The Put Out to Pasture Life

It's well over two months now since I became a happy pensioner. Earlier I'd get annoyed when friends told me how much I'd love pension life because it suggested I was old and had one foot in the grave. Now though I couldn't care less. I just potter around the house doing nothing much, wake up late, have my meals late and a bath only at noon. And I love having no work pressures or responsibilities. It's only now that I realize how hectic my work had been, and how stressful it was getting through one urgent crisis after the other.

Initially I spent the first couple of weeks glued to my phone watching Korean/Chinese short reels. The plots were all the same, centering around rich and powerful CEOs and rival business groups, nasty mothers-in-law and both male and female characters furiously slapping each other around. Eventually I weaned myself off the silly addiction, and turned to burying myself in ebooks, particularly murder mysteries and whodunnits.

In between, I bought myself a sketch book and pencils, and tried to get into sketching. Turned out to be not too easy so I'm laying off that for a while though I certainly plan to return to it. Lord knows I have enough time on my hands...

What If

Years ago I read an article in the Readers' Digest about a little girl whose father had died and the family had to move away. I think the father was pastor of a church or parish which explains the move. She was unaccountably reluctant to leave and as her father's good friend tried to console her, she eventually confessed why: "What if he comes back?" If her father did come back, he would find his family gone and not know where they were. The father's friend hugged her tightly and assured her that he would tell the father their whereabouts if he did come back. But he said gently she did know, didn't she, that he was not coming back?

When my mother died, I was in my early 30s, a long way away from being a naive little girl. But I had that irrational hope just the same. In healthier times, my mother would rise early every morning to attend a prayer service at our church. A few weeks after she died, I wanted to do the same with the illogical, unfounded hope that somehow in the dark and early hours of the morning I would see her there, praying in church, and I could talk to her again. Needless to say, it didn't happen and I knew it wouldn't. There was just this tiny, mad part of me that hoped against hope...

I did continue attending the morning prayers for several years until I eventually tapered off. And among the regulars was this friendly, smiling woman who sometimes brought her pretty little granddaughter with her. Today I attended the funeral of the grandmother, now in her 80s, and the memory of those early mornings have brought on this requiem.

For my aunt

The first rain on your final resting place
falls gently in the early hours
Not a pounding downpour but soft and light
as if conscious of your fragility.

It's been two weeks that we wake up
with the first conscious thought you're gone
We knew you were ailing and aging
but hoped somehow you'd be around a little longer.

Now you've fallen silent, you who always
loved company and talking.
I remember that journey years ago
in a little Ambassador enroute for Mumbai
and Mother's cancer treatment. She was quiet and pensive
but you chattered all the way and Mother told me later
how grateful she was for your loquacity, it kept her
awake and away from dismal thoughts.

The circle keeps breaking again and again and again
but someday perhaps it will be mended as we
all meet again on the other side.

Comin' on Christmas

Christmas time 2021 and it's hard to feel particularly Christmassy with masks on when out shopping. Or in church. It felt all kinds of weird trying to sing behind a mask as we did last Sunday evening. Good effort with it, pastor. But singing with masks on is a no no, I think we all agree. 

To get back to the un-Christmassy feeling, it makes you want to cry looking at the traffic point at Zarkawt. Every other year it's bedecked in strings of lights and tinsel and foil and green and red and what have you, and always always, the obligatory nativity scene stall. On No Vehicle Zone day, pedestrians en familia happily glide along the middle of the road while some make a mini-queue posing for photographs by the stall with its figures of the holy family. I remember one year when they had particularly Mizo looking figurines, high cheekbones, broad flat noses, stout legs et al.

I miss all that now.

October

 And suddenly it's October again.

The dank dark damp will soon be gone

with the slush and wet. Shadows

will lengthen in the angled sunlight

we shall warm our backs to

on chilly mornings when winter sets in.

Morning pools of cotton wool

white-wreathed across valleys and mountains,

blue skies piled with immense white clouds,

evenings that explode with colour,

brown confetti from the gulmohar tree

long past its May days of glory.

The dry and dust bring back childhood memories,

riding homeward from sun baked plains

up cool, winding highland roads

the nuns at boarding school left far behind,

Father wrapping a warm arm around one of us,

home to Mother and the dear little house

at the top of the dusty hill.

Season changes worm out memories

buried in time. And the more things change,

the more things remain the same.

(October 2, 2020)

Lockdown Covid 2.0

 I am slowly beginning to forget the pleasure
of waking up in the morning,
anticipating what the day might bring.
One locked-in day after the other,
pacing within these four walls,
classes over zoom, attempting to reach
confused students behind computer screens.

In these hills too, the second wave is harsher,
statistics surge every day, nudging at five figures,
ambulances scream under cover of the night
ferrying the infected to safe places,
and patients wheeled into the ICU
do not all leave upright anymore.

But life here is kinder than in the plains,
there it’s a nightmare come alive,
swollen bodies floating in rivers
washed up on embankments
for stray dogs to feed on,
a desperate sister’s calls
of Balaji, wake up, Balaji echo in the ear,
as the summer sun mingles
with smoke and fire from funeral pyres,
people gasping for breath and finding
no hospital beds, dying on roadsides.


I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt
but these lockdown mornings are so unendingly empty.

(May 12, 2021)

 

 

 

The Silence of Sundays

One day, some day,
when the pandemic is over
and the world is back to normal
I will look back and miss
the quiet of Sundays:
the stillness, the peace,
the leisurely calm,
the silent streets emptied
of traffic and pedestrians
but for the odd two-wheeler or two
running an emergency.

The Sundays that kept us at home
from church, our social meetings,
the bells clanging at 10
in reminder of busier times.

For now, I will bask
in the soothing winter sunshine
and soak in this quietude.

Koorie

We lost our sweet Koo Koorie last night. 13 years old, kidney failure.

My sister fell in love with her and adopted her from our neighbours in 2005 even though we already had some five or six dogs at the time. She was always a happy little thing and got on well with all our visitors, unlike our other dogs who tended to be very territorial and wary of strangers. The neighbourhood kids all loved her and would often come to spend time with her across the gate. Over time, she grew old, slow and tired, and her heavy weight from her love of food, didn't help. Between Christmas and New Year, we learnt she had severe kidney problems. IV feeds and treatment went on for a week but in the end, it all got too much. 

Be with the angels, little one.