Down but not Out

13 days after surgery, and a week after coming home from hospital. I've been meaning to make a new blog post but I just couldn't sit long enough. My first day home I actually sat for over an hour before the computor. Bad idea. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Ours is an upstairs, downstairs house and with my room upstairs, I was stuck here for 6 days because traipsing up and down steps, I was told, is strictly a no-no too soon after ovarian surgery. It jars the incisions inside, so the nurses said. As of last evening though, I've been slowly inching myself downstairs and upstairs, and feel terrific. Maybe the kitchen is the most home-like place in the house, I don't know, but I feel like I'm really, really home there.

I make a really bad nurse and an equally bad patient. I quickly get tired of everything. Reading, watching TV or stuff on a laptop in bed, even sleeping too much makes my butt ache. My hormones too got into the act, going into overdrive for a few days. Sigh.

When I first went to the doctor, it was because...hang on, STATUTORY WARNING: if there are any guys reading this who can't handle women's stuff, close the page right here! My period went on too long. Not a heavy, gushing one but endless spotting. By day 7, I knew I had to see a gynae but with a cold and its accompanying aches, I made it to him only on day 11. And when he said I had to take a pelvic ultrasound test, I was pretty sure all my vitals would come out normal, normal, normal and he'd sit me down and say, "Ah madam, welcome to your menopause!" Instead, the tests said I had a clearly defined ovarian cyst, sized 6 to 5 cms, and the doc said all cysts above 5 cms were better off surgically removed. And that was it.

I have a good friend who'd just a couple of weeks earlier had the same kind of surgery but her biopsy result suggested cancer and her gynae sent her rushing off to Mumbai. I was terrified that would happen to me too and despite the doctor's assurance that mine didn't look malignant, I had a few rough moments. But thank the Lord, all I did have was a harmless cyst. Meanwhile, my friend had her first dose of chemotherapy last week. Please pray for her.

Lunatic and Memories of Shillong

This past week, between sniffles and lazy lie-ins, I got to read this brilliantly written novel called Lunatic in my Head by a young woman named Anjum Hasan (Penguin, Dec 2007). Sometime last year, Mona Zote had sent me an issue of a poetry mag called Carapace which featured my favourite poem of hers, as well as this fantastic poem titled "The Last Winter, But" by the said Anjum Hasan. The structure of the poem just blew me away but I assumed she was probably one of those very high-brow, middle-aged looking eggheads with uncombed, scruffy hair. Recently, I googled her down and found that she was actually a young, pretty woman who'd grown up in the same place I did, Shillong. Now Shillong and the name Hasan rang a bell so I quickly made inquiries and discovered that Anjum was the daughter of one of my teachers at university, the laconic Dr (now Professor) Nurul Hasan. I remember him as a complete Thomas Hardy maniac with a gangly frame who'd come in and sit with his legs crossed, talking non-stop in the same tone of voice about Tess of D'Urbervilles, William Golding or Jane Austen, all the time kicking the air with one foot under the table and never really minding if the class wasn't quiet or paying him a great deal of attention. He was a brooding intellectual who approached things from the opposite end of the stick and gave us home assignments on topics like Lord of the Flies as an anti-modern novel or Pride and Prejudice as an anti-ironic novel. Despite his obvious knowledge, however he didn't inspire us as much as he might have because he was so close-mouthed and uncommunicative, and didn't exactly give off warm, welcoming vibes. It's wonderfully in keeping with the scheme of things though, that his daughter (and a younger sister Daisy who's reportedly also written a novel) should have inherited their father's formidable little grey cells.

Lunatic brings back many memories of Shillong where my family had fled Mizoram in the wake of the insurgency movement in the mid 60s. My father had been a high-ranking young officer then and after a while, had gone back to Aizawl with my mother, leaving four very small children (us 2 sisters and a male cousin) with my maternal grandparents. We lived in an assortment of houses, ranging from a Mizo family's ground floor tenement to a little cottage near a pretty field to a larger house in Nongrim just next to the Khasi section of Auxilium Convent. There had been many Mizo families then, many like us, on enforced self-exile due to the political instablity back home. Of course, Shillong was always the most cosmopolitan place in the Northeast even then.

I'd started my education at Auxilium and later shifted to the all-girl Loreto Convent. Loreto was, hands down, the most snobbish, stuck-up, snooty schools I ever went to. I remember lunch time when we'd take our little tiffin boxes to the lunch room or whatever it was called, and eat furtively with our right hands while with the left, we kept a tight grip on the slightly ajar lids of our boxes so that nobody could see what we were eating. Another memory I have of LC is funnier. My grandparents had instructed my older sister to always make sure she shepherded us younger ones home, so there we'd stand at the bus stand at Dhanketi and my older sister, always a voracious reader, would bury her bespectacled head in a book, usually an Enid Blyton, and never pay attention to the buses coming and going. So bus after bus after bus would sail by and we'd only eventually make it home when it was almost dark. Finally, grandma strictly forbade my sister from reading at the bus stand or until she'd brought us safely home.

Though I never knew Anjum Hasan personally, from what I do remember of her family, I can see that she weaves in many personal details of herself and her folks in varying degrees in her three protagonists. Like their little house just above the Fire Brigade bus stand which was opposite A la carte restaurant, and for anyone who knew/knows Dr Hasan, he's been immortalised quite unmistakably in the character of Mr Das. But despite the interest and hype about Anjum's Lunatic bringing the largely little-known and often ignored Northeast into the Indian literary mainstream, a word of caution. This is the Northeast through the perspective of someone who was born and brought up in the Northeast certainly, but to whom the distinctive essence of the Northeast must forever remain impenetrable because she is, as she keeps putting it, a "non-tribal". Never liked that tribal/non-tribal terminology and even while I understand perfectly well that the theme of the book runs along precisely those lines, I'll stick my head out and say I like Anjum the less because of her obvious inability to transcend the socio-cultural divide.

Her poetry though is immaculately faultless, and I include here the poem that first made me sit up and take note of her. Just love the innovative pattern of these lines.

The Last Winter, But...

This longing to get to the end of things,
I just walked everywhere, eating dust.
It was December and the light had changed,
Sunlight ripening like squares of rare fruit.

I just walked everywhere, eating dust,
Thinking, this will be the last winter, but...
Sunlight ripening like squares of rare fruit,
Every city street still resistant to habit.

Thinking, this will be the last winter, but...
I have explanations to offer myself.
Every city street still resistant to habit,
And barefoot women wanting the time.

I have explanations to offer myself,
Firmer than the day's jelly shadows
And barefoot women wanting the time,
The afternoon's sounds like, like a new alphabet.

Firmer than the day's jelly shadows,
That place where all sentences hold good,
The afternoon's sounds, like a new alphabet,
This longing to get to the end of things.


PS I'm going to hospital to have an ovarian cyst removed on Tuesday. Please, everybody, say a little prayer for me.

Feelin' Froggy?

With the sting of winter easing into balmier but v-e-r-y dry, gritty with dust and no rain for months on end weather, colds and sore throats seem to be the in thing these days. I'm no exception. And my colds are usually always long-drawn-out affairs with a couple of days' painful sore throat and then just one side of my nose starts running, and after it's mended in about 2/3 days, the other side starts its own little process. I caught my sore throat a couple of evenings ago and spent yesterday feeling like I was being slowly done in by an invisible Boston Strangler but this morning I woke up with the constricting pain gone. My head remains woozy and the old body like it's been hammered but at least my throat doesn't feel like it's being scraped raw anymore.

The secret to my vanquished sore throat comes from my sister. Many years ago, when her three kids were still small and catching childhood illnesses right, left and centre, she found a great way to zap away sore throats. Called the cold compress, it works like this -

At bedtime, take a face towel or a large hanky, wet it in cold water, wring it out well and fold it lengthwise so you end up with a longish strip. Wrap it all around the neck with the overlap in front. Then wrap a warm, woollen scarf over it and pin securely into place. Re-wet the compress after every 8 hours. This hydro-therapy usually cures a sore throat in a day, two at the most.

Forget about saline gargles, ginger tea, lozenge sucks, warm honey and lemon drinks and the rest. This remedy works like a charm every time.

Puppy Dog Tales

In the way that sparrows do with the coming of warm weather, some four or five were busily twittering and chasing each other around outside the door today when one obviously got a little over-excited and came fluttering right into my sister's room. I thought it would either find its way out again or my sister, in bed with her seasonal sniffles, would take care of it. Not so. An hour later I walked into my room to find a dead bird neatly left smack in the middle of my bed. My sister's naughty 3 year old poochie Kuri she'd adopted from our neighbours a couple of years ago, had struck again.

My sister says this is possibly the seventh bird Kuri's exterminated. We think it's appalling that she goes around mauling these fragile little creatures. Not that she's done it for a while. When she wasn't yet a year old and an exuberantly energetic little puppy, she'd gambol around and somehow keep nailing the sparrows that seem to love our terrace but to our relief, she seemed to have slowed down with time. No more dead or injured birds. Until today. Hopefully this will be the last.

Of the 15 or so dogs that we've had over the years, there was just one other that seemed to share this kind of predatory instinct. Except in her case, it wasn't birds but rodents. When Teii smelled a mouse, she just about morphed into a cat, albeit a barking, yelping, highly excitable one. She'd get into a tizzy, chasing the probably highly puzzled mouse around tight corners while we shrieked and hoped the mouse wouldn't come running in our direction, and after relentless hounding, Teii invariably ended up with a kill. At which point, she would lose all interest and we'd quickly get rid of the little unwanted creature.

I suppose the predatory instinct is just a little more pronounced in some animals than it is in others and with individual preferences hardwired into them as well.

Picture: Kuri looking demure with a neighbour's kid

Crazy Little Thing called Love

Back in the 70s, there used to be this little comic strip in black and white that was all the rage. You couldn't open a newspaper or magazine without coming across one of its cartoons. The sentiments expressed were invariably sweet, simple and innocent, and left you, more often than not, in a smiling frame of mind. I don't know when exactly they fell out of public affection. Perhaps they were just out of place in the new times. But recently, as I was mulling over that age-old, complicated thing called love, I suddenly remembered those little cartoons and did a quick online search. Despite the numerous cartoon sites available, there was just one which offered Love is cartoons. But bingo, there was actually a community on Facebook dedicated to the comic strip. A few handpicked favourites I ripped off from there. Click on the collages to read the captions.

The uh-oh side of love...


The mmm-this-is-bliss side of it...


And my personal faves...


So what is love actually? How exactly does it work? Is there truly such a thing as a soul mate? Can love fade away over time? Growing up on a chick lit diet of Barbara Cartland, Denise Robbins, Mills and Boon and the like, I fed off all the oooooh notions of "falling in love." Then I got older, met all kinds of people, perfectly normal, ordinary people who'd never been swept away by some earth-shattering, all-consuming Wuthering Heights kind of passion but had settled into matrimony for the most prosaic of reasons. They're living proof that you can live a perfectly contented life with anyone if you set your mind to it. Love grows, see?

So my conclusion is, as with all things in life, you can't generalize here either. It's not the same for everyone. Different strokes for different folks.

Flowers along the way

“…that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.”

As we wend our way through life, I wonder how many little acts of kindness we leave in our trail. Little acts we don’t give much thought to even a few minutes later, even completely put out of our minds, but which mean a great deal to the persons on the receiving end.

As I write this, two incidents instantly spring to mind. Several years ago, I’d been called to attend a month’s course of training in a little town called Burdwan, a few miles away from Calcutta. The liaison officer at Mizoram House arranged a car with a house worker to drop me off at the railway station, and the worker, on leaving me at the ladies’ compartment, asked the women there to make sure I got off at Burdwan station. It was about an hour’s ride and quickly getting dark and many of the women got off before me. As I began to panic wondering how on earth I was going to get to my destination, we reached a station where this woman, young, petite, obviously not that well-off, pallu over head, gestured to me that this was my stop. She beckoned me to follow her and we manoeuvered past busy travelers, all in a hurry to get home. It was completely dark by then and there wasn’t a familiar face in sight. The woman quickly led me out the bustling station to a rickshaw stand where she spoke to one of the drivers. They asked me where I wanted to go and as I told them, she spoke to him again, waving me to get on. I thanked her profusely, quickly clambered up and she melted away into the darkness as we rattled off in another direction. A few minutes later, I was safely ensconced at the guesthouse. Had it not been for her, I’d have been helplessly floundering at the station for ages.

The second incident happened a couple of weeks later. I’d gone to Cal for the day with a friend and we were at Howrah to get back to Burdwan by the local train. As we waited in the train for an interminably long time, for some reason I got off for a minute. Perhaps it was to buy a bottle of mineral water, I don’t quite remember, but as I was caught up doing whatever it was that I’d got off to do, I heard the train hooting and slowly start pulling out. Hey, I thought, that’s my train. I ran towards it but couldn’t remember my compartment. And to my horror, the train began to put up speed and I chased after it frantically. Then through an open door, a face popped out and a strong helping arm shot out to pull me up onboard. It belonged to a strong, sturdy, young coolie who was with two or three other coolies. I thanked my savior with a huge, breathless smile of relief and thank yous in English and asked where the ladies’ compartment was. I then took the direction they pointed me to and was soon back safely where I should never have left.

These are just two of the most vivid memories I have of little acts of kindness done to me. I never got to know my saviors or their names, probably wouldn’t recognize them if I saw them again and they probably don’t remember me or the help they once gave me. But I shall always remember them and the kindness they showed me at times when I was desperately in need. It didn’t matter that I was a total stranger. I obviously needed help and they gave it.

Perhaps there are one or two people out there somewhere who might say the same about me. Here's a lovely song that totally goes with my state of mind. A Beautiful Life sung by Kim Richey. Lyrics by William M. Golden here.

Meeting a Poet

Last week, I met the awesome Mona Zote, heir apparent to TS Eliot and all other elite poetic giants that I haven't even heard of yet :) Ever since I'd started my Mizo lit blog slightly over a year ago, I'd been in touch with her over the phone and email but despite living in what she once termed a one hoss town, we'd never met. I'd asked around, heard she was the daughter of a former IAS officer, worked, peculiarly enough, at the Income Tax dept, was a voracious reader and something of a social recluse. From my personal contact with her, I knew she also had a whacky sense of humour.

Last Friday, I finally had the opportunity for a face-off. I had sos-ed her for a new poetic contribution and while she was entirely sympathetic, didn't have anything new to offer just yet. She then suggested it was time we met up over tea someplace and I agreed though I must confess that the idea of meeting a mind as formidable as Ms. Zote's filled me with some trepidation. Perhaps she's clairvoyant as well because she firmly told me, "2 at David's Kitchen tomorrow and no reneging allowed!"

The next day she changed the venue to Silvermoon because they had "nicer momos." I got there a little late after first shopping for off-white curtain linings. As I made it up the steps and into the restaurant, slightly out of breath, I looked around for someone I'd never seen and had no idea how to picture. At one table, there were a couple of girly-looking boys and at another, a lone young woman busy tucking into her food. As I wondered if she'd reneged on me, the young woman raised her head and waved. And the rest, as they say, is history :)

I hadn't been too sure what to expect but Mona definitely isn't some head-in-the-sand or la-di-dah egghead. Yes, she's deeply into highly esoteric stuff, be it in lit or movies or the arts in general, and that ease with the intricate and abstruse explains her complex poetry. But she's also as into everyday stuff as you and me besides being wonderfully polite and well-bred. She loves tea and smokes like a chimney too. Yes, I had sensed that Ernestina, the "woman of the hills" who sat "pulling on one thin cigarillo after another" while lifting "her teacup in friendly greeting to the hills" was her.


Remarkably, there is actually another writer from the Northeast who reminds me a great deal of Mona. Mamang Dai is from Arunachal Pradesh but like Mona, she also writes from a world view, adeptly and skillfully fusing the ethnic, the universal and the personal into a highly individualised whole. While I haven't read much of Dai yet, here are pieces from her poem The Voice of the Mountain,

I am the desert and the rain.
The wild bird that sits in the west.
The past that recreates itself
and particles of life that clutch and cling
For thousands of years –
I know, I know these things
as rocks know, burning in the sun’s embrace,
about clouds, and sudden rain;
as I know a cloud is a cloud is a cloud,
A cloud is this uncertain pulse
that sits over my heart....

...I am the breath that opens the mouth of the canyon,
the sunlight on the tips of trees;
There, where the narrow gorge hastens the wind
I am the place where memory escapes
the myth of time,
I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain.

The best thing about these two deeply complex, highly creative women poets is not just that they're both from the Northeast but that they're personal friends. To Mona and Ms. Dai, may their tribe increase.

P.S. None of the above, the writing or the picture, either in part or in whole, may be reproduced anywhere, either in print or on the web, without my express permission.

2009: Que Sera Sera

The Christmas tree and trimmings have all been taken down and packed away. A new year, a new beginning. Used to be that I'd get myself all worked up that a new year had come and what it might bring in its wake et al. This time I'm completely blasé about it all. The future's not ours to see or worry over. Amen.

What I've been feeling very strongly about over a fairly quiet and uneventful Christmas season though is that I want to live more for the Lord. Over the last few years, my enthusiasm for wholesome Christian living has ebbed disgracefully as my faith has dipped abysmally. I'm tired of that. I want to be reinvented, reinvigorated, reclaim lost ground and live less selfishly. In hindsight, I believe it was my faith that gave me whatever dignity I had. I'm tired of hobnobbing, especially online, with sceptics who disbelieve, and of unwittingly allowing myself to let their dissension and cynicism rub off on me. I'm a believer, been one since Christmas 1989 and I want to go back to remaining one. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

On a less tired note, yesterday I picked up the entire 5 seasons of Ally McBeal on dvd. I have no idea when I'll ever actually get to watching all of them but I've been dying to get a look in at the Christmas episodes with Robert Downey Jr. Specially the part where he sings Joni Mitchell's River so beautifully.

I also have this thick tome of papers I'm supposed to edit. A friend, or perhaps more accurately, an old acquaintance, asked me to edit some 157 pages of a manuscript for a book on Mizo history. Whole lotta reading to do. I wouldn't do it if it weren't for my interest in Mizo literature. Speaking of which, my Mizo lit blog has been stagnating horribly. I've sort of run out of steam on that. Going around begging people to contribute is just not that high on my list of priorities anymore. Specially when the feedback hasn't been quite what I'd hoped for. Oh well, perhaps this manuscript editing will throw up something new.

Here's to the next 365 days of whatever will be.