Thursday 18 May 2023

Rousing a memory, long disavowed


Many years ago now my cousin told me this: my aunt would tell her at bedtime that sleeps fly through the air, spreading out over the land like fruit bats leaving their roost on leisurely wing beats. You had to catch one in your eyes and then keep them shut, lest it flee to someone else – perhaps even to the rightful owner. For clearly, as we all know, there are more people in the world than there is sound sleep. (Like the poet lamented: why so many poets, o lord, and so little poetry to go around?) Fleet footed sleep, one for each, no one’s to keep.

Someone must’ve waylaid my sleep last night, for I was up a bit later than usual, reading. And so when I did put off the lights and lay down still, it was a stream of words that my eyes caught instead, blinking away as they put them into staggered lines like typecast. My husband can hear my eyelashes scrape against the pillow and know that I’m up, thinking. He puts his arms around me then, to help me sleep. That is just one of the vast repository of lovable gestures that he is the master of. So aware of me, so generous, so demonstrative. But he wasn’t around last night and my thoughts inevitable turned to lovers past. And who better to share these with than the stars? So I stepped out.

Maybe they trap them by the dozen now – hundreds even, like Amur Falcons in Nagaland – in mist nets, to sell for a good price. Don’t open your eyes; they have traps set up for sleep.

The new moon had set and the stars were like fireflies in the swaying trees. There must be a better metaphor for that, I thought, and they immediately turned into lights flaring on distant ships tossing upon the stormy sea of eucalyptus leaves. I paced the courtyard, whirling like a dervish to frame the dots within the gaps, to join them in familiar shapes. When you’ve spent enough time with the stars they take on poses that only you can see. Orion with his bow drawn taut had already gone over the horizon, and his dachshund, with the jewel of Sirius in his collar had followed close behind. Straight overhead, Virgo lay back languorous to rub the belly of Leo, who sat up all of a sudden to see what Hydra was looking at. Triangulating my way from the more familiar characters, I arrived to the eucalyptus trees and was surprised to see Argo, sailing on its eternal voyage with Jason and the Argonauts to bring back the Golden Fleece. It was no coincidence then.

I sat down on the steps at the end of the courtyard and the wind rose, blowing in gusts so the susurrant leaves sounded like incoming waves washing over me, lifting me bodily and tilting me till the world seemed to keel. That’s how it is with first love too. The only thing missing was the hyena. That was a long time ago. Ten years now. Man, I’m growing old! (Don’t ‘man’ me, my husband would say. He doesn’t like me talking like that, “like a teenager trying to sound cool”, he says.)

Everyone else had gone to bed while I sat up with the boy who first showed me the stars. It was our first trip together to the forest and we didn’t want to miss a thing. Who knew when the forest might bestow upon us its magic, the precious encounter, the moment that we’d remember for the rest of our lives? And so we sat on the steps of the veranda of the forest guest house, letting the night wash over us, bringing us closer.

My memory colours the hyena a shimmering silver, striped as if with deep shadows, the fur along its back bristling. It walked across the lawn against the far hedge, from the right to the left; it did not even know that it was watched. And it paints the boy next to me as a cool presence in thin cotton pyjamas, his skin smelling of the forest stream; for he always knew what one ought to be doing at any moment, and that’s where we’d been going for our evening baths – to a small rocky pool where giant spiders had stretched their webs to catch the hairy caterpillars that fell with alarming regularity.

I haven’t really given in to memories like this before: it feels a bit like cheating. Do mothers think about what their lives could’ve been if they hadn’t had kids? And does that make them bad mothers?

Memories lie dormant like little voles in the winter. They must be roused and fed and allowed to gambol about once in a while, allowed a spring and a summer so to speak, however brief; lest they go into a sleep too deep and be lost forever. I held this one in the hollow of my hand, holding it up next to my face the better to see, and it snuggled in, making the most of the warmth. It was so close I could smell the dust on its fur…

The crunch of dry leaves startled me, bringing me back with a jolt to the treed courtyard with the swaying eucalyptus. I looked up and saw a large black mass move against the silhouetted trees. Bristles along its back shimmered in the starlight colandering through trees, and I held my breath. Then the light shone upon its tushes. He got wind of me after he had passed me and he paused, gave me a perfunctory grunted nod, and then snuffled on, his stiff tail wagging. A wild boar. I’d sometimes seen him about during the day, his sleep having eluded him.

Maybe sleeps sometimes do double shifts, going to the animals of the night once we wake up, taking with them our restless dreams and then bringing us theirs.

Conversations with Santokh Sarungbam, aka Corvus vagabunda


“So when you eventually did decide to settle down, why did you pick a place so far away?” I asked Santokh.

“So far away from where?” she replied, “My work table is in the bedroom. My bedroom is right next to my kitchen. The bathroom is outside, in the apple orchard. It’s all I needed. I am right here.”


Last year, I met and stayed for a couple of days with Santokh Sarungbam – writer, thinker, story teller, farmer, inveterate confabulator. The following passages are based on conversations I had with her, interspersed with some of her poems. 


Distance brings things together

  There’s poetry in everything

  but most of all there’s poetry in the links between things

  in the analogies that arise

  between things distant, seemingly unrelated

 

  I guess when you look at things from far enough away

  they will inevitably seem to meet 

  like the tall buildings in the cities that seem

  to lean together conspiratorially

  when you look up at them from the street

  like the mountain peaks

  when seen from afar

  like the parallel tracks of the railway lines

  meeting at infinity

 

  Distance brings things together

 

I stumbled upon a book of poems in a little book shop in Lower Sohra (Cherrapunji) titled The Good Wife. Most of it was free verse, with misshapen sentences. What caught my eye was the name of the author – Corvus vagabunda. That’s Latin for ‘the vagabond crow’, as any enthusiastic birdwatcher would know.

 

“It wasn’t a heteronym, like Pessoa’s many heteronyms, no. It was just a pseudonym. I had to distance myself from the ideas that I was writing about. They were still very much my ideas; I was just forced to distance myself from them.

“I hadn’t written anything since my marriage. I just couldn’t write, because every time I sat down to write, I imagined my husband reading what I was writing, and more often than not, I knew that it would hurt him, or sadden him – or at the very least, affect him. I did not want that. But I couldn’t just keep all these thoughts and characters bottled up inside; it was maddening; I would’ve burst, PHURFFF!! Gone mad! And so, the vagabond crow – the brazen profligate given to blasphemy; who held nothing sacred, mocked everything; who reveled in the unspeakable.”

 

 

Dreams of Infidelity

 

Travelling back to her husband

after a month in the field she dreams

of infidelity

these aren’t the dreams of her youth

of promiscuity

when she dreamt of places

of villages full of clean young men

courteous and well built

interested in her

cl*t

Now she would stand back and politely ask

the newfound friend

 

do you wanna kiss?”

 

And some of the poems were pleasantly startling, to say the least. I claim to be a writer these days, and this looked like a story worth following up. So, I contacted the publishers and got hold of an address in a small town in coastal Kerala only to be told that she’d moved. That address got me a phone number though, which turned out be that of a niece living in London, who gave me her e-mail address.

 

The Good Wife came much later. It was a collection of poems that I wrote over the next couple of years. To begin with I was writing short stories, putting strange names to people and places around me to write about incidents that took place in my own life. I was writing strictlypure fiction’. 

“I wrote about death, depression, alcoholism – all morbid stuff, really – and how love can trap us. I did not want fame, or recognition. Those were youthful ideas that I’d long outgrown; now I just wanted to write, to put things into words, and thus into perspective. I wanted to be able to stand back and look at my own life and understand it.”

 

Maybe I Don’t Understand Love

the saddest part is that he knows

deep down

I think

that he’s wasting his life

for nothing

 

they gave birth to me

 

                             how can I just leave them to die?

who will take care of them

                                           if not I ?

but it’s obvious in his smile

at times

the martyr’s choice

after he’s consoled his mother

and put her to bed

or brought his father home from the wedding reception

yet again

drunk

 

I never forgot that she loved me

even when she did, said liz murray

he          hates her

at times      

like when she’s been taking her medication

and is fine

and calls him names

and then he says             the meanest things

about her

to me

I’ve learnt not to respond with anything

but the kindest words then

for tomorrow

or the day after

or the day after that

he will forget these times

and remember

that he loves his mother

and also that I said mean things about her

 

It was a crisp winter day, with furrows of cirrus far away in a blue sky. No one answered, and so I went in, latching the little gate behind me. The courtyard was paved over with ancient-looking flagstones, one of which had a depression, like a mortar. A little path led away from between the side of the house and the large shed stacked high with firewood, to a cowshed behind. There were some terraced fields to the side, hemmed in by tall trees and thick bamboo. The chickens shuffled away, raising dust in their wake that shone in the late afternoon winter sun.

 

“The very first piece that I wrote was actually an interview with this character, the pseudonym, who would from then on do all my inconvenient writing for me. It was about how I met Corvus vagabunda, the wandering crow.

“I used to travel a lot then, and I had this loud, awkward way of writing dark, morbid stuff; so, I thought the name was quite apt. I remember I’d initially thought of making him a man, but then the mental gymnastics required to switch all the genders around him made me settle for a woman.

“It was liberating. I could finally write about my true feelings, about how I actually felt. I could discover how I truly felt. And then I realized that some ideas just sounded better coming from her.”

 

The Good Wife

so          many    poems

pledging             undying love

lamenting           unrequited love

mourning           love lost forever

 

where are the poems

living     love

 

they lived happily ever after

sure. but how?

 

like jack gilbert’s poem about how

courage is not

the momentary madness but the steadfast evenness

day after day

year after year

an equal music                even

 

even the books on child rearing

are almost poetic

when they say

              you will feel like flinging the baby out the window

              but the impulse will pass

you will still be the loving mother

same as ever

or even more so

 

where is the poetry of marriage?

that says

              you will feel like having a goddamned fling

but the impulse will pass

and you will still be the loving wife

same as ever

or some such thing

 

I found her working in the fields, her curly salt-and-pepper hair tied back hastily with a rag. She stood up, with a huge radish she’d just pulled out still in her hand, her eyes crinkling up as she squinted at me, the hints of a smile already at her lips. Then she saw the book I was holding out, more like a shield than a visiting card, and a smile of recognition broke through, sending deep furrows all the way down her cheeks.

 

“I got away with it for quite a while before my husband got suspicious. He saw all this correspondence with publishers and editors and nothing coming out of it. But we’d been together long enough by then and he knew me; so it wasn’t long before he came to terms with it. He even came up with a little doggerel:

 

“Poetry, a mistress most unforgiving

consuming hearts for a living

ruining writers and their lives

and those of their hunbands/ wives

 

“A part of me knew that love was important, but another part – the more interesting part, perhaps – knew that poetry was, well, life. My pseudonym helped be bridge the gap. It helped me come back to my poetry; and through that, closer to myself.

 

Not          me

never do I feel connected     to me

on waking up in the morning    however

tenuously

 

sometimes I pause in the middle of my chores

and looking down upon my hands    don’t

recognize them       whose could they be?

thin wrists    fingers brittle   their motives unknown    their master

anonymous    can they be linked

justifiably           to me?

 

somnambulatorily    for days

on end    I walk around    my thoughts

meandering through the crowds’

eroding no bank    upsetting no    soul    no    one

occasionally rethinking morality     and my being    only to disavow it

neatly putting it away    never to be

exhumed          feeling

 

eerily

like I’m not myself    but

someone

else

 

 

What does one live for?

A madness, surely.

What does one live for? It used to be a question to muse about at leisure, an abstract philosophical query that I could take up as and when the fancy took me. But of late it’s acquired trappings more somber. The transformation, though a gradual one, is now pressing: its urgency brought on by the madness.  And the madness didn’t take me by surprise either, it is like a disease whose relentless advance you can witness but do nothing about.

We lead a dual existence. Within us, thrive the person who lives, and the person who watches. There is the actor, the I, who acts out his part; and there’s the lone observer in the audience, the eye, the thinker. We can go about our daily lives without much thought, just live it out practically – work, laugh, socialize, sleep. That’s how we strive to live, with some sense of the familiar, some semblance of a routine; it’s easier on the brain. And then every once in a while, we seem to stop and think about our lives, about events, about things said or done, or maybe the larger picture, about where we’re going; that is the stock-taking.

We are born into a world that is in a state of tumultuous flux. But a limited exposure, coupled with an overwhelming sense of wonder that that miniscule snapshot stirs within us, leads us to assume – at least initially – that the world has always been the way it is. This is just one of the many illusions that we are born burdened with; born as we are into a web, an elaborate tapestry of ideas and ideals, of insecurities and boundaries, of beliefs and principles that we are woven into until they shackle us and tie us down.

But we revel in this confinement for it puts us at ease. We could go our entire life and not think beyond the immediate actions of the actor.

We see other people living out their lives, and these are the standards we seek to match, the ideals we try to emulate. We collect purses, shoes, books, houses, people, papers, places, experiences, birds, trees, kilometers, reps, peaks, songs, bikes, guns, rocks, coins, whatever our group considers important, whatever it values, whatever can keep us from thinking.

Perhaps the immensity of space and time, when dwelt upon, is too terrifying; the possibilities in the absolute absence of definite limits too daunting and so we shun it. Instead, we seek comfort in the familiar, occasionally dwelling upon questions like, ‘what does one live for?’ before retreating to a life we are accustomed to. Maybe thought is unnecessary, and it’s best to be just the actor. It is a possibility. But sadly, the process is irreversible. Once you’ve stepped onto the path of thought, it grabs you by the hair and drags you on, and then there’s no going back, especially if you have the madness.

In a story my father sometimes told me, a holy man visiting a wicked landlord blessed him with a settled life and cursed a kindly farmer to a life of wandering. Perhaps it was two villages and not two people, but I forget. The idea, anyhow, was that the wicked landlord’s malice be contained while the kind farmer’s benevolence spread far and wide. I don’t remember if I found the idea of the farmer’s involuntary sacrifice noble at the time, since a settled life is what constitutes happiness for most, and all a farmer would pray for, in story after story, was that the seasons keep turning, the rains be plentiful and the crop, good.           

I often went back to the story and at some point, began to wonder if the holy man had been getting at something that the storytellers missed. Maybe what he wanted for the farmer was not a forced sacrifice, but in fact, a better life. Perhaps Chatwin is right, that we were meant to be wanderers, and settling down ruined it all. Forced out of our comfort zones we would begin to think, and in thought would we come alive.

It comes in bouts, this madness. Like hunger. And poetry. For I don’t think the body can survive sustained exertion. I wake up in the morning and check, like for a cold or a bad throat, for symptoms of it. Maybe it is a disease, caused by some parasitic bacteria that would stand to gain immensely in reproductive fitness if I die unknown in some distant land. And like the rabid dog manipulated into biting and thus infecting his victim, I too must seek out the destiny that awaits me, my fate, maneuvered by the madness.

There is a liver fluke that infests the guts of cattle. It’s life cycle passes through a snail and an ant. The ant bits a blade of grass and is suspended upside down, waiting to be ingested by the cow.

One of the symptoms – or maybe it is the effect – of the madness is a shift in the weights attached to pros and cons. Most decisions in life, like which road to take at a fork, for instance, are made by a value-judgment. We attach weights to the pros and cons associated with each road and then choose the one that comes out on top. These weights, though seemingly objective, are nothing but our subjective perceptions and feelings: they are emotions externalized, projected to future events and predicted as best as can be; and mistakes of judgment occur when we misjudge the weights.

Emotions, though, are not absolute even in their subjectivity. Feelings neither. What pleases me today might not tomorrow, and that is because I change. All of us do, we constantly change. Emotions and feelings draw upon my current worldview, my perspective, my set of beliefs. However, we are fine with most of our decisions because these changes are gradual and though we may be very different people in ten years’ time, we are more or less ok from day to day. The coherence of our lives enables us to make sense of our decisions.

This is where the madness comes in, wreaking havoc. It causes the weights to change dramatically by drastically shifting perspectives and worldviews. With this shift in the framework, one is left floundering for a stable point of reference, an infallible truth that one can rely upon. For instance, when faced by a certain choice, the decisions a settled farmer with a family would make will be very different from the decisions made by a wandering mendicant. And they can both justify their respective decisions to themselves. But what happens when the farmer goes to sleep having made a decision and wakes up in the rough robe of the wanderer, staff in hand?

He can then quote Sartre. “Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it anymore. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. I am quite at ease this evening, quite solidly terre-a-terre in the world.”

And thus it is that I now seek an answer to that old question that now has immediate relevance; that is now so practical and real. It is supposed to provide me with a framework within which to think.

What is it that one lives for?

I often think of my life as a book I’d like to read; a life less ordinary. But then I run the danger of choosing for my future, the past of famous dead men. Did I say that or did Kazantzakis? I wouldn’t put it beyond myself to simply want a life that is tragic. Why I want this is hard to say. A simple answer I often think of is that that’s what gets the poetry going. Why is poetry important? Well, what else is there to life anyway, but poetry?

Because next to travel, and often alongside it, art is the only real marker of life that I think is worth anything. I may be mistaken, but it is through travel and art that I consider my days well spent.

And happiness is but fleeting, it is sorrow that is deep. It’s almost as if I would like to actively work towards making my life a tragedy. The actor in pain would give the thinker food for thought. The actor living a battered life will ensure that the thinker leads a sublime existence. When you force yourself awake early in the morning, the groggy actor is miserable, but the observer in you revels in that miniscule suffering. I want to let the actor grapple with the meanest of circumstances until he is broken, lash him until the lacerated flesh yields up something inspiring.

The observer is beginning to wrest control over the actor as the bouts of madness get longer, bigger, more ominous. The only thing that holds me back is the ever-diminishing voice that says, this too shall pass: it is but a passing bout of madness.

But what if it leaves in its wake an altered landscape that I don’t recognize anymore? What if the coherence oh my existence actually snaps? Or worse yet, what if I’m stuck forever between the two worlds? Imagine the cracked freeze of the moment when you are able to hold the two discordant perspectives simultaneously: the farmer and the wanderer merging at the frontiers of thought. It is a terrifying place, the mind.

Sometimes I feel the entire burden of a lifetime’s worth of thoughts weighing me down and I don’t even recognize them as mine; and I wonder what it’s all about.

The burden of feeling, says Pessoa, the burden of having to feel.

Wednesday 17 May 2023

Cyclic Existence

                                                                At times          In bouts
                                                             I have this          and in tides
                                                  irrepressible urge          my wretched heart connives
                                                                              says
                                                         the farmer to          the mendicant to
                                                           his fields to           his bowl to 
                                             just get up and leave          make a seed of my soul
                           leave everything behind and seek          send my guts down as roots
                                     out my destiny. to breathe          into the soil and grow us food 
                                        in experiences and spew          as the seasons come and go 
                                      out songs that'll leave you          in the garden that we sow 
                                                               all breath         and water

b
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Rousing a memory, long disavowed

Many years ago now my cousin told me this: my aunt would tell her at bedtime that sleeps fly through the air, spreading out over the land li...