Calliopia who?

Almost three years after I started blogging, I still get the occasional query about the name I use here. Some assume it's just a fancy name I cooked up out of thin air but surprise, surprise, Calliopia isn't something I made up. Instead it's a very real name from the fascinating realm of Greek mythology which, incidentally, is something you can't escape from if you're a student of English lit. When I first decided to start up a blog, I thought it would make a great online scrapbook where I'd copy and paste all my treasured and favourite pieces of poetry and song lyrics. I figured I needed a name with poetic/songlike associations and that's where all the myth info overload came in.

Calliopia, also known as Calliope, was one of the nine Muses, and the Muse of epic and lyric poetry. And despite the fact that this is the internet and you can quickly google down every detail you never needed to know about Greek mythology, here's a quick summation.

The ancient Greeks, in the blissfully pagan times before the pre-Christian era, had a whole string of deities with a very clear cut hierachy. At the top of the table were the Olympian gods who were called so because they were believed to live at the top of Mount Olympus. There was Zeus, the El Supremo, god of the gods and ruler of mankind, the beloved Apollo, god of the sun and music, Hades the dark god of the underworld, Poseidon the stormy god of the seas, Aphrodite the original perfect 10, goddess of beauty, love and eternal youth, Hera the goddess of marriage and the family who also happened to be married to Zeus who regularly cheated on her and once famously seduced a mortal beauty in the guise of a swan, a union which led to the birth of the fabled Helen of Troy, etc etc. One great thing you can't help noticing about the pagan gods is that they didn't seem to have this much maligned distinction between male and female that plagues us today.

Next on the hierachy were the demi-gods and spirits. These included the Furies, who specialised in wreaking vengeance and retribution for crimes committed and relentlessly chased down the guilty, the Fates - the three sisters, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who decided on the life span or destiny of every human being, the Graces or the Charities, the Nymphs, the Sirens, and the Muses. The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of a clandestine but passionate nine nighter between Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They lived on Mount Helicon and rode on the back of the winged Pegasus, gifted to them by Minerva. These beautiful and highly intelligent immortals were given the privilege of being the representatives of poetry, the arts and science, and divine sources of inspiration and guidance for poets, artists, thinkers etc, in other words, the intelligentsia.

Calliopia was the eldest and wisest of the Muses, and was reputed to have mothered Orpheus, the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, whose songs were said to charm wild beasts and coax even rocks and trees into movement. As a child, I remember being entranced by the story of the death of his wife, Eurydice, and his attempt to bring her back from the kingdom of the underworld. When he failed, he became so inconsolable that he forever rejected female company, a situation which led to his killing by a group of furious, scorned women. They tore him to pieces and threw his severed head, still singing beautifully, into the river Hebrus, and it finally came to rest at the isle of Lesbos, home of the original Lesbian, Sappho.

Now you know why I call Greek mythology fascinating, and why I choose to use this pseudonym.

The original Calliopia, painted by Simon Vouet, 1634.

High tech learning, anyone?

What puts me off most about blogging is the regular updating thing. It's great when you have tons of things on your mind or just need to vent. I've done a lot of blowing my top online, not necessarily on my blog but on online forums I've patronised over the years. Anything that I felt was inaccurate, mispresented or didn't agree with, I had absolutely no qualms in making my difference of opinion quite clear but I guess I now have to accept defeat. There are just so many morons who cannot be talked sense into, I'd rather save my breath and leave them to drown in their ignorance. I've had it with trying to be a catcher in the rye.

Of the last 8 or so years that I've been online, it was only last year that I finally got a fast connnection. Earlier I'd been enthusiastically but laboriously exploring the much hyped world wide web at a top speed of 52 kbps. Laughable as it sounds now, it didn't stop me getting what I wanted. I frequented chatrooms, talked to all kinds of people all over the globe. Satiated my curiousity about people in far away, distant, seemingly glamourous places. Found out that they're just regular folks and some are even unbelievably dumb. Fell madly in love a few times with people I always knew I was never going to ever meet anytime but still stayed up long hours at night connecting with. I made a lot of friends, others, while I wouldn't call them enemies exactly, definitely not people I'd so much as say hello to were I to bump into them tomorrow.

What the little old dial-up connectivity couldn't deliver though was meaningful video streaming. I rarely, if ever, attempted to watch youtube. It just wasn't worth the hassle. And even after I got my broadband connection early last year, I'd got so much into the habit of avoiding watching videos online I often forgot about them. Now though I'm pleasantly surprised with the variety of visual information that's available. Last summer, I'd hunted down a few pieces of Hamlet that I wanted to show my students - from Laurence Olivier to Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson to this ingenious little rap piece made by a couple of American high schoolers.



Now there's a youtube/edu category which has so many amazing educational vids you could just sit and watch all day. Like how to roast the perfect chicken, poetry readings (mmm perhaps someday we can get our very own Mona reading her Ernestina), plenty of scholarly lectures from universities all the US (not exactly visual treats but there's only so much entertainment you can provide while giving a lecture). I think I can quite safely recommend this youtube/edu thing to my students. Perhaps one day I can just flick on a video of a Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads class in session and let the kids draw their conclusions from it while I recline in the back bench with an Archie comics :o)

Anatomy of a Rainstorm on the Mountains

Ruahthimpui is what we call them up here. Ruah for rain, thim for dark, pui for big, so literally a big, black rainstorm. As opposed to those summery showers which thoroughly wet your umbrella but don't last very long. An RTP usually visits these mountains at least a couple of times a year, sometimes unexpectedly at the beginning of the year around February or March, much before the onset of the monsoon rains, and more usually during mid-monsoon from July to October.

There's never any indication earlier on in the day that an RTP is brewing. No bleary sunrise, no overcast skies, no agitated bird alarms. Just business as usual everywhere, people going about their work, children playing outside. Then suddenly, thick dark clouds start sweeping ominously down the mountains, a strong wind whips out of nowhere and noisily flaps clothes hanging out on lines, bangs shut unbolted windows and doors, stirs dust from the ground and sends debris swirling in the air. There are short, sharp sounds everywhere. Glass shattering, neighbours calling out to one another in high, hurried tones as they rush around collecting their wash, voices screaming for the children to get indoors immediately. Windows and doors are noisily shut and firmly bolted, the steel doors of shops dragged way down low, people on the streets, with or without umbrellas, rush for the nearest shelter. Lightning streaks viciously across blackened skies and thunder rumbles.

Within minutes, heavy raindrops smack fatly down, relentlessly rattling tin rooftops and glass windows. A smothering curtain of grey, impenetrable mist and fog settles over everything, drawing visibility to claustrophobic limits. Sometimes, little iceballs of petrified rain pelt down, hammering roofs of cars and houses. Hail always causes excitement. Children are especially fascinated and a few daring ones dart out to pick up the glistening, white stones.

Within four walls, the electricity is invariably cut off. Darkness reigns supreme. People light candles or old-fashioned lanterns at noon, a few awestruck faces peer through glass panes at nature's unleashed fury raging outside. Some huddle down on long chairs, others bunk down under warm blankets in bed to comfortably wait out the storm.

Sometimes it continues for as long as an hour. Sometimes it's done in a few minutes. The rain stops, the fog clears, the clouds roll back to their places somewhere beyond the mountains. The sun reappears. People open windows and doors and come outside. Everything is bedraggled and dripping. And life picks up again.

Individuality and the Poor Man's Culture

Ok, hands up all of you who've ever received this kind of encouragement from parents or teachers. I get the feeling somehow that this might be more socially divisive than we realise. Meaning it's dependent on the kind of society we grow up and live in.

From what I see of young people around me, I'd say practically none have ever been actively fed on an idea like this. In fact, I'll stick my neck out to claim that a clean 100% Mizo parents swear by the go with the flow school of parenting. Case in point - many years ago, our Sunday School dept teachers had made plans to spend a day out together on a picnic. But on the morning of D day, someone in the church community died and some of us hastily met to decide whether to cancel or go ahead with our plans. I hadn't been terribly enthusiastic about the outing anyway and it seemed quite wrong to go goofing off when there was a funeral of a fellow church member to attend. But out of around 25 people, only three or four opted to cancel, and the rest all went off picnicking. One said later that he'd gone despite qualms about it because his parents had always drummed into him the line that in crunch situations, he should always go with the majority. The soft, safe option that many parents take pains to teach their children.

It's a different story when you watch children in more affluent societies. Like with the American Idol no-hopers. They bellow horribly like landlocked water buffalos deprived of H2O on a hot day but swear that their parents, family et al have always told them they're wonderful, super talented and unique. And they believe the hype so completely, they can't take the truth that they can't sing to save even one of a cat's nine lives.

Parents in affluent societies where career choices are as numerous as the sand tell their children they can be anything they want. Try out even the quirkiest job they can think of. After all, there's easy money everywhere. In India though, parents expect their kids to be doctors or engineers. That's where the moolah is, alongwith public respect and recognition. In Mizoram, parents want their kids to hold government jobs, play active roles in the church and stay out of trouble. Trouble being everything from crime and jail to holding opinions that are too radical and unpopular, sticking out your head too much and rocking the boat. With the fairer sex especially, you're expected to hold your head down and never let on you have a higher IQ than all your bumpkin beaus put together. Shame, girl, do you want to frighten off all prospective husbands and remain a lonely spinster forever?!

Of course, times change. As social communities gradually move up the scale in terms of economic prosperity, public opinions also slowly evolve. But a paradigm shift is an excruciatingly s-l-o-w process. Which is why I don't think we'll see Mizo parents and teachers encouraging individuality in their young ones just yet. Instead all we can expect to see are more run of the mill products who do everything that everyone else does, never rock the safe boat, always live respectably within a marginalised circle and never ever venture to even flutter their wings outside the box. Like yours truly here. Sigh.

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