Ink Beauty

The Sixth Sun

2007-07-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

He had checked in his luggage. His hands were free. He missed the consolation of an airport novel the brunette next seat blissfully absorbed herself in: No Greater Love. Danielle Steel.
Women! Mohan sighed and looked away before the reader glanced up and caught him staring. Manner-less man, she too will think. Mohan believed that certain female authors were directly responsible for giving women such loony tunes and ruining the lives of their men forever.
Certain authors had influenced Maya, too. He remembered her as a young girl reading Jane Austen in the evenings in the verandah, waiting for her Darcy to open the gate against the setting sun and step into her rose garden. Her plaited hair fell across her breasts down to her hips. She was so young then, so very young. Something inside Mohan ached. He had observed her often: In her soft eyes a secret pledge glinted in the twilight like a reflection of a star in a deep, still well. He had heard her at the piano after that. Her little laments wedged in between piano keys. Her youth tired of waiting in the shadows but hopeful.

Maya.
The beautiful.
Maya.
The star crossed.
That was before he left.

Mohan closed his eyes to erase the sad, beautiful memory that haunted him time and again. The cacophony of the airport filled his ears. He opened his eyes to see the familiar impersonal presence of travelers he would probably never get to know.
Walking, talking, baggage fumbling, trolley pushing, luggage check in, duty free shopping, waiting…

The reality of waiting, with nothing but anticipation taken for granted.
Outside the glass cage Boeings and Airbuses swam in and out like metallic whales, teaming around the jetties against a stainless steel sky. For a moment Mohan didn’t know where he was. Heathrow? Amsterdam? Or still in New York? Why do airports everywhere look the same?
He couldn’t help comparing them with the railway stations of the country of his birth. Old, used, uncared for like wives, yet in some ways unique; rusted beams with murders of crows and peeling poles with luscious creepers wrapped around them. Sea wind blowing peanut flakes across a pigeon shit patterned floor. The third world taste for variety, Mohan decided, with a smile.

This is the first world feel; the sparkle of a shopping mall: Clean. Categorized. Labeled. And priced. Bewildering, in its array of choices, encountered at every turn of your head. Forcing you to choose in a world where choosing has no alternative. Could Mohan for once not walk around in the airport mall to kill time, looking at the same products he has seen before, as if they were some ancient exotic artifacts in a museum display? Armani Leather Jacket. 1990-2000 AD.
He wished he had someone to share his observation. But everyone, reduced to mere transit passengers like him, seemed busy exhibiting themselves for anyone they assumed to be watching. So occupied. So concerned. With the boding passes, their hand luggage, their make up. Checking time. Chattering into cellulars. Opening laptops. Reading The Economist. Worrying about stock quotes on the Daily Telegraph, or catching up with Manchester United on the flashing tele-screens across the spacious transit lounge. As if to say, look, I’m not just a passenger, I’m a professional. I’m busy. I’m important.

He wished the brunette reading Danielle Steel would look up for once; just a smile. He wished nothing more from her. He was tired and lonely.

Airports were strange places indeed. They made you wait and watch. They hung between the transitory spheres, not owned by the earth or the sky, to which Mohan related more than the tug of the possessive, divided earth. They lured you with a promise of change; a new life in a new place. Mohan remembered the young man who first fled his country of birth, too small a place for his quest for freedom, his thirst for knowledge, his hankering for success. His blue-chip baron dreams were too big for a teardrop-island, he had told himself.
It took him three decades to realize that the continent he adopted was also an island. A larger one perhaps, than the one he left, but still an island. But he had sired Algorithms by then. The company had grown up like a child, with his love and sacrifice. It gave him everything he had on that particular day. It was his alter ego. Algorithms Inc. committed him and absorbed him in a devotion that sustained him in that land. On a day like this, when life enfolded a sense of conclusion, it was his only reason to hold his chin so high.

But he still felt like a snake searching for a skin, discarded and left behind at some distant point in the past, never giving it a second thought. Strange, he thought, how joy consumes the moments of triumph so swiftly and abandons you.

And there was Maya, waiting for a day like this perhaps. He still saw her waiting in the verandah in a gloomy evening, watching the sun set in her world, carcasses of the mosquitoes that bothered her littering the green cement floor.

Maya…the secret whisperer in his head, who made him ache with love and shame. A weary hope, annihilated by guilt, protected by choice-less-ness or perhaps his indomitable sense of optimism, waved at him like a weak patient from a hospital bed. Would she look the same? Would the house look the same? The paint on the walls. The floor. The mid court yard. The old teak sofa. The piano. The brass vases. Was she still there, alone in that house?
Did she still watch their favorite TV programs in the evening, the way they used to in their intimate shared childhood?

Their ‘Sesames Street’-childhood. That was when life just began. When Maya only knew how to play ‘Happy Birthday’ on the piano. And only read Masha and the Bear. He had watched her grow up to be a soft-eyed beauty playing the Nutcracker Suite and reading Pride and Prejudice.
He hadn’t talked to her in years.

It was Maya he sought now, when life had completed its full circle, but somehow never found where it began. As if, somewhere along the line, it became a spiral instead of a circle, making his mind hang on that loose end, forever searching, seeking to meet the other end, incomplete.
It must have been what he sought in those many faces. In Sunita and Kimberley. Perhaps even those fleeting women about whom his memory was amorphous, their names forever lost in the tumult of his early college days. The marijuana Saturdays when he woke up mid day and wondered who was lying next to him, deadly asleep amidst the roar of Iron Maiden still playing full blast on the stereo. He was heady then with his new freedom; his escape from a futureless land, drowned in the vastness of his new territory which at that time seemed boundless. He loved the cityscape that glistened around him – the arrogance of metal, concrete and glass in the sun. It must have been his age…

In a way, Mohan married Sunita to compensate for what his family went through to finance his higher education from across the oceans. His parents spent on him what he in his heart felt should have given Maya. Not that the lack of dowry was the reason why she never married. And his parents tried hard. So did he. He did what he could, which was to beg her to come with him. Nothing could budge her sense of belonging to that house. And that land. She didn’t want to leave her Jane Austens. Her rose garden. Her piano. For her there could be no other place.
Roots ruined Maya’s life. It was written in her birth chart that she would never get married or cross an ocean. Not for all her brother’s success and her parents’ good name, all her beauty and accomplishments. Despite all the blessings she could count in her life, the stars simply crossed her out. At times it was a joke that went sour. It somehow made Mohan feel guilty. It took years for him to figure out why. Now, all these years later, after marrying twice and crossing the oceans a countless times, Mohan felt that finally, the stars had treated them equal; that this was Destiny’s sense of justice. Peppered with irony, of course.

She had always been a reserved girl. Not quite arrogant, but always a little distant. She gained a reputation as a musician during her school days, going to church though she wasn’t a Catholic simply because they allowed her to play the organ and sing in the choir. Mohan had seen her singing hymns with devotion he could not understand at that time. Their parents worried that she would convert.
He always thought about Maya when he went for operas with Kimberly. Kimberly smiled that kind, patient smile every time he told her that his Maya played and sang much better; that she was a soprano of a rare kind, which is why he wanted Maya to come away from a land that didn’t recognize the quality of her talent.

It was such a waste, he felt. Her beauty suffered the same end. Every time Mohan flew in from States, in those early years, he was once again startled by Maya’s loveliness. To him it was a delicacy, a mix of unmixable features that he had not inherited from their parents. In Maya it blossomed into a nineteenth-century charm one only finds in oil-on-canvas or dreams.
It puzzled him that she never attracted a suitor in any of the social gatherings she must have attended in her prime. Later he took it that either they lacked refinement or had been intimidated by her elegance.

It was too late when it occurred to him that Maya never married because she searched for love. Had he been closer to their home could he have saved her from the state he found her in years later? He could have explained that the several lifetimes could pass by before one found love, the kind that she seemed to want, anyway… and even if one found it would never last. He would have told her that men are shaped differently; that they are born with far greater ambitions than falling in love with women…that her virtue was outdated and did not serve a purpose…that she was committing social suicide by remaining a spinster in a country where marriage meant much more than two individuals passionately fancying each other.

Had only he been closer…

But then, Maya was not one of those stubborn women he so often came across. On the contrary, she was willing and eager and later, became quite desperate. She managed to mask it by pretending that she chose the freedom of spinsterhood. She fought to age gracefully by turning her loss in to a victory. She became a dedicated daughter to her aging parents and refused Mohan’s economic assistance when her music lessons could give her a decent living. She stopped going to church to avoid meeting friends who were now mothers and instead turned to the temple. Secretly, she believed that she would remain young as long as she remained pure, and thus her wardrobe became all white, colours abandoning her before her youth actually faded.
Kimberly, of course, had her own explanation about ‘the issue’: Maya never married because she was in love with Mohan. And Mohan never loved any other woman because in truth he actually loved Maya. She came up with the theory in one of her fleeting Freudian moods, when they tried to reason out why Mohan always failed in sustaining relationships and she tried to play his shrink. Mohan said Kim was crazy. Kim said Mohan was obsessed.
He badly wanted a cigarette. He had another hour to kill. He was sitting next to a beautiful stranger in a non-smoking transit lounge.

Mohan had no taste for ironies. By then there had been too many in his life. Kim was one of them. She came after several others after Sunita. In a dingy nightclub he should never have visited, in a multi-coloured darkness mingled with marijuana fumes, he had stopped to fill her glass. They walked out wrapped around each other; took each other in frenzy on the back seat of his sedan parked in a crowded lot of empty cars. He took three months to decide but he married her.

She was an actress in a small, badly paid theatre group, never making it even close to limelight because she hadn’t bothered a try. It hadn’t mattered much to her as she was born and brought up in downtown Soho. With his money she made him buy a penthouse on the East Side; decorated their bedroom with baroque paintings bought from Soho auctions and gracefully hosted his social gatherings. She was thirty-seven looking twenty-five and had a daughter living somewhere with her father, who Mohan never saw. Nobody could guess where she came from. She smiled and shook her head when a guest questioned her about Irish ancestry. She got pregnant because she felt it was fashionable but miscarried, (to Mohan’s relief).
In bed she was a creature with many faces, melting from Iron maiden to Kenny G in a flick of eyelashes. Her ability to fuse myriad moods into their moments of intimacy involved Mohan in a way he never thought was possible. Kimberly was a deeply engaging woman who had lived many lifetimes in one and for that very reason, was beyond Mohan’s reach. He never considered her ravings supporting open marriage thinking it would not be an issue, especially as he hadn’t been a faithful husband to Sunita. But when six months into their astounding marriage, Kim started to take her nights out with fellow actors, Mohan shambled into their lovely penthouse, exhausted after the board meetings of Algorithms and found that he had to stare at the baroque painting in the bedroom - a pair of lovers moist with passion with a human skull wedged between their nudity.

That was Kimberly on canvas. Mohan was surprised that it hurt him. Something he never believed himself capable of. He refused to call it love because he did not want to loose her. The irony was that it never meant much for her. She walked out of his life as swiftly as she walked in; never taking a second look at the luxuries she left behind; As if she were only vacating a hotel room where she had stayed for a couple of days. She left her expensive gowns because she did not need them, she explained in the voice message she had left on the recorder. The divorce papers came to his office a week later. There had been no arguments between them, but Mohan wasn’t surprised. It was the second divorce in his life. His hand shook more than it did the first time as he signed – he buried himself with the last dot. The simplest things in life had failed him.

It was a gloomy morning outside the lounge. He could now see a slight drizzle wetting the wings of the aircrafts stationed closer to him. A weak sun tussled the hulking clouds. Inside the lounge it didn’t matter whether it was day or night, dry or raining, warm or cold. Nature had ceased to matter. Mohan wondered about the lives of his co-passengers. Had they won the simple things in life? For instance, who was this beautiful brunette beside him, reading Danielle Steel, page 114? Where did she come from? What had her childhood been? How many times had she been in love? How many brothers and sisters? How many husbands? How many kids? Who were her closest friends? Were her parents still living? Did they know where she was now?

Mohan thought about his parents; wondered where they were now. He realized that he still believed in rebirth. Funny, after all those years; it made him feel better. Maybe he’ll have better luck next time.

He couldn’t remember how old his mother was when she died. By then she had realized that her son might never come home and her daughter might never get married. She had grown old and dull with the constant knowledge that she would never see a grandchild, which in her own opinion made her the same as barren.

Mohan recalled his mother’s funeral with surprising lucidity. He even recalled the houses he passed by on his way from the airport. The streets had changed. New up-stair houses like cakes with vanilla icing, looking so fresh that you could eat them, replaced the small houses at the top of the lane Mohan remembered from his childhood. In those houses now lived a class of mothers slightly different from Mohan’s own. They had their sons and daughters in the deserts of the Middle East and Mohan could hear it in the loud noise of their stereo sets; in the glint of gold around their flabby necks, the fake sunglasses: Their desperate race to outdo next-door.

The buildings and roads had changed. The people looked the same.

When Mohan had entered the house – his home – he felt so strange that it shocked him. He stood for a long time by her still body wondering how little he knew of her now. He was unfamiliar with the whiteness of her hair, the shrivelled skin that wrapped her skeleton. His father was small and grieved and unnoticeable.

That was the last time he had seen Maya. Her luscious hair had thinned away. Her eyes had lost their glint. The space around her was constantly permeated with a bitter struggle to accept her fate…the staleness of her virginity flaked off her skin like dandruff. It disgusted Mohan.

They were both dry-eyed beside their mother. Only their father shook with silent sobs. Mohan could never believe that his parents were madly in love with each other. But they were compatible and happy. To them it had been enough. They had won the simple things in life.

In his misfortune he probed his parents’ marriage hunting for clues. How did they manage to live together for so long? From what he remembered his mother spent more time on them than with his father. The mother figure stepped forward and Mohan could not imagine her as a lover of another man, his father. He could only see her as she was to him, the smell of her skin, and the youth in her voice were devoid of womanliness and filled with motherliness. Try as he might, he couldn’t understand women through his mother, or vice versa, or whichever the way Freud had it. As she fed Mohan and Maya mouthfuls of rice from the same plate she had weaved her magical tales into their heads. Her tales were many, but now, he could recall only one:

The evening Mohan’s mother told Maya and him the story of the seven suns was not like the day that waited outside the terminal windows, waiting politely like a low-caste stranger to be blatantly dismissed. For one thing, that tropical evening didn’t wait to be noticed. It wasn’t the background description of a novel, setting the mood for protagonists to say whatever they were about to say. It was the protagonist. It was the main action. The sun was a step closer than any other days, fighting its fiery way down to the sea, while in its glow the greenness of the garden (Maya’s beloved garden with Mohan’s beloved guava tree in it) suddenly came alive with a tint of rusty bronze. The air was pregnant with anticipation. The monsoon was probably a day away. Even now, almost a lifetime later, this was the nature’s moment Mohan related to most: a hot humid evening a day away from the southwest monsoon, when everything about life was expectant of that first clap of thunder that would let it loose. It was madness, this monsoon rain. It was romance and renewal, release and retaliation. And this, for those who knew what's in store, was the moment before that drama began.

On that evening Mohan and Maya were the backdrop. They were sniffing for the rain in the wind like puppies searching for the scent of milk. Their mother was treating them to a plate of hot rice with coconut sambol and fried fish. She made the mixed rice into perfect little portions which she equally divided for the two of them. Mohan had been content just to watch the sunset. It was Maya who insisted a story and Mohan decided it should be about the rain and the sun. That was how their mother came to tell them the story of the seven suns. It was a tale about the end of the world, the way Buddhists perceived it.

His mother said that after the seven suns, there would be hailstones of fire. In Buddhist folklore these storms were called the Murugasan varusa: Beastly Rain.

Why did they come? The children ask, looking suspiciously at the monsoony skies. When people become corrupt to the point of no return, when they start treating each other like beasts, their mother answered.

‘Divided, isolated and estranged from each other, we will perish one day in a hailstorm. They say this world will burn out with the seventh sun, and that would be the end.’

Her words ring again from some hollow corner, registering in Mohan the certainty of disaster. When he opens his eyes, the evening is no more. The airport devoid of natural time sends a shiver down his spine. Estrangement, the harbinger of the sixth sun, he thinks, looking at the busy bodies around him; the beautiful stranger beside him. Should he dare disturb her?

Mohan decided to take his father to the States with him after the funeral. It was the only sensible step he could think of. Maya had not protested. By then they had grown apart, being away from each other for so long. They were strangers with separate lives about which the other knew next to nothing. No longer the pair of intimate children who frolicked in a shared fairy story, one beauty when the other was beast, one Little John when the other was Tuck.
Having his father around him was one of those few decisions about which he was happy. At first the old gentleman seemed to adapt well. He went for solitary promenades and in the evenings they had their long overdue father to son chats, with a shot of rum to ease the scourge that life had become to them. Things were almost fine.

Until the day his father went to the near by department store to buy some cheese and witnessed a bunch of teenagers walk in with guns. At gun-point the old gentleman stood blinking for a few moments, unbelieving, then simply fell on the floor though he wasn’t shot and was rushed to a hospital.

The shock had been too much for his weak brain cells. Mohan had to see his father in coma for three months, dead long before his actual death, surrounded by the sterile environment of a hospital bed, a mesh of tubes and needles sucking and injecting and monitoring him. It was so rude and clinical and took ages that Mohan sobbed at his bed: don’t punish me father…. I know this is not your way to die.

It took him months to come to terms with this irony and to inform Maya about the death of their father. What could he say to her…? Hello…Maya…? This is Mohan. I’m afraid its bad news…father passed away…a few months back…at the shock of seeing a shopping mall robbed…

So he hadn’t talked to her since. He believed that she lived the same life, played the same Mozart on the same piano. She might have given up her roses…but then, what else could change?

A cell phone rang irritatingly in the terminal lounge: Like women, annoyingly indispensable. Mohan wished it were his so he could switch it off.
Danielle Steel: No Greater Love, page 121. The brunette has not looked up once. That is a little unnatural, thought Mohan. Is it because she felt his eyes on her? Is she another Sunita, who doesn’t look you straight in the eye for the fear of confrontations?

When he married Sunita and first brought her to States, it seemed as if she would never survive. She was not the kind of woman who could adapt fast enough with the changing patterns of American life. The things that intrigued Mohan frightened or revolted Sunita. Mohan remembered that especially after he married her he kept on running into irresistibly interesting women. And when he divorced her, they all seemed to vanish.

Over the years his thoughts about Sunita shrunk to a laconic acquaintance, as if she were just a stranger one met at the supermarket, who once picked up oranges from the same carton. Only that they had more than oranges in common. They had Tara.

Contrary to what Mohan expected, Sunita never left the States after the divorce. She fiercely brought up an American daughter who didn’t speak her mother’s tongue. Again Mohan took some time to understand his first wife’s wisdom: the importance of being unimportant.
Tara was an average American teenager, born and brought up in States, complete with divorced immigrant parents and a boyfriend high on drugs: a first generation American not too keen about roots. Tara attended her grandfather’s burial with a dignity that gave Sunita a sense of triumph, which finally allowed her to look Mohan in the eye.

In Mohan’s life Tara created a sense of loss and irony of a daughter who does not need a father. His craving for Tara became a dull pain in his bones, like rheumatism. The more he tried to show his love for her the more she hated him. He had often stood clownishly, outside her school gate, with teddy bears and ice-cream, while Tara walked past him straight in to Sunita’s old, coughing car. Back at home, he wept like a rejected bride.

He found himself sobbing in the transit lounge. The drizzle on the other side of the glass panes poured in Mohan’s mind, like a deluge of recollections and ironies he wanted to check in with his baggage, but was still there next to him as real as the brunette who had not given him a smile. Memory is that obsessive image in the mirror every morning, something Mohan couldn’t erase even if he smashed it down; only worse, by fragmenting himself into thousand splinters. At times, memory was only Maya’s eyes. Or Tara’s scornful glance. Memory is an organ in your body…like your hair or nails that keep growing however much you cut and clip. You can ignore it when you are busy, but it will lunge back at you, worsened, when you are not.

Like Maya…who never crossed the ocean, but trails him like a pallid shadow.

He longed to listen to her voice glistening with the sheen of white piano keys; a call from some wild, distant shore. He yearned to see her as he remembered her, as lovely as a renaissance painting. He imagined it would be by the hour the monsoon sets in. Maybe he would stand there in the pouring rain till she recognizes him, till she recalls the contours of his face from some wild, distant childhood. He wished she wouldn’t look too old…

The brunette closed her book as the gates opened for another flight. Passengers rolled into a queue, stretching themselves. She got up and walked away across his sight, without a glance. Not that he cared. He panicked a little when he remembered the long, tortuous hours ahead of him. The passageway down the terminal tangled up in his brain, a wild convoluted maze, as he ambled towards the strangers flocking to the cocoon of another flight.

THE END.

Woman in White

2007-05-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

There's comfort in walking
walking consciously
walking to remember and forget
without looking back

Behind you, your footsteps
sunk into the wet sands
are frisked away by playful waves,
in the froth of childhood innocence

Rising from the vortex
we walk onto the land
looking for what we have lost
in the currents of our times

Dressed in white of froth and foam
a woman walks onto the land
as always, searching
for someone she had loved and lost
in the currents of her times

As always, wandering
why she - of all - survived.

Pallu

2007-04-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

On this length of Cashmere silk, my fingers halt and my mind scurries out with a scrap of recognition. The spell of threads weave their way to a grand allure at the pallu, knotting into flowery aplomb a woman would love to reserve, all by herself. The hues are subdued but. Bright enough to retain the exotic yet dulled to suit the Western palate. Zenith caters only to the classy. It serves the Orient on a platter, cinnamon-scented, to the resonance of an Indian raga floating through the gallery-store at any runic hour.

Not that I wish to be critical of this place, so now I can finally afford it. In fact, I enjoy going through the useless baubles – antique flotsam from some eastern wave washing upon the western shores – the customers pay through their noses to own. The garden café at the back with its wind chimers and the second-hand bookstand is my favourite haunt, where I sit and sip herbal tea in the summer and chat with someone worth talking to; some one as old as I am, I mean – with enough reminiscence and patience for coffee-talk. Possibly, that is what I like about Zenith most: it keeps the young and memory-less at bay; by the way, the world is obsessed with youth I notice, as if being smooth-skinned and craved by all is the best life could ever get. I remember it differently though – the frenzy, the insecurity and the disoriented farce to fit in. What anguish we harboured beneath our flawless faces!

Indeed, it is better to have that ‘future’ finally behind me. There’s ample time to amuse myself with Zenith’s scarlet embroidery silk, florid jade snuff boxes, limestone Buddhas and bronze Taras; ivory stemmed opium pipes, jasmine oil in miniature majolica pots, palm-leaf fans, kapok cushions, Tibetan lampshades, paschmina shawls and oh, the prodigious array of saris – all gingerly priced!

Though I finger this sari – a beautiful pastel of grey-blue Cashmere shot with dull gold thread – like a connoisseur, I know I am not. I wouldn’t know a Benaris from a Manipuri. My only consolation is that I can afford it as a gift to a loved one: my daughter from a late marriage entering a late marriage. In the blonde existence of this land, I have not passed her my wayward baggage of rampant colours; believing that one need not relate to two worlds, unless one chose to. Yet, here I am playing with this sari, with this pallu that speaks of the uncertain lilt in patterns predictable – a lusty symbol of my daughter’s feminine provenance. I hope she could wear it like a discrete trinket, without betraying she had never worn one: something to complement the ink in her eyes, the silk of her hair and the dusk of her skin.

Zenith’s personnel are patient with me. They mistake me for a nostalgic Indian who visits the store for its music and spicy ambience, in an effort to clinch a fading snap of ‘home’. In truth, nothing about Zenith’s paraphernalia echoes the rustics of ‘home’, or that place where I grew up. Indeed, that is what the island should be called. Homes, I found in many lands where, contrary to popular belief, I hadn’t felt at exile – lands adopted like children in my childless years. So the word ‘home’ no longer conjures a singular authentic place in my mind. That place where I grew up, feels more like the island remembered in the droplet motif of this pallu – a shape that reminds me a pearl, a tear, a drop of blood and the dew of a childhood morn.

The pallu of a sari is an achievement of sorts. It requires a flare for detail and dexterity; and a nubile mind to animate design. As something that holds much colour and chaos in its threads I am surprised that a sari could amount to its six yards of simplicity, as wearable as a fetching smile. Since I am no cognoscente I cannot tell you where exactly and how they are made – myths of origin, I am convinced, that are sagas by themselves. A sense of loss ruffles me for my ignorance what my mother would have known by sheer womanly instinct. Her name was Malathi and she was a great beauty… (At least by local standards, but then, beauty is always locally defined, isn’t it?)

Malathi, my mother, could feel the fabric and tell you what it is, smell it and say where it is from, (unlike me: I know I hold Cashmere Silk simply because it is labelled so). She had never laid her finger on a Cashmere Silk though, let alone owning one. She had stepped out of our village-in-disguise-of-a-small-town, only a few times. She taught eastern music in secondary school, which is how I keep recognizing Bhairavi whenever Zenith plays it.

When her husband returned home without a gift on their first wedding anniversary, my mother felt it was time to sort out miffed feelings. She was a woman of compulsion. After serving him the special dinner she had prepared (tender jackfruit, I smell), and sitting on the other edge of the bed, she broached the subject gently, as gently as she combed her hair. Her face turned away from him, she said in the coyest possible cadence of Sinhala, difficult to pin in English:

“They say there are beautiful saris in the Pettah market…all colours you can ever think of…”

My father stared at my mother; how she inspected the split ends of her hair with disapproval. After what seemed an eternity to him, she said, quite casually and abruptly, as if starting a song in a different scale:

“Was it a busy day for you? You forgot that it was our anniversary…”

At that, my dear uxorious father – the gentle and naive soul he was – piously noted down all anniversaries – wedding, birthday, New Year, Vesak – and brought my mother a sari or two at each occasion. For the next ten good years! He brought her every colour she could ever think of, though of course, restricted to the modesty of a public servant’s salary. They were mostly Nylex and Georgette. Some Crêpe and Cottons with colourful borders, and Chiffon. Nothing as glamorous as Cashmere Silk.

During that period my parent’s home acquired a diaphanous ambience. Mother had an almirah full, from which a couple of sleek saris would tumble out every time you opened its screechy door. Old ones she no longer considered fit to wear smiled from the windows as curtains, transformed into tablecloth or materialized as kitchen rags. I too owned two discarded saris which I wore alternately to my imaginary playschool where – devoid of my mother’s musical talent – I taught ghost pupils Geography of my own invention.

In case you have not realised by now that this reverie will not amount to anything more than few scraps of childhood, let me assure you so: I am old enough to be indulgent. Nostalgia is my right. And yet, it is a dim acquiescence of patterns and infinite contradictions that come to my mind, a quality common to human existence and sari pallus – distinctly, disagreeably beautiful. There is no grand narrative but that of a most personal kind, which is largely a motley of feelings and small enlightenments nuanced by time.

For instance, I realised as an eight year old that a sari reveals what it hides.

In the years that I accompanied my mother to school, the most glorious bit of the day would be to watch her dress in the morning. She used to send out my father with a lunch packed lovingly into the uncertainty of their times; worrying, like many women of her generation. Then, prohibiting me to open the windows, she would switch the 40 watts on. Filtered further by an orange shade, that light registered in me an aura of secret ritual, which I sadly discovered later to be the sheer cautiousness of the times we lived in. She would take the swathe of the sari and step in front of the mirror. Mystified, I would follow each lithe movement doubled in its fluid reflection. Her hand would move like a flying fish skimming the waves as she gathered pleats and swirled around, with a final cascade of the pallu over her shoulder. Supple adjustments with little tucks and pulls would spruce her nubile shape and suddenly, I realise I watch her with different eyes. The drape hid her figure save a teasing midriff, yet lavished on the accent of breasts, the dignified swell of hips. The flower designs on the sari pallu bloom inside my head. That smile on her face, when she finally inspects herself on the mirror and ties her hair to a bun on her nape...

How impressionable our minds when young! I even recall the glint of dew on hibiscus and cannas groves I pass on our way to school – not always in my uniform. Our schools asked us to attend without uniforms at the time. I believed it was something to do with our new principal till I found out that other schools did the same for a while. Some schools closed down completely. We weren’t so lucky. Mother continued to go though eastern music was no longer taught. Only subjects like maths and science got the school time cut short. I had a pink dress, polka dotted, that I insisted on wearing every other day. I warmed up to the new liberalism of our school, to the sudden interludes of holiday we got without praying for it. I remember occasional visits to school, entangling myself in mother’s pallu as I walked, holding it across my eyes and watching the world through its floral patterns.

What I have seen through gossamer pallus, I never forget. Red hibiscus. Schoolchildren without uniforms. Vacuous policemen at junctions, without traffic to guide. Buses billowing thick fumes past their unsafe eyes. Vacant vegetable stalls. Limp mongrels. Once I saw through a pallu, a man, a naked man, though mother pulled it over my face to hide. But a pallu reveals what it hides, remember?

A man. A naked man. A burning man. The first I have seen in my life by the roadside on a mound of flaring tires – the infamous funeral pyres of those days. The flames rose to a nearby billboard that said Always Coca Cola in a happy lilt. People avoided that side of the road and went past it, to their schools and offices and wherever they were going that morning, as if they were passing a milkman on a bicycle, ringing his bell. That was first time I saw a man naked; the first time I saw a man burning. I saw it through a pallu with a droplet motif – a shape that reminded me a pearl, a tear, a drop of blood and dew I knew as an island child.

People from different places have told me that they lived their childhoods in perpetual fear. Of not growing up. Of being powerless forever. Or not understanding what was going on around them. Not getting the joke, as if it were. I too had to wait until I grew up to sort it out. And it always takes longer than you wish to grow up. And then, there I was, a young woman, anxious of her youth, anxious of the fire I saw in the eyes of my friends at the university, anxious that they were so young and fiery; I used to stare, picking at the hem of my own pallu, knowing the design, knowing what is to come, and amazed why none could smell it in the wind.

Youth burning;

Youth burning again;

Youth that somehow crept into to the design, as if to repeat in a flowering of violence.

Holding this length of fabric, I know I am a woman from a different world, different age, somehow marked by what I have seen, known, and fled from. By what is hidden from me and what is revealed in the lapse of time. By what I find out and what I don’t, like who burnt there that day, his name, his face, and why I fled without putting up a fight for him. I get heady by the repetition of a design, the recognition of something from childhood, the inability to pull at the loose end of the thread, to stop.

Hibiscus, Coca Cola billboards, flaring tires, the brackish stench of kerosene that clings to your lungs, school without uniforms, time-tables cut short, overdoses of math and science, the reflection of mother in the mirror, a private smile, uxorious husbands trying to please wives – things that nothing in Zenith evoke, except perhaps this beautiful pallu. I walk in to a honeycomb sun with my bare arms reaching for its tenderness, dangling Zenith’s recycled paper bag with a grey-blue Cashmere in it, for my daughter. For the new life she soon begins. A sari with a pallu that speaks of things she does not know, with a droplet motif she would not recognise. So I can unburden myself without burdening her.

It is a calm Canadian morning; A small-town-heaven on earth. On the square, lovers kiss in the dappled shade of Maples. Children gorge on their ice creams. The mist recedes over the bay waters, revealing clear expanses, as large as life. An east European accordionist wheezes a tune by the cobbled pavement, an upturned hat and a few scattered coins beside him.

Here I am, old, safe, remembering.

You are right, I wasn’t born, I didn’t exist, that moment when mother sat combing her hair, telling father about the saris in Pettah market on their first anniversary. She waited ten long years before she could not stand his lack of imagination a trice longer. Perhaps she tired of washing them at the well, and hanging them on long clotheslines to dry. Perhaps she tired of wearing them and seeing them as curtains and kitchen rags. Ten years of Pettah pallus, I was nine, he had just returned from work and given her the routine gift and she bluntly asked him, snapping viciously, if markets sold anything other than saris.

It must have been her birthday, and I still recall the surprised hurt in his eyes.

The End.

Breakfast with Abu

2007-04-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Sri Lanka!
Today in World Visions we bring you the story of Abu…
Miss Reporter looks prim
Nice suit, crisp accent with lipstick
I like her style.

I dash more butter on my appams
Hot and milky from Soma’s stall
Across the street.
She’s the best, her lunumiris,
My spicy morning affair! Yum!

Cut to Abu.
Abu lives in Somalia.
Seventeen, they tell me.
He hardly looks ten.
Zoom in.

Protruding bellies and flies. Dark eyes.
A bona fide Somalian;
A shot for the Pulitzer Prize.
They give me the figures of malnutrition
UN quoted; no mistakes.
Harrowing tale.
Well researched, interesting.
Lucid images, disturbing.

Abu steps out of the screen.
Join me for breakfast?
Miss Reporter smiles. Cho-chweet!
He’s special you know, she says
I ask her how.
He’s suffering she says, can’t you see?
I can.
They’ve mastered the art of emotional blackmail,
I say!

Abu takes a rickety step towards the table.
Drags a chair. Sits down.
He waves away the food, doesn’t want to eat he says.
In silence he waits as I finish my last appam.
I notice the scabies, the foul smell.
True to life.

You know about Darfur? He asks.
Yes, yes I know about Darfur but
How do you know?
I watch the news too he smirks.

I peel a banana, fresh kolikuttu, my favourite.
Tsunami was bad huh?
Yeah, but the war is worse.
Hmmm.
We talk local politics, for a while.

So what’ the plan?
Finish my thesis, find a job, get married;
I don’t know… Maybe.
My guru said I should stop
Worrying about things I cannot help.

He nods in vague approval
Life’s there to get on with, says wise old man
Trapped in malnourished childhood.

I sip my tea, sweetened
With suffering of the world
While Abu shivers his legs under the table.

We watch the magpies on the garden lawns.
Flashes of black and white,
Chattering; unceasing:
A Nineteen-thirties’ flick on the screen.
And Abu muttering
as I pick lacy leftovers
of appams for breakfast.

Attaining Age

2007-04-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

Sundown drive on E FM
Familiar songs
Men in love croon for women
Their yearning, the unbelievable red
Drowning in the waves.

In a known illusion
sky meets earth.

Simple knowledge
Curls at the pit of her stomach
Ready like vomit
to come out in time.

The shell of this metallic frame on wheels
The limits of their private space
The side by side intimacy
of air-conditioned grace
Clean shutters
keeping the war outside at bay.

His eyes ahead and hands on wheels
Clutch and brakes, clutch and brakes
The traffic ebb and flow
He drives, she sighs
Her battle of desire and gloom
Inching forward, jamming the rows.

Past the sea and MC,
Past the skeleton of railways,
Past Bambalapitiya Station,
Old and grouchy like a wife,
waiting...

This road
she knows
doesn’t lead to heaven or home.

The oft-repeated rites of passage
From working girl
To working woman.

They wade in traffic grieving
In the Silence of the Common.

Song for Stephanie

2007-04-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

(Inspired by John Masefield’s Sea Fever)

You must be down to the seas again, and bid us all good-bye
And we all wish you a merry boat and a star to steer her by
May the journey from our island home lead where you’d love to be
Around the world and back to yourself and your closest family

You must be down to the seas again, and bid us all adieu
Though in our minds and in our work your mark will continue
And all we wish is the best of luck for the future that’s just begun
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip's done.

Stephanie Schell-Faucon, Senior Adviser and colleague is leaving Sri Lanka soon, and this my dedication to her on behalf of the office team! I knew her but shortly, and yet she leaves quite a few things for me to reflect on!

Photo Credit: Paul Haan

Windows

2007-03-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

The simple mix of wood and glass
the perfection of my childhood:
the halfway house - like growing up -
between the world and me.

A frame of mind, a frame in mind
a transparency which
is the shadow of the future.
The point between, the scene beyond.

My childhood window opened
to a bed of ice-begonias
under the nettles of passion fruit
attacked by snails, homed by humming birds.

The remembered window of a train
I took to Nawala Pitiya hills
the tea-flowers twinkling
in the carpet of our desire and wealth.

The car windows of my lonely years
through which I watched the rags and riches
the success stories and the disillusionment
crumbling bridges across the social barrios.

The windows I closed to keep out
the chaos and violence
the stench of kerosene and burning tyres
the sound of gunshots in the nights.

The windows through which I see the world
and the world sees me.
The windows I fling wide open
to remember
and close
to forget.

From Here to There

2007-03-18T01:49:00.000-07:00

This tarrying moment
before I wade into sleep
before the plunge into the unfathomable deep
I quiver
with the memory of wings.

Flying, from here to there
over the island lagoon
glimmering so lovingly in the sun
so lovingly green and blue.

Swimming, from the equatorial glaze
to the northern slumber and pine haze
the black forest, the cliffs and shores I pass
become monuments
the mountains turn sacred in the climbing
the faces and voices and songs, mingling
into a cherished, familiar map
I carry in my heart,
creased
with constant use .

My flighty movement
from the immobility of day and reality.

In to the endless voyage
beyond sleep's release
past the mermaid, waiting,
I travel
from here to there.

I dream.

A Soldier Mourned

2007-03-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

Gunshots in the distant night
Surge with news of death
Inklings of my turn brew
In livid silence between the shelling

News of death that comes, as foretold
In the guise of white papers to be signed
Neatly typed, touchy words from someone unfamiliar
Someone without a shadow or a face

Polecats yowling
Fever-pitched battle to game and mate
A minor crisis on the half-done ceiling
Their frenetic scuffling
Trailing into my dreams

I turn to your side of the mat
To residues of your last embrace
The memory of you tapping
On the valley between my breasts
Asking, as if you knew
It is what I almost cannot give

The ghost of your ardour
Sealing my womb
As days slip too easily
Into night

Hibiscus

2007-03-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

Red
Is it the true colour of life?
The forbidden sweetness
Seeping through your fingers
No trace of luring fragrance
Just a glare, the sun in your eyes...

Red
Tell me why memories are white
A shade of grey,
Unforgivable as a hibiscus in sepia
Lacking Red Remembrance

Red hands
The colour of cords to be untied
On a smooth back
Marks etched in your mind

Touch red!
Life to be snatched from your fingers
Just about
A fire...A flower...a flag...

Watch out
The moments of red
Are the best in your life

Waging War

2007-03-18T00:31:00.000-07:00

She wants me to eat
She purrs, persistent: lunch is turning cold.
She wants me living
Getting on with life
From day to day, as normal
As normal folks do
Normal

Walk talk eat smile
Pass exams, secure promotions, get married
Be good to neighbours, polite to strangers
Produce an identity card when requested
Be normal.

After all, nothing has happened to me;
Nothing worthy of a headline.
I am lucky; I am privileged: I am alive
In a land where at a distance
Nipped buds and blossoms drop dead:
Life without the chance I seem to have got.

Why do I always make it personal?
Hunting room to bury my private grief
In a public grave?

Waging war brings a trace of consolation.
Did the guerrillas get it right, after all?
Is triumphant self-destruction, in any case
All we wish for and all we get?

My lunch turns colds
As I withdraw, her voice throbbing with rift
At a distance.

RETURNING HOME.

2007-03-18T00:30:00.000-07:00

Chasing a skull full of dreams
I came to this land
To claim a territory of my own
As a lad;
Resonant with the echoes
Of the distances traveled;
The sacrifices made;
Following the foot prints of the people,
I had loved and believed in then,
Burning and beckoning in front of me.
I had chosen the long way, I see.

My grandfather was a happy man.
He was buried where he was born.
He never got lost in the maze
Of footprints; he never bothered
About his own. The day I left
He made me promise
To trace my steps back home.

I have completed my circle of ideals
Hunting my own change of heels
The miles of confusion, despair and grief...

This familiar house looks strange,
Now why? This familiar face -
I know! - I think I do -
Frowns at me and questions -
"May I help you?"

Moon Death

2007-03-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

When the pouring ceases
The sky will clear
And I promise myself: the moon will be there

This time of the year
Monsoon clouds eclipse the rotund shape
So just a sliver, a waning silver-ness, maybe
Am I asking for too much?

A bitter night in a Ratnapura rest house
The sound of crickets over the ridge
Ebbing reminiscence
To colour moon a wounded red.
The journey ends tomorrow
I have no clue whom I will meet
Though in Ratnapura the roads have not changed
And the people look the same

But fear (or is it shame?) refuses the salve
Of memory, long unrecalled
By-lanes and signposts I forget
Without a map and a familiar moon
To guide me through a mnemonic maze:
Residues of the loon dialogue with myself

I need a bit of light
To seek

Fugitive

2007-03-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

Running away from home
Is easy
In search of identity
The boundaries broken seem flimsy
The thresholds crossed, too many
Taking the unbeaten path
When you know too well to blunder
Seem hip;
And then,
You gain
You win
Lucky stars twinkling between
Your crossed fingers
At least for a while...
But the point of return
If it ever comes

STREET-WALKERS

2007-03-18T00:22:00.000-07:00

Colombo cuddles another night
As I walk to the bus,
Disoriented, after work.

I feel skinless under the clothes.
If I had a chance to change the world,
I will change my boss.

My fluid fragmented
Divided self flows
To mingle with the dark.

And the world seeps into me.
The crowded bus. The neon lights.
A mocking celebration of my plight.

The lurid lipstick, the wayward glance
Of a street walker on her prowl
I tell myself - look;
There are lives worse than your own.

Sanity insults: how?
Aren't we all what we despise?
After all,
She sells her body.
We sell our lives.

Bhairavi

2007-03-18T00:18:00.000-07:00

This pitch at which your voice breaks
- your breath wilting
into the husk of a raga I cannot mistake
so unlike the tortuous streets of old Delhi
Some resonance left to ache
to ache, as you rise again
Singing me of love remembered in epics
telling me: you cannot go home again.

I trace in mind the turns and by lanes.
Places where I stopped to pirouette and see your face.
Through our erratic refrains
of discovery, this city embraced
a part of me I couldn't regain.
Your laughing eyes told me then:
You will not go home again.

The streets your voice evoke
in echoes of a note, in a pitch you surrender
the desire to walk again, pretending:
I am not lost.
To celebrate old intimacy, or a waning Indian summer
in Delhi rain
I follow your voice to be followed again
singing: I cannot go home again.

In a song you tell me and I believe.
When you come to know
a person, a place
as you do in a raga
When you touch the tampura strings' timbre
and lose yourself as you do
in touching
in walking
the dirt alleys, the soiled canals, the armpits
of an old city
an old body
loving the unlovable vestiges
you know, you found home
far away from home.

Finding Yourself

2005-11-21T05:43:00.000-08:00

That´s quite difficult...we all know that..but finding the blog that you once kept and have forgotten all login information about could be very difficult too! Finally..i managed to break in....
test posting to check my settings!

MADE FOR EACH OTHER.

2005-02-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

It was at a bus stop, some where near the Red Fort that I ran into her for the first time...a moment when I had lost the sense of direction. Just two weeks after my landfall in Delhi the criss-crossing highways and fly-overs overwhelmed me. God knows why I strode up to her to inquire about my destination, when there were many other middle aged men around, who seemed to know their way around the Delhi maze, more than an average college girl would.
"Excuse me, do you have any idea where Azad Bhavan is?" I asked.
She looked at me, her eyes wincing in the noonday heat, and answered with a natural smile of confession that she didn't.

For a split, lonely second, I was lost in Old Delhi.
The summer bled on the street, oozing tremulous sheets of mirage. The Red Fort was about to melt into a splotch of magma amidst the throngs of peoples, cycles, rickshaws, buses, vendors shouting by the roadside and cows: Ring Road at Lal Quila, I learnt later.
The girl must have realized how confused I was by the look in my eyes and suggested:
"Why don't you ask an auto-rickshaw.'
"Err...my Hindi is not so good...." I blabbered. Before I could realize she waved at an auto-rickshaw cruising by, haggled fluently in Hindi, turned to me with a triumphant smile and said:
"He'll take you there for twenty bucks."

I jumped in, and later felt that my 'thank-you' wasn't grateful enough. Anyway, did it matter; she was just a helpful stranger. I felt happy; it was nice to have a good impression about a country. I had one for India, however hot it is in July. Maybe it was that sheer optimism that led me to Indians who turned out to be friendly and helpful.

It was a pleasant surprise when I bumped into the same girl in the college library few days later. A moment of wide-eyed wonder and voice-less-ness passed before we could stumble into a conversation; shaking hands and wagging our heads in recognition.
"You were...."
"Yeah..."
"And you are in Hindu College??"
"Yes, you too?"
"Of course, I'm a Hinduite"

The coincidence rang a bit cliché, almost straight out of a Hindi movie, but something told me we were both glad inside. After I offered my profuse gratitude, making up for what I missed that day, which she brushed away with modesty, we got ourselves properly introduced.
"You're in which course?" I had already picked up Indian syntax.
"Socio honours, 1st year."
A pleasant surprise. She looked a classic English- honours.
"I'm in Eco honours." I said.
"Eco honours?" she echoed, "Ego honours!"

Our laughter shook the bookshelves; sudden thunder that shook the wooden Silence is Golden plaques in the library. The readers looked up stunned. The flab old librarian waddled towards us while in our mutual movie the background score changed to Danger Theme. I think I noticed a clap of lightning between us, as we guiltily waited to be ordered out of the library. "Get out!" The librarian hissed like a dragon disturbed in its dark sleepy den. "Immediately!"

After that it was a quick development between us. We ran into each other often in the corridors, the library, the college bank and the canteen. Once we even got ragged together under the legendary 'Virgin Tree', the cosmic centre of Hindu college. I had to kneel down in front of her with a plastic Coca-Cola cup stuck on an ice cream stick and propose to her in my language, which she didn't understand; and she had to refuse in her own, which I didn't. We both enjoyed it, as much as those who ragged us.

We held hands tight and giggled when we saw on the notice board next day that the bunch of Bihari boys who ragged us were fined Rs. 1000/= each.
Even now, much later, our first fond memories rustle whenever we see the warnings on college walls: "This is Hindu. We do not rag."

At first I'm sure it was a casual friendship for both of us. We hung in the canteen together and shopped in Kamla Nagar, bunking classes and escaping from the back entrance of college. Wasted mornings under the Virgin Tree, blissfully impassive to the lectures we were missing, when a lonely lover would sit with his guitar and sing to Julie, the college stray-dog. Hindu Style. Sat together on the college semi-wall, after a recent basketball loss, fuming at Stephenians walking in the clouds on 'the other side of the road'. Hindu style. Joined the famous college dramatic society to find the ringleader too bitchy and dropped out of it. Disappointed. Hindu style.

After sometime we started waiting outside each other's classrooms. It became natural and habitual. We took part in quizzes and face painting competitions organized by college festivals and won several times. She dragged me to Oddissi concerts and I took her to see Picasso's French Collection on exhibition at the National Museum. We watched Dil Chahta Hai thrice; dialogues of which she laboriously translated so that I captured the sweet-nothing-ness of college life. She introduced me to Euphoria and cigarettes. Allu-chaat and Bhel-puri. Tested Tequila. Tried out Cannabis; homegrown from the backyard of the hostel; self-made joints that never got us stoned.

Gradually our conversations matured from trivial matters to deeper issues. She talked to me about her passions. Sociology. Her love. Her madness. Her explanation of every thing under the sun. She spoke like a prophet and giggled like a witch and listened with eyes, fascinated. And I, half knowing, half not, got bound to her. Like an alien intrigued by a pulsing earthling.

We gave up on buses. We would walk from college down Chattra Marg , cross the Mall road and take the lonely quiet path which ran along the dirty canal that smelled of decomposed Delhi. We would often argue and disagree. Sometimes even fight over our identities. But by that time we had fallen deeply in love with each other's countries.

My island home with its limited boundaries and a small way of life contrasted against the vast expanses and complexities of her Indian sub-continent. In her land of competing confusions the limits of existences were blurred. The memory of a war-torn motherland, the agony of guilt, for loving another land more took a back seat and waited inside me, for the point of return. I wanted her to understand.

To an alarming extent, she did.

We travelled during the Autumn break, to Agra and Taj Mahal in the first year, in front of which we took a photograph together, just to get rid of the harrying photographers who give you the nuisance of your life, but later chose two baroque frames from Studio Prem and kept our photographs on our study tables.

It took us time to realize what we were getting into. Where we were heading. Our conversation dribbled from PLO and South East Asian economic crisis to our ex-lovers and experiences. Basking in the watery winter sun, stretched out on the front lawn of university gardens, she would blow a perfect smoke ring and destroy it with the next breath. Touched by her power of expression I could only smile.

I knew there was a guy in Chemistry, who looked the sleepy sensuous of Rahul Khanna whose crush on her was obvious; but she displayed none of her usual fiery enthusiasm (which swept some people off their feet and annoyed others) towards him. Once, driven to a point of unbearable curiosity (or was it jealousy) I probed:
"Don't you find him attractive?"
"Do you?"

I could hardly laugh off the irony. Some how it contained our twisted story. All of it. The present. The future. What it could be at most, at best. I knew she meant it, and she couldn't help it. I, of course, had asked for it.

So we kept our compliments to each other at sweet nothing: I liked the soft glow in her eyes. She loved the distinct frown on my brows. She sent me her poetry, into which she drew all the experience that lie ahead of her in the future, like a soothsayer. I showed her my paintings; gory with all the colours I could muster to defy nature, God and tragic destinies. Even towards the end of our graduation we could still listen to each other for hours over cappuccinos. The same attention and curiosity, unsullied over the years.

We cooked up theories on relationships - my idea of the vicious circle of love in which I explained, based on a theoretically economic model, how people were caught in a chain reaction where all were loving someone: A 'some one else'. Except the one that loves them. She conceptualised the Rules of Being that explained how society decides in the end for any individual, the way to live, what to learn and whom to love and how. The Rules we stumble to follow were decided even before our fathers loved our mothers; so that our fathers loved our mothers exactly the way they did; so it happens we were there that day...facing each other...with cigarette smoke between us.

The Rules had made us, she said. They were us. Simply, that which made us human also made us inhuman at times. I understood what she meant by it, that we were still adhering to it even when we try to defy. Truth is often strange. Especially when we know it.
Maybe that's why we never needed useless words or confrontations. It was all there, crisp in the air between us.
"Would you still mail me when I'm gone?"
"Until the day you stop the effort."
"Explain."
"I don't like Shakespeare you know; I don't like tragedies"
"And then?"
"Who knows. And maybe, who cares"
"Even if I stop the effort, I would never say that to you."
"Good dialogue."

There was silence before we could smile. And forget. And become normal again...'coz it was not because she was Indian and I wasn't. Would it have made a difference had it been in New York instead of New Delhi, I still wouldn't know. Couldn't say. We were made for each other. That much I dared to say. About the rest, nothing much.
Only that she is a girl.
And so am I.

The End

Glossary
Lal Quila : The Red Fort in local parlance. An area one should photograph. It's typical Old Delhi.
Auto-rickshaw: the three-wheeler, cheap mode of travel in India and a traffic nuisance.
Bihari boys: from Bihar, a state considered to be the poorest in India. I wasn't allowed to use this term when this got published in a college magazine because it is politically incorrect although it depicts reality.
Kamla Nagar: the university market place named after Kamla Nehru, where one can find everything from Indian Kajol (eye liner) to Christine Dior, delicious Tibetan momos to Barrista and Macdonalds and books. A slice of Delhi University consumer culture with a shot of intellectuality.
Stephenians : from St. Stephens' College. Considered as the oldest college in Delhi University started by the British for their children. To date, it prefers to admit Christians. The Indian nationalists in retaliation established Hindu College a little later in 1899 and up to now the colleges remain rivals. They are situated facing each other in the heart of the campus, thus each referring to the other as 'the college across the street'. Though both are considered to be elitist colleges they have evolved into two distinctive cultures, generations of students follow and defend.
Oddissi : a form of traditional Indian Dance from the state of Orrissa, internationally famous for its fluid and lyrical grace and sculptural poses.
Dil Chahta Hai: a Bollywood blockbuster and romantic comedy that became immensely popular among the college students for its depiction of upper middle class, premier college-culture in Indian metropolitans.
Euphoria : famous Indian Rock band, trend setters in 'Ethnic Rock' and Fusion music. An integral element of modern Hindu college culture, which again, is a fusion of similar natures.
Allu-chaat : fried potato chunks served with green chutney. Might give you Delhi-belly.
Bhel-puri: delicious spicy snack served by the roadside. Quite addictive.
Chattra Marg : the main road across Delhi University campus.
Rahul Khanna : Bollywood actor. Yet to become a star.

Pilgrim Country

2005-02-27T21:21:00.000-08:00

The goddess was demanding. Halfway up the sun-scorched steps my chappals[1] snap. She wants me to come to her barefoot, I take. So I fling them into the bare ravine, a basin of dust-brown earth unfamiliar to the feel of rain. The forlorn terrain only knows this wind from the Runn of Kutch[2]. Gujarat[3] is a desolate beauty, excruciating in the sun and magical by the moon. She draws sweat from my body and a certain angst from my heart; a deja-vu feeling. Have I been here before?
I join the throngs again. I’m carried forward in the flow of their prayers, voices used to different tongues forming the same tune. Their fervour is foreign to my rational soul.
Devotion is pervasive.
It knocks on your door at a sudden hour and walks into your life uninvited. And you find yourself staring at a beautiful stranger who stands in the middle of your heart and gently smiles. How do you deny? Some of the darkest corners of your life are lit already...
Surprise!
I am moved by their moving; enchanted by their chanting. Instinctively I start humming one of my own folksongs, sung on the way up to another holy mountain, the one in my own land. I loose the words here and there, but the rhythm blends into the native hymns.
This goddess draws a human stream uphill in the sweltering Indian summer. My soles blister at the feel of Pavagadh[4], the Rock beneath my feet. It is midday now and I had lost count of the steps. There is still a long difficult climb before I could meet the goddess. She is my goddess, Jai told me last night. She is the goddess of Pavagadh. Parvati[5] - the goddess of stone.
Jai brought me to Pavagadh yesterday. “I think you should say good-bye to your goddess before you go” he said.
“My goddess?” I asked, weary with the sorrow that drained me as my last two days in India ticked away. I was on my way to Trivandrum via Mumbai for the flight back home. I had spent my one thousand nights in India. I had finished my three-year course. In a strange way, I had no reason to stay. The thin maroon book, a stamped page, that allowed me to this land, now demands that I leave it. It is a land of blue books. In a strange way, it is my only reason to go. Funny how small red, blue, green books decide where we belong. Or do they, really?
Caprice stopped me at Baroda to say good-bye to Jai. I love his mom’s cooking. Fine Gujarati cuisine that I take ages to savour, sniffing and mashing it with my fingers. Dining at Jai’s house is a ritual. Aunty Rithu is fussy about table manners. She watches how I use my hands to mix Dohkla[6] like a hawk.
“Jai, she’s using the wrong hand to pick!” she cries.
“Ma! Let her be! I’ll take her out to a restaurant.” Jai grunts.
“No way! The food is amazing!”
“Do you need a spoon? You look confused.”
“No! This is fine. I like eating with my fingers…”
However, the looks tell me I am not doing it right.
“Aunty, you’ve got to give me the secret. I’ll try these recipes at home”
She beams. Got her!
Jai winks: ‘flatterer!’
Post-lunch I spend some time peering into her seasoning powders and cook books. She touches me lovingly as she explains her recipes. I write them down piously. The way to a woman’s heart is through praising her cooking they say. The dinner will be elaborate and intoxicating.
“Let’s spend the night at Pavagadh” Jai tells me. “I think you should say good-bye to your goddess before you go”
I was looking forward to dinner with the family. Being a guest at a warm extended family like Jai’s is not just a feast to the senses. There is so much love and liveliness, gossip and wisdom to match the delicacies. The sentimentality and concern is so overwhelming that I blush over the dishes.
Pavagadh is a three hours drive from Baroda into the stark plains of Gujarat. It rises out of the parched earth like a mammoth and carries the temple of the goddess Parvati between its prehistoric folds.
“It’s the highest point in Gujarat”
Jai says casually. He is describing the weather, the land, and the commonness of the people in his favourite words.
Why do you feel so sad about returning home?
He asks me without asking. Our discussion is like this most of the time; a rivulet dipping underground and gurgling to surface every now and then. Sometimes, words passed between us. Mostly, the thoughts are shared in silence. Whole conversations took place between us that way.
By then we had acquired that rare faculty the kindred develop by being far apart; of sensing each others’ emotional ups and downs across the distance without ever demanding for explanations. Jai is the first Indian I got to know. Over time we had written less and less, and seen the least of each other. But the bonding became more and more precious. We compared our intimacy to a pressed flower each of us retained sacredly, hidden between the pages of a favourite novel. We sought it from time to time, to feel that faint fragrance.
A deep Gujarati sun, bold as the teeka [7]on Aunty Rithu’s brow, was setting behind the massive rock. The spread of land drowned the horizons. The open sky blurred the contours of Time. As our shared road took us to Pavagadh, with his hands on the steering wheel, his eyes fixed reassuringly ahead, Jai has started telling me yet another tale; of Parvati and Pavagadh, in his mind. It is again, a story worth telling. But not the one I tell tonight... In my own mind, another story is burning. A story that answers his question; and the red-blue-green books.
The road unfurls in front of us like a legend.
Everything has to start with a sensuous woman; histories, epics, nations, wars. All our stories begin there; with a fearless woman daring enough to be remembered long after her beauty fades. To him, Parvati is such. My ancestress Suppa[8] is another.
Suppa had taken this same road long before me, with this drowning horizon surrounding her. Her blood craved a freedom beyond the walls of the palace she lived in, to become Vanga’s[9] queen. In the mornings she would watch the sun rise over the land unknown to her, beckoning like new and secret love. When the calling was too loud to bear she ran away from the towering walls, out on to the feral plains, joining a caravan heading to Thar and beyond. The earth brown quickly crept into her skin. That was how she came to Laata[10] - the land on which I am standing now.
The road slowly elevates, cliffs rising from the thirsting Laata land to kiss the sky. The night comes prowling like a panther to the foothills of Pavagadh. In the morning, before the sun, I will have to start my journey. No, Jai will not come. It is my journey: the one that I have to make alone to meet my own goddess. So we will sleep here tonight, under a star-stolen sky, on this crag overlooking the plains. In the distance we see fires lit and further, the city lights of modern Gujarat competing with the heaven’s glow. We sit on the crag with wind in our face.
Personified silences need to be sculpted - Jai feels poetic. He is getting sozzled with Mahuda, a locally brewed spirit, which we picked up on our way.
I hate to treat nature like a prostitute, a comfort sought occasionally to soothe my city-worn soul. But tonight I seek her as a faithful and in return am amazed by her bounty.
Sad, it always has to be a one-night-stand - I think. I hear Jai’s laugh reverberate down the gusty gorge. He reads every word in my mind…
In her first night with the Lion, Suppa was as coy as a mermaid. They played hide and seek among the moonlit rocks. After a whole childhood had passed the child in her was free to play. But this pursuit tonight was not merely a sport. Her companion was this formidable king of beasts, who destroyed the caravan and killed the traders in a gruesome way. The blood on his main was still fresh.
When the last human was ripped apart in his belly and the camels had run riot, the Lion King was satisfied. He was about to leave for his den in the crags when his sharp senses caught a whiff of movement, the slight rustle of breathing. He could easily detect where she hid; effortlessly dismantle her cover; and even chew her to bits and pieces as he did the others.
But he didn’t.
He stood over her for a long time. She stared back at him.

Ages later a poet wrote a touching poem about that spark of far-fetched history. Folks sang it in the evenings by the common kiosk. A grandmother recounted it as she fed mouthfuls of rice to a child. A villager dreamt it in his deepest slumber.
Jai is still awake. I am mumbling about the epic play I saw while in the 8th class. I’ve seen it so many times afterwards that the words come rushing to me now. Suddenly I hear the maddal[11] and see the lion taking his proud steps.
It is so vivid that it’s almost happening on the gully down there. If we sneak we might even see them…
But a Lion???
Why not…?
The more I thought about it, the more I believed... When I was small I could never believe it. I must have been a rational kid. Wanted to explain everything! Thought it was a man who lived in the wild and was so brave that he was just called the ‘lion king’.
Morbid kid.
Yeah.
And now you believe it?
I’ve grown up.
Wow. Look what three years of Anthropology has done to you.
It’s got nothing to do with Anthropology; or three years.
Jai stretches out on the sandy stone. The stars reveal their secrets to him. It will be a clear windy night. The morning will be cool. There is some more Mahuda both of us are too sleepy to pour.
“I’ll get the sleeping bags,” I tease him. “You are too drunk!”
Are you still sad?
I don’t know. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to stay.
Hmmm…I hope to understand you someday.
Thanks for the compliment.
Behind his mocking comments there is gratefulness for the moment. After all, how many times could you sleep under the open sky and dream about the other’s myth of origin?
So the lion took the lady to his den?
Yes.
And they lived happily ever after?
Yes.
End of story?
No.
That is where I begin.
Ah! Yes you! I forgot!
Suppa bore the lion king twins. A son who made the lion filled with indescribable pride became Sinhaba - Lion Arms. Sivali, the Lion Lass made him melt. He loved the three of them so that he did what his human counterparts often do, when they fear loosing what is precious to them. He forbade them to step out of the den without him.
The lion children grew up in the familiar darkness without ever realizing the difference between their parents. They inherited qualities from both. Sivali, her mother’s woman body and her father’s keen sense of smell. She could smell the rain on the wind days before it fell or her father’s catch miles away. Sinhaba had his father’s animal strength in him and from his mother, who once gave up a kingdom and a throne, a desire to rule - things which he discovered after coming of age, for the misfortune of his father.
The morning kept all its promises. People had already started climbing as I started towards Pavagadh. Their devotion is a beautiful cascade glittering in the glorious morning sun. They were the people of a continent whose borders were illusions of history. Belief held them to this goddess they came to pray, to ask for their boons, to share their good fortune, cry out their miseries.
In a country of myriad faiths and zillion gods atheistic rationalists like me end up as religious cocktails. Too many stories, too many competing truths to contain within individual conscience. No wonder I am awed by collective piety.
Jai had warned me to take change for those who begged alms. I distributed it within the first ten minutes of the climb to find that I could distribute a whole fortune the way up. Those who received my kindness thanked in whichever language they spoke. A soothsayer insisted I got my palm read. Jai must still be asleep at the foothills. He will wake up to a late morning.
In an alternate reality young Sinhaba woke up to another morning, with an immediate, reckless yearning rising from the pit of his stomach. Yesterday had been critical to him, the human turning of his life. Suppa had at last revealed the differences between the beast king and herself. She had said it with utmost pride and love for her spouse that Sinhaba’s instant revulsion took her by surprise. Instinct told her she had made her mistake, but once told, reality became a frozen truth that couldn’t be denied. Their love seemed animal and shameful. She would die someday guilty of unnatural love.
She wept as Sinhaba used his arms to dismantle the rock that imprisoned them, and took her on to his right shoulder and Sivali on his left and runaway before their father found them. He claimed his mother’s kingdom, Vanga - what is rightfully his. But the crazy Laata land was his home. Soon he gave up Vanga and moved his kingdom to Gujarat, where his furious father, saddened and maddened by his loss, destroyed hamlets of innocent men. As Laata’s king, it was Sinhaba’s duty to protect his people.
That’s where you sit on the edge of your seat. The sound of the maddal gains an aching tenor. A father and a son. A confrontation. The raging lion calms down. The search has worn out his soul. He does not notice that his son is now a king. How could he? His son has always been a king to him. Even when Sinhaba was of tender age playing with his own little penis, trying harder to pee a bit further. The nights that he cuddled his child to sleep rushes to his beastly heart now; the moments which kept him awake thinking and inhaling with lust the very breath Sinhaba exhaled.
Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. He calls his son.
The answer comes swiftly as an arrow.
The audience waits, breathless and overwhelmed. The first three arrows fall short of harming the lion his love for the archer shielding him like armour. The fourth arrow draws wrath and blood from the lion. A king fulfills his duty to his people. A father is slain by a son. When the play ends, I remember, I am always too drained to clap...
The blood that seeped, soaking his mane to this earth gave my island nation its name: Sinhale - the lion blood. The dust into which the lion falls is the dust that covers me now. The spread of Gujarat that I see from this cliff is the Laata his son ruled. Sinhaba took Sivali, his sister as his queen and legend has it that she bore him 32 sons. The first son, Vijay, grew up to be a rascal.
Jai...?
I'm with you.
I think I have a soft corner for Sinhaba.
For the patricidal son?
I relate to the irony of his life; as a king he had to kill his father. As a king he had to expel his son from his land.
Why didn't he kill him too?
Perhaps he couldn't...this time he was the father.
We think life became ironic with modern times ...don't we?
The legends too have their lessons to teach.
Pashchim Express chugs through the night. I fail to stay awake as I rush past Baruch. That's from where Vijay took sails with his band of outcasts - Barukaccha. I'll be passing Surat too. That was Supparaka, the famous sea port Vijay first landed before he reached Sri Lanka. Lulled into a rhythmic train dream I try to connect with the places I pass by and the history connected to them. I see Sivali confronting her twin brother, her husband. Once he killed her father for his people and now probably her son. When I wake up next day to another train morning of pakoda[12] and gharam chai[13] it is almost close to Goa. It had already begun to look like home.
So, Vijay became your first king?
Well, in a way, yes...though the country was already inhabited by a few tribes...
Are you proud about him?
History has a lot of skeletons. So does our lives…He was the first but not our best king.
How did he become king? Must be quite a story.
It is a story for another night...and another journey...
Find another holy mountain to climb.
Already got one back home...
I am taxed for overweight in Trivandrum. Wretched airport. Besides, Malayali men make me dizzy. They all look identical with their moustaches. I don't like the way they look at me as I eat my idli[14] in the waiting lounge so that I can skip the dreary airline food. They see so much of them in me. Strange enough, they still know I am not one of them. They don't ask me who I am or where I come from. They sense I wouldn't know what to say if they do. A confused little gypsy girl eating idli in the airport...
I avoided a window seat while check-in. I don't want to look back. I don't want to know what part of me I was leaving behind. When I feel that one moment, when the wheels lift from the ground I shut my senses. I don’t say good bye. There are things in life that you can't do, that won't make sense even if you do, like waving good bye to a soul mate.......leaving India, for me, was one of them.
I make friends with a Rajasthani girl who gives me nimbu pani[15] along the way up to Pavagadh. She talks a lot about the miracles of Parvati. She says that I should climb at least the last fifty steps to the Goddess on my knees. Toughie! I'm already half dead and dehydrated.
Climbing a mountain is living a metaphor. Something about that lonely ambition to make it to the top brings your soul to each step that you take, defines the reason for you to keep going. The higher you rise in altitude the deeper you sink into the core of your being. I am remotely aware that for every one who is travailing upwards, it's a special journey. We have our selfish reasons to climb; we are separated thus. Yet all of us are heading for the same; all of us move forward with the common flow of life, bound together by belief that the goddess up there has a minute for you.
When I reach the top, I will be crawling to Parvati's feet like a caterpillar. Still, I will look upon the land that has a bit of my blood in it like a queen. As I go down on my knees, my sight blurring from the sweat, I notice the people again. They are all from different parts of the country, belonging to different backgrounds, climbing a holy mountain to meet their Goddess. They look different they speak different they feel different, and yet....
Who are these people? What is it about them that define the soul of this country?
And again I am surprised by what I see. I close my eyes and imagine...this land and its people...
The rich.
The poor.
The faithful.
The End[†]

[1] Chappals: sandals in Hindi
[2] Runn of Kucth: A large stretch of semi desert in Gujarat adjoining Thar.
[3] Gujarat: A state in western India covering Kathiawar peninsula. Capital Ahmedabad.
[4] Pavaghad: A rocky mountain considered as a shakthi peetham - a place where Parvati’s limbs fell when she danced to death according to Hindu Mythology.
[5] Parvati: Consort of Shiva, worshipped as Kali in Pavagadh. Type Parvati in Google and you’ll be buried in a mountain of literature.
[6] Dohkla: Traditional Gujarati cuisine. Small yellow cakes of soft dough Wonderful stuff.
[7] Teeka: The red spot Indian women wear on their forehead. Has a lot of meanings and purposes to it.
[8] Suppa: Bengali princess and ancestress of Sinhalese. Her father was the King of Vanga and mother was from Kalinga (Modern Orissa)
[9] Vanga: Area covering West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. One of the sixteen famous republics of Ancient India.
[10] Laata: Area covering modern Gujarat.
[11] Maddal: Musical instrument similar to a Tabla played in classical/musical drama in Sri Lanka. It has a rather folk touch to it. The play referred to, is unmistakably Sinhabahu by Sarathchandra, considered as the centrepiece of Sri Lankan classical drama and easily recognized by a Sri Lankan reader.
[12] Pakoda: Deep fried bread crumbs and sometimes even sandwiches served commonly in trains in India, taken as a snack or a meal.
[13] Gharam Chai: Hot tea. They serve it in small paper cups. Really makes your day in a train!
[14] Idli: Rice cakes eaten with Daal curry and coconut gravy. South Indian delicacy. You get the best ones in Kerala!
[15] Nimbu Paani: Lime water sweetened, salted or plain. Truly Indian drink of the masses!

[†] Author’s note: The legend of Sinhabahu has many versions. Though cross checked with Mahavamsa, (the Great Chronicle) for clarifications, the version in this is essentially the way I heard it from my grandmother.

Finding yourself

2004-12-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

I am becoming a recluse; a sense of indifference is permeating my soul. It is in a way amazing since this is a period of change in my life; a period when a door is opened for new learning; Advertising is something so completely new and something that demands to be learnt and mastered quickly in order to survive. I can't believe I am floating in a lacuna. If anything turns me onner than something unknown, it is unknown. How come it does not excite me? How come that I suddenly think of life in past tense. Something lived. How come I cannot imagine a future?

One of my favourite lines used to be 'the day I become indifferent to life, I'll kill myself' and here I am completely indifferent to the idea of killing myself. When one sees sameness in change, when one becomes lethargic to spit out ones head and even read your favourite authors without taking in the words or watch your favourite movie without understanding the sequence, if I were you, I would ask myself to go see a shrink.

And then...ya, you are right...I don't like the idea of having to pay someone to listen to me. And then what?
I'm even indifferent to my thoughts that i can't bother to find words that can match them or express them...

Change is the only constant

2004-12-10T01:53:00.000-08:00

That's a lot of sense for an old saying. When I found a job in small television station as a scriptwriter I thought I'll stick around and achieve something cohesive. The work was satisfying though slow to pick up and I had found two wonderful grilfriends to share sweet nothings with....
but destiny has a funny twists to it. It winds up your life in queer ways. so here comes a remarkable offer from JWT. And here I am , not knowing wheather it is my true calling and a little perplexed about the way I made up my mind.
What a life...
Any way it is still a little too early to share anything mpre than that.

THE SHORT STORY.

2004-10-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

Ave Maria Convent School was a Christian institution. It had remained so for more than a century of tropical suns and monsoon moons and within that endlessness of time established itself as an indomitable monument of colonialism, which changed the natural course of that island’s history, forever. In truth, it was only the old Dutch chapel set in the remotest corner of the school compound, hidden by impenetrable foliage giving way to a narrow passageway that was as old as Ave Maria Convent claimed to be. And those who strove to preserve its aura of ancient mysticism succeeded mostly due to the mere readiness of people to create and continue a legend out of the 'whispering walls’ of the small white chapel. Those walls were so permeated with generations of high-pitched youthful singing that even at the most secluded moments a faint hum of an angel’s breath, a whispered prayer ruffled the air locked within the antique structure.

The nuns, of course, were very modest about its history, discreet about the legend; so flamboyant about the prestige of their institution that they naturally became the strictest Victorians of the island. Their standards of moral discipline peaked every morning as they sang their halleluiahs to a crucified saviour and his mother of sorrows in the dim light that seeped through the painted glass windows.

Later, aided by its inauthentic claims to antiquity, unhindered by its many instances of academic failure, Ave Maria Convent became, in a fashionable world, a fashion.
A few years of breeding within the institution for the lucky daughters of the rich, became a thing to be mentioned at social gatherings and in Sunday matrimonial columns.

On that sunny September morning, in the principal’s office, sister Mary Francheska settled herself to read the English newspaper. She was a buxom woman, broad hipped, short, whose bearing declared she was born to be a mother in the natural sense of the word. But she had entered the order, convinced that no man was worthy of her love but the Ultimate Himself. Her share of disappointments as a young, passionate girl had led her to believe that the height of her devotion, the depth of her faith, was indeed too sublime to be slighted by a mortal; and in a sense she had found reciprocity with the Immortal. In his acceptance: the silence of God.
She skimmed through the pages, sneaking mischievously at matrimonials: an act that purged the leftovers of a vain hope; an act in which she was cathartically desperate for the world she left behind; a secret ritual that helped to preserve sanity in a woman of her kind.

But the feeling of despair that coloured her that morning had different reasons behind it. Sister Francheska put down the newspaper sighing, stepped into reality and eyed the document on her table – her problem for the day-- with clear disgust. She didn’t quite know how to handle this one. After all, it was not another surreptitious love letter hunted out from a school bag of a frightened girl in love. Those she knew how to handle. Years of experience had made her a soldier-angel fighting the hot blood that gushed in these adolescent girls under her care: a coolness of attitude, the right mix of head and heart, the cutting edge of Christian morality, to bring those love-struck souls to their senses. It wasn’t easy, no, for that helpelssness in the eyes of a girl confronting her reminded her of her own. It wasn’t easy, though she claimed to be a practical person. And at times she loved these girls under her care, squeaking like blind little nestlings for life and its pains, a little too much.

What bothered sister Francheska that morning was not a love note, but a short story written by Rosetta de Silva of 8th standard. Attested to be original by none other than sister Francheska herself. The letter on her table declared that the story was selected to be awarded at an all island open short story competition sponsored by Lafemme, the multi-national soap company. But receipt of the letter was followed by a telephone call from the board of judges who realized, a bit too late unfortunately, that the author was in fact a schoolgirl, barely fourteen. The fact that she came from Ave Maria Convent added the much needed spice for a mini-controversy.

They questioned the story’s originality. They questioned the integrity of sister Mary Francheska the principal of Ave Maria Convent School.
Sister Francheska smelled the rat. She knew that there were probably reasons besides originality that led to a disqualification, if it were to happen. She had no faith in all island competitions.

She had not, in truth, gone through the story when the script was brought to her to be attested. She looked at the girl, Rosetta. Ah; she had a flare with words. Another story? Good! Keep up the writing! And she had just signed. At the time she entertained no doubts about its originality. Rosetta was a sincere student; one of those serious types who never got involved in a broil. Indeed sister Francheska was quite aware of Rosetta’s potential. She had heard the English literature teacher praising the child and her essays being read by other teachers in the staff room.
But she wasn’t prepared for the perplexity that engulfed her when she finally read the story.

The previous evening she had gotten a hold of Rosetta’s English Essays book and taken it to her room. Post-dinner, she settled among her fresh, immaculate sheets, opened the narrow window for a wet night’s breeze and lazily opened the exercise book. Its pages were sprinkled with horrific spelling mistakes corrected in a glaring lurid red.

She read the story. Confused, she read it again. Unnerved, she read every single essay in the book. From word to word; without skipping a page. And she read way into the night, till the moon rose over the chapel’s head crucifix and inside its walls the whispers swelled into a medieval midnight chorus.
When she finally put the book down she had to wipe a film of perspiration off her brow.
It was a riot of imagination. A bacchanalia of senses. Something that shattered the silence and sleep of the night. Something that mocked the tranquillity of her existence. Wide-awake, sister Francheska felt trapped in those pages. A slanting, uneven hand of a fourteen year old child had transported her alive onto the burning streets of Ho-Chi-Ming, with the sun drying up the blood on the cracked windowpanes and the stench of fire feeding on dead bodies fouling the air. A shell-shocked child orphaned in war trying to help a dying enemy soldier by hiding him in an underground tunnel; trying to save the last human connection. Their growing intimacy a departure from standards of normalcy. Their effort to survive exceeding the extremes. A farrago of emotions flooding a singular scene of carnage and obsession that belied the façade of humanity.
Confusion.
In the coolness of the night breeze sister Francheska shuddered at the story’s lucidity, its terror, profoundly different from the placid existence within Ave Maria Convent. Yet it was so vividly portrayed that she couldn’t quite name what it was about the story that tossed the readers’ hope so cruelly, like a loose coin. Since sister Francheska had never seen Hollywood war thrillers she didn’t quite recognize that desperate urge to flee, one only feels otherwise in obsessive nightmares. It wasn’t an excellence in language or even the reality of passion that made the story powerful. No refined adjectives or sweeping climaxes, nor cleverness of plot. Had sister Francheska known that it was just a child’s attempt to harness her imagination when it dreamt its wildest, what would she figure out? That it’s all in the subtle shock of breaking the boundaries that limited their existences? Challenging the fake morality, their faith in humanity, tampering with the very rules that Ave Maria Convent itself stood for and guarded? Then would she call it what the others usually called it? Or would she doubt its originality the way the judges did? Point out that the child wasn’t even born when the war she writes about took place in some other part of the world?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
In her fitful sleep sister Francheska realized that she would have judged the girl harshly hadn’t she read the rest of the essay book, cleared her doubts and accepted the possibility of the impossible. Luckily, neither the words ‘pervert’ nor ‘genius’ came to her mind.
Sitting in her principal’s chair the next day, sister Francheska wavered between her student and the white world she mocked; the office walls, her own cassock, the school uniforms, the chapel, the chalk.
Her institution. Her student.
She neatly weighed the sides with a typical shrewdness: her institution’s fame against her student’s potential. Of course she knew that Rosetta was original, but she knew she would have to make a strong case against the judges, risking the reputation of Ave Maria Convent, all for a short story. All for a silly competition of a soap company. Soap suds indeed!
Sister Francheska decided that defending Rosetta would be foolish. The child had a flare for controversy, a forbidden taste of life. A broil in which sister Francheska did not wish to involve her institution. She was glad she did not declare the contents of the document in front of her, to the staff. Or to Rosetta.

She briskly lifted the phone and called the board of judges, boldly agreeing to let them interview the child as requested and also to hand over the letter declaring her position in the competition, if Rosetta failed to prove original. She had to be practical, she told herself later.

The judges had been clever despite their careless mistake. Their doubts appeared well founded. They were counting on sister Francheska’s reaction at the prospect of the winning stories being published in foremost Sunday journals. Surely she didn’t fancy her students writing that kind of stories for the public!

“Sister Francesca, we are very sorry about this mess-up,” he three gentlemen were very polite. They hailed from the capital’s highest institution of learning, the distinguished judges of youth and talent of the country.
“Francheska” she corrected her name softly. “It is understandable, professor…luckily I didn’t inform the child” she continued, adjusting her cap.
All of them smiled delightedly at sister Francheska’s sensibility.
“Oh, that’s very convenient, sister.”
“Actually, we cannot help the situation”
“We must heed the sponsors too…” the three gentlemen purred one after the other and suddenly sister Francheska felt overwhelmed by their presence, equally polite and demanding; a little too much to handle.
“You may interview her now, if you want” she said, trying to hide the schoolgirl coyness creeping into her voice.
Smiles.
Since the principal didn’t want the interview to be done in her office due to personal reasons and in the staff room due to lack of privacy plus the three gentlemen themselves decided a dramatic location to stage their little comedy, Rosetta de Silva was called to the Ave Maria Chapel.
For an interview.

In the cool dim light within the chapel a surprised child was questioned quickly by three gentlemen whose faces she could never recall later, try as she might. For once the famous whispering walls of the chapel were silent. The questions were not as grand as the setting.
“What are your hobbies?”
“From where do you borrow books to read?’”
“Who are your favourite authors?”
Rosetta answered indecisively, confidence deserting her voice with every word uttered. She had been in the sun when she was called into the chapel and her eyes were slow to get used to the darkness. For a few minutes, it was as if God was interrogating her in three different voices.

Gradually three faces took shape in front of her; their voices bounced back from the walls, unabsorbed; demanding to be answered:
“Who taught you about Vietnam? That is not in your school curriculum.”
“Why didn’t you write about the war in your own country?”
The questions confused Rosetta. She blinked and remained silent for a long time. When she opened her mouth to answer she felt like a dead fish floating in a small tank feeling slightly guilty in her inconspicuous death.
Then, she was asked to return to her classroom.
Back in the office the three gentlemen started smiling again. Sister Francheska smiled in return and adjusted her cap coyly. For a split second she thought they had decided in favour of Rosetta.
But the child hadn’t impressed them. They found her rather hesitant and ordinary. Sister Francheska confirmed that the girl indeed was average: a normal schoolgirl; with a weakness for spellings.

“The story is too…extraordinary, to be written by an average girl like her,” they concluded.
“So the average can never be above average; ordinary never be extraordinary?” sister Francheska couldn’t help asking.
“Can a mortal be divine, sister?” they silenced her with a masterstroke.
“She must have copied it from some book she read; or maybe translated.”
The principal grew crimson.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to ask for the original letter back.”
“By all means, we want to encourage creativity. We will try to give her a certificate of merit or something, in recognition of her effort.”
“For that we have to talk to other decision making bodies.”
Sister Francheska thrust the letter back without a word.
“Thank you for your cooperation sister Frances…sorry – Francheska!”
A final slap before she slammed the door after them.

Once alone she sat down with a sob. The memory of the previous night hit her full blast like a locomotive in the dark. So my student wasn’t original! Was Shakespeare? Simply because their empty skulls can’t think!
Sister Francheska felt beaten by her own senses. How original could one be in this world after all? She kept muttering to herself for days.
She decided not to let Rosetta know the truth about her short story, fearing that it might damage her further. She assuaged her own guilt by hoping in vain that Rosetta will, in her road to womanhood and love, fare a lot more than a disqualified short story. After all she had to be practical about it!
Years later, when Rosetta passed out of the convent sister Francheska never tried to keep track of her, the way she did with the other bright students of the school. So she never knew what became of her; or whether she had ‘done well in life’ according to sister Francheska’s standards.

Every Christmas, year after year after year, long after she retired from the school to her small room with the old chapel in view, sister Francheska received greeting cards in that unforgettable hand, slanting letters looped, that reminded her of a particular book of English essays, sprinkled with horrific spelling errors corrected in red. They were posted from different corners of the earth – India, Romania, Brazil – unlike other greeting card senders from rich countries whose from addresses remained fairly the same. Finally the old nun was convinced that the sender had gone too far, to trace her steps back home.

Then a time came when Reverend Mother Superior, Mary Francheska couldn’t read the bundle of Christmas cards she received and couldn’t recognize the faces that came to pay their respect to her, as she lay among the immaculate linen, a Madonna at her head. Girls whom she had loved and punished as a principal, who grew up to be mothers and nuns as she predicted in Monday morning assemblies. For some reason she kept calling every one of them Doreen. They all smiled sadly down at her, love and tears welling in their eyes. They kissed her hand and whispered silent Hail Mary’s kneeling beside her bed. In her last days the Mother looked as if she would continue living forever that way, holding life and death side by side.

One January evening a stranger entered the Mother’s room, carrying a jingle of gypsy trinkets and a faint whiff of sea. The air blushed like feelings. The Mother opened her eyes to see a luminous woman kneeling beside her bed.
“You are not Doreen,” the Mother whispered with conviction. The visitor smiled. A rare patience marked her brow and a fan of laugh lines gathered at the corners of her mouth. She was the kind of woman who would have a high tropical laugh, with her head thrown back; the way much simpler women of that island laughed when they were loved and happy. The Mother tried to recall a girl’s face that could have grown up to be this extraordinary woman…with this magic and mystery in her eyes. She must have been an ordinary girl, she thought. Ordinary. Extraordinary. A woman without a name. She closed her eyes and joined the visitor’s prayer. Through the narrow window the soft light of a setting sun, carrying the shadow of the chapel-head crucifix fell glowing gold upon them. And the stranger held the Mother’s hand long after their mutual prayer was over….

By the end of September the results of the all island open short story competition, sponsored by Lafemme Soap, was announced grandly in the newspapers. The winner was a middle-aged writer with a few books of poetry and prose to his credit. Despite the confusion of the absurdly laconic interview at the chapel Rosetta de Silva had not suspected anything. She wasn’t surprised or disappointed because she hadn’t been hopeful. She had only entered the competition hoping to receive some comments. Unfortunately the three gentlemen hadn’t offered any.

When she came across the winning entry published in a daily she read it in a gulp. It was then the feeling returned to her; the dead-fish-floating-in-the-glass-prison-tank feeling. Still she was too young to figure it out all by herself. The principal avoided an explanation and she couldn’t demand one. She spent the confused day away from her friends, engulfed by an uncanny sense of revolt and despair.

After school, Rosetta ran to the sanctuary of the Dutch chapel. She was not a devout Christian and most of the time at mass she did not pray. She didn’t skip mass either, for somehow she liked the ritual than the faith. As her teachers and friends lost themselves in a communal chant, their voices soaring past ages to resurrect a man they shared in loving, she saw Him come to life, vibrant and breathing their devotion.

The chapel was secluded now. Silent. Empty like a shell without the calling. Rosetta sat for a while, unseeing, unhearing, the weight of growing up suddenly crashing down on her shoulders. A huddled foetus in an ancient womb; disoriented by life’s pain as it fought to be born.
Rosetta wiped an unwanted tear and looked up. For the first time she became aware of the stillness around her; and then the whispering of the walls. The murmur was soft and secret. As she listened with all her senses, the clamour inside her ebbed.

Little light came through the coloured glass panes, blue, orange, green. A candle flickered at the feet of Madonna, the mother of sorrows. A lonely figure with a bowed head. A lambent woman with infinitely sad eyes, who again, paid heavily for her creation, the world didn’t quite acknowledge as hers. The greatness she bore bled on the crucifix above her: The extraordinary man the world so feared and faulted and later revered in churches and chapels. And she, a Mary, an ordinary woman; the creator, the woman they worshipped.
Rosetta closed her eyes and joined hands to absorb the wisdom of the whispers. It was one of those fleeting moments that grew people up by years; that people remember throughout life; small sparks of enlightenment to recall in moments of bitterness to keep going; when nameless experience shines on a traveller like the morning sun and sudden infinite perception clears up the course one lost during the dark ignorant night.

Rosetta crossed herself before she left; a lean lonely figure, not yet a woman, no more a child, counting her steps along the aisle. The watchwords of Ave Maria Convent gleamed above the Madonna, the candlelight played with its gothic lilt, as the walls mysteriously murmured:

Virgin Most Pure. Pray For Us.

THE END.

AFTER LOVE.

2004-10-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the night
You move and murmur in your sleep
Strange whispers of mischief
Of a child caught in a shell-shocked dream.

And I, awake and fixed
Hours after the breathing, the fumbling
The sweat, the meanings
Slowly evaporate, desires
Lived and shared in a narrow space.

And the boundaries are redrawn.
This breast is mine; this shoulder yours
This hand mine and this thigh yours.
I recollect my limbs.

Is this jealousy I feel
That having given all to you
None is mine?
Neither joy.
Nor sleep.
Nor you.

The silence of your sleep
Mocks; calls me name;
Makes me a bride-for-the-moment
And all I have to give
A mistake of the night.

SUPERNOVA

2004-10-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

I plucked a star
Out of a lonely sky
To give away with my love for you.

I kept my wish
in the space instead
and left it there to start anew.

When I left the stars
And came to you
Burning into the darkness of your womb

I knew my wish
was growing in me
To a supernova of many hues.

Since I am destined
to carry within
the secret sea of love and dew

That earth call
no man nor stars feel
as mothers and daughters do.

WHISPERER OF MISCHIEF.

2004-10-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

This empty parking lot
Is littered with your whispers
Of strange truths
I would die one day,
Believing.

Of dead bodies floating in monsoon floods
In which you wade
Searching for the familiar bulk
You would still know in a glance
Even without a face.

Of cold finger tips on your brow
The flick of eye lashes
On your cheek, before the fire began
To burn you in your bed.

My car is empty. Shutters locked.
No face to peer from within.
Out on the streets new memories
Are being lived, stagnant and shimmering
As a traffic jam in the sun.

In a sudden surge of conscience
Sirens blow
And red lights flash
My own skull and bones
The danger sign..

High

2004-10-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

I am God.
A poem is my power.
With words I can send,
Any other god to Guillotine.

I am the nature of this wintry morning,
When the floor is too cold to tread,
And the bed tea spills over the sheets.

I am a man’s misfortune.
He told me so last night.
Couldn’t care less.

Downstairs, the neighbors howl.
Their morning row of broken vases
And sniveling kids.

The Asian Age declares war.
Titans clash. Marlon Brando
Is tri-sexual, did you know?

I’m getting late. I’ll miss the bus.
Broke. Can’t afford a Rick. I’ll walk.
Say, am I too young to be lucky?

I see my shape in the sky.
That soaring eagle, my winged grit.
That’s me! And the god I know.

Tell me,
Are you still searching
For the god
In you?

My Way Home.

2004-10-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

When life gets a little too confusing and work demands too much; when constant traveling creates a sense of insecurity and rootless-ness or I begin to feel I belong to the rest of the world than I do to this small island, I go to Anuradhapura. It is the place where civilization in its proper sense began for the Sri Lankan, our first capital; A place which, 2500 years ago, was as vibrant and thriving as the streets of Colombo today, if not more; A place that one has to visit again and again, to realize that there is always something new about things ancient.
Today, Anuradhapura is not one of the ‘happening’ places of the country though it still is the most important town in the north central province. Apart from those who live off selling souvenirs and snacks to the tourists, the life style is predominantly agricultural. Weather-wise it is a dry place with an erratic monsoon not to be trusted. The modern day farmer still depends heavily on water irrigated by his ancestors. And if you take a stroll by the evening along the bund of a wewa[1] you will see how close the tank is to their daily lives, very much the same perhaps, as two millennia ago.
I remember my first sight of tanks in Anuradhapura at the age of ten. Wherever I turned my head, I was looking at one: Basawakkulma tank beside the mighty Ruwanweli, Thisa near the exquisite Isurumuniya and the magnificent Avukana Buddha overlooking Kala wewa; sudden seas in the middle of torrid landscape, awesome in their size and serenity. Though I have spent many thoughtful hours staring at each of these great reservoirs, history turning into a motion picture of kings and chivalry in my mind, the sight of Kala wewa from the boulder near the lordly statue of Avukana Buddha is an experience sublime.
I always make it to this spot in an evening when the sun glows softly on the waves of the Kala wewa. From where I sit, I can see the tank, the Buddha, and the wind blowing dreamy grass flower pollen in the twilight. Darkness first gathers on the delicately chiseled sandstone pleats of the Buddha’s robe as smooth and real as the ripples of the tank. The music of nature’s silence is redeeming. It’s the perfect place to listen to the voices of the ruins of Anuradhapura, and the myriad tales of our heritage.

The Founts of Sinhala.
The ancient civilization of Sri Lanka emerged and flourished with this city. The pioneering settlements quickly spread across the extensive northern plains, prompting an urgent need for a means of coping with the geological and geographical peculiarities of the dry zone and its frequent droughts. Thus Sri Lanka became one of the greatest irrigation civilizations of the ancient world.
Large scale irrigation networks began crisscrossing the parched landscape as early as the 1st century A.D. Our engineers utilized the waters of the Mahaweli and other rivers that flowed down to the plains from the mountains of the west zone. The construction of their canals and channels exhibit an amazing in depth knowledge of trigonometry; and the design of these reservoirs revealed a thorough grasp of hydraulic principles.

Genius of Irrigation
Tanks like Kala, Thisa, Abhaya, Nuwara and Parakrama Samudra[2] are breath-taking triumphs of (what I call) scientific art. Their damns had broad bases able to withstand very heavy pressures. Outlets to for the discharge of water were installed at suitable points in the embankment. The method of regulating the flow of water from these tanks was ingenious. By the 3rd century B.C. Sri Lankan engineers had invented the Bisokotuwa (valve pit), the prototype of sluices regulating the flow of water from contemporary reservoirs.
The increasing sophistication of irrigation technologies enabled our early settlers to extend the water networks throughout the dry zone by the 6th century A.D. Engineering milestones include Kantalai wewa built by King Mahasena (276-303). It covered 4,560 acres and was fed by a canal 25 miles long, and was contained by a damn 50 feet high.
Even more superior in technology is the Kala wewa (Now I can’t help boasting about it!) constructed by king Dhatusena (459-477). It encompassed seven square miles and had a damn 3, ½ miles long and 36 to 58 feet high with a spill of hammered granite. A canal 54 miles long and 40 feet wide linked it to the city of Anuradhapura and the first 17 miles of this canal had a gradient of only six inches slope per miles. Kala wewa played an integral role in the development of Anuradhapura into the splendid capital it once was.
Subsequent centuries saw even more remarkable developments in the irrigation systems. By the end of the 8th century, these systems enabled the islanders to open vast tracts of arid land to lush paddy cultivation, making it a sri lanka – a ‘resplendent isle’.
For intrigued engineers with a flair for hydraulics and archeology or plain inquisitive wanderers like me who want to dive deeper into these tanks, Ancient Irrigation Systems of Ceylon by R. L. Brocher (Colombo, 1979) is an excellent resource.

The Legacy of the Common Man.
While mighty kings built mighty tanks the commoners built thousands of small tanks. These village tank settlements became the backbone of civilization, finding their best expression across the various landscape of the Rajarata[3]. The construction and maintenance of these small tanks had been fairly simple, certainly within the capability of village labour and construction skills. Temporary damns of mud and logs were built to address immediate needs. More importantly they were built by communal effort for the daily sustenance of village communities. By the 1st century B.C. ‘game wewa’ became a common sight and word remnants like amuna, mada ela are still a part of the modern villager’s livelihood; the living legacy he has inherited from his forefather.
However, the natural drainage patterns in relation to the location of the individual tanks, traditionally known in the folkloristic term as ‘ellangawas’, reveal a distinct cascade pattern now identified as ‘small tank cascade system’. There are no recorded scripts or historical documents relating to the methods employed in site selection of small tanks. At best, some fragments of the oral traditional knowledge handed down from past generations are still available with some of the village elders now living within these cascades.

Legends and Memories
Against the backdrop of technological and agricultural growth, economic and political supremacy and cultural glory there were many human dramas, both epic and mundane. When I see the farmers walking into the waves for a cool dip after a hard days work, or when they walk across the bund to their homes I realize that this way of life has been their only way of life for times past. On their way they will stop by an old banyan tree, to light an incense stick or a lamp, adorn the niche of a demi-god with some flowers, and murmur a prayer as the days closing. These lesser gods are those who built the tanks so that thousands years later these farmers survive and earn a livelihood. Minneri Deiyo, one of the more famous, is none other than King Mahasena, who built 16 tanks including Minneriya, turned immortal in collective village conscience.
A reading lesson from the 4th grade text book invariably comes to my mind. It is about the child hero Kaala who on one stormy night noticed a leak in the newly constructed damn. The child cupped it with his hands to stop the flow which would have soon destroyed the entire village in its sleep, and was found unconscious the next morning, still sealing the leak with his hands. And that is how Kala wewa got its name. From where I sit I can see Wekande Devale built for the spirit of Kaala, who fell seriously ill and passed away soon after. For the villagers, Kaala’s spirit still protects the tank.
The death of king Dhatusena, who built this tank, at the hand of his son, Kashyapa is one of the most dramatic episodes in Mahavamasa, the Great Chronicle. Demanded to reveal his hidden treasure, king Dhatusena asked to be taken to the tank. The noble king drinks from the wewa, flushes his face one last time and turned to his son saying “This is my treasure. This is all I have.”

The Spirit of Sinhala
As impressed as I am by Kala wewa, its ingenious technology, its resourcefulness, its endurance, the most wonderful of its aspects comes to light with its affinity to Buddhism, as with any other great reservoirs. The intimate connection finds expression in common parlance: wewai daagabai. If the irrigation network formed the basis for a thriving economy with large agricultural surplus that sustained an effervescent civilization, Buddhism gave that civilization dignity and elegance. It inspired the architectural and sculptural splendors like the Avukana Buddha, turning Anuradhapura into a bejeweled testament of wealth, cultural refinement and spiritual luminance of ancient Sri Lanka.
The best of our rulers are known not only by the number of tanks they built but also the number of stupas they offered to the Sangha. King Dhatusena is said to have built sixteen tanks and sixteen temples and offered the title of the tanks to them.
However, it is not this religiosity of the ancient kings that will amaze you, if you walk around Anuradhapura. It is not even the fact that every rock pillar, every ruin, and even wayside boulders like my favorite perch overlooking Kala wewa and Avukana, have threads of history attached to them, that when you tug you will discover a remarkable legend flooding your senses.
It is the memory of the artist.
I have no space in this article for Avukana’s artist. He deserves a book. In a mere mentioning, I pay my tribute to him, who I am sure stood on the same boulder and gathered inspiration from the serene sea before him to carve out the glorious Buddha, to chisel the living patience and compassion of the Great.
It is this artist who gives me my native confidence, something deeper than self-belief; something that makes me return to this land and this place however far I venture. When I walk along the bund in the darkness, the sound of the waves and wind reassuring me, I always know, this is my only way home.

References
Ancient Anuradhapura, Anuradha Senaviratne, 1995
Ancient irrigation works of Ceylon, R.L. Brochure, 1979
Small Tank heritage of Rajarata –Convocation Address of the Rajarata University, C.R. Panabokke, 2000
The Mahavamsa

[1] man-made reservoir often referred to as a ‘tank’
[2] Meaning, the sea of Parakrama. The largest and the most spectacular of ancient tanks built by Parakramabahu I (1153-1186)* in Polonnaruwa.
[3] Meaning the Kings’ Country.