Two Exhumations and a Re-interment

Yesterday, after time gaps of 43 and 30 years respectively, both my maternal grandparents were re-interred.

One September evening, over forty years ago, my grandfather was struck down by a speeding car and killed. The family had fled Mizoram in the terror-filled days of the MNF insurgency in 1964 and settled down in Shillong where we started schooling there, my two sisters and two cousins. Grandma lived with us while our parents went back to Mizoram. Grandpa divided his time between Shillong and Aizawl. That fatal September, he was in Shillong with some Mizo church leaders for the opening of a Mizo Church, and they were all walking home when the car sped by. The other men managed to jump out of the way but not my grandfather. He was already 74 and obviously not as agile as the others. The car knocked him down flat and raced away, and was never traced: it left Grandma a widow.

It was 1969, a time when all journeys were taken by road, and with the insurgency problem, vehicles had to travel in convoys, with stopovers and sleepovers enroute. Since some of the family, including Grandma already lived in Shillong, I guess it was decided it was easier to bury him there. And so at the slope of a little pine hill in Laitumkhrah cemetery, Grandpa was laid to rest.

A few years later, the family, including my grandmother, moved back to Aizawl, to the family home at Mission Veng. In 1976, she suffered a sudden stroke which left her paralyzed on the entire left side of her body. She managed to survive that until 1982 when she broke her left thigh bone in a fall. She was then living with my family at Chanmari. Her health declined rapidly and in July, she passed on to join my grandfather. She was buried at the Chanmari cemetery.

Earlier this year, following long, faintly hoped-for but never actuated family dreams, it was decided that Grandpa's bones be brought back home and reburied at the Mission Veng cemetery. And since most of our now large family lives at Mission Veng anyway, Grandmother's bones should also be brought to join her husband in his final resting place. 

And so it was that both my grandparents' bones were re-laid to rest in a little white satin-covered coffin. It had taken three male members of the family to travel to Shillong earlier this week to locate Grandfather's grave and to reopen it. His remains, as scanty as might be expected after 43 long years,  were reverently gathered  and brought back home. Meanwhile, back home, some of us worked on exhuming Grandma's grave for her remains. It was an experience that made me realise how unsubstantial human life is. Once we die, we pass into nothingness, our carrion passing back into the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All is vanity. 

My grandfather, Pu Zalawra, is today an established name in Mizo Church history, most notably in connection with the Sunday School that he helped set up. My grandmother, Pi Lalnemi, was just an ordinary, extraordinary woman who took good care of her family. They lived and they died, their mortal remains today mere debris. But they live on in and through their descendants and so long as we live, they will too. 

Rest in peace, Grandma and Grandpa.

The Unwinding

A woman's muted laugh, a male voice, drunken, loud, uncaring of the time of night. "Shhh, shhhhhh!" "What, it's early yet, not sleeping time." Away in the distance a dog barks, a lone bike roars, a truck rumbles, a window pulls shut. The dog on the couch sighs in its sleep, on the bedside table tick tick tick tock. Day unravels, dissolves quietly in the dark.

Sweet January

                                                 

Sweet January, I miss your crisp cold touch, your warm sunrises, your threadbare trees, and lazy stretches of endless clear blue skies.

February arrives, still cold, still wintry but soon it will thaw out to the smothering warmth of slithering sweat that will drown me. Or just about.

Wait and watch

Earlier today I was taking down the Christmas trimmings and wrapping up the ornaments in newspapers. The papers were mostly recent Times of India issues, and a lot of them carried pictures of high-end cell phones, iphones 4 and 5 etc. I didn't have time to look at any of the small print but one headline caught my eye, the details of which I had carefully read days before. "Gang-rape victim's fight will not go in vain: Sonia Gandhi"  It struck me that by year end when it's time to deck the house up for Christmas and we unwrap the baubles once again, we will know for sure. Time will tell.

As with a lot of things we don't know now. A happy new year all around.

18

It doesn't seem that many years ago, more like only three or four at most. And they say time heals and it does. But sometimes the memories come stealing back.

I remember that grim, silent, early morning ride down the twisting Durtlang road from the hospital. On the left, the high, looming rock walls, on the right the steep, perilous cliffs. The biting cold of a dark mid-November pre-dawn. In the open jeep, or was it a Gypsy, running less than twenty metres before us, I can still see the white shroud that covered your still, lifeless form. I remember silently wishing the ride would last forever. I didn't want to reach our home. I didn't want to see any mourners. I didn't want to have to deal with your death, your funeral. I only wanted that ride to go on and on and on, never going anywhere, never reaching anywhere.

M. today remembered your anniversary by visiting the orphanage again and taking them a bagful of the toiletries she'd coaxed them to admit they badly needed. Your sister accompanied her. She's getting old too, your sister, defeated by her own griefs and bereavements. We all still need you so much, Mum. And we all deal with your absence in our own ways. 

But there's not a lot we can do when you're always a step ahead of us, always out of grasp, always out of reach.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Once upon a long ago, I used to wish my real-time friends and acquaintances were online. I'd see youngsters social networking with each other and wish I could do the same with my peers. Sure, the young people were friendly and helpful and never made me feel excluded.  But there were times upon times when I longed for a little peer to peer online nostalgia time-out. My contemporaries however were least bothered about toeing the techno line.

Until recently when a handful of colleagues finally breached the Facebook divide. And sadly, I have to admit the old cliche is true: Be careful what you wish for - you just might get it. Having my old friends and workmates finally available online isn't at all what I'd once fondly cracked it out to be. Reason: we're just not on the same wavelength online. I probably come off sounding like a nasty diva but their rookie bumbling around blows my stress levels sky high. It's annoying and aggravating when they discuss my statuses at work, do steals on my friends or make clumsy newbie moves. One even "shared" a photo album with single shots of yours truly (something I don't often care to post online). I had to quickly text her that sharing entire albums was a big no-no. She apologized profusely and said she'd "hide or unshare it right away." Right away took some time but after a couple of days, phew, my album no longer featured on her timeline.

Sure, I know being new to anything, much less the mad, mad world of social networking, is tough nuts. But I've been there, done that, sport a few scars, and it's like I'm now on level 12 and way, way past level 1. Maybe soon the newbies will catch up and we will all coexist as happily online as off. But for now, excuse me while I tear my hair and climb the walls, grrrrrr.

Where Glam Goes

October already. My blog posts have become so sporadic, I surprise even myself.  It's partly because I've gotten so lazy about writing anything lengthy. Maybe I should just do extra-short posts so this place doesn't mildew too much.

Anyway, September was a busy month. The last couple of weeks were specially hectic with the annual inter-college sports which was uncutely followed right away by Internal tests. I don't know what the power-that-be was thinking when he decided on that particular pattern of action. Should've been the other way round definitely. Anyway, the whole sports shebang was great fun and we won. Again, ting! 

Back at work on Tuesday (Monday being a holiday to celebrate our championship), some of the kids who had been on the college teams came milling around the teachers' room to hand in slightly overdue home assignments. And looking at some of them, it struck me how different they seemed. In the courts and stadiums, fitted out in sporting gear, they had been all enviable, confident strut - steady eyed, cool, calm, collected, moving around with easy grace and self-assurance in the way that only sports people can, and displaying skill, tact and aggro with perfect timing. But out of their kits and off court in the teachers' common room, they looked bewilderingly out of sorts: gawky, gauche, tentative - just your regular awkward teenager with all the uncoordinated movements and fractured speech. I tried to put one at ease by asking what his height was and wondered if he was the tallest student we had in college - he'd been one of the volleyball players, and he nervously replied 6'1". Other teachers asked him other things but he didn't relax much. It was then I realised how different we all are when in our element and out of it. In the one, we ooze savvy, poise and confidence; in the other, all the glam just vanishes right back under our skins. Same persons, different people.

Just an old song

Through most of last week, for no apparent reason, I listened to a lot of 70s music on youtube. Or should that read watched music on youtube.  Videos of songs that I had grown up on, but was only really properly seeing, in many cases for the first time ever, people whose familiar voices I'd often heard on the radio or on music cassettes. Now I don't know if it's just me and if it's because I'm no singer or am particularly musical but I tend to never really pay much attention to song lyrics. I just catch bits and pieces and sing those or just vaguely hum along and then sing out the instrumental solo bits. This is why last week when I watched an old song that I'd played often without really noting any of the lyrics, it brought up something I had long, long forgotten.

The song was Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and it turned out to be a song about an incident I had read about and seen pictures of in Life magazine years ago. On May 4th 1970 in Ohio, America, there had been a huge stand-off between students of Kent State University protesting against the Vietnam war and the government, which ended with soldiers shooting the unarmed college students, leaving 4 dead and several wounded. Of course, being on the other side of the world at a time when there was yet none of the instant media we have today, I think I got to see this issue of Life only around 1975/6. My sister and I were full of childish shock and fascination by the pictures (and Life carried only really great pictures) and I remember we felt especially sad for one of the victims who seemed particularly good-looking. The magazine with all the pictures was around for a while but over time, it disappeared, as did my memories of it. Until last week. 

What an amazing invention the Internet is, I keep thinking as I follow links around of the story. It had apparently been a huge, traumatic moment in the nation's history. Plenty of books have been written on it, there are lots of videos online with people still arguing bitterly over it, lots of articles, blogs et al. How could a government kill its young? How could it just shoot into a crowd of unarmed students? As a teacher, I know students, especially collegiate-aged ones, can be infuriatingly difficult to deal with. Late teens, early twenties. They're not so young and impressionable anymore as school children, they've read a bit more, know a bit more but they're not quite adults either and can be impossibly idealistic and stubborn. A real force to reckon with. Case in point, the student movement of South Korea in the '80s. But to shoot into a crowd of your own young? When the '89 Tiananmen Square massacre took place in Beijing, I had long forgotten the Life pictures but I wonder now as I write this, what people then who remembered the Kent State shootings had to say about it.  I remember my mother trying to rationalize the Tiananmen incident by attributing it to the Malthusian theory which was totally new to us and I remember us scolding Mum for being so callous. What a pity we had all forgotten about the Life/KSU incident then. I wonder what my mother would've made of it. For now, I'm still following around and reading up on this story that was evoked by an old song. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,

We're finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio.