Love stories



Source: Here

 I've just finished reading Annie Zaidi's Love  Stories # 1 to 14. And let me tell you one thing- love is messy. In case you hadn't already realized, that is. Love is messy. It's complicated. It's violent- and I don't mean physically. Being in love and loving and being loved are all on some level violent- the violence of the heart is perhaps something one cannot recover from - ever. You get over it, perhaps, but do you ever fully recover?

I remember in some movie one of the characters says " I have loved many people and each of them has taken a little piece of me." Isn't that perhaps the most violent act of all- giving a piece of yourself and taking a piece of someone else and neither of you is ever the same again.The happily ever afters are a dream really- a very unrealistic one. Even the happiest love stories I know of are not happily ever afters. And on some level I think who needs that anyway.

However, I digress. The book that I just finished reading- Zaidi's Love Stories # 1 to 14- is a collection of short stories and each deals with an aspect of love- romantic love. The stories are unexpected and honest. They have that strange quality that's so hard to capture of making one live each of the characters. You cannot help but be involved and wonder and even worry. For me each of these stories contained an 'aha' moment and I'm sure most readers would find this too. The magic of Zaidi's book really lies in the fact that she has somehow managed to capture and express the nuances- the layers- of love if you will. Even the cheesiest isn't necessarily the easiest cheese. They leave you with uncomfortable questions as well. Where does love end and comfort/habit begin? Is all love some kind of mass delusion? What's real? Who decides? When do you decide to trust and why?

A couple of the stories probably could have done with a bit tighter writing or better editing.

In the end though this is probably the best collection of stories coming from the crop of new writers emerging out of India that I have read in a very long time.

Icarus and reflections on a pale blue dot

I've been reading Mona Simpson's A Regular Guy and there's a lovely part in the book where the main character acquires a Matisse. He then gets so attached to it that he cannot stand the thought of it mattering as much as it does and proceeds to give it away. This is the second time that Henri Matisse has entered my life.

Source: Here

The first time was through a friend ( who is no longer a friend, unfortunately) and it was a very specific piece- Icarus. I fell in love with it. I don't know if it's that deep, vibrant blue. Or those exploding yellow stars. Or that wonderful, free falling, almost dancing figure with that beating red heart. There's something so beautiful and tragic about it.

Based on the story of the adventurer who aspired to reach the sun and in trying to attain his dream failed so spectacularly that he must be celebrated. But it's never really failure is it if you dared to dream and dared to defy the gods as it were.Dared to defy your 'humanness'.

Perhaps it meant so much to me then because it came into my life at a time when I was setting out to explore my own life.I was testing the waters.The universe was throwing things my way that were unexpected. It was significant I think in a way that was not yet clear to me and wouldn't be for some time to come. But now, almost a decade later I look at it again and it moves me. The artist who had so much to create that neither pain nor disability would stop him. He found ways to negotiate both. Isn't that what the story of Icarus is anyway? Indeed the story of humanity as a whole in a sense. For all our frailty we must defy the gods. We must - we are compelled - to reach for the stars. We look at the birds and we are compelled to fly. And we have. We have flown and we  have traveled among the stars .We are looking at worlds beyond our gaze. We are not perfect but that which is perfection in us is beyond compare- don't you think?

We no more know why we've been put on this "pale blue dot" " floating along like a smote of dust on a beam of sunlight" , than when we first began wondering about these things. But here we are.

So, there, those are my reflections for a Thursday night. I'll leave you with the following lesson in perspectives from the incomparable Carl Sagan:

Pale Blue Dot (Source: Here)

 We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Of feet of clay and a house sparrow named Ben Franklin

I feel I must write something today. But it's all rather random- the thoughts in my head.

Gaza is being pounded mercilessly by Israel. Israel is getting its share of missile attacks from Gaza. But the power balance remains skewed as always. The world remains divided as usual. I'd rather not say anything about a certain Mr Obama and his stance on the whole thing.

 My uncle and a cousin are stuck in Jerusalem. What was a tour of the holy lands has turned into a nightmare. They finally learn that the holy lands are not quite so holy anymore. If they ever were that is. I wish there was some intelligent insight into the mess that I could provide. But I'm fresh out I'm afraid.

The famous Aung San Suu Kyi was in town yesterday and I was given an opportunity to go meet her which I turned down. Her rather crude fence sitting on the whole Rohingya problem has been rather off putting. As a friend said the other day, it's best not to have heroes- they turn out to have feet of clay anyway.

All this is rather depressing. So turning to slightly more cheerful topics- the sparrow on my balcony has been christened Benjamin Franklin by my sister for his rather founding father-ish aspect and demeanour. She also believes he used to be a cat in his previous life going by the long hours he sits in meditation on our window sill. I personally find fascinating his fascination with the washing machine. Benjamin can sit for hours watching the water swirl and the clothes tumble. Watching him definitely makes clear why they're called house

Sparrow love

sparrows. He loves household sounds of all sort be it the clang of vessels in the kitchen, the pounding of pestle in mortar, the sputter of mustard seeds in hot oil, the sizzle of  frying onions, the whistle on the pressure cooker, the blender- anything really. Lunch preparation is his favourite time of day I have noticed. And he loves our flowers... the geraniums are a particular favourite.

Looking forward to a quiet Sunday reading four books simultaneously ( always a thrilling , if not entirely practical, approach). But on the menu are Annie Zaidi's Love Stories, Mona Simpson's A Regular Guy, Agatha Christie's autobiography and Paul Theroux's short stories.

Here's hoping for peace everywhere...

Ruminations on a cold rainy day

So, a cyclone hit nearby Tamil Nadu state yesterday. And as usual, Bangalore must bear part of the consequence. This came in the form of rain that just still hasn't let up. It's Thursday afternoon and the rain hasn't stopped even one little bit in that time. And it's cold. Colder than I have ever felt here I think in these three years.

The mid-week holiday means that I have pretty much spent the day sitting on one sofa or another in front of my laptop and in front of the tv , eating bread and peanut butter and drinking gallons of green tea. The world outside - at least the glimpses of it that I catch when I look out the one open window in the flat- is drenched. My plants are holding on. Their blooms seem to be able to withstand the wind and the incessant drip drip of the rain.

I just finished watching a beautiful Malayalam movie, Adaminte Makan Abu. I hadn't expected to like it. I ended up loving it. On the face of it , it's a movie about a man at the end of his life who hopes to perform the Hajj in Mecca. But it's so much more. It's about human relationships and what it means to lead a life well-lived. It is about faith and what that means to each of us. Faith has got to be the most personal of all human experiences I think. And in an odd way it dictates our relationships. Or maybe not so odd. The protagonist has lived his whole life with the one desire- to go to Mecca. Not just go to Mecca. But go to Mecca on the terms dictated by his faith. No short cuts and no half measures will do. And so as he sets about arranging for this- the most significant journey of his life, it's the relationships that he's built over a lifetime lived faithfully that help him prepare.And in the end when things don't go as expected it's that faith that helps him live as well and find hope.

I found this movie a great comfort.

So, that was the theme of the day- comfort... and faith.

Changes

It's been a while. In that while, the world I grew up in has been changing faster than I can keep up. People gone. Monuments gone. So many things -just gone. Not complaining here. At least not too much. Not all of the change has been bad I must admit. In fact much of it has been for the good. But at least a couple of people who are gone , I wish they'd stuck around for a while longer. Nora Ephron for example. The way she saw the world made it always so much more bearable somehow. I loved the movies she made even before I knew that it was she who'd made them. I loved things that she'd said even before I knew it was she who'd said them.

Reading a book that has much to do with change at the moment. Julia Gregson's East of the Sun. The story's set in India of the 1920's -30's. If I have to categorize it , I'd call it 'Raj era chick lit'. Filled with inaccuracies of all sort. Some good research and fact checking would have helped it much. But the characters are wonderfully compelling and one does get terribly attached to them. The kind of book to be enjoyed with a lovely cup of tea and a plate of butter cookies. Hmm.

A friend also introduced me to the work of Joann Sfar through his graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat. A work of effortless genius. I highly recommend it.

In the meantime, the monsoons here are mighty spotty. Not good. But there are days with lovely weather and these are to be enjoyed when they do occur I suppose.

The fuss about marriage

So, I got an email from my father yesterday and all it said was this :

" Hi Serene, Go thru this profile. Let me know. Take care. Dad".

There followed a profile from a 'matrimonial website' called (believe it or not) "Muslim Matrimony". Now my dad under the best of circumstances isn't the most loquacious man ( unless you put him in front of an audience and then all bets are off), but when it comes to the topic of 'marriage' or in this case ' arranged marriage', the man becomes semi-literate. He'd like to be dictatorial about it and it instead turns into a sputteringly incomprehensible speech that loses steam about half way through with the onset of an acute embarrassment. At other times he tries the emotional blackmail route. This usually begins with " I'm getting older. I'm getting sicker. I'm not long for this world. Get married." That second part by the way is patently untrue. The last visit to the cardiologist proved this. The first part , well, we're all getting older. And somehow my "marriage" is supposed to be the panacea for old age and death. My getting married is also supposed to be the solution to every property dispute in the family ( this is probably true but I still maintain that this isn't anything that's going to be solved by marriage-mine or anyone else's-  let's face it my relatives aren't exactly in the running for the UN).

My mother, by the way, just goes for full on emotional blackmail. She has threatened me with various scenarios of lonely death over the years. If I remain a  single woman ,my life always comes to a gruesome end in my mother's mind at the hands of various relatives ( who all want to kill me for whatever reason , but mostly property); it comes to an equally gruesome end in some hospital where I'll lie rotting alone and dying; it comes to an end eaten by cats and raped and murdered by unknown assailants; my sister and all my friends will have their own lives to lead and men to marry and children to take care of and I'll be alone and dying in a corner forgotten and thrown to the side. Ladies and gentlemen, these are my poor mother's worst case scenarios if I continue to live my life in blessed singledom- what must be it like to be her I wonder.

And a combination of these strategies has been going on for well nigh 14 years now. Technically it started when I hit puberty but I thought I'd give them a little slack for the early years because my extended family were much more involved than my parents at that time.

Anyway, so coming back to last night. A combination of curiosity, exasperation and boredom made me open up the profile. This was the information that the profile contained - the gentleman was all of 37 years, unmarried, 6ft tall, living in Kuwait and working as an engineer (not software) and earns 12,000 Kuwaiti Dinars per annum. His 'partner preference' could be summed up in one word 'Any'. So, 'Anyman' here, basically didn't care what he married ( I'm glad in a way that he specified 'female' or maybe that too was an assumption on my part- things are a bit unclear at this point). So, based on this 'profile' , my father ( an otherwise intelligent man albeit an extremely , and proven, bad judge of people) wanted me to make a decision on whether this should be 'taken further'.

Now , tell me dear reader, how was I supposed to respond?  Was I supposed to say, " yes please, dad, let us take this further because I see so much potential." After all this man put up his own profile on a website meant to attract future partners and clearly he was so interested in attracting the best of the best that he simply couldn't take the time out to fill in what sort of a partner he would like to see himself with. This is exactly what I want to do with the rest of my very short life- spend it with a man who can't be bothered.

What I really wanted to say was " Are you kidding me???? What is WRONG with you???" But then that would lead to sulking and more arguments and frankly I don't have the energy. Not even a little bit. So, I took the path of least resistance and simply ignored the mail and shut down the computer. But I did take a look see at the various trolls who'd "expressed interest" in my profile, kindly provided by my dear parents ( and reads like it was written by two barely literate people!! What happens to two educated and extremely well-read people when it comes to this topic is something for another post). There was , believe it or not, a 58 year old pervert who's trolling for a second go at marriage. His claim to fame? He's a doctor in Saudi Arabia with a brood of kids. I mean ,what the hell! The past months on this particular website has in fact washed up the very bottom of the barrel. It's soul-crushing I tell you.

The reason is of course painfully clear. In my society ( and even more specifically, in my religious community ) once a woman is well into her 30's and unmarried, it is immediately assumed that (a) there is something physically or mentally wrong with her (b) she has a bad character ( read: she's no longer a virgin and this is THE WORST thing) (c) she's so butt ugly she'll settle for anything that comes along because she's just so desperate to jump into bed with anything ,and (d) in a late breaking development they assume you're lesbian. So, "profiles" of women my age on these websites always , and I mean ALWAYS, attract the oldest, most pathetic losers on whom other women have already given up. I mean these are men who have been dumped or have dumped others. It wouldn't matter to them that I have more degrees than they can count in subjects that is way beyond the comprehension of their puny little minds. Oh no! To them I'm still fair game because I'm in my 30's and that means my parents and I are desperate. 

And what about men my age from the same community you ask? Well, this is what happens. They put down their profiles with their most 'dashing' photos and demand brides of 29 and below. Yes, they must have prime  ( and untouched) meat don't you know? Now that they have "sowed their wild oats" they must settle down with " a young woman who understands their needs". Double standards anyone?

What do my parents have to say about this? Well to be fair, my mother suggested that I advertise for a younger man. My dad  of course has maintained his sphinx-like silent disapproval and carries on sending me 'profiles'.

Source: Here

Now, what do I think of marriage you may wonder dear reader. I think it's an extremely flawed institution and in many ways it's sick. But as institutions go it does have its advantages.But for something that began as a way of preserving property I wonder when it became so emotionally overwrought. What was the need to have made it so? Why couldn't people just keep it practical and carried on as usual? But no, everything had to become about sex and emotions and violence and sickly sweet  and frankly disgusting anniversary celebrations ( I mean what is that? Yay! We survived each other these many years and scrubbed toilets and washed underwear without killing each other! Let's cut the cake!). Okay, fine, make it that way. But if it must be that and if one must saddle oneself with this other human who's going to be hovering around every single day, then let it at least be a someone that one can tolerate and with whom one shares more than just human DNA and a few ape-like characteristics.

If I must spend  time in enforced companionship with someone I'd like it to be with a reasonably intelligent human being who will have something to say if I mention ,say, Damien Hurst . I'd like it to be someone funny and who can make me laugh. And I'd like it if the person was reasonably good and had some financial security. I don't have an ideal man in mind. Yes , I have fallen 'in love' before ( whatever that may mean to various people) .But no, I don't expect that to happen again. So, really, is it too much to ask for me to not completely lose myself and my life and my perspective on things. I don't want to meld into another and become one with someone else. I want to be me and I'd like to have someone to be 'me' with. Simple.

I fear though that I may be dreaming for such simplicity in life. These days when I bring up how annoyed I get at the constant pressure that I have been for the past decade and more, the word 'duty' keeps cropping up. Earlier it was just the parents - "It's our duty to find you a suitable boy". Now my sister is in on the act too- "They're just doing their duty." And on most days I'd love to tell everyone where to go place their misplaced sense of duty.

It's fair to say I've given up. Now, I just wish 'they' would.

The Sage of Sanaa mesmerizes -again

Have any of you ever felt that miserable feeling when you've just finished a book? Especially a book that was so engrossing and so nearly surreal that at some point you begin to wonder if it was real ( no matter what it says on the cover!). I've just come to the end of Travels with a Tangerine. 

And I'm miserable! It was such a beautiful account of the author's travels in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah. In an earlier post I'd written about another of his books that I'd read- an account of his travels through India in the footsteps of Battutah- The Hall of a Thousand Columns. The author has portrayed so beautifully and 'surreally' two of the countries that have meant much in my life- Oman and India. And yes, I want to gush endlessly about it. He has managed to capture so beautifully that something quite not captured about Oman in a way that I never could. Although I do disagree strongly with him on his perceptions of Khor Rawri ( which has to be my most favorite spot anywhere on earth) , I couldn't be happier with the rest.

There seems to be a wonderful linguistic alchemy to the author's words that just transports and transforms and you're constantly surprised to find yourself in your everyday surroundings (which will always seem so dull when you do emerge I promise!). And the words he uses- they are mesmerizing and unusual. 

After the sensory assault (almost) that the book was for almost two months ( I tried to read it as slowly as possible), I feel I've been left high and dry.

Once I've re-adjusted though I have a whole pile waiting to claim me. I think I'm going to finally open up the Amitav Ghosh that has been eying me ( and that I've been eying back) these past couple of weeks.