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.

The Closure

I get up from sleep and pull the drapes. It’s cloudy. Suddenly I feel I am unable to read my mind. Just as the overcast sky, my mind is clouded with thoughts. These clouds have thickened my thought process. I love clouds, but not always. I am suddenly reminded of another such cloudy day.

It was a sleepy monsoon day. The sky was painted black with dark nimbostratus clouds of weird shapes. The darkness well casted it shadow on the earth and made this world devoid of light. Everything appeared to be in unison with the clouds. They spread gloom. It was a black day, literally and figuratively. And I can feel it happening to me right away.

I am standing in the balcony of the hospital room where my grandmother is being treated. She has suffered a haemorrhage. She wanted to see me, her grandchild. Oh! How much do I adore her. At one moment I was her pet, at another she was my teacher and I her pupil, and still at another moment she was my mother, my homework buddy, my secret confidante. And there I see her lying motionless on a hospital cot. She had crafted my childhood. Just like a potter carefully gives shape to his pots and pans, she had chosen and guarded the shape, colour, pattern of my childhood. I still remember the bright plastic alphabets she had bought for me to recognize. She would sit patiently for hours and teach me the alphabet. She would hold my hand and help me write. She was my mentor. And I remember she would read those bed time stories to me. And later she would ask me to read or at least try to read. She was a marvellous teacher.

She used to tell me that “reading” is something that will help you sail through the toughest of times. Lemony Snicket said “Well-read people are less likely to be evil”. I don’t know if his quote satisfies a Hindu mythological character Ravan who was the source of erudition at that time and yet he had to play a villain’s part. And yeah what about the terrorist “Osama Bin Laden”, he was a Civil Engineer. Or for that matter many of us who cheat or swindle others, do they all never read or read less? Sherman Alexie describes in his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and me” how he loved to read. His entire childhood, adolescence, youth was spent in reading which made him a great writer. I am sure he must have been a less evil man. But nothing can be more evil than seeing a beloved one die.

And here she lay, incapacitated on that cot. It was so unlike her. She had struggled and fought all her life. Just like “Sherman Alexie”, she had fought the world just to be able to go to school. Her parents would not allow her to go school because no girl in their community attended school. She was a girl child of conservative Indian parents just as “Alexie” was a Native American; both were the unprivileged lot. Alexie defied the norms; she revolted. She learnt to read and write, she attended high school, joined a college, and started to teach. She is my iron lady. In terms of Lemony Snicket, she could be described as the least of lesser evil people. She is my angel.

Suddenly she opens her eyes and beckons me. I sit by her side. I hold her hand. She tells me in a faint voice” Read me Ramayan,the balkanda”, when Lord Ram is born to Dashrath and Kuashalya. I smile at her, assure her she wouldn’t die, touch her forehead and read. I read how King Dashrath prays to god to bestow upon him the joy and pride of being a father. He goes on to perform a yagya. Suddenly my eyes go back to her. I see her sleeping. I feel death around and yet the scene that I am reading is that of birth .I can’t concentrate anymore. She seems so helpless. My mind loses comprehension; it is the ultimate juxtaposition, the dichotomy that my mind is in. I realize reading is a very emotive feeling. Alexie loved his father, his father loved books, so Alexie decides to love books. Here emotion triggers reading and yeah reading triggers emotions and it’s an obvious fact. I try to be cheerful but I fail. Death is inevitable. Virginia Woolf in her essay “The Death of the Moth” says “Death is stronger than I am”. The text that I am reading to my grandmother is perfectly synonymous with her statement when she says “it was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers had set it dancing and zig zagging to show us the true nature of life”. Lord Ram is prancing about playing with his brothers and spreading joy to everyone who sees him. The joy is inductive to everyone but not to me because my mind is observing the onset of death. I guess she has lost all her will to struggle and face death. She is like the moth of Virginia Woolf. The moth is no human. Its life is relatively ephemeral. It cannot struggle as much as the human beings. But yeah she does depict the struggles of the moth. It gets lodged onto a window sill where it is barely able to move its legs. It wriggles and twists and yet it is nothing but the sheer onset of death. It appears that the author was troubled too. She portrays her own stifled mind-set when she writes about its struggles. Somewhere deep down in her soul she is experiencing those struggles and has a quest to break free of the chains that bind it. Woolf was very well read and yet she was stifled. Perhaps the less “well-read” people made her life miserable. But I am miserable right now. I cannot sit across death. I stop thinking.

Woolf says “Death is a powerful competitor of life” and it has to win eventually but it is not so rude that it takes away our right to fight for it. Every living creature is brought into this world with the basic most attribute, which is its ability to fight for its life which indeed is a precious possession.

But do I see my grandmother struggling? I believe she wants to die. She doesn’t like the evil and the less read people around her. She read so many things. All the scriptures she could lay her hands upon, all the books she could procure. She too like Alexie was “Reading to live”. She found her resonance with books. They were therapeutic for her, she used to tell me.

She has lost her will to struggle. She is behaving like Virginia’s “moth” and not like “Alexie”.He struggled to learn and here she gives up so soon. I wish I had narrated her Alexie’s story. She might have found struggle useful. But then what next? Woolf says “Death is inevitable”. But she had never read Woolf. Oh, she had read The Geeta. The Geeta says Death and Life is all in the hands of god. You should not worry about death because it will come; you struggle and live your life. Don’t expect anything from anyone. Just do your bit. And as I think, I see her so deep calm and composed.

I remember that somewhere Kafka says ‘the meaning of human life is to die”. He wrote well, so according to “Alexie” he was a well-read person. As per Snicket he must have been a less evil man. But death is not less evil. I am a normal human, I hate to part. I hate to see my grandmother die. I hate emotive writing. I am numb. Reading of birth and joy, I interpret death. I am reminded of W.H.Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues”. The last stanza perfectly describes my state of being. It goes

“The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good”.

Suddenly she smiles at me, I see her. She is like a firefly, glowing and beautiful. And here, I see the macabre magnificence of death as it comes. The soul is free. I cannot take it anymore. I have to escape from this strange alien emotion. I am transformed to the present. I try not to think of her. She must have attained liberty from the karmic cycle of life and death.

But my mind is still juggling with questions. Is death really evil? Does reading make one a better person? Do you win if you struggle more? I think of Woolf’s moth and my grandmother. No, death is not evil. It’s inevitable and it’s beautiful. ”The moth was decently uncomplaining and composed” and so was my grandmother at her deathbed. I am reminded of the struggles she had faced all her life. I think of Alexie. Both had faced all hassles and emerged as winners. While Alexie became a writer, she became a teacher. The struggles had paid off.

I suddenly realize the meaning of our lives. We are born, we are cared for, we are given the tools to fight and struggle because life essentially is a struggle. I now see why my grandmother taught me to read. She was equipping me to fight the world and carve my niche, however small it may be. I know I have to exert and strive and I am not afraid. I don’t fear anything, not even death. Death is ineluctable. It is the completion of a cycle, the closure.