the years past, a group of them went to dinner after every Easter Mass. It was the same this Easter, and she put on last year's wifely facade. She found her fingers and toes clenching for fear that the friends would remember it was her birthday and rile him about a "treat" or a gift.
Someone did at last ask for a birthday treat while they discussed which restaurant to go to. He directed the conversation deftly away while the women admired his witty comeback. No one that night knew that he had threatened to kill his family that morning.
The bill they split equally. The friends did not mention her birthday again. She restrained herself from agonizing over whether they had sensed his anger at his family. She wiped her birthday from his memory by ignoring it herself.
+++
Then one year when her children grew up a bit and he had pinned her down with her hands and feet together, their son told them that he was moving out with his mother. He apologized tenderly: "like a princess" he said she was. And she trod on fewer eggshells. "I regained a non-violent world," she said to her friend.
But it returned, and then it was the turn of her Chinese-made phone to die under his duress. It was a moment when unintelligent sentiment again took her down, so the moment does not deserve a pity party or story. It only meant a new SIM card had to be bought and inserted in an old-gen phone she found in their storeroom, so that she could make calls and order bubbletops and prawns and lamb and gas cylinder refills. She remembered some numbers; some essential ones she found on his phone; some service numbers she found on the Internet.
For he had thrown away, into the garbage collector's van, the SIM card and all the bits of her world outside of himself.
She knew she must drink water, and the family must too. She stocked bubbletop cans so her family would not be thirsty. She knew she must eat, and their son must eat better, so she found the recipes and the resources to feed him. She was afraid to know how much more she could do. She stopped knowing the could-dos so that she would not implode. She remembered the musts, she remembered the to-dos, and she remembered the nothings.
She got up from her sleep-deprived bed in the mornings; she found dishes to wash that took a long number of comforting hours, and tiles to clean. Lunches to pack, clothes to sort into dark and light, smiles to dispense into their son's world. Dust she did not care about for there was no one to see it; no one who cared about dust was invited anymore. Still she dusted sometimes, when she remembered their son must not fall sick. She did not remember why she cleaned, or dressed. She tried to revive the memory of why she bought clothes or looked in mirrors. Glimmers of remembrances like ice picks tried to lodge in her veins. She removed them and cooked on. Her memory was her bane, so she let it go sometimes without remembering.
She had watched desultorily her Chinese-made phone crash and be stamped upon by the man who had fathered her children. Picked up and thrown again. A phone her children had had delivered for one of her birthdays.
+++++
Eight years ago, on another birthday, a computer was delivered to their home. And she began her career online.
The phone and the computer were windows to worlds he resented her having. He reviled both till she plucked out of herself any desires for worlds he did not want for her. But she learnt new skills when he was not looking.
++++++
She had watched other phones being flung for other reasons.
Like, for being left plugged into the charger after it was done charging.
It was the eve of yet another of her birthdays, and the phone belonged to the other woman in her family, their pre-teen daughter who was then a day scholar at the same school as their ten-year-old son.
It was a night when their son held her tight in the dark, while his older sister and his father sparred with each other over the girl's phone left plugged into the charger.
She pretended she was the mother protecting the son, knowing all the while that it was the son trying to comfort the mother.
Perhaps he was holding for her a birthday wish without his father's knowledge, clutching his mother in the darkness while his sister's phone flew toward the wall and landed softly on the carpet without breaking.
The carpet was an advantage of circumstance that her own Chinese-made phone did not have six years later.
The girl loudly protested the flinging of her phone. That led to one more unsuccessful flinging.
The next morning, the girl and the boy and their mother woke up to paternal frost. It was made more pronounced because it was a ritual to be cheerful, even if you were not, on family birthdays. Still, she chirped at every dark face merrily, in an attempt to sweep the night under the carpet.
Together the four of them got into the car to mark their attendance at a lunch. Her chirps fell into a void, and at one unintelligent moment, she took resort to sentiment. It's my birthday, she suggested. Could we all talk to each other and forget hate?
The car screeched sharply towards the median. I will kill us all, he told her, while the children continued to sit unmoved and morose in the rear. She checked on their seat belts, turned her eyes to the trees whistling by, and willed that her memories of feeling would dry up a little quicker.
Together they had lunch at her friend's new home with men and women who moved naturally among each other. She sat in an inner room with her children and their friends, unable to be an adult with the adults that afternoon.
+++
They drove in silence everywhere they had to go the rest of that day, the car a dreaded family reunion.
+++
The evening was Easter Eve, and together they dressed for church. In the years past, a group of them went to dinner after every Easter Mass. It was the same this Easter, and she put on last year's wifely facade. She found her fingers and toes clenching for fear that the friends would remember it was her birthday and rile him about a "treat" or a gift.
Someone did at last ask for a birthday treat while they discussed which restaurant to go to. He directed the conversation deftly away while the women admired his witty comeback. No one that night knew that he had threatened to kill his family that morning.
The bill they split equally. The friends did not mention her birthday again. She restrained herself from agonizing over whether they had sensed his anger at his family. She wiped her birthday from his memory by ignoring it herself.
+++
Then one year when her children grew up a bit and he had pinned her down with her hands and feet together, their son told them that he was moving out with his mother. He apologized tenderly: "like a princess" he said she was. And she trod on fewer eggshells. "I regained a non-violent world," she said to her friend.
But it returned, and then it was the turn of her Chinese-made phone to die under his duress. It was a moment when unintelligent sentiment again took her down, so the moment does not deserve a pity party or story. It only meant a new SIM card had to be bought and inserted in an old-gen phone she found in their storeroom, so that she could make calls and order bubbletops and prawns and lamb and gas cylinder refills. She remembered some numbers; some essential ones she found on his phone; some service numbers she found on the Internet.
For he had thrown away, into the garbage collector's van, the SIM card and all the bits of her world outside of himself.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Make me some dreams!
I kiss the large brown nipples on her pint-size breasts and then let my lips linger all over her.
My kisses are making her say my name in agony, but I don't stop. I let her writhe and arch till she will not take it lying down anymore. She flips all six feet of me over on to the bed.
With her teeth and fingers and lips, she pulls down my boxers and kisses my penis from head to root, taking it all into her mouth for one long pulse beat. She lets it go for a minute, looks up at me, into my eyes as always, and I think, "What can she see that she is always looking?"
Then she goes back with her fingers and touches my testicles and the perineum, for she has read that the perineum must not be ignored. I remember her telling me that; I smile and hum a bit, and she raises her head again, so I shut up and smile back and bring her head down again.
So she goes back and forth, checking my eyes (what IS she seeing?) and my perineum and my testicles in a long-drawn conversation with them. I try not to ejaculate and abruptly, she is raising my head up. I want to see you sitting up when I have you in my mouth, she says.
She puts her head down, her ass in the air, my hands gripping it. I almost push her head hard in my frenzy, but she doesn't protest. Soon I am spent. I mechanically reach out for tissues, and she says smiling, "Well, there's nothing left to wipe. It's all inside of me."
"It is?"
"Yes," she says nonchalantly. "Why?"
She delves into my eyes again and it hits her soon enough, "No one's ever swallowed you before!"
"No," I admit.
"It could do with a spoonful of sugar next time," she laughs.
I bring her head up to my lips and say, "I love you, baby." We kiss, lips entangled, tongues not knowing or caring where they are for a long, long time. Then I lay her down on the bed, and go down to her thighs, spreading them apart while she arches her back and holds on to my fingers to keep anchored and in touch. I take her in my mouth and she is now clawing at the sheet with her free hand and at my hand with the other. I find her clit and let my tongue explore it. I lose myself for a minute and nip it gently with my teeth.
There's a high-pitched moan from the top of the bed and I stop, a bit shaken, and kiss her clit and massage it with a finger softly. She is now arching again. and I watch her while I use my tongue and fingers in a tangle of lust and then she raises herself up, arches backward, calls out my name and ...slaps me. I look up bewildered.
I am awake now, and I complete my dream alone. She is awake in another city, wishing someone would make dreams for her too.
My kisses are making her say my name in agony, but I don't stop. I let her writhe and arch till she will not take it lying down anymore. She flips all six feet of me over on to the bed.
With her teeth and fingers and lips, she pulls down my boxers and kisses my penis from head to root, taking it all into her mouth for one long pulse beat. She lets it go for a minute, looks up at me, into my eyes as always, and I think, "What can she see that she is always looking?"
Then she goes back with her fingers and touches my testicles and the perineum, for she has read that the perineum must not be ignored. I remember her telling me that; I smile and hum a bit, and she raises her head again, so I shut up and smile back and bring her head down again.
So she goes back and forth, checking my eyes (what IS she seeing?) and my perineum and my testicles in a long-drawn conversation with them. I try not to ejaculate and abruptly, she is raising my head up. I want to see you sitting up when I have you in my mouth, she says.
She puts her head down, her ass in the air, my hands gripping it. I almost push her head hard in my frenzy, but she doesn't protest. Soon I am spent. I mechanically reach out for tissues, and she says smiling, "Well, there's nothing left to wipe. It's all inside of me."
"It is?"
"Yes," she says nonchalantly. "Why?"
She delves into my eyes again and it hits her soon enough, "No one's ever swallowed you before!"
"No," I admit.
"It could do with a spoonful of sugar next time," she laughs.
I bring her head up to my lips and say, "I love you, baby." We kiss, lips entangled, tongues not knowing or caring where they are for a long, long time. Then I lay her down on the bed, and go down to her thighs, spreading them apart while she arches her back and holds on to my fingers to keep anchored and in touch. I take her in my mouth and she is now clawing at the sheet with her free hand and at my hand with the other. I find her clit and let my tongue explore it. I lose myself for a minute and nip it gently with my teeth.
There's a high-pitched moan from the top of the bed and I stop, a bit shaken, and kiss her clit and massage it with a finger softly. She is now arching again. and I watch her while I use my tongue and fingers in a tangle of lust and then she raises herself up, arches backward, calls out my name and ...slaps me. I look up bewildered.
I am awake now, and I complete my dream alone. She is awake in another city, wishing someone would make dreams for her too.
Friday, February 20, 2015
One pheromone, two garbs?
Addicted to romance? Addicted to sex?
If ranting will help me resolve my attempt to label myself, I am giving up ten minutes of my day to it, so I can with a free mind, produce work today that will satiate the Crone/Diva of Chennai Theatre. It will stop her from giving my two mentors a hard time for picking me to write for her.
It could be that there is no dichotomy between the two, and that it is the same pheromone in different garb. Which confuses my essentially monogamous heart. It is a heart that cannot say those three under-rated words "I love you" to more than one person in the same week. It's a heart that has gotten over its reluctance to reveal it to more than one man in a year.
########
He turns up this month in your country for a holiday, the first man who told you he loves you after you lowered your expectations of marital romance.
Four years ago, you absorbed that ray of romance like a welcoming sponge. You luminously reciprocated as you usually do to 'safe' men, and had a 'safe' long-distance emotional relationship, with powerful fantasies keeping it warmed up every breathing moment. The only time you touch is in a viewing chamber for transit travellers at a foreign airport, where you find a miniscule gap between the viewing glass and the table on which it is set up, and you touch the tip of a finger to his.
Two years later, he arrives in your city and he refuses to meet you at a restaurant because his relatives crawl all over the city, and you refuse to meet in his hotel room.
#####
Stalemated and broken-hearted, you fall in love with the next man who says he loves you.
He says that to you when you appeal to him to take away the book he has lent your husband. It is a book that purports to reveal the truth about religion/s. There is a picture of a long-haired saffron robed-guru on the cover and it creeps out you and your children because their father reads it every night for six months without finishing it; because you are threatened, isolated and disciplined like the home is a monastery, even before you recover from the shock of moving to a ramshackle country without friends.
He cannot do anything about the book as it is his older brother who has lent his classmate, your husband, the book. Instead, he teaches you to stand up for yourself and your daughter and tells you he is in love with you.
On the rebound, you lose your marital virginity.
But then you fall physically sick at the radical step you think you have taken. He is nowhere near to hold and calm you down, and you surprise him with your guilt trip. He takes time out and gives you space to recover. You hold on to his memory but you are too guilt-stricken to go for it again. He continues to profess love; he is there for you when you need an ear, but painfully you forget and forget till you never fantasize about him. You explain you can't want him again but he is gentle about that and tells you that love cannot forget, and is not desperate, but patient and fulfilled. He rationalizes the necessity to be apart for the sake of his relationship with your husband.
You are glad he has a fulfilled life elsewhere, but you don't find that yourself. You throw yourself in with single girlfriends because you are no longer on the wavelength of married friends. These new friends seem to have trouble finding men to be in love with and that worries you. Are you giving out whorish vibes, you wonder, that the number of men who fall in love with you quickly multiply? Have they a sixth sense that you have opened the door, and might open it for them too?
You stop telling your girls, and open up your doubts to your former lover in Sydney, for you have reconciled as friends. He reassures you and you try to stop the panic, the result of guilt enforced from your girlhood.
#####
One girlfriend introduces you to someone who courts you without romance for a few months. He calls you everyday for a year, recounting his days that begin with golf, his work with brandies, his weekends that he spends fishing and on a search for fresh seafood in quirky markets. Without pressure, he becomes your friend, and you are his, and soon he becomes the best sexual partner you have ever had, listening to your tears and your joys without rancour.
Not one word that denotes love passes between you. He is your own suave Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey, but without the violence. Or the love. For the first time in your life, you realize you have given up on romance. The expectation seems wiped clean from your life. You work hard, you are kind to others, you try not to miss friends and family, and your golfer keeps your spark alive for that time in your future when you will be free to stand up for yourself without abandoning your children.
####
While your golfer calls everyday, and the men who have loved and been loved fill other emotional gaps, you fall.
This time it is your responsibility to stay away, for he is but a boy who has barely begun the cycles of life while you are on your second run. You are stern with yourself, and push him out of your mind. He does not give up, and one day you find yourself turning like the sunflower to the sun. It is the same luminous reciprocation to 'safe' men, the emotional relationship that you are addicted to, powered by unlikely fantasies.
On a fateful train ride one day, it is shattered by a realization: he is a boy who will biologically and inevitably need girls. You are a woman who is legally with a man, and illegally with another, in love with none, but bound by word to both.
You pause.
You clean up your broken heart once more. You strengthen yourself and go again, toward love.
Sex and romance: there is no dichotomy when you are with the right person. The question if they are different arises when you are with the wrong person.
You give yourself to him now, and focus on the romance.
####
The holidaying man asks if you will see him this month. You talk of how complex sex and romance and distances are. You tell him how breaking your heart over him led to another on the rebound. You tell him how much you love to love and how you break your heart over it.
#####
You could be selfish and break-proof your heart by not giving in to romance; or you could be brave and give in and risk your heart again.
This year, you choose the latter, though the risk is a hundredfold.
If ranting will help me resolve my attempt to label myself, I am giving up ten minutes of my day to it, so I can with a free mind, produce work today that will satiate the Crone/Diva of Chennai Theatre. It will stop her from giving my two mentors a hard time for picking me to write for her.
It could be that there is no dichotomy between the two, and that it is the same pheromone in different garb. Which confuses my essentially monogamous heart. It is a heart that cannot say those three under-rated words "I love you" to more than one person in the same week. It's a heart that has gotten over its reluctance to reveal it to more than one man in a year.
########
He turns up this month in your country for a holiday, the first man who told you he loves you after you lowered your expectations of marital romance.
Four years ago, you absorbed that ray of romance like a welcoming sponge. You luminously reciprocated as you usually do to 'safe' men, and had a 'safe' long-distance emotional relationship, with powerful fantasies keeping it warmed up every breathing moment. The only time you touch is in a viewing chamber for transit travellers at a foreign airport, where you find a miniscule gap between the viewing glass and the table on which it is set up, and you touch the tip of a finger to his.
Two years later, he arrives in your city and he refuses to meet you at a restaurant because his relatives crawl all over the city, and you refuse to meet in his hotel room.
#####
Stalemated and broken-hearted, you fall in love with the next man who says he loves you.
He says that to you when you appeal to him to take away the book he has lent your husband. It is a book that purports to reveal the truth about religion/s. There is a picture of a long-haired saffron robed-guru on the cover and it creeps out you and your children because their father reads it every night for six months without finishing it; because you are threatened, isolated and disciplined like the home is a monastery, even before you recover from the shock of moving to a ramshackle country without friends.
He cannot do anything about the book as it is his older brother who has lent his classmate, your husband, the book. Instead, he teaches you to stand up for yourself and your daughter and tells you he is in love with you.
On the rebound, you lose your marital virginity.
But then you fall physically sick at the radical step you think you have taken. He is nowhere near to hold and calm you down, and you surprise him with your guilt trip. He takes time out and gives you space to recover. You hold on to his memory but you are too guilt-stricken to go for it again. He continues to profess love; he is there for you when you need an ear, but painfully you forget and forget till you never fantasize about him. You explain you can't want him again but he is gentle about that and tells you that love cannot forget, and is not desperate, but patient and fulfilled. He rationalizes the necessity to be apart for the sake of his relationship with your husband.
You are glad he has a fulfilled life elsewhere, but you don't find that yourself. You throw yourself in with single girlfriends because you are no longer on the wavelength of married friends. These new friends seem to have trouble finding men to be in love with and that worries you. Are you giving out whorish vibes, you wonder, that the number of men who fall in love with you quickly multiply? Have they a sixth sense that you have opened the door, and might open it for them too?
You stop telling your girls, and open up your doubts to your former lover in Sydney, for you have reconciled as friends. He reassures you and you try to stop the panic, the result of guilt enforced from your girlhood.
#####
One girlfriend introduces you to someone who courts you without romance for a few months. He calls you everyday for a year, recounting his days that begin with golf, his work with brandies, his weekends that he spends fishing and on a search for fresh seafood in quirky markets. Without pressure, he becomes your friend, and you are his, and soon he becomes the best sexual partner you have ever had, listening to your tears and your joys without rancour.
Not one word that denotes love passes between you. He is your own suave Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey, but without the violence. Or the love. For the first time in your life, you realize you have given up on romance. The expectation seems wiped clean from your life. You work hard, you are kind to others, you try not to miss friends and family, and your golfer keeps your spark alive for that time in your future when you will be free to stand up for yourself without abandoning your children.
####
While your golfer calls everyday, and the men who have loved and been loved fill other emotional gaps, you fall.
This time it is your responsibility to stay away, for he is but a boy who has barely begun the cycles of life while you are on your second run. You are stern with yourself, and push him out of your mind. He does not give up, and one day you find yourself turning like the sunflower to the sun. It is the same luminous reciprocation to 'safe' men, the emotional relationship that you are addicted to, powered by unlikely fantasies.
On a fateful train ride one day, it is shattered by a realization: he is a boy who will biologically and inevitably need girls. You are a woman who is legally with a man, and illegally with another, in love with none, but bound by word to both.
You pause.
You clean up your broken heart once more. You strengthen yourself and go again, toward love.
Sex and romance: there is no dichotomy when you are with the right person. The question if they are different arises when you are with the wrong person.
You give yourself to him now, and focus on the romance.
####
The holidaying man asks if you will see him this month. You talk of how complex sex and romance and distances are. You tell him how breaking your heart over him led to another on the rebound. You tell him how much you love to love and how you break your heart over it.
#####
You could be selfish and break-proof your heart by not giving in to romance; or you could be brave and give in and risk your heart again.
This year, you choose the latter, though the risk is a hundredfold.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Soccer Boys and Moms
"Why do you work out?"
"To strengthen my core."
"Why are you doing it with me?"
"Because you are good."
"Are you committed?"
"Yes."
I can only reply in short bursts because I haven't much oxygen in my lungs. And my 14-yr-old is glowering at me from up above while I lie spent on the ground, taking a rest break.
I raise myself and turn over like a very floppy pancake, trying to align all the parts which he said should be in a straight line. He positions himself next to me and begins counting.
"I will work with you so you will be motivated," he says, and does eight push-ups without watching me, before he notices. And roars.
"Do you know what you have been doing? Raising and lowering your head and butt! No wonder you are fat, woman. Now bring just your nose to my palm while you flex your elbows."
Here I must protest. "I'm 106 pounds!"
"But you're my mom and I want you toned," he proclaims.
I pretend to get my nose somewhere near his palm but the palm seems to get further and further away. By the count of three, Maria Sharapova would be proud of me, but my boy is not moved despite the tears that accompany my soul-filled whimpers.
"You have to make 20 counts. I'm having you do five push-ups with two-minute rest breaks. Do you know that we guys have to do 40, and if one of us makes a mistake, Coach has us all run round the track and start over."
"I've never done push-ups before," I protest. "By tomorrow, perhaps? Let me learn how to balance on my elbows today."
My son begins a monologue that makes me wonder if he has self-help essays pre-written in his brain. If only I could remember what he said, but my head had stopped working and I couldn't feel any organs.
But hey, I did rise to his exhortations and touch his palm to my nose without cheating, in counts of three till I got to 20. Three was my mortal limit.
There were the Ranger jumps I passed fairly and some well-mangled acrobatics, done balancing on my side. All of them involved very little air, many sermons, and my despair.
At last, I bring out a trump card I did not know I had. "I haven't had breakfast."
Hand to his forehead, he shoos me out and away with more rants on how people should have early breakfasts or they'd have saggy arms.
And then, the revelation: "Oh yeah. I wouldn't be caught dead doing this, but papa's paying me for a month to train you, and a bonus if I'm 100% successful."
Cue 50 deep breaths to prevent manslaughter.
"To strengthen my core."
"Why are you doing it with me?"
"Because you are good."
"Are you committed?"
"Yes."
I can only reply in short bursts because I haven't much oxygen in my lungs. And my 14-yr-old is glowering at me from up above while I lie spent on the ground, taking a rest break.
I raise myself and turn over like a very floppy pancake, trying to align all the parts which he said should be in a straight line. He positions himself next to me and begins counting.
"I will work with you so you will be motivated," he says, and does eight push-ups without watching me, before he notices. And roars.
"Do you know what you have been doing? Raising and lowering your head and butt! No wonder you are fat, woman. Now bring just your nose to my palm while you flex your elbows."
Here I must protest. "I'm 106 pounds!"
"But you're my mom and I want you toned," he proclaims.
I pretend to get my nose somewhere near his palm but the palm seems to get further and further away. By the count of three, Maria Sharapova would be proud of me, but my boy is not moved despite the tears that accompany my soul-filled whimpers.
"You have to make 20 counts. I'm having you do five push-ups with two-minute rest breaks. Do you know that we guys have to do 40, and if one of us makes a mistake, Coach has us all run round the track and start over."
"I've never done push-ups before," I protest. "By tomorrow, perhaps? Let me learn how to balance on my elbows today."
My son begins a monologue that makes me wonder if he has self-help essays pre-written in his brain. If only I could remember what he said, but my head had stopped working and I couldn't feel any organs.
But hey, I did rise to his exhortations and touch his palm to my nose without cheating, in counts of three till I got to 20. Three was my mortal limit.
There were the Ranger jumps I passed fairly and some well-mangled acrobatics, done balancing on my side. All of them involved very little air, many sermons, and my despair.
At last, I bring out a trump card I did not know I had. "I haven't had breakfast."
Hand to his forehead, he shoos me out and away with more rants on how people should have early breakfasts or they'd have saggy arms.
And then, the revelation: "Oh yeah. I wouldn't be caught dead doing this, but papa's paying me for a month to train you, and a bonus if I'm 100% successful."
Cue 50 deep breaths to prevent manslaughter.
An Eulogy (An Academic Assignment)
Dec 2012
Eighteen years ago, I left my endogamous community to marry someone I had known from university.
That time I was in India, so pre-knowing the person I was marrying, and marrying outside my community, was a double rebellion.
In what many of my countrywomen would consider an inauspicious omen, I offered to write his eulogy last week. He had to speak his own eulogy as part of his Master's course requirements.
In a darkened theatre today, he spoke to a solemn audience of his classmates, dressed in black, each trying to imagine his own eulogy.
This was his as I imagined I would say it, and he based his speaking assignment on it. "I did not think she would be this easy on me," he told the class.
I, on the other hand, could not imagine why he thought I was being easy on him.
I’m afraid this is going to be a very personal speech, something he would not approve of, but as of yesterday, I’m free to do things he did not approve of.
Those were among his last words: “You don’t have to be afraid of what I will say much longer.”
After 67 years of embedding his dislikes in my soul, mind and body, I will miss being afraid. So I suppose.
His likes were few: One big like was our post-dinner walk, and the weekend bike ride. Those he never tired of, though he could be exhausted after an hour at the mall. He learnt to slow down for my much shorter legs on our bike rides; I learnt to let him sit out the mall crawls. He suffered from withdrawal symptoms if he did not get his daily walks, and soon I started getting them too. It helped keep him the way he looks, the silver hair still on his head, almost as tall as he was when we first met. Not all bad for a 94 year-old. That's why I never left him, come whoever else.
Our children and all our grandchildren and great grandchildren are gathered here today, because I made sure they came, or I would not bury him. He loved them for being independent people who never struck roots, for they were reflections of him. Until he was fifty, we did not own an inch of earth, and we were proud of ourselves for being restless souls who would be up and away when we were curious about other ways of living.
There are facts about his life that diverge so much from mine and surprise me still. He was a child in a house without electricity, but scores of relatives to love him and carry him around, while his 18-year old mother worked hard to feed and care for a large joint family. He was a teenager who almost became a priest but abandoned the seminary after two years. He was a student who took an education loan when banks in India were not yet loan-savvy. He was a young working adult who was soon jaded by proximity to politicians and businessmen in India’s capital city. He was a man who took a chance on me and is still with me. He was a father who cut our children’s hair, saved our daughter from choking on a grape when everyone else panicked, our son from deep inside a stinking manhole while others wondered how. He was a migrant who almost adopted the countries we lived in, but for my insistence on going "home." He was once more a student at 42, in awe of the insights he got from his brilliant professors, especially when he got in touch with his feminine side. That’s what his second Master’s degree taught him. Conflict negotiation and leadership after conquering the self. Stuff I have always practised in our family, albeit on a lonely path, as I once told him and never mentioned again.
Well, those effects did not last long, as always when he had such insights. He was still my possessive Indian Malayali male, resigned to being married to a typical non-resident Malayali female.
That’s mid-point on this timeline, and now the boring parts begin. Yet to me they were the best years, because he was learning to be human, as my children and I would tease. He taught our daughter to make sense of economics which did not exist in the intellect of the female side of our family. And he taught himself to say economics did not matter, if it did not make her happy, but literature did. He pulled our son through his bumpy entrepreneurial madcap years by staying firmly away but rapping him on his head when needed.
And he fulfilled his highest ambition of making a political impact. His efficiency and clear objective became assets here. If it has made the slightest difference, I am humbled. That single-mindedness which could drive me up walls has made a difference elsewhere. And in me.
I still can’t get rid of the habit of walking from the dining room to the bedroom in the most efficient manner, on the shortest route, that lets me pick up any book, pin or paper that’s lying out of place and putting them in their places. In my head, he will still be watching, so nothing will be out of place, and I will always be walking efficient routes. In case.
To the grandchildren we brought up together while your mother wrote her books: you will forever be part of the legacy of family love which did not limit itself to parents. It made your grandfather secure and independent from childhood. And to the great grandchildren who are wondering what this fuss is all about, someday I promise to read you the letters we wrote each other so that you understand too.
To the man whom once I couldn’t sleep without, I know you will be mad if I don’t. So I promise to sleep, walk, and achieve a flat tummy that was your one dream for me. Also to finish that book you were writing, and to make it even better, like I always wanted to.
Eighteen years ago, I left my endogamous community to marry someone I had known from university.
That time I was in India, so pre-knowing the person I was marrying, and marrying outside my community, was a double rebellion.
In what many of my countrywomen would consider an inauspicious omen, I offered to write his eulogy last week. He had to speak his own eulogy as part of his Master's course requirements.
In a darkened theatre today, he spoke to a solemn audience of his classmates, dressed in black, each trying to imagine his own eulogy.
This was his as I imagined I would say it, and he based his speaking assignment on it. "I did not think she would be this easy on me," he told the class.
I, on the other hand, could not imagine why he thought I was being easy on him.
I’m afraid this is going to be a very personal speech, something he would not approve of, but as of yesterday, I’m free to do things he did not approve of.
Those were among his last words: “You don’t have to be afraid of what I will say much longer.”
After 67 years of embedding his dislikes in my soul, mind and body, I will miss being afraid. So I suppose.
His likes were few: One big like was our post-dinner walk, and the weekend bike ride. Those he never tired of, though he could be exhausted after an hour at the mall. He learnt to slow down for my much shorter legs on our bike rides; I learnt to let him sit out the mall crawls. He suffered from withdrawal symptoms if he did not get his daily walks, and soon I started getting them too. It helped keep him the way he looks, the silver hair still on his head, almost as tall as he was when we first met. Not all bad for a 94 year-old. That's why I never left him, come whoever else.
Our children and all our grandchildren and great grandchildren are gathered here today, because I made sure they came, or I would not bury him. He loved them for being independent people who never struck roots, for they were reflections of him. Until he was fifty, we did not own an inch of earth, and we were proud of ourselves for being restless souls who would be up and away when we were curious about other ways of living.
There are facts about his life that diverge so much from mine and surprise me still. He was a child in a house without electricity, but scores of relatives to love him and carry him around, while his 18-year old mother worked hard to feed and care for a large joint family. He was a teenager who almost became a priest but abandoned the seminary after two years. He was a student who took an education loan when banks in India were not yet loan-savvy. He was a young working adult who was soon jaded by proximity to politicians and businessmen in India’s capital city. He was a man who took a chance on me and is still with me. He was a father who cut our children’s hair, saved our daughter from choking on a grape when everyone else panicked, our son from deep inside a stinking manhole while others wondered how. He was a migrant who almost adopted the countries we lived in, but for my insistence on going "home." He was once more a student at 42, in awe of the insights he got from his brilliant professors, especially when he got in touch with his feminine side. That’s what his second Master’s degree taught him. Conflict negotiation and leadership after conquering the self. Stuff I have always practised in our family, albeit on a lonely path, as I once told him and never mentioned again.
Well, those effects did not last long, as always when he had such insights. He was still my possessive Indian Malayali male, resigned to being married to a typical non-resident Malayali female.
That’s mid-point on this timeline, and now the boring parts begin. Yet to me they were the best years, because he was learning to be human, as my children and I would tease. He taught our daughter to make sense of economics which did not exist in the intellect of the female side of our family. And he taught himself to say economics did not matter, if it did not make her happy, but literature did. He pulled our son through his bumpy entrepreneurial madcap years by staying firmly away but rapping him on his head when needed.
And he fulfilled his highest ambition of making a political impact. His efficiency and clear objective became assets here. If it has made the slightest difference, I am humbled. That single-mindedness which could drive me up walls has made a difference elsewhere. And in me.
I still can’t get rid of the habit of walking from the dining room to the bedroom in the most efficient manner, on the shortest route, that lets me pick up any book, pin or paper that’s lying out of place and putting them in their places. In my head, he will still be watching, so nothing will be out of place, and I will always be walking efficient routes. In case.
To the grandchildren we brought up together while your mother wrote her books: you will forever be part of the legacy of family love which did not limit itself to parents. It made your grandfather secure and independent from childhood. And to the great grandchildren who are wondering what this fuss is all about, someday I promise to read you the letters we wrote each other so that you understand too.
To the man whom once I couldn’t sleep without, I know you will be mad if I don’t. So I promise to sleep, walk, and achieve a flat tummy that was your one dream for me. Also to finish that book you were writing, and to make it even better, like I always wanted to.
Saturday, July 06, 2013
Expo
We had just moved to SE Asia then and lived not too far from a giant trade exhibition hall.
One lonely weekend, I took my reluctant husband to the little country's first sex exhibition. I saw large hordes of wrinkled single men and a few young couples there. There were no housewives or children who typically swarmed to the expo for the usual warehouse sales.
On a raised stage, a very enthusiastic DJ was trying to rouse the crowd, who stood unmoved. He wanted couples up there, and wouldn't say why. I looked at the impassive faces around and knew this country wasn't for me, so there was nothing to lose in making a spectacle of myself if I had to. So I went up the stage, pulling along my bored husband. Two young local couples joined us, encouraged by our presence.
The DJ produced oddly shaped velvet stools and couches from the wings. Our challenge was to use the props and demonstrate as many sexual positions in a minute as we could.
From up there, I had a better view of the sad old faces in the audience and nearly jumped off the stage at the thought of performing anything before them. My formerly bored husband suddenly found the humour in it and wouldn't let me go. He grabbed the mic and even made a little speech before he arranged the props and a very embarrassed wife into various positions on the props, counting off each one into the mic.
We won. Condoms, a video on the Kamasutra, lubricating gels ... And a vibrator ring.
I kept it by my bedside until we moved home. I gave my friends the other prizes, and it became their favourite party game with clothes on. That vibrator never measured up to my sportive husband's mastery on the stage that day, but it was the one prize I never gave away.
One lonely weekend, I took my reluctant husband to the little country's first sex exhibition. I saw large hordes of wrinkled single men and a few young couples there. There were no housewives or children who typically swarmed to the expo for the usual warehouse sales.
On a raised stage, a very enthusiastic DJ was trying to rouse the crowd, who stood unmoved. He wanted couples up there, and wouldn't say why. I looked at the impassive faces around and knew this country wasn't for me, so there was nothing to lose in making a spectacle of myself if I had to. So I went up the stage, pulling along my bored husband. Two young local couples joined us, encouraged by our presence.
The DJ produced oddly shaped velvet stools and couches from the wings. Our challenge was to use the props and demonstrate as many sexual positions in a minute as we could.
From up there, I had a better view of the sad old faces in the audience and nearly jumped off the stage at the thought of performing anything before them. My formerly bored husband suddenly found the humour in it and wouldn't let me go. He grabbed the mic and even made a little speech before he arranged the props and a very embarrassed wife into various positions on the props, counting off each one into the mic.
We won. Condoms, a video on the Kamasutra, lubricating gels ... And a vibrator ring.
I kept it by my bedside until we moved home. I gave my friends the other prizes, and it became their favourite party game with clothes on. That vibrator never measured up to my sportive husband's mastery on the stage that day, but it was the one prize I never gave away.
Woman on Top
Your skin tasted of salt, your hair of cinnamon
Your lips of pepper
The Saturday morning after she bought her first cable subscription, Maya grilled sausages and tomato sandwiches at 6 am.
She microwaved oats with whole milk, and fried two eggs sunny-side up for an early breakfast with her son before his athletics heats. She wrapped for him the sausages with sandwiches and a chocolate milkshake, and kissed him goodbye.
She had begun drinking mineral water when she woke up and sipped more while she worked out. She did crunches and planks and watched the new "sexercise" videos she had saved on her tablet, trying to learn them.
Maya had never bought cable before that year. There had always been a basic terrestrial service so her family would have access to a few news channels, if there ever was a curfew and they needed the news, perhaps.
But now, eight months after they had returned to their country, her friend wanted to transfer his cable subscription midway through his contract. He was going to buy a comprehensive package with regional worship channels for his parents.
Maya agreed to the transfer and now the four of them were faced with a bewildering number of choices. It was a whole other screen life they had missed - of food, travel and all-day dancing, singing, playing - and now she knew, worshiping.
That morning, she performed her Kegels to Channel V, and when it switched to a Salman Khan starrer with a simpering heroine, she switched to Star World.
Woman on Top, old loved movie, was on.
And at last she was in love with cable.
Love and food combusted when coupled with Penelope D'Cruz in Woman on Top. Maya remembered it from 13 years ago, during a phase when she cooked and fed large numbers of people with affection and hard work and excitement. It starred Mark Feuerstein, whose first longing look at Penelope was like Naren's first glance at the conference.
And like Naren, he was tenderly sweet, but very like a puppy whom you only wanted to pet, not bare yourself to.
Naren, for whom she did not update her changing phone numbers. Of the "Do you like hairy chests?" question that threw her off. Who only wanted "to hold" her, and dropped on his knee at her feet, the first time another man had touched her outside her marriage. Who did not deserve a betrayal which was all she would have for him if she had let him hold her.
After her floor exercises, she lightly massaged ayurvedic oil on her arms, face and neck and the grooves where her thighs met her groin, and the tops of her feet. With the oil in and Woman on Top on screen, she jogged, did jumping jacks and high kicks and anything else she felt like.
Meanwhile a friend texted from abroad. Maya would miss her that summer; she had already left India after a visit. But then there was the next phone call, from the newest woman in her life, Parul, her alter ego born twelve years after her.
Together they had spent treasured hours in a foreign country, discovering desires in common, sharing and loving each other, not ever having enough time because of work and family.
Now Parul talked of meeting at a boyfriend's farmhouse by a lagoon, where they could swim naked and explore each other and their lives apart.
Dangerously, but not disliking the thought, Maya asked Parul to take out her husband, Vinod, who was then visiting Parul's city on work.
Maya remembered Parul's whimsical observation that she would really not mind if her own husband had an affair with, for instance, Maya. And Maya smiled to herself, thinking that if she threw Parul and Vinod together and they made love, there was no one more worthy than Parul of Vinod whom she loved obsessively.
For now, Maya wanted Parul to ask Vinod if he could send Maya for a holiday alone to the farmhouse by the lagoon.
Later, showered and blissful, Maya peeled and sliced ripe mangoes that her aunt had sent from her orchard. And Woman on Top kept pace, while she ate mangoes in the nude, abs worked out and limbs epilated.
Your lips of pepper
The Saturday morning after she bought her first cable subscription, Maya grilled sausages and tomato sandwiches at 6 am.
She microwaved oats with whole milk, and fried two eggs sunny-side up for an early breakfast with her son before his athletics heats. She wrapped for him the sausages with sandwiches and a chocolate milkshake, and kissed him goodbye.
She had begun drinking mineral water when she woke up and sipped more while she worked out. She did crunches and planks and watched the new "sexercise" videos she had saved on her tablet, trying to learn them.
Maya had never bought cable before that year. There had always been a basic terrestrial service so her family would have access to a few news channels, if there ever was a curfew and they needed the news, perhaps.
But now, eight months after they had returned to their country, her friend wanted to transfer his cable subscription midway through his contract. He was going to buy a comprehensive package with regional worship channels for his parents.
Maya agreed to the transfer and now the four of them were faced with a bewildering number of choices. It was a whole other screen life they had missed - of food, travel and all-day dancing, singing, playing - and now she knew, worshiping.
That morning, she performed her Kegels to Channel V, and when it switched to a Salman Khan starrer with a simpering heroine, she switched to Star World.
Woman on Top, old loved movie, was on.
And at last she was in love with cable.
Love and food combusted when coupled with Penelope D'Cruz in Woman on Top. Maya remembered it from 13 years ago, during a phase when she cooked and fed large numbers of people with affection and hard work and excitement. It starred Mark Feuerstein, whose first longing look at Penelope was like Naren's first glance at the conference.
And like Naren, he was tenderly sweet, but very like a puppy whom you only wanted to pet, not bare yourself to.
Naren, for whom she did not update her changing phone numbers. Of the "Do you like hairy chests?" question that threw her off. Who only wanted "to hold" her, and dropped on his knee at her feet, the first time another man had touched her outside her marriage. Who did not deserve a betrayal which was all she would have for him if she had let him hold her.
After her floor exercises, she lightly massaged ayurvedic oil on her arms, face and neck and the grooves where her thighs met her groin, and the tops of her feet. With the oil in and Woman on Top on screen, she jogged, did jumping jacks and high kicks and anything else she felt like.
Meanwhile a friend texted from abroad. Maya would miss her that summer; she had already left India after a visit. But then there was the next phone call, from the newest woman in her life, Parul, her alter ego born twelve years after her.
Together they had spent treasured hours in a foreign country, discovering desires in common, sharing and loving each other, not ever having enough time because of work and family.
Now Parul talked of meeting at a boyfriend's farmhouse by a lagoon, where they could swim naked and explore each other and their lives apart.
Dangerously, but not disliking the thought, Maya asked Parul to take out her husband, Vinod, who was then visiting Parul's city on work.
Maya remembered Parul's whimsical observation that she would really not mind if her own husband had an affair with, for instance, Maya. And Maya smiled to herself, thinking that if she threw Parul and Vinod together and they made love, there was no one more worthy than Parul of Vinod whom she loved obsessively.
For now, Maya wanted Parul to ask Vinod if he could send Maya for a holiday alone to the farmhouse by the lagoon.
Later, showered and blissful, Maya peeled and sliced ripe mangoes that her aunt had sent from her orchard. And Woman on Top kept pace, while she ate mangoes in the nude, abs worked out and limbs epilated.
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