Minding my ABCs.... (1)

Prep School, somewhere in a remote corner of Orissa, an Integral School developed on the tenets of The Mother and Shri Aurobindo. Event: The Independence Day Oratory Competition. year 1986-87. I went knobbly kneed and spoke nothing on the dias...I am told I could recite chapters from books after just 2 readings. Maybe the initial synaptic connections were being set. But my first stage presentation and even if I had memorized the stuff in only one or two readings I got nothing on my lips the moment I set foot on the dias. Everyone gave me a respectful lapse until they finally got bored and finally asked me to step down. Another girl got a prize.

There was some man my mother had given a job in the school as a physical instructor who also teamed up as my bearer for the 20 odd kilometers I used to go by bus everyday. Sort of a benefactress for both the school's director and this man, who were her patients. I used to torture him into giving me a soft drink every day we used to walk back from school. I hated him but I loved his father, who was a village priest. He had a long aquiline nose and had a Sandalwood paste done in a way till the mark came upto his nostrils. I found him very good looking and kind. I thought my tutor was a monster since he was mean not to ever give me any cold drinks. What I did not know was that they barely had money to cook food in their family, and my mother had put him in a job because of his father's insistence when she went to the temple. So everytime he did give me a Gold Spot, my mother would force a note in his pocket.

He and his father were both very nice men and his family adored me. Everytime I went to their house in the village I got an omelette. I hated the Omelette. I wanted to eat smoked potatoes and water rice like them with Saag from their garden but never got that. They always gave me the parboiled rice and omelette. I loved his mother because she used to take me to the big and cold mud thatched room in their house which smelled of fresh straw and showed my how rice was beaten on a dhinki. And taught me to play see-saw on their bullock cart.

I was the previleged one in at least 5 villages...as the daughter of two dashing doctors from Cuttack. And so it couldn't be that I did not win a prize. I beat up C, the physical instructor, who also doubled up as my private tutor. My mother inquired what I wanted and bought it and secretly gave it to me through C Sir. I was told the school had retrospectively decided to award me because that was the first time I spoke, even if I did not come first. I had a school bag which I hated. I wanted a shiny steel box, like all others used to carry. It was heavy. So 'C Sir' used to carry it for me. It had a Bonnisan baby joker pasted on the top. Bonnisan for Happy Healthy Babies.

Somewhere through that winter and the rest, my mother bought me 2 illustrated fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. My world was awash with the idea of the being a mermaid dying for her love, sharing a chocolate house with Hansel and Grethel, wearing a frock that looked like a lotus, a black rose, having a house in a kite, understanding animal languages, visiting Russia to meet Ivan Ivanovich, live in a caravan and so on. I used to sleep between my parents and the first thing they did was to ask me tables. They wanted me to learn upto 30. I was not even 6 that time. I hated that time when I woke up and used to pretend to sleep over. But I loved it when father picked me up from the tables to talk to me about Popes and kings and India's Independence struggle. They stopped the tables recitation after I reached 25.

With the fairy tales I used to read strange books my mother bought me to read. I was being trained to go to Stewart School in Cuttack. My mother used to work in the hospital and then come back and teach me. I devoured the Science book and the New Horizons book for English. She got me another years book in advance that I was supposed to do in my spare time. I did that in no time.

I used to play Doctor Doctor with my cousin in the sprawling drawing room in our quarters. We were always short of paper we used for our games. I despised the white notepads that MRs gave my parents. My attention was in turn on the sheaths of blue kept in a black leather bag in my father's shelf. One day I picked a few sheets a little scared some one would know. We played with it, and I threw it out the window. It went unnoticed. Next day I became a little bit daring and we brought out another bunch and had a field day cutting it into prescriptions, bus tickets, coupons, currency and so on. Within a week a ream worth of typed paper was lying in a heap outside the window. A few days from then some summons came for my father to attend. He was and till date remains an extremely organized man. I was in the room when he came to the shelf. He opened the bag and found a pen without a cap. ( We were using the bag as the money bag conductors carry ). He never told me a word.

Not long there after I once jumped inside the operation theater in the Primary Health Center both my parents were posted at. It was an open air, open access, brightly lit room with windows that had no panes, and my father used to remove fibroids, lipomas, drain abscesses, squelch hernias and so on, with some spectators from outside who kept standing outside the window panes and looked on at the proceedings. One day I entered the OT to ask permission for something. On the outside was my mother, with a baby hanging upside down in her left hand, and a woman with red between her legs and a bucket below. I ran inside when she asked me to go out. I saw dad stiffen. But no one spoke a word. I strained at what he was operating through the drapes. I stood there a long time before I got bored and walked out. It was a circumcision. I knew that day that my mother was a gynaecologist. She was giving birth to a baby !!!

In 1989, I walked as a 9 year old into a section full of 90 odd students. I was readmitted into Standard 2 Section B because the "English Medium" ICSE schools would not admit me in Standard 3. I thought I had failed, so I was doing it again. I was not in Stewart School, because my mother was told kids did drugs there in that school. And that scare was enough for my parents to decide to put me in good old SCB. I was in my favorite yellow Salwar and in my aluminium box which was heavy with hard bound notebooks. I was pink with shame. Someone called me back and the teacher asked me to go back and I began to go towards her. ' Go Back...' she said a bit louder. I blushed. A guy I later knew to be Santosh called me from behind in Oriya to come back. I went and sat next to him. We were friends. A few minutes later it was decided that I should ask Amrita, the smartest girl in the class for her friendship. But it would depend on whether she wanted to be my friend or not. I eagerly waited for the Recess.

The bell rang and I was taken by 3 or 4 kids to a girl who was incredibly round cheeks and eyes that ended in a oiled sort of way between her lashes. She had incredibly beautiful eyes and wore her hair parted on the side with a white band pushing the front hair back. In one moment I felt ashamed of the Yellow Salwar, the Aluminium box I was carrying. They were all bought at my own insistence when I was back in the Integral School. In one moment, I wanted to be like her, with her shirt having a round collar, and blue tunic. " See I don't have a problem in making you my friend. But I need to know what my best friend has to say about it". I waited for her Best Friend to come. An extremely fair girl, with a nose I noticed immediately, and kajol in her brown eyes, came banging desks on either side of her with her palms. " Can I be your and Amrita's friend? "

She took one look at me from top to bottom. I was very nervous. 'She is not a good girl', she said and walked back, palms banging desks either side of her. "I am sorry", Amrita said matter of factly. " I really had no problems being your friend but since my Best Friend says you are not a good girl, I will go by what she says". She walked away. Santosh consoled me. " Don't worry, I will be your friend." We shook hands or what I don't remember. I hated myself for being bad. I wondered why my parents had to give birth to a bad girl. I cried that day while returning from school.

That white girl was known was "White Ghost" amongst us. I used to run away every time I saw her. Because every time she neared me she cast a shrewd look that convinced me I had something deeply worng with me. Santosh had some time convincing me I wasn't bad. We shared our tiffins. But I did not like Santosh for all his help. He just did not want to read and had a terrible handwriting. I wanrted to befriend Amrita an her Best Friend. She was a very vicious girl it was said. She was a 'dada', a goon. And her name was Subhashree Panda.

I am obsessed with neat looking files and treatment charts that have less than 2 cancelled orders. But I am wondering if that part of the Obsessive Compulsive disorder I have to keep things clean, then why I don't carry it to my room. My room is a heap of mess, do not know if it is for the stuff that I kept lugging from Delhi, a total of contents of three rooms all shoved into one small dreary room I have here, with its books and papers, all flying about, and now 2 computers to add. For this reason I choose to suffer the summer heat and not add a refrigerator and cooler to it. Tonight I am going to clean it, in terms of shoving out the papers and literature I have been bringing home. Then I will get that 20 kilos of books from Delhi I am planning to finish. God be with me.

J

What she did not realize. What people like me and some others never realize. Never idolize a human being. People are full of imperfections. And I have no idea how women end up being the way they are when it comes to idolization. They idolize weak faltering men into towers of divinity until that divine soul kicks them down their stairway of heaven into the realm of reality. Whether its a girl who goes on loving a person despite fully knowing he neither kept his promises to her when he had said it was a forever thing and that his basic reason for getting rid of her, was perhaps, his not getting everything of her, or its a woman who realizes on her twentieth marriage anniversary the man and his family she married and gave her life to, has been tweedling a teenager's nipples in the comfort of his home she works her guts out to run, the story just goes on and on and on.

Whether its a trait that makes them strong or weak, these women, I have not been able to know. They are the women you find everywhere, women who you might pass by on the street ever realizing what her life might have been, what her day to day struggle could possibly entail. Sometimes I think its a good thing to be so, to go by the morals people only hear about and read about but never endure, never try to live. But you can never imagine the torture these people face every single day. Words are easy to pen, especially when we have a bunch of thinkers who sit over a packet of cigarettes and start to write about things they can never ever live upto.

She has been living alone, a 'Widow despite a husband', in all possible ways a single woman can possibly manage to live. She has aged, all these years have brought the loose strands out of her tight hair bob and her heels have given way to sandals, sandals to chappals. When the man she married her life into left her, she was left with a child and a mountain of memories belonging to another one. And nothing else besides. Everyday since that morning till the time she sits to recollect it is a struggle against herself, more than the surrounding thoroughfare that usually gets thrown at women into this fate. Against a life that was forsaken, against comforts that could have been her due, she had to get up every morning to rummage through her scanty powers to live through a struggle that slowly consumed hours, days and now stretches over a decade, not ending, not being overcome. I cannot spell it out what every day can be for a woman brought into this fate in terms of people who tried to understand her, people who tried to take advantage of her, and people who kept forsaking her. For the men who asked her to take use of a good opportunity in lieu of unmentionable filth they had in their eyes for the woman they called their sister, bhabi...I am not qualified to do that. I am not a woman who has gone through this.

But she kept on. With some success and more failure if you strictly talk in the materialistic sense of the word. Its just that when she talks about the big dreams she has been waiting for to come true, of grand times to come for her and her son, which now her son grown up and man of the world, sees it as mere foolishness, I don't see it as a way of running away from it, or an indulgence. Its perhaps just a douser to the inner filth a woman feels for herself when she must have looked into her son's eyes, and found he was looking for someone apart from her. The pang a woman feels when she returns into an empty room burning with memories of a life that she hates with all her existence, but something that was a part of her, her marriage, her identity in terms of the promise an average Indian woman makes when she consigns her life to the holiness of the flames burning in front of her. For better or for worse. And when she must have finally realized herself, that even with the best of her efforts, she could not give her child the happiness and love he deserved, and the comfort and luxury every single woman wants her child to be in...prehistoric rules of Biology. Basic Instincts of every species against Darwin's back drop. Propagation of a productive perpetua. Because she could always be the mother. The boy needed a father.

And also the realization that her dreams betrayed her...Her idea of things that she deserved to get were rudely crushed under that wheel called destiny...and she was consigned to the ordinariness she could have despised when she had that age. I can understand that feeling of "Not enough" in a woman's eyes when despite everything she does for her son, she will always know that there will be a chair on the table she will not be able to take. Women have this inherent masochistic tendency in them. The more independent they become, the more they yearn to be taken care of, to be pampered and even treated like a kid. To the onlooker, it is an impossibility.

Men tend to run away from such women because they never get past that sexual mould where men are supposed to go hunting and women cook the meat they bring. Its will take a day to write about the bizarre malady that afflicts when such situations reverse. Women tended to move out of the house in the absence of an alpha male who fell back upon his words. There was never any need to prove a point. All the things that followed were cascade reactions of the vicious cycle. And in case of women who do manage to succeed, often but not all the time, their success becomes their private tragedy. Especially more so for a woman living in a society like ours with pseudo societal values of honor and chivalry. And in the lack of what she wants most, that is a new identity besides the tag she carries around like millstones, if she wants to prove that even she can make it on her own in the masculine chauvinistic society she lives in; if for some reason or the other not managed to do it, her indulgence in the idea of a better future, which she may have got complusively adhered to, not realizing that her boy has grown up, understands that his mother isn't exactly the heroine she keeps telling him she is, its her bane. She feels she has been a total failure as the caretaker of the one person who is all she has. He feels she is stupid and suggestible, a cause for embarassment. For him the adulation he feels for her is at a level she doesn't manage to see. For her his love is a distant expression of silence she doesn't feel reassured with. Distances grow. He denies responsibilities fiercely, and runs from expectations. She cannot live without hoping for it. And she is too proud to demand that due. Love fades. Or does it.

Because she is honest, scrupulous, and believe it or not honest to a fault. No wonder she keeps failing more than succeeding. Except where she lends her dreams to people who do not have the patience of a conversation with her, even when they love her. For she needs love too. She needs someone to scoop her off and carry her to a place where she can have the indulgence of a little comfort without worrying about the next meal. Her people don't see it like that. They subconsciously compare her with the modern day mothers they see trampling in stillettoes and think how ignorant she is when it comes to the ways of the world. And how stupid she is to keep trusting those who hurt her. Petty things. Inconsequential things to ponder about, really. And things pile on until it becomes one big mound of rotting filth. I don't see any foolishness in that dream, any falsehood in that staff she holds on to, and any malice in the idea of helping someone; and its okay if she does not make it. Its her salve. Because if someone will ever heartlessly tell her the truth, which in any case she knows, she will break into the million shreds she has actually managed to keep herself from turning into.

I feel sorry about it when I realize it that things like the lack of a family or a lack of love can bring upon a man a peculiar escapism even when he seeks such higher truths. And then I decide to bury the truth. And accept that not every person chooses to go by his word. There will always be men who will leave their mothers for their wives, there will always be boys who will promise their lovers the world and then move on to another city and find another woman and trample the hopes of the ones they left without even giving so much as a decent explanation. And there will always be women who will run off to marry someone better off. Or daughter-in-laws who will come to a house with the chief intention to break it. Despite what people say in the beginning. Promises are meant to be broken. You just never know just about how many of them practice this laugh line. And when people forget things for any reason, its best not to remind them and to move on and beyond it. Even if you think you deserve to know the answer to a simple question. Why? Even when you glorified him in your loss. And kept waiting. For a time that was never to come.

There are people who choose to bring out at their dearest ones the most hurt that they have in themselves. There are people who cannot bear to see the truth and the trust and will challenge one's faith to their utmost, not because they do not believe in it, but because they believe in it to the extent that they start getting scared. And some of them, some of them, don't come back and make up for it even when they know its time. Whatever be the case, whatever be their reasons, be it between brothers, lovers, sons and daughters, and whoever is the one who has been waiting...Exhale....And move on. Do not wait. Do not waste your life for people like these ignoring those who love you and care for you. Like she does. And when you ask her how she does it, its simple...'I have surrendered everything to Him'. I cannot express how she described her faith in this word we all call God, to my left cerebral hemisphere it was a weird indulgence. Sublimation of all things she has suffered to this date. Even my conjenctural Meera Bai Phenomenon where all emotional, physical and sexual frustrations are brought out in terms of lyrical words and music. But one part of me listened. Agape, as she recounted her personal love affair with her God. I know the love between the mother son duo. Its not the place to write about it. But She and her God I can. It was weird. How can someone still have so much faith? Do people like this actually exist?

Utter Bullshit.

That was India that lived like that upto the eighties. Still lives on in nooks and crannies where you find women in white sarees wearing bright red vermillion on their foreheads for a man who treated her like a whore, and then left her and her son for another. The ultimate biological definition of a male. And she lived on. Through everything. And then you watch agape. And the cynic in you wonders if the same can happen to you. Rather, if the same ever happened to you, would you/ could you become like her.

And then that utterly beautiful woman comes and hugs you and plants a wet kiss on your neck, because that is the most of you she can reach. You take one look at her, at the whole of her. And you lose it.

You can never understand that. Not if you have not been a married single woman bringing up a child both as a father and a mother.

I have the honor of my life in knowing someone like her. She may not have managed to scorch the headlines as an immense success story, or be a failure to end her life. Her life, small, like the 5 feet of her, is reason enough for me to be stronger and more confident and more hopeful about the world and the people in it. The way she holds her head high when she walks from door to door to vindicate her belief in serving, in helping people, not everybody can believe it. Even I cannot myself. But I give it a possibility. People like this can and do exist.

To you, who will never know this, I promise to get over the single hurt that has been present as an insiduous nuisance all my life, which affects my thinking, gives me the violent tempers and gives me stubborness beyond reason. And I cannot explain why but I will see to it that your head always remains as high as I first saw it when I saw you...And for every drop that fell from our eyes when I held your hand for the first time and you said you did not need to know why they fell. You are reason enough to forget ( & I have long since forgiven) and reason enough to feel like starting all over again.

I am ready. And I am not afraid. Not because I lost, but because I fought a just battle, and admitted my human lacking with the candour. Because I admitted to being susceptible to what most people want in their lives. For someone to understand them without hurting them. In any case. Today I am ready to start living my life the way I used to before things changed. Except perhaps that it is odd that you should be the one to get me on about this. Life can be that odd. You get the light at the end of a tunnel. You get the answer from where you least expect it.

I want to start all over again. And this time I will take a human being as a human being. With limitations and punctuations. Except perhaps that I will still be looking for the God within. And I have learned my lessons this time. I want to fall in love with a human being, not with a concept of perfection or endurance. They do not exist. They never did. I want to move beyond the scattered question marks that arise when I ask myself questions about relinquishing the concept of owning to the concept of belonging. I have been too strong and too hurt and too cynical for too long now. I just want to be what I was when I read "Little Mermaid" for the first time. And when I told the story to someone. I want to become a child again. Be able to dream and trust again. Be able to hope again that all is not lost inside me. That a new day is approaching.

May God bless you with the abundance of his kindnesses (Since you are such a believer. My prayers have been more or less heard when I have prayed for others..With whatever religion I have in me..which I believe solely results from the passion and honesty and the respect I put towards my profession and the sacrifices I feel I have done for it. It can never be mentioned. Its in the life I live. I have no running on other peoples quotas of loves or cares. I owe no one anything except the care and unconditional support of my parents and faith of some of my teachers and some nameless, faceless ones who will never ask me for anything. I don't drink other people's alcohol, and I haven't unfortunately been in the need to borrow money from anyone which I have not been able to return. My parents taught me that. Mostly, even though I have anger potentials booming upto a few thousand volts enough to burn one or two houses down, I am not exactly a bad person, for I don't hurt people for the fun or the forgetfulness or the inconsideration of it. And I take my promises very seriously.)

And may the one person you love with abandon understand this some day what it takes to be you. Beyond writing about it in a language you will perhaps never get to read. Nor will any of us. And some part of one person who was waiting with all her dreams for it to be written so that she could go and tell him how much she loved and how things really were, and how mistaken he really was about certain things, she will perhaps keep waiting for ever. These are virtual concepts. Skeletons in cupboards you open and smell in the cold of your dreams. They will never see the light of the day. Should not either.

From me, to the TWO of you. The BEST. I hope your lives converge into something meaningful rather than the base escapism exhibited by one of you and the miserable suffering of the other. Its time for both of them to end. And I will love you both till the end of time with all our imperfections and fears acting as the glue to keep us separately connected. Maybe we will meet again...I don't know what lies ahead of us. Whether our 6 degrees of freedom will actually bring us closer or put us further off on our individual destinies.

And I will recede into mine now. I have to live my life. And now I want to. Hopefully, I will begin. Its time.

EMERGENCY

Another 45 admission day...misdiagonses, missed diagnoses, unknowns and the pangaas with Neurosurgery and Surgery dudes. But what I am about to write is that it was good to sleep in the ward again. I rather liked the 24 hour shift the ward handler has. Cannot say because I have always had a problem falling asleep and today was an official holiday so the Rheumatology clinic was closed. Otherwise things are bound to become very hectic for someone in our place. And as for the guy doing the night, without the intern, things will become dicey...

Fever is the most difficult to treat. Its easy if you know what you are handling. With temperatures at 104 you just cant write a treatment and ask the patient to come after 7 days. Its not like a fibroid you know lying in your pelvis silently, its not a burning micturition you are not aware of unless you visit the loo, fever and dyspnea are perhaps the most unnerving of all clinical symptoms. The insipid taste to the tongue that goes on until you have cured yourself off it, it ruins your life, spoils your mood and downs the examination results.

Hate the weather. Am longing for the winter to set in, that crisp way the air begins to break..Hope it will be soon now. Am still on with the other idea of posting things freely available on the internet; but as of now, one thing at a time. First, a new laptop and a short break. I am losing my edge and I need to be by myself for some time without having 50 people conversing in my head.

Yesterday, at 5 am I had to console an attendant whose father was admitted as meningitis but one my work up turned out to be a huge frontal lobe infarct...Was feeling like shit at that time, pulverised from morning Emergency, afternoon journal club evening round and post round emergency dash...but it was exactly that hurt in the son's eyes that took all the physical thing away. And here I am. Need a thorough spring cleaning of my room before I go to Delhi. Will be back, and start my thesis work.

Will write more. There are things I have been piling on.