Story of a Ship

There is a story that begins with a character, lets call our character Eva. Eva lives her life and her life has a few events which are of interest to others. The events form a story. Invariably, these events sum up into something that we call an end. An end, that brings about a closure. We mostly believe that all stories should end. And why shouldn’t we expect that? The end gives the sense of purpose to Eva’s story. Why did it happen? What was the result? How did it sum up? Ah, well! Lets read the story backwards, from end to start. No, I am not giving you a Benjamin Button nor Eva’s life story. I am simply thinking about a film that I watched just recently. It was a twisted tale of four people.

To begin with, a man dies! Just before he dies, he decides his life could be a lot worthy post his death. So, he donates his various organs to the people who may need it while they serve their tenure of mortality. After all, much is said about life and the ways in which it can be made worthy of living. Now is the right time to ponder on what is the benchmark of a worthy life? This is a question so often and so frequently pondered upon by many of us, that it has almost lost its sheen and reputation in the common day conversation. But despite that, the question is very pertinent to our film, and sometimes life too. For many of us, standing up for others, humans and animals could be something worth living for. For many others, achieving excellence in their work could be a worthy life. And yes, there is huge brigade of nihilists who would proclaim that living for oneself is the best thing one could do. So with different benchmarks and philosophies that we believe in, we deconstruct our realities. And often our happiness and satisfaction go hand in hand with how we break the reality into pieces for ourselves.

So maybe someone, who has received a kidney transplant, wants to think that his donor was not tricked into donating a kidney. Else, that makes him uneasy and unhappy. For another person, he would love to believe that his disease and suffering is miniscule compared to the lab animals on which the cure for the disease is tested. If not, he is unhappy. A person may think that her being blind has never been a deterrent to her photographic profession as she had been an acclaimed photographer even with her handicap. And if her work changes because of her becoming able, she becomes sad. Yes my friend, happiness, in the context of one’s benchmarks of a worthy life seems to be the purpose of life.

And this reminds me that happiness is but a state of mind. So are sadness and life worth and reality. But we all are born with it. It starts the moment we are born .And it keeps being born. It starts the moment we decide to become a stockbroker, a philosopher, a photographer, a cave discoverer. It begins every instant. The pursuit of happiness takes different forms. And as they say, ‘You do not step into the same river twice’, you are a part of a cycle that changes but without a closure.

Get married, because you know......

When are you getting married?’, asks the literally rounded aunty draped in a saree that shines 10 times that of Iron Man’s body suit. And while I try to calculate the reflection coefficient of her dress, an involuntary smile flashes across my face while my eyes try to scan the mithai (sweet) box kept on the table. She is in no mood to let me go. She speaks as if her voice just took a dip in a bottle of mango juice (alphanso, mind it) and her tone grows silky soft as the best skin crème available. I dread this.

While I try to save myself and use my smartphone as a shield to escape her Heath Ledger smile, she snatches it and asks me to show the pictures I have. She calls my mom, sarcastically announcing that the next half an hour should be spent by all the elders in the family scrolling through the pictures of my phone, because 'you know, kids these days!’ And I ask myself, ‘Who in the world invented sarcasm?’ He would be cringing in his grave, because right now all my family surrounds me for the announced show. I mumble to myself ‘Showtime, baby!’ and remark loudly ‘Lets get a projector too. That would enable easy viewing’. And again I ask myself, ‘ Who in the world invented sarcasm?’ because my over enthusiastic uncle gets one in fifteen minutes. I pray for the soul of the sarcasm inventor.

While I am not sure if my prayers are being heard, in order to raise the happiness index of the gathering, a happily-married-friend-who-is-a-mother- of-a-two-year-old-kid turns up. Her happiness seeps to the faces of all the aunts and they sound in unison ‘for a girl, the amount of happiness that comes after marriage is beyond measurement.’ I wish the inventor of kilogram scale had thought of such intangibles too. Now while the projector has been set up and I have gotten a narrow escape from the milieu by playing their favorite Bollywood songs on Youtube, and I have already silently thanked Yash Chopra (?) and Steve Chen, I stealthily move out of the room. And there I am intercepted by another happily married friend. I ask myself ‘Who in the world came up with the idea of family gatherings?’ In our country, family gatherings are like a village feast. And this married friend gives me the good advice of finding a good groom at the right age because, ‘you know, its so tough these days!’ My central and lateral incisors request me to put off their incessant showcasing as a response to all of these questions but there is no respite for them.

Suddenly there are more people in the house. There is more food and more music but there are no more girls of marriageable age. And while everyone is suggesting names of good successful prospective grooms to my mom and dad, I concentrate on the laddoos. After everyone has had their food and I have dropped two scores down on the favoritism index of my aunt whose proposal to marry an IT programmer has met with an outright rejection from me, I get up to take their leave. My mother does her classic angry eyes at me for my act. At this moment if I focused her eyesight through a magnifying glass, it could have burnt down anything placed beneath it. My mother soothes my aunt by thanking her profusely and saying,’you know, girls these days!’ Thankfully, the wedding song playlist gets over and everyone gets up for goodbyes.

And yes everyone promises me to make it to my wedding come what may, because, ‘you know, everyone is important!’. My mother does her classic sad-mother-of-a-pesky-girl face during all the sad goodbyes and promises to invite everyone and everyone of everyone to my would-be wedding. I smile and mumble to myself, ‘Who in the world invented the idea of getting married in a public ceremony to be attended by scores of people you have never known and shall never know for all practical purposes?’.

Brown Nothingness

There she was, clad in her favorite chaste white chiffon dress ,trying to save herself from the occasional mud slush that projectiled towards her from the tyres of cars that had to drive through this monsoon. It was overcast and the clouds seem to promise more shower. She stood at the crossroads undecided where to go. Sunday should be spent with friends and family but in case of non availability of both, one should engage in productive activities like reading , exercising and doing good to the society. But for the moment she fancied nothing. It was as if nothingness had its own beauty. If it were corporate debt restructuring or the ensuing recession or the presidential elections or cooking maybe, some logic would have gotten into it. For now, watching traffic seemed be a productive activity too. The end products were more subtle but they exist nonetheless. For example she could now spot the latest model of the latest fancy automobile in the town. Nothingness is delusional maybe, she thought and moved onto the next coffee shop. Maybe coffee was not nothingness, it was made to fill up for all empty spaces. The shop was bustling with people and she could not understand this sudden fetish amongst people to stay out on a Sunday morning. Quiet places are extinct like drinking water with adequate BOD. She found a small place by the window, table for two she thought. Virginia slims and Arabic coffee should do for the day. Drizzle, coffee and a notepad without music. Ideal it seems. Thoughts came in and evaporated and humdrum continued. Maybe nothingness never exists or even if it does we just give it names and forms and shapes. For some its loneliness but for some it is bliss. What about that imaginary voice in her head. All the past days of all the past years have been translated into so many events but this stopover seems like complete in so many ways. For example she does not have to worry about who killed whom in the latest sci-fi movie or who invented what or who has the latest gadget with him. Maybe nothingness is an algorithm to kill time. Why dont you paint or write or network, is what her dear friend would have said. She would have then gotten into a never ending conversation and then gone off to read something. But in absence of everything and presence of nothingness, its was just that old notepad and she.Nothingness is bliss after all.

Unread Unflipped

Trudging through the lanes of unremembered faces
The dusty streets of the Delhi summer
Shake me and bring forth, the impression of reality
Which is nothing but surrealism wrapped in sequin
And I see you through these impressions
Carefully plodding through those mazes
Writing endlessly and loving your beloved
And perhaps making coffee for the evening.
Musings that I cannot express
Probably stay aloft the boat of thoughts
That you put across and relate to a cause,
And oh! I love that smile over the steam
That rises from that steel plate of hot food.
Darkness has been a good friend to me
Perhaps you too find solace in it
Hopes and affections recreate my reality
And it’s just the satiating smell of the old book
I am sure that we shall remember both.

The strategic repositioning of a no-brand

Ah! What a day it was. The rich aroma of coffee mixed with the music of the zydeco was so relieving. It was as if a moment from her past life has awakened her and made her think of the last bit of her remaining life. Relativity seems to be the most interesting discovery of theoretical physics. She could justify her entire being on that. Think of the problem from someone else’s frame of reference and you might end up solving it. But empathy was a virtue unasked for in her world.
Anyhow, the brutal reality of her world was that it was realistically elusive. Thinkers were outdated, emotionals were in. Same protoplasmic configurations but massively restructured to behave in a manner that would single out any iota of similarity between the two of them. And with each passing day , similarity was a passé. Attend me because I am unique, and please don’t talk to me if I do not enmesh my words in a convoluted mesh of jargon and befuddle you at every instant because I am unique. And in this world, listening was the most dreaded vice you could have. And having opinions was so great a virtue, you need to be well read for that, she thought. But nonetheless, words work for many of us. Don’t they? But she had given up because she knew she was no match for her world. She would read her solitary piece every day and talk to herself and live what she felt made no difference to anyone. Probably, grey was her favourite colour because of that.
She thought that she would take a top down approach to this problem. She remembered on of the revered member of her world using this phrase as if it were his middle name. So, the problem statement first. She had little concern for the world she lived in, little did she care for her state of confusion, for her loss of spoken world and for her ignorance and for self-made realities and for her arrogance which kept her immune from the world she did not fit in. So, she could survive in this world. She had a couple of people to write to. So what exactly was wrong? Well, she had to fight for so many things in life that she had developed a passion for it. Strong as she was, she would not give up so easily. She would get the means to sustain herself and probably live the way she wanted to. But what about the loss of people around her. She was not a social person, nor a revered one. But she wanted people who could hear her out. The ones who had put her into this world had long involved themselves into their own worlds. She had a friend who could actually hear her talk . But of late his life changed and he knew he had to listen to so many people out there. So here she was. Trying to define if it was a loss or if it was a sense of loss. It did not appear to be either. Oh but wait, the problem statement. She had no one to speak to with the departure of her last audience, she had to put a stop to her words and think even more.
So what could be done? She did not know. She had no means to sustain herself. Living frugally on the fringes of last worldly means of sustenance, she could go on for sometime may be. Words were a welcome respite from all these worries. But that resource was dead maybe.
So what next, life cannot be so depressing. But what could she do? Still looking out for answers. Perhaps, another grey evening may put her back into the world where she would like to be. And today even the sky was painted grey.

The Complex She

She clinks her spoon nervously against the frothy coffee mug. I see her lost deep in thought. She nonchalantly smiles at the man seated before her. Her boyfriend, maybe, I think. Her nonchalance is intimidating. I notice her nervous fingers fumbling with the paper napkin. Probably, she is in a deep confusion.

I see her every day, women who belong to the era of technology. She is well read. She can speak at length about history, philosophy, geography, art, literature, politics, and business. Men find her interesting. Not because she is the dumb bimbo who would say yes to their small talk but because she confronts them, she challenges their ideas, she has an opinion. Men call her intelligently complex. The person seated next to her tells her that she thinks something else while she speaks something to him. She multiprocesses, she does not walk the talk, rather walk the thought. Men are utterly linear beings. Women are all circuitous. She disagrees. She tells him it’s not the way it is supposed to be. Women are just as simple. Just as no two men are same, no two women can be same. He disagrees. He is a learned man. He can give you a treatise on virtually anything on this planet. She can challenge him, but probably not convince. But he relents, unwillingly. He calls her intelligently simple. She knows it’s a just you-are-my-friend-hence –different kind of yes.

She thinks of the man she loves. How would he react to this? He would have aligned his view with the guy next to her. She is complex. Her paradigm is non-coinciding. She does not understand herself, nor does anyone do. The man she loves, or probably thinks she loves, would have said you are mysterious. You store things to fight upon at later times. She knows that she does not. She hates to fight. She prefers being silent, probably she can breathe when she is silent. She respects him for what he is. She wants the same in return. But of course, he is a man who respects women, opens the door for them, talks softly when they are around, serves them at dinner table, laughs at their jokes and does not mind wasting football time on shopping with her. But he would still prefer some other woman’s company to her. Because she is complex and she has unrelenting opinions and she would prefer reading to clubbing and she would write not talk and she would not call him every split second to tell him about topics of discussion while she is with her male friends. She is definitely complex. I see her face. She does not need any man to prove herself. She knows coffee, books, travel and a salary would last her longer than her boyfriends. She is free but she knows she isn’t.

The sun begins to set. She takes the final sip of the coffee. She smiles one of those it-was-nice-meeting-you smiles. I know she is still thinking of the man she loves. The sun sets. I see her confident gait, she is still nervous.

The Flower that went to sleep when the sun went down

The flower that went to sleep when the sun went down

I am a lonely nomad travelling barefoot on the sands which change with every single impression made onto their face by the numerous entities playing with them. I am veiled and I am tired. The scorching sun and the endless sparkles of sand is what I can behold. The men ahead of me are conversing passionately. I happen to catch up bits of the conversation. It’s something about a dust storm. I begin to wonder what a dust storm is and I am still wondering why I am veiled.

At the horizon I see sand rising up and falling off like a giant oceanic wave. Oh I do know what an ocean is. The huge wall of sand comes with the great passion and surges and engulfs everything around. It engulfs me and devours me and stifles me. I welcome it as if I consensually allowed it to cover me up. I die and I wake up.

Its two AM in the night. Yeah technically it is two AM in the morning. But nonetheless it’s night. Darkness, its eldest daughter, plays around blissfully. It has a strange quality to comfort me. It is beauteous. It is eerie. It is silent. I wish I were Nyx^[1] or Ratri^[2], the goddesses of night and darkness in Greek and Hindu mythology respectively. I would have worn a black veil and used my wand to turn everything as inky as the onyx that I wear. I know it’s romantic but impassable for because I cannot exercise any authority over anything. I am powerless. Or perhaps I am thinking too much.

I wish to go back to sleep but ‘Hypnos’^[3] is no friend of mine and his brother ‘Morpheus’^[4] derives a sadistic pleasure in making me struggle even when I dream. I cannot dream now. I think. Why is it that I am a weakling? My vulnerability perhaps stems from my past, from my childhood.

I have identified myself with it and this has become my destiny. Fully aware of the fact that I am my own creator, I tend to live in the creation of this false identity. It does not let go of any chance in which it could possibly manifest and reinforce itself in my life again and again. I have often tried to cut off the last remnant of those melanoid^[5] memories. I dare not remember it. But I am a weakling. I allow myself to be haunted and tortured. It’s a giant whirlpool and I drown in it. I don’t wish to say what is happening but I am under a spell. And here I pour down those dreaded moments.

I am a child of five. The bright afternoon sun has kept me grounded within my house. I so want to go out and go up on a swing. My angel, my mother realizes my restlessness and cuddles me. I smile, she smiles. She proposes to read out a story to me. I prop myself up on the kitchen counter. She puts the vegetables to boil and meanwhile she starts to read out. It’s a lovely tale about a goblin, a water–rat, a tin soldier and a flower. ^[6] The goblin prevents the water soldier from meeting the flower because the flower has gone to sleep after sundown. I instantly detest the goblin. He could be more polite. I am sure the flower would not mind meeting the soldier if the soldier was on a really important mission. I contemplate what mummy would think of the impolite goblin. Suddenly, the sound of the cooker puts a stop to my mother’s narration. She smiles. I don’t. I know she would want me to have a bath. How much do I detest bathing! The water is so unfriendly. I don’t like the transparent colour it possesses.

Nevertheless, I get up. She runs the tap and fills the tub. She asks me to scrub myself while she runs on some errand. I immediately get out of the tub. Mummy is not around. I might have some fun. I get in the tub and open the tap. I stand there for a few moments and then decide to get out. My foot strikes against the corner and I slip. I fall into the pool. I am unable to get up. I don’t know what is happening to me. But it’s not good. My eyelids droop. I see something strange. It’s a Church. It’s the most beauteous piece of art I have ever seen. The huge crafted Oakwood doors beckon me but I do not wish to enter. I am afraid of its towering presence. It’s prodigious and monumental. Despite of its elegance there is something melancholic about it. I seek to enter inside but cannot. I look around and see a woman in white, veiled and full of tears. She resembles someone I know. Suddenly, she goes inside the building and shuts herself in. I try to follow her. I look through the glass panes. I see her crying for help. I wish to get in and hold her hands. I am pulled away. I gasp. I feel giddy. I hear faint voices. And comfort of all comforts, I am in my mother’s lap. She smiles. I don’t. I tell her I saw a woman die. I tell her the woman resembles her cousin. She gently pats my hair and says “It’s all fine my cherub, no one is dying. See, we all are here”. I clutch her hands and go to sleep. And the next thing I hear is that her cousin died.

I don’t want to say it all but the truth is that after that incident, the church started to frequent me more often, in my dreams, in my books, in my imagination. I forged a strange kind of a relationship with it. It was exquisite, ornate, monumental and towering. It was the most pious site I had ever seen. Today as I sit in my bed and think of it I remember its giant façade. It was a greatly chaste representation of the omniscient and omnipotent force of nature. I could revere the building more than the institution it housed. It was majestic. It made me feel how small I was. I now think it was something my imagination had built so that someday if I forget how big God is, all I have to do is to visit that chapter of my imagination, see the monument and remember the prodigiousness of the Supreme Power. But how much ever I revered it I dreaded it even more. I did not want to be a doomsayer. I curbed and tried to escape. I tried to sleep less and solve maths. I refrained from doing anything that would ask my imagination to run wild.

My grandmother had told my mother once that I shall grow up to be a clairvoyant, a soothsayer. But here I was turning out to be a doomsayer. However, these visions stopped as I started to read and study and grow. To the great relief of my mother I was behaving like a normal child. But did I ever become normal? I think not. Even if I wanted to the people around me made me realize that I were different. I wanted to be friends with everyone around me but I was alienated. I bore myself into books. I read and read and wrote and tried to escape from the very tag that I had been labelled with. I tried to evade, escape, runaway and yes I did manage it somehow. In all effectiveness I became an escapist. And that is how I considered myself to be weak. The church and its memories made me forgo my sleep, my calm and as soon as I found it overpowering me, I would do something else just to escape it. I often wonder if escape is the only route possible to overcome fears. My phobia stemmed from nothing but an imagination. But in the real sense it was not just the fear of the dream. It was a quest of my identity. Who would like to be labelled as doomsayer? Who would like to be an outcast? The emotional vulnerability, that this social status of mine put me in, was immense. All I wanted was comfort and company. All I wanted was to break free from the shackles of my portrayed image. All I wanted was acceptance. I wanted acceptance from others and more than that I wanted self-acceptance. I wanted to be happy about my reality. And yes the acceptance came, but years later.

I came across a book by Paulo Coelho^[7] called “The Witch of Portobello”. This book did cast off all my self-image of doomsayer. It made me feel so ordinary and small and comforted. I immediately identified with the protagonist Athena. She sees those visions of doom just as I used to. She turns to be a witch. She leaves no stone unturned in the search of the real truth. She wanders around in the desert and learns to meditate. She learns to live with those visions and accepts them as a gift. And with acceptance comes realization of a greater truth. The truth manifests it in the saying “what we are, we are”. Our identity depends on what we want it to be. It’s just like destiny, we can carve it or we can mar it. And this woman learns how to craft her life. She is the creator of her destiny. She is my superwoman. Interestingly, Coelho’s expression of feminism is pertinent to the context of destiny. He says there are four types of women, the Virgin, the Martyr, the Saint and the Witch. In one word I could describe each of them as the challenger, the sufferer, the lover and the maverick. Each one of them is responsible for their own creation.

So here I am, trying to create my own reality. I realize I am not the ‘Black Swan^[8]’. I am a woman. I am like the ordinary woman who is fighting her way out in this vicious world full of misogynists. I am student who still is learning the truth of life. I am a learner, a sufferer, a fighter.

Demosthenes^[9] once said “A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. “ I suppose he talk about me. I begin to believe what I want to be. The powerhouse of our will is something that makes us what we are. If I submit to my weakness, I am vulnerable. I try to curb it, I am an escapist. I face it, I am a challenger. I now believe I want to be a maverick. I want to sleep as and when I want to. I am peaceful. As they say in Kung Fu Panda ^[10], I guess I will get my “inner peace” someday. For now I am the flower who goes to sleep when the sun goes down and my conscious mind is the rat who does not allow it to be woken up by any sinful dream. I am a nomad who is travelling alone but is crafting her own path.I still belong to the desert. Only difference is that I am not veiled anymore.

Footnotes:

[1] The Greek goddess of night

[2] The Hindu goddess of night

[3] The Greek god of sleep

[4] The Greek god of dreams

[5] Of or related to melanin, black pigmented

[6] Anderson’s Fairy Tales; Hans Christian Anderson

[7] Paulo Coelho (born August 24, 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist.

[8] The term black swan derives from a Latin expression—its oldest known reference comes from the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" (6.165).[3] In English, this Latin phrase means "a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan."

[9] Demosthenes (384–322 BC) was a prominent Greek statesman and orator of ancient Athens. His orations constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual prowess and provide an insight into the politics and culture of ancient Greece during the 4th century BC.

[10] Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 American computer-animated action comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was directed by John Wayne Stevenson and Mark Osborne and produced by Melissa Cobb.