Pati. A year on.

Time flies. It's been a year already since pati bid goodbye to us. The one word that comes to mind when I think of her is regal - she had a regal air to her. Even in her most shrivelled, helpless, confused last few days, she was a queen. Exercising control during the moments of clarity between long spells of daze that she was experiencing. Glimpses of the Lady of 312, Thadagam Link Road, who oversaw her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, maybe a grand niece and a grandnephew or two grow up, become persons of their own being, get married, have children, get jobs, move cities, move countries and continents. She was the constant. Over the last few years, we bonded so much more as friends and conspirers. She would take me back in time to go with her neighbour and friend to watch Tamil films in Alankar (I think) Theatre in Mumbai. Through her I would experience the country's Independence, like her, learning from her Post-Master father about the birth of a nation at midnight. I would walk a few paces behind her and her friend as they giggled and chatted on their way to school. I would watch enviously and proudly as she got a rubber stamp declaring the magazines she collected, collated, curated belonged to Annapoorni Swaminathan. I would gape with amazement at a grandmother who could hold her own in conversations about any sport - be it tennis, cricket or even football. I learnt how she started getting interested in cricket - serving as the secret messenger who would listen to the radio commentary of matches played by India to religiously recount the same to her elder brother who was forbidden from listening to the radio because of his exams. The mischief never left my grandmother. We would indulge in some of her guilty pleasures, like an icecream, some sweets (especially badam halwa / badusha from Sri Krishna Sweets), and earlier, a soda (usually Sprite or Limca. As I remember her, the fragments of our conversations come rushing through my memory palace. Especially as I am stranded without access to my Smart Phone which had recordings of many of our ramblings, I rely on memory to relive my dearest pati. As I watched a golden sunset over some hills in Deogarh today, I wondered whether a person who dies lives on in every memory of them that stays behind. Is that what forever means?        

Count your blessings

The last few days: from watching a swarm of bees fly towards us atop Ponnuthi Hills as we tried to get as close as possible to Lambton's Peak to watching a bear with her cubs negotiating the tea gardens in the Nilgiris, from bisons out on an evening walk to peacock twins perform a synchronised number in the morning as I was enjoying breakfast on the thokkarai kallu, it's just a reminder to count the blessings. 

Also witnessed a teacher taking students down archaeological journey at an hour exhibition of excavations in different parts of Tamil Nadu. 

Of Leprechauns and more

Spent a sleepless night tossing and turning, waking up several times, listening to the screeching peacocks and the pattering rain. Spent an hour of darkness staring into the screen wondering what was making me so anxious. Decided enough was enough and stepped out through the backdoor, hoping to sit on 'washing stone' for a while with my thoughts. 

However, that wasn't to be!

Stepped out to see a glorious rainbow through the coconut trees and my father pulling out weeds oblivious to the cosmic creation behind him. I called out to him and we went looking for the edge of the rainbow. The sun groggily shone and the beautiful brick wall of a neighbour's half-constructed house basked shyly in the goden light, turning pink with the adoration. A patch of gold on the water tank. A patch of pink gold on the house. What was it about rainbows and Leprechauns with pots of gold again?! 

Went about weeding some more, woke up some beetles from slumber, plucked some spinach for lunch and worked up an appetite before the rain steadied into patter once again. 

Yes, I found the pot of gold alright. 

Coimbatore, May 19 2022

The Tower of Babel

June 22, 2020

Each to one’s own. 

Each in one’s own. 

In a tower of one’s own build, 

One’s own rules, messages, memories filled.

Each running one’s own race

Each one the victor

Each the vanquished 

Alone in an imagined crowd, dead.

Life in a vacuum

Held in a palm

I talk, you listen, you talk, I hear

Yet, neither knows the other’s fear.

Fighting for another, 

Fighting for self

Art, music, borders, votes

Everything comes, and everything goes.

Your words sound familiar

Yet your ideas queer

Why! do we speak the same tongue?

I hear you loud and clear

As you tell me your dreams

Unfulfilled desires

Our minds intersect briefly

Before contempt dulls the fires. 

Alone, in our shell, dead. 

Speak out and be heard

When i was a child, I was told I was too young to know what’s good for me.
I was told life is too short to make mistakes and learn from others
When I grew up, I was told my focus should be studies and I believed it.
When I went to college, I was advised to stay off politics as it is a ‘bad’ thing.
When I started working, I put my soul into following orders, even ones that I knew were wrong.
When I questioned anything, my seniors said I was too big for my boots and needed to be shut down
Now I am told to keep quiet or face the consequences.

I have kept silent enough and now I know I must speak up now or die.
Because my silence is equal to the permanent closure of all my thoughts
It is the shroud over my ability to think and to decide for myself.
I dare you to tell me what is right and wrong and whom to follow and who not to.
I dare you, because, it is as much an insult to my intelligence as to yours.
I believe I can make an informed choice, even if it goes against what the majority believes
I believe I will be right even if my decision is wrong for me.

This is a promise to myself, today and hereafter.
Your voice will not quell mine.
Your stares will not blind me.
Your abuses will only make me stronger
And your selective silence will only convince me that I am doing something right.
It is not the time to wait for understanding and compassion
It is the time to stand up for what I believe in and stand up I will. 

#StandWithJNU

Aruna's Song

The night sings the elegy
Holding your head lightly upon its lap
The farewell song hums
Tears gently flow.

Confined to a bed,
Condemned to live your death
You served the sentence second by second
While the fiend escaped unscathed.

You lay limited by four walls.
While he roamed the streets.

You like to listen to the radio they said.
They who breathed life into you morsel by morsel.

I listen to the radio along with you.
Praying for you to pass.
Wishing you peace.
Wishing you release from this strange life you were forced to lead.

Stomach churns to hear the words you may have spoken.
Heartbeats pause to catch your wasted smile.
Eyes hurt holding back the pain you have endured.
It's time to let go. Gently may the night take you home.

(11.45 pm. May 15, 2015)

She died two days later. Hope she finally found the peace that was eluding her for so long. 

My article on Tsutomu Yamaguchi ... So that it doesn't get lost in time

Would you call him the luckiest or unluckiest man alive? (Published in Mail Today on 23 August 2009) Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who miraculously survived despite being at ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when US bombers used atom bombs in August 1945, does not know the answer to this question. But what he does know, and repeatedly acknowledges, is that fate had a plan for him. At 93, Yamaguchi’s battle with cancer, probably caused by exposure to radiation sixty-four years ago, has become a way of life. Recuperating in a hospital where he was admitted on August 8 this year, he said he spent every anniversary of the two “fateful days” praying. “This has been like the 128th anniversary in these 64 years,” he told Mail Today. In March, he became the first person to be officially recognised as a nijuu hibakusha — a dual A-bomb survivor. The recognition comes towards the end of a life of bitterness, a constant effort to water down the blow dealt by fate, and a late reconciliation with the role he could play in ending war and nuclear proliferation. After all, one does not often meet a person who has been through hell twice, within the space of just three days. Yamaguchi survived while more than two lakh people around him succumbed. In August 1945, Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old shipbuilding engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. A resident of Nagasaki, he was in Hiroshima on a three-month assignment. He and two other colleagues were scheduled to return to home on August 7. Destiny had other plans. On August 6, Yamaguchi was on his way to the shipyard a little after 8 am when he heard the familiar drone of a B-29 bomber. In wartime Japan, this was a noise one grew used to. But what happened next was unprecedented. “The ground was filled with a white light that sparked midair and I saw a ballooning giant fireball,” he wrote in his autobiography published in 2007. “I saw a pillar of cloud growing high above the sky in the shape of a mushroom.” At least 90,000 people were killed that day in Hiroshima. Yamaguchi partially lost his hearing and suffered burns. But what affected him most was what he saw around him. “The river that till yesterday had reflected peace was now filled with bodies clumped together… The river kept flowing yesterday and today. But a single bomb forever divided them into completely unrelated days,” he wrote. After spending a fitful night in Hiroshima, he managed to return to Nagasaki on August 8, almost as if to keep his date with fate. On August 9, he went to work and tried convincing his manager that one single bomb had destroyed an entire city. Even as he was being called a madman by his disbelieving superior, the atom bomb dropped over Nagasaki, about three kilometers from where they stood. “The same mushroom cloud I saw in Hiroshima was growing tall as if to sneer at me,” he wrote years later. Five feet in diameter, 11 feet in length and over 9,000 pounds in weight, the bomb called Fat Man killed nearly 70,000 people in Nagasaki that day. Even after all these years, the images of destruction and pain he saw refuse to leave Yamaguchi. “I remember the pain in my body. I saw people evaporate like mist, people lying on the street burnt to charcoal, barely recognisable as human bodies,” he told Mail Today. The bitterness towards the Americans caused by the experience still finds voice in him. “I cannot forgive them because this hell is a result of a well-planned attack,” he said. Despite the anger, Yamaguchi did not participate in anti-war activities. Nor did he make it a point to get official recognition of his status as a dual survivor. He carried on with life, taking up a job as an English interpreter with the US Navy and later as an English teacher in a Japanese school. A few years later, he returned to his job as an engineer. But his family’s constant struggle with illnesses and the effects of exposure to radiation prompted Yamaguchi to come out of his shell. When his son died of cancer in 2005, he felt the need to voice his anguish and tell the world about what millions of A-bomb had gone through. Yamaguchi finally penned an autobiography in his eighties. He was also featured in a 2006 documentary Nijuu Hibaku. He attended a screening of the film at the United Nations, where he urged the audience to fight for the abolition of nuclear weapons. “As a double atomic bomb survivor I experienced the bomb twice and I sincerely hope there will not be a third," he had said. For Yamaguchi, the official recognition as a nijuu hibakusha on March 24 this year was a hope for the future. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die,” he told a local newspaper. Asked what he would most like to change about his life, Yamaguchi’s answer was simple and direct — “Everything on wars.” Yamaguchi’s faith in the Buddhist concept of insei mijyou (the impermanence of everything) kept him going as the pain of his past threatened to consume him. Now, finally at peace with what fate had in store for him, Yamaguchi made an example of his life. “Life or death, there are only two choices for human beings. I wish young people choose life as their purpose,” he signed off, hinting that hope too may have survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.