This Old House

This old house that I pass by
on morning walks,
I’ve seen older houses,
some with walls of rusted tin cans
flattened and cobbled together,
some of rotted wood, deprecit
and blackened with age,
still standing with grim dignity.

This house does not look quite so
rundown or derelict;
it’s the lush foliage from the trees
growing with such untamed abandon
like the briars and trees concealing
Sleeping Beauty’s castle as she slept,
that catches my attention.

The disappearing house is a disquieting
reminder as I feel myself fading away
under the relentless onslaught of time
and age and the passing years;
both house and I will cease to be seen and known,
as slowly we vanish from sight and memory
and sink into oblivion.

Dear Easterine

Dear Easterine,

Every time I pick up your book of poetry

it reminds me of a little jewel box -

the gleaming gems nestling inside,

some small and fragmentary but all

honed and polished to perfection

by a master craftsman.

The iridescent moonstone of your mother's earthleavingness

that echoes mine so painfully,

the diamond hellos to old friends - the wind and rain,

fog and moonlight, and childhood memories..

the glittering amethyst purple rain in April

from the Windhover Collection you once

told me is your favourite book..

the tinkle of goat-bells in the emerald grass,

the lapis lazuli of earthbound clouds

and the little pearl cloud-dog which went away

to live in heaven with Jesus and his decibels.

I will hold this little treasure chest close to my heart,

rifling through it oftentimes till every jewel

feels like a dearly loved friend.

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.

Long Weekend Musings

Maundy Thursday night. I should be in church now, and I had actually showered and washed my hair this evening after I got home from another hectic day at work. Eventually though I was too tired to go.

It's been another brutal week at work. Last week was the same. Being HOD may sound like a grand designation to throw around but in reality it's nothing more than being glorified clerks. The amount of clerical work we do is staggering. Mounds and mounds of paperwork. And crunching numbers. There's still some of it waiting on my table right now. I have to have it all ready on Monday but it's a long weekend ahead so I'm treating myself to putting it on hold tonight.

Good Friday and Easter week. Over the last three/four days or so, I've been hearing people continuously read Biblical passages over a PA system somewhere down the valley below. Young voices so probably a KTP project. I've been engrossed in my work (yes, been bringing it home, as well as slogging over it at work by day) so I haven't really been listening with any real attention. But it did pass through my mind how reading out loud can be both so banal and a treat. Most of us tend to just go through the words in a flat monotone. A to B to C. Boring, b-o-r-i-n-g. It sounds so much better when someone puts a little effort into it. Variations in speed, pitch and volume. A little drama, a little theatrics, and the page comes to life.

Excusa moi, I think I'll go practise a bit. Nothing like practising what you preach immediately.

We Are Nostalgia

We are nostalgia

old friends who go back a long, long way,

raw-boned and scrawny,

barely out of our teens,
a motley bunch

in pursuit of a master's degree

in that cold, pine-needled land across the state

because ours didn't have

a postgraduate setup then.

Coping with study stress, cultural divides
and bouts of homesickness,

we sealed strong bonds at Mayurbhanj, Long View, and Bijni,

over guitar sing-alongs, dinners, socials, and picnics

out in the wilds where the boys would disappear
into the bushes (for Dutch courage)

before asking the girls for a dance,

and complain when the girls wouldn't oblige
but declare it time to get back to the hostel!

Vacation time, homeward bound,
early morning risings to catch the hired bus,
long hours on winding mountain roads,
stopping for meals at little shacks,
rewinding cassette reels with a ball pen,

nodding off on one another's shoulders,

promises to stay in touch.

Thirty odd years down the line,

in varying positions of power at work

we never dreamt to attain,

old friends meet and greet again

at funerals and at weddings.
So much history forged together,

yes, my friend, we are nostalgia.

The Slip Away

When it comes
at a time when life
no longer holds promise or magic,
when ailments are part of daily life,
and you no longer dream dreams
for so many have been realised,
you feel you shouldn't be too greedy
but be satisfied with what you have,
and your discontent with what you are
and what you have accomplished
is quietly washed away with drink.

But the drink eats away at you,
at your insides, and time after time
you cheat death
in painful, close escapes,
and you go on,
tiredly,
knowing you're not too old yet to sit back on life
while all too aware you're no longer
young enough to start afresh
and tackle those dreams you never fulfilled.

That's when it comes,
the swift, sudden call,
and you go, quietly, alone,
you let go for it seems so easy
to slip away from the weariness of it all
and you don't really care anymore
what waits on the other side.

Zawlaidi: the Story and the Book

Spent the weekend reading a new novel Zawlaidi by Lalengzauva, a fellow rabbi at a local college.  I don't normally read books in Mizo, not because of any cultural snobbery but simply because I grew up reading in English (the reason why being another story altogether), and while I can skim a page in English and several key words immediately pop out, not so in Mizo. My brain process works ever so slowly when confronted with a page in Mizo, so I tend to mostly avoid it altogether.

This particular book was pretty much foisted on me by our Lit. Club kids at work. They said they would get to earn a small commission for every sale they made so I was happily suckered into buying a copy. Flipping through the pages, I was delighted to discover it to be about an old Mizo story that had fascinated me since I’d first heard about it a year or so ago. One that I thought would make great copy as a poem or short story. A story of illicit love, incest to be specific, of a young girl who falls hopelessly in love with her brother under the influence of the fabled zawlaidi (magic potion), and flees home the evening her brother marries another woman to presumably weep their nuptial night away on a sheer rock ledge since immortalised in cultural legend as “Zawlmangi Khum” (Zawlmangi’s Bed).

Quirkily enough, this book, while basing its plot on the legend and crafting a fictional narrative of its principal characters, actually debunks the traditionally romanticised claims of zawlaidi. And it's a minor, albeit intriguing, character who blows the zawlaidi myth out of the water: the precious potion he gives the leading man is really the crushed, dried powder of a common plant. Literally all that ensues is stage-managed by the wily sister who has all along nurtured an obsessive crush on her rather clueless brother.

Or does she? Is it rather perhaps the mysterious stranger who perceptively guesses the sister's true feelings for the brother, and in true Machiavellian spirit, manipulates the consequential chain of  love, hate, intrigue and inevitable destruction of one of the major players? Is there a deeper, hidden truth of a man born with razor-sharp wit and intelligence yet bearing the appearance of a brutish oaf deciding to play God with human dice? Idk.

While I enjoy the creative spin on the story immensely, I'd have liked the writer to provide a slightly more substantive reason for the sister's obsession with her sibling. Sisters and brothers don't normally just bend that way, do they? Or at least those that might, grow out of it as they mature, so some kind of psychological cause and effect would have given greater depth to this otherwise highly engaging book.

In all, a good read.

(Yay, I just reviewed a book!)

Mood Piece

July days, brooding and heavy. A picture I shot a year ago, I think. With an eloquent quote I found online.

Closures

Passing the Baton

Years ago, I remember watching a movie called The Mission where in a climactic ending, a priest leading a procession through a jungle while carrying a Holy Sacrament is gunned down. As he falls, someone else takes up the holy object till he too is shot, and the sacred object passes on from hand to hand.

I've often thought how much life is like that: like a relay race where a baton is passed on from one runner to another, human beings live for a few years, then die to be replaced by another generation which carries on the legacy.

Today my mother's closest friend, the friend who had held her hand as she died, also passed away. Her husband too, who had been so kind to my widowed mother, is long gone. Many of my parents' friends and their generation are gone, or are getting increasingly fragile with time. The generation that had always walked a step ahead, had always dealt with the woes and worries of the world, is dying away. Mine must take up what they leave behind, putting aside fears and self-doubts, and however unwilling and ill-prepared, try as best as we can to carry on. From generation to generation.

It's the way of the world. Agonizing. Heartwrenching. But go on we must.

May Day

A quiet Sunday,
May is running out of days
The gulmohar flaunts scarlet remnants of its flowers,
the ones left untouched by rain,
a little bird sings before the mist rolls in
and the afternoon shower comes.

A hot cup of evening tea,
you call a friend on the phone
but she doesn't answer
Cup in hand, you sit by the window
and watch the sun's last rays
light up trees in the distance

entangled in white wisps of fog.

A Mid-monsoon Rant

Another wet, slushy day in July. I've lost count of how many wet, slushy July days in a row it's been. Fog, rain, no sunshine, soggy underwear staying soggy for days on end.

I feel especially sorry for the sparrows. I've been feeding the little birds for the last four/five years. Every morning and evening, I put out a plate filled with rice and pounded peanuts and they come flocking as if they can't find food anywhere else. When it rains though, the peanuts and rice drown in the rainwater that collects in the shallow plate. I still haven't figured out a way on how to help when it rains. A feeding post with a cover. That'll do nicely but since I can't make one myself, all I can do is hope sunny days are back again soon.

Mid Year

After the chilling start
that left us uneasy
and braced for worse,
March arrived.

Seventeen years after the clampdown on alcohol
when impoverished vendors
furtively brewing spirits in jungles
were chased down, dragged into courts
and jailed, with babies strapped to their backs
while at weddings and celebrations
of the rich and well-connected,
liquor flowed, the red kind, always the rich red,
prohibition was lifted.

We waited
for the streets at dark
to be peopled by drunks,
staggering, delirious, out of their minds.
It didn't happen.

Kelkang happened instead.
Crowds upon crowds
flocking to the tiny village
to drink of the spirit,
for in the last days, I will pour out my Spirit
on all people. Your sons and daughters
will prophesy, your young men
will see visions and your old men
shall dream dreams.

In the churches in the big city,
drums beat urgently
voices rise in worship
bodies whirl like dervishes,
and when the euphoria
does not, will not, abate,
they take to the streets.

Yes, in May, warm, sultry May,
they walk the streets by night,
singing, dancing, praying, chanting,
puncturing the air with cries of hallelujah,
some so delirious they can hardly walk straight,
drunk on the power of the spirit.

As with every revival of the spirit,
darker forces awaken too,
undeniable testimony
a power is at work
we don't all fully understand.