What remains?

As a child of the 80s and 90s, life was good. Despite growing up in the city, my childhood was not severed from the natural world. Apart from the numerous parks, gardens, and playgrounds we children had to ourselves, I also had the luxury of my vacations in Kerala. I am surprised by how little I recall of events in the last few years, while some of the memories of my childhood are as clear as daylight. I even remember how slowly time passed in my mother’s ancestral house in Kerala. The nights were long, electricity was just a dim-lit room with the moths arranging themselves on the ceiling around the bulb. There was not much that we could do, and there was no television to watch. So we kids would find our own ways to pass time. I remember the smell of hay and the attic where firewood was stacked. I remember the pretty wild flowers that grew everywhere, some purple and some yellow, some with round bulbs and others with fragile petals. I remember the dull thud of coconuts falling from the tree. In the city, my memories of childhood are of open spaces filled with the sounds of play and laughter; of interesting indigenous characters with an abundance of affection and native wisdom; and of thousands and thousands of books that presented to our little minds the enticing worlds beyond our own. As a child, I had nature, books and people to absorb. The world of my childhood faded away slowly. The people from my childhood left; some changed. Places changed. The culture changed. Even as men turned into beasts, nature remained.

I recently picked up Heidi to reminisce impressions from my childhood. When Heidi accompanies Peter and the goats to the pastures high up in the mountains, she finds herself awed by the experience of the natural world. The glorious sunset leaves behind a lasting impression on her young mind. Only the intuitive wisdom of a child can access the invisible communication that exists between the elements of our world. As the sun sets, it appears to have set everything ablaze. Every rock, every blade of grass, every flower, is brought under the sun’s spell. For a few moments, they have all borrowed the character of the sun, and have lost their distinctiveness. The sunset becomes a unifying force, and the earth speaks the language of the sun. Heidi is too young to verbalize the phenomenon she has just witnessed, but her native wisdom allows her to access the miracles of the universe and to form impressions of these. Her native wisdom allows her to discern what is original and profound. Heidi is sad when the spell ends, and the colors of the sunset give way to darkness. She voices her concern to Peter who reassures her by declaring that it will be the same the next evening. Heidi is relieved to learn that this phenomenon repeats itself day after day.

Heidi voiced the concern that we all have. None of us really like change. There are things we wish would never change. Deep inside, we want everything to be the same. We never want to grow old, we never want to be parted from our homes and our near and dear ones, we never want to be separated from the familiarity of all that was once home. Deep inside, we always want to belong. We learn the hard way that we have to let go of many things we cherished and identified with. Eventually, we only belong with the impressions that exist within us. The impressions that can never be erased, simply because they touched us so deep at a time when we could devour our world without any filters.

So what remains? Nature remains. Knowledge remains. Even when everything else has faded away, there is nature that comforts, counsels, and heals. Nature that recreates the experiences of our childhood. Nature that allows us to go back to our instinctive nature. There is also knowledge that allows us to be eternally youthful, and never lose the qualities of our childhood- our inquisitiveness, our fearlessness, our desire to know, our ability to lose ourselves to experiences, and our ability to be touched.

38 Bahadurabad

38 Bahadurabad by Zeeba Sadiq.

I do not recall when I had purchased the book, or why I had purchased it. Nor do I recall why I chose to read it now when I hadn’t read it in all these years. But somehow, I had stared at the book, and the book had stared back at me, until I could no longer evade it.

Through the book, I met a young author who chose to write under the name of Zeeba. The more I read the book, the more I was intrigued by the author. I recognized a strange, uncanny resemblance to my own self…or perhaps to the elements of life that were a part of my formative years in a country that was very different from what it is today. Somehow, our lives were enmeshed in a strange way. Zeeba’s description of her childhood that drew sustenance from the soulful characters whose lives were entwined with hers, evoked in me a personal sense of loss. Her words captured the sublime elements of personality and human interactions that went into making the ordinary pattern of life extraordinary. That was an era when people lived more authentic lives, and knew the art of transforming their poverty and adversity into stories of valour. There was much that they had survived, defeated, and outlived; there was much that had enriched them from within, no matter how poor or uneducated they were on the outside. Those were years when our subcontinent retained something of our cultural and spiritual essence; our cultural soul had not yet been eroded by bloodshed, war, or the forces of globalization. The only other work that evoked a similar mood was the television series Buniyaad. Zeeba wrote about the loss of the meanings created by forgotten cities and forgotten characters. This resonated with me.

I was intrigued by Zeeba, and I looked her up. As if to complete the story of losses, I learnt that Zeeba had passed away abruptly in 2010, from an aneurysm. In 2010, I had already returned from London. But in 2004, when Zeeba was alive, we lived in the same city, never having heard about each other. Like all the souls I had never met and who became my family because their perceptions, quests, and private sorrows throbbed in me, Zeeba became my family too. The family that I had never met, but the family that I perhaps knew better than the people I know for real.

In the course of my exploration, I stumbled on two articles that touched upon Zeeba’s work. These articles were written by Taha Kehar who had never met Zeeba for real, but whose writings had accessed her world and her mind in a way that only writers are capable of. I downed both the articles, holding on to every word. One of the articles was about how 38 Bahadurabad had acquired meaning as a tangible world that was used to access something intangible shared by a mother and a son. This resonated with me because even though my mother is alive, I am already preparing for the time she will be gone. Sometimes, the words I write, are my means of holding on to her- to all that she stood for. The other article was about the forgotten soul of Karachi. My own equivalent of this is the sense of loss I feel when I think of the Bangalore and the India that I left behind.

In an author’s work, if we can find a bit of our own worlds- the part that is private, personally meaningful, that we cherish deeply, and that cannot be described casually or carelessly, the author becomes family. Zeeba, Taha, and me. We have never met. But 38 Bahadurabad ties us together. In 38 Bahadurabad, are the perceptions and the memories that time took away from us, and that can never again be found in the external reality of our lives. 38 Bahadurabad helps me pick up the pen where Zeeba left off.

Where do I belong?

Some days, my mind breaks loose. It likes to indulge in an unorganized journey of spontaneity, dwelling in perception, memory and nostalgia. It is on such days that I feel closest to life. I feel its companionship, its attachments and its rooting. I feel its joy and sadness. I take a journey into the innocence, sweetness and magic of the uncorrupted emotions we experienced as children and adolescents. I feel a sense of belonging- that feeling of having returned home, after having wandered through the big wide universe. I feel I have shed the worn out layers of my mind. I feel as if my lost youth is finally cutting through the frost, eager to embrace the sunshine and the moonlight.

I experience life pretty much like the beautiful stories we read or watch. I live in anticipation of the next extraordinary moment of perception or revelation. I endure my struggles only because I know that the next magical moment awaits me. My mother says the extraordinary and magical moments portrayed on screen are mostly fiction, and that such moments are seldom experienced in real life. But if you ask me, my life has largely been a compilation of such extraordinary moments, every single day. I now realize that life is perceived in our minds. Our lives would be as magical as are our perceptions. Those of us who are gifted with the magic of perception see the world with the mind’s eye; we see more than what most people see, we read more into our experiences than what most people can. We hear music that others cannot hear, we see stars where others see darkness.

Magic attracts magic; life attracts life; innocence attracts innocence. Perhaps this is why I was successful in surrounding myself with people who helped me experience the most beautiful version of human relationships. My mind has this habit of weeding out all the relationships that were removed from the truth of emotions while forming deep imprints of the relationships that gave me a taste of their aesthetic potential. There is perhaps nothing more beautiful than to be cherished and valued by people. If you have had the experience of somebody putting you ahead of them, then you have experienced the most beautiful facet of life.

I have decided to dedicate the rest of my life to education. I believe I have finally discovered where I fit in best- the place where I can be most resourceful. However, when it comes to my personal life, I am slowly beginning to realize that home is made up of the ingredients that your formative years are rooted into. While I love nature, there is something of home that I perceive in the ambience of a city. A place like Canary Wharf is where I shall feel most at home. How am I to describe it? How am I to describe those elements of beauty in urban life that I cherish? That feeling of youthfulness, optimism and exhilaration. The music and the lights. The open spaces and the freedom. Taking the bridge across the river, lost in the shimmer of lights. The cinema and the theatre experiences. The art and craft. The multicuisine restaurants and the cosmopolitan crowds. The double decker buses and the automated trains. The canals and the Japanese bridges. The writers, artists and musicians that one gets to befriend. The city never goes to sleep. The night never comes to an end. How much I miss these elements of life. It is these that I long to go back to.

I have always loved the anonymity of the city. I also find it easier to live in the city where one is not exposed to the brutal truths of life. Life in the countryside is beautiful from the outside, but it is a hard life. One cannot endure it alone. As I abruptly end this post, I cannot help wondering- Where would I be, five years from now?

A journey of loss

In her interview with Simi Grewal, Maharani Gayatri Devi described the feel of India of the pre-independence times. Of the fabric that Indian society was then made of. Of how life was never about the self in exclusion. Of how rulers served the people, unlike the politicians of today who serve themselves. She drew a comparison between the social temperament that characterized pre-Independence India and the India that emerged post-independence. Though there was the initial excitement and exhilaration of Independence, she recalls witnessing the slow transformation of Indian society from one that was rooted in human values to one that started to value money and individualism over human values. Her sense of loss was palpable in her reminiscence of the aesthetics of life in her formative years.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=%23&ved=2ahUKEwj4z8belvjjAhVY6nMBHSADASoQxa8BMAB6BAgAEAI&usg=AOvVaw0VTJzWxrN8ZFOD4xbU2nov

I suppose some of us are particularly affected by this phenomenon- the loss of the aesthetics in life. What we lost in the process of making our lives easier, more comfortable and convenient, is the aesthetic quality that once characterized our lives.

I think of the open wells that were central to life in rural India of those times. I recall vividly the joy of drawing water from the well at my grandparents’ house where we spent our summer vacations as children. I would lean over, stare at my reflection in the water, and drop a pebble. I loved watching the reflection skewed momentarily, until the water was still again. As I let down the rope that circled the pulley, it seemed to slip off my hands, and the bucket went down with ease. Sometimes, the metallic bucket would float on the surface. I would then maneuver the rope to lift it a little and then let it fall forcefully so that it would tip over. Pulling up the bucket was a bit of an effort, especially during the summer, when the water level was low. I would use my hands alternately to tug at the rope, and watch the bucket rise slowly. It sometimes dangled and hit the wall of the well, tipping over and spilling half the water. The brown laterite walls of the well would catch my attention- they were covered with moss and fern. Sometimes, we would see tadpoles gliding on the surface of the water.

Eventually, taps replaced wells. Just as private baths had replaced ponds. With every new invention, we were moving one step closer to comfort, and one step away from aesthetics.

I quote the example of a well only because it was the first thing that came to my mind. In the process of making our lives comfortable and private, there is so much that we lost- the aesthetic quality of our engagement with nature. With fellow creatures. With fellow human beings. We destroyed the aesthetics- within and without. The aesthetic make-up of our personalities was gone. Our beauty was now only skin deep. We had successfully over-simplified our lives. In the process, we had complicated our perception of the world and of ourselves.

Paper and books were being replaced by screens. We were no longer writing; we were typing. We were no longer using our feet to walk, run, climb or play; we were letting machines replace our mobility. Everything was now happening at lightning speed and we were busy rewiring our brains to cope with this speed.

‘Slow down. Slow down’, whispers a voice in my head.

I pick up a book by Ruskin Bond. My mind is unable to slow down enough to savour the book. It is then that I recall my English teacher’s lessons. She taught us how to read literature. How to savour words, phrases. How to allow them to linger and how to lose oneself in them. How to pause, feel, savour.

The warmth of literature slowly permeates and my mind slows down.

The Death of Culture

As a child, I was closer to my mother’s family. My mother’s family was made up of people who were culturally sensitive, and that made all the difference to the moments I spent with them.

It was my great grandmother who shaped my earliest perceptions of the world into which I was born. My mother was her first and favourite grandchild, and so, she came to take care of me when I was born. My mother was working and I was left to her care in the first year of my life. Though I have no conscious memory of that period, she gave me the very first impression of this world and I am certain she presented the world to me as a fascinating, enchanting place. When she left, I was inconsolable. I was just an year old, but she seemed to have created a deep impression in my mind. My mother recollects how I would look at every grey-haired woman thereafter and cry, “Ammamma, Ammamma!”.

My mother grew up with my great grandmother, and she had instilled in my mother a love for culture. She would narrate to my mother many events and experiences from her life, and she always described them in a cultural context. She had traveled a great deal with my great-grandfather who had a transferable job, and she saw each place and its people in the light of their inherent culture. While the other women exchanged pleasantries and gossiped, she was busy absorbing the difference in culture. She refrained from too much judgement; she loved assimilating, learning and absorbing new aspects of culture, particularly those that appealed to the senses. She infected my mother with this sensitivity to culture, and my mother’s memories were therefore rooted deeply in culture.

Bangalore was not a culturally stimulating place. It was a multicultural community where we were exposed to such broad differences that we had learned to accept difference as the norm. It was when I spent my vacations in Kerala that the cultural ingredients came alive and awakened my senses to the profound beauty in life. My mother’s ancestral house was in itself, a key cultural ingredient that shaped my early emotions. It was an old weather beaten house, and it was a miracle that it had survived the storms of centuries. That in itself, made it special for it was a relic from the past. I was fascinated by its wooden half doors that seemed to let the world in, its patio where we all gathered most of the time, its attic where mice could be heard quarreling, its dark kitchen where the hearth was always warm, and the backyard that looked onto pepper creepers coiling around the jackfruit trees. I loved some of the things that we children were asked to do, and that my cousins seemed to hate. For instance, I loved sitting in front of the lamp, reciting prayer verses at dusk. It was something we didn’t do back home in Bangalore. I loved the feel of pebbles and earth on my feet. I loved earthen floors more than I loved tiled floors. I loved taking bath because it meant drawing water from the well. I loved the sight of jasmine flowers that had blossomed overnight. I would pick handfuls of the flowers and smell them. I loved the wooden reclining chair in the patio where my great grandfather used to sit. I loved the high cot in my great grandmother’s room that served the purpose of a store. From its insides, my aunts would fish out cakes, sweets and savories. I loved the women who passed by our house, sometimes with sickles in their hand, in search of tender grass for the cows. They would smile at us fondly and ask a million questions. I loved the old temples we visited. The stone steps and pillars, the sopanam, the fragrance of the incense sticks, the sandal paste, the temple pond and the serpent shrines. I loved the little lamps that glowed in the dim light of dusk, and lit up the shrine. I loved the oracle’s performance though I was also frightened by his demeanour. I loved the graceful movements of the Mohiniattam and I loved the mudras of the Kathakali. I loved weddings where women dressed up the bride and the bride, clad in spotless white, her hair adorned with the most beautiful and fragrant jasmine flowers, reminded me of a swan gliding through a procession. I loved being part of the wedding processions that walked the bride and the groom to the bride’s new house. Though I was raised in the Hindu faith, and loved the cultural elements of this religion, I was equally fascinated by cultural elements of other religions. I was very excited by toothless elderly Muslim women who stopped to talk to my aunts. I was fascinated by the number of gold earrings that adorned their ears and by the zari bordered headdress through which silvery strands of hair broke loose. Their houses were a delight, and so were their weddings. I loved the boatman who ferried us across the river. I loved the fishmonger who hooted in the mornings and passed by on his bicycle, an army of cats following him dutifully.I loved the tea stalls where old men discussed politics amidst glasses of tea and plates of parippu vada. I loved watching women pound rice; I was in awe of their synchrony.

In those days, the men and women seemed to possess so many skills that we no longer have. People could grow their own food, catch fish and crabs from the streams, chop wood and obtain firewood, make a fire, and cook their own food. They could even build their own house. They could climb trees, swim, row a boat, walk for miles, and labour for hours. My mother tells me about how she would accompany my great grandmother to sow seeds, till the soil, and water the saplings. She remembers how during the cucumber harvest, men would erect a pandal in the fields, light a fire, and stand guard, so as to ward away foxes that ransacked the fields at night. Those sleepovers can never match our modern sleepovers.

In retrospect, I realize that culture played an important role in my formation. It defined the aesthetic framework that was necessary to make all my engagements with the world profoundly beautiful. It taught me to see the aesthetic dimension in all my relationships- with nature, with people, with other living beings, with living spaces. It taught me to explore this aesthetic space in my day to day life, in education, in religion, and in every facet of life I engaged with. The more diversity there was, the more was the scope for such aesthetics. Perhaps that was the reason I loved this country the most. It provided for so much cultural diversity. And so, my memories were rooted in these cultural ingredients.

Sometimes, I am aware that my mind is seeking something from the environment. It seeks familiarity. And that familiarity is to do with these cultural ingredients on which I was raised. When it doesn’t find them in the world, it resorts to the books and movies that have immortalized them.

Today, our lives are so empty. The death of culture is palpable. Instead of the soulful cultural ingredients that once defined our lives, there is just a human buzz- a mechanical buzz with no aesthetics in the monotonous scheme of our comfortable lives. In place of a memory, is a big void. Something that science labels as depression.

Culture is a carefully crafted, time-tested art that has ingredients that nourish the soul. I think these cultural ingredients were largely responsible for the sense of fulfillment that characterized the traditional way of life. Culture comprises of those ingredients that teach us to engage deeply and meaningfully with the natural world, and therefore nourish our souls. As we dissociate ourselves from culture, we are also alienating the mind from soulful ingredients that are necessary to anchor the mind to a fundamental framework of factors that govern life. Cultural ingredients awaken the senses to the inherent beauty in life. All memory and learning feeds on such aesthetic awakening. The definitions of all facets of human life- love, relationships, home, marriage, childhood, womanhood are deeply rooted in culture. Human potential is rooted in such sensory awakening. And so, this era of depression, violence and crimes is not surprising.