Eveything Else Is A Bonus

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

In Blue Nights, Joan Didion writes about the long and blue twilights, during summer, just before it gets engulfed by the inky blackness of the night as an analogy for how ‘ordinary and expected blessings‘ like good health, finding love, marriage, bringing up a child, travels, new beginnings can be wiped away by sudden and unexpected catastrophes, uprooting the very foundation of a life that one had carefully built over the years. She has a career as a successful novelist and memoirist; a wonderful family; travels around the world; fame and money; and then came the irreparable and sudden loss of her husband and only daughter within a span of less than two years. The anxiety, sense of foreboding, grief and the subdued nihilism in her words made me realize how flippant most of us are towards the “ordinary blessings“.

I have everything I need; a late-blooming yet deep and strong bond with my parents, a sibling who knows me inside out and loves me despite it, seven ‘soul sisters‘ who creates unmeasured joy and camaraderie, a job that enables me to pay my bills comfortably and brings in a sense of making a direct and real difference in the lives of others (in whatever small way), a cosy home resounding with love and laughter; good health of my near ones, and here I use the term loosely to denote just the absence of any major illnesses; a sense of wanderlust, wonder and stubborn hope that (now) fails to get marred even by the dreariest of circumstances; stacks and stacks of books overspilling from every shelf in my room; and the love of a kind man.

Yet, not so long ago, I was drowning in the dark and turbulent waters of mourning about what I want and didn’t (yet) get. And no one wants to be ordinary. The hopelessness that stems from the knowledge that one has not yet achieved the universally accepted cornerstones of ‘success‘ in their specific profession, negates every little achievement and joy that were present at the beginning of the career. Tangled in self-doubt and an unfulfilled and misplaced sense of entitlement, the thought of settling for less pained me to the very core. My parents are quite supportive and happy with the very fact that I am the first and only doctor in the entire extended family including the past generations. But it meant nothing to me, because I had failed my own expectations owing to reasons that varied from circumstantial to self-sabotage or being just lazy. Anxiety didn’t help as much as ruined my confidence every passing moment. My whole worth as a person began to be centred around my academic performance. Nothing else mattered.

I remember my little cousin once asked me the reason behind the suicide of a movie star and I replied that it was allegedly due to depression, which many speculated was over a stagnant career. My cousin failed to understand why an actor who had surpassed thousands of people struggling to get not just a role in a movie and had attained world-wide fame and recognition had killed himself. How was he a ‘failure‘? I struggled to explain to my cousin that success is a subjective term, rooted deeply in comparison to others, and that happiness and well-being is centred around it to varying degrees.

Today I have reached a point in my life where I am thankful for every blessing I had been given unasked for; but I know the helplessness that many people might have due to failed expectations and the vicious thoughts it spurs about the absence of any way out, the complete oblivion of hope, the negligible sense of self-worth and the highly exaggerated delusion of what others will say. I had been trapped in that web of negativity and depression a few years ago for long enough to toy with the idea of embracing death in a bid to escape living. It was the result of a cumulative despair, feeding on certain untoward incidents in my life, that tipped me over the edge when I was challenged with a a period of stagnancy in my career.

While I was battling such negativity, a childhood friend passed away due to post-operative complications following a minor surgery. The day after she died the sun shone brightly in a brilliant blue sky, the bougainvillea was a riot of colour, my mother prepared my favourite dish, my father broke through my wall of gloom with his booming laughter; my sister kicked me in the butt and grinned impishly when I wanted to borrow something from her wardrobe; the television blared upcoming movie trailers, a few friends sent me a postcard from a holiday in Ladakh (because they knew how much I loved the mountains); I read an Alice Munro story; and I had an overwhelming realization that my friend will never experience these ordinary and mundane blessings again.

The world will go on, will bring in the new and hold on to the nostalgia of the past, and she won’t be there to know any of it.

Happiness is being alive. That’s it. Everything else is a bonus. And I had, a decade ago, let the fleeting thoughts of ending it all creep in to my mind; I don’t regret those thoughts, nor am I ashamed. I am immensely relieved to pry myself away from the clutches of such hopelessness and despair. Even now, my life is devoid of the ‘certain things that I want‘, but I am ready to work for them, strive towards them, wait for them. I realize that I will never have all the things I want; but I have everything I need, a wider focus of what this world has to offer and yes, I am alive to enjoy it all.

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Pandemic Musings

This post might not make much sense. I just want to share how I feel right now. It might seem too preachy, the kind of post I would have skipped reading too, but today the value of these words has been reinforced in my life.

Treasure every moment. Treasure every person in your life. Count every single blessing; from the ability to go to a normal day at work, to quietly eat a meal without any huge worries looming in the horizon. It’s highly disturbing and scary how easily one stands to lose everything they hold dear in life, somtime all it takes is a mere second. A pandemic is ruthless.

.I face every hurdle; yet plan expectantly towards a future, the next week or the next decade of my life; hope for miracles; work towards the dream career, the love of my life, the books I want to read, the places I want to see, the children I want to have someday, confess the secrets I carry in my heart, do the things I had been holding back, putting them off for a distant day or letting them go too easily, and oh, the dreams, so many dreams! And a mere gust of wind can carry everything to the edge of a cliff, threatening to topple me and my dreams over, and I hang precariously, not knowing what to do.

Such gusts of wind can be quite unpredictable and blow into anyone’s life. What happens then to the career you fret about, the love you have, the dreams you nurtured, the children you wanted to have, the places your feet never tread on? What then? Only one word comes to my mind. Unfair. But who had said it would be fair?

So, I treasure everything I have, even that petty colleague, the extra kilos, a broken heart, the windswept hair, my books with dog-eared pages, that tiny chunk of blue sky I see from my window. I won’t put off anything till tomorrow. I will hold my dear ones near. I will do only what I love. And not waste my time worrying about petty setbacks. Every blessing we have is palpable during COVID times. Especially the ordinary, everyday ones.

Intuition

I never really relied on the (in)famous “intuitive” power women claim to be gifted with. Till recently I used to believe people unquestioningly, and was of the general opinion that all people have an inherent “goodness” in them, and since I don’t want to hurt anyone, why would anyone ever hurt me? Dumb reasoning, I know.

I was taken on many a ride by friends, acquaintances and strangers alike because my reputation of being the “ever-trusting” fool preceded me everywhere I went! I used to unquestioningly believe each and every word the people I loved and cared about said to me. Not a very wise decision as I ended up hurt quite often. Sense got drilled into my head much later. I finally have begun not to take everything at face value and trust my intuition after neglecting it for too long. I did follow my intuition when it came to all things except for when it came to judging people. If I had not done that, I’d have saved myself a couple of heartbreaks.

I am a firm believer of the fact that a lie would be caught sooner or later, in ways we least expect of. Every time I’ve lied about something, my family came to know about it sooner or later, even when I had made sure no one can ever detect it. So they came to know of each time I’d made excuses of bunking class, or had met my ex secretly, or made excuses about not completing a chore assigned to me…just about anything. They will come to know, sometimes as late as a decade! Sometimes I confess and sometimes they come to know because I goof up and forget what I’d lied about!! It’s easy to tell the truth…you don’t have to make an effort to remember something that hadn’t happened, but for a telling a lie you need to be on constant alert for the rest of your life and remember what story you’d made up. It can be very taxing. My mother takes one look at me and immediately knows if I’m making excuses or fibbing about something.

So, I’ve experienced it myself in a small scale, and my belief that lies get caught sooner or later only got stronger. My mother intuitively knew every time I fibbed. And so did I, every time someone cheated me or lied to me. It took time, sometimes years…but I eventually come to know. ALWAYS! I find it difficult to explain, because it’s hard for me to ever doubt the ones I love, but sometimes an intuition gets so strong and it inevitably turns true when I follow it. Every time.

If something doesn’t sit right with you, think and question why it is so. Don’t just ignore that voice. Don’t become suspicious of everything, but don’t take every word and emotion at face value either.

Watch Out For What You Wish

How can I be sure of what I might want a year from now, when I seek a million different things every day? Not long ago I had the good sense to finally accept the fluidity of my thoughts and desires that refuse any stagnancy. I am also aware that getting what one wishes for doesn’t always guarantee happiness.

I grew up cursing the dust, smoke and blaring noise of vehicles; I detested the hectic buzz of cities where everyone was in a hurry and longed for the slow and meditative pace of life in the hills or a quiet village. In my relatively short life, I had already formed opinions about what is ideal and lying in a patch of sunshine and reading, dipping my feet in the silken sheet of a river at sunset, and long conversations by the glow of a kerosene lamp were prerequisites of it. I would like to mention here that the books that I read in the formative years of childhood were of the likes of Heidi (with its mountains, stern but kind-hearted grandfather, ruddy-cheeked children, goat cheese and a bed of hay), Anne of Green Gables (trees, brooks, books and conversations), My Family and Other Animals (Corfu and its glorious flora and fauna, and its quirky inhabitants) and stories of Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond (with his turtles in a shallow pond, leopards and foxes in dark forests, haunted houses standing alone atop hills, old widows who had a treasure of stories to tell, deodar trees and yes again, the mountains). And then there were my father’s stories of growing up in his village where he swam in the Brahmaputra, and was surrounded by people and surroundings so idyllic that made hardships and poverty not just bearable but tackled with an optimism. I craved for such a life, surroundings that provided a premise for stories to occur.

My wish came true in late 2011 when I enrolled in the compulsory rural posting under NRHM and was sent to work in a remote village in Assam. By the end of the first month I went dizzy with excitement by the steady diet of impossibly green fields, fresh air and bluest blue skies, witnessing the simple (and slow) lives of the people who spent their mornings digging up sweet potatoes and afternoons taking long siestas. By the end of the second month I was ready to commit seppuku for the lack of excitement. Time stopped in that place and I slept off at eight every night only to be woken up at odd hours to deliver babies. The simple life got on my nerves to the extent that I could have torn apart the limbs of the next person who called up to say, “I envy your quiet sojourn“. Every time I returned home, it felt like an escape from a prison. I gulped in lungfuls of polluted air, chalked in every hour of my weekend with some activity, ate out, went shopping, surrounded myself with noisy and boisterous people, and went to bed at two in the morning. I missed the noisy, grimy, hectic city life where there was always something going on. I still crave for the quiet hills and idyllic sunsets but now I am wise enough to realize that I want a balance between the quietness and the noise. I want both, I love both. 

I fell in love when I was nineteen. But it was out of reach and in the following eight years I wished to recreate that first love in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. I got attracted to only emotionally unavailable men or to those that didn’t have the potential to evolve into anything substantial. I created illusions of love. Was it a subconscious protective instinct? I don’t know. Love had brought out a side of me that I didn’t like-clingy, jealous, insecure and nurturing worthless hopes. That’s not how it is supposed to be, is it? Yet I convinced myself that I was wishing for romantic love. I was ecstatic when that first love walked into my life again, but everything that followed clashed with my wish. When I think hard and clear about it, I don’t really want the romantic love and all its complications and responsibilities in my life right now. Not until the right person and the reasons comes along. Then why did I wish for it? Because I mistook my need for quiet companionship as a need for love and this lack of clarity led to unnecessary anguish. But now I know better. 

I never had any definite ambition in life; I just wished for a career that brought me job satisfaction, stimulated the mind, gave something back to the people, and made me financially secure and independent. I ended up being a physician. But there were few unseen and sometimes self-induced obstacles on that path. I am happy with the career I have chosen; not many get to be a part of this noble profession and heal lives. I am just grateful that I got the opportunity and sincerely carry on my duties. But it hasn’t brought me the happiness that I had hoped it would. And I know why. I am always eager to learn and improve my skills, but it lacked that rush of passion and go-getter ambition. Instead I am passionate about writing. The irony is that I am skilled in the medical profession that doesn’t invoke in me a mad fervour, and even though all I want to do is to write I lack the talent for it. There is the clash again.

Often I get what I wish for but it doesn’t guarantee the happiness that I had imagined. So be careful about what you wish for, and devote some time to know what you really want. People change and so do their desires and wants. Always foresee that possibility when you make that next grand wish.

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How To Lose Your Sanity In One Easy Step

Step 1: Try to please everyone.

Do you remember that scene from F.R.I.E.N.D.S when Rachel’s mother behaves outright rude with Monica for a minor (and unintended) lapse, yet Monica continues to apologize profusely and disproportionately to her? There are people who can remain impervious to others’ opinions of them. I am not one of them and have an innate need to please everybody, avoid conflicts and fall-outs. It would be sheer idiocy to actualize my desire and I succeed in not being a ‘Monica‘ when it involves people whose actions or thoughts I detest strongly. I turn completely indifferent to their existence and memories. But when the people I respect and admire harbour a distorted perception of me owing to misunderstandings or miscommunication, I worry myself sick about setting things right. I would fret about where I had gone wrong, apologize continuously, take repeated initiatives to sort things out, and allow them to stamp all over my dignity by giving undue importance to their (lack of) response. It would torture me to wonder how I am being perceived, and in my restlessness, contribute negatively to that distorted image by offering unnecessary justifications. Recently I went through a similar situation and it disturbed me a lot. Between the two of us, the generous share of wisdom belongs to my younger sister and I often look to her for advice.

Sis: Why do you care so much about what others think of you? 

Me: I don’t know. I can’t help it.

Sis: Then prepare yourself for a lifetime of self-induced tragedy.

Me: How do I get out of this need to seek everyone’s approval?

Sis: Seek approval of only those who matter to you and for whom you matter. Judge yourself if a person falls in that category. If no, don’t think about it again. If yes, try to sort out any misunderstandings or apologize appropriately and genuinely for any lapses. If they don’t acknowledge or appreciate your efforts, don’t go overboard by giving others the power to hurt you.

Me: I was being an idiot, wasn’t I?

Sis: A first-rate one.

Me: Hmm.

Sis: There’s no use wasting your mental peace over unnecessary issues. But also keep in mind how you are quick to shed off excess baggage of certain people and fussy about who you let into your life. Sometimes people might be selective about letting you into their lives too, and it might not be because you had done something ‘wrong’. Accept that.

Me: *big kiss*

It won’t be easy to change overnight, but I have to learn to let go of my need to please all those whom I had let into my life. That is the basic requirement to preserve my sanity.

As if on cue, I stumbled upon this wonderful children’s book by Plath as an “an admonition against the perilous preoccupation with other people’s opinions“.

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The Price of Resilience

When I was a child, I used to accompany my parents to visit a family whom they had known for more than a decade. The couple had lost their elder daughter, then aged four, in a road traffic accident a couple of months before their second child was born. Both their present children, a boy and a girl, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Even as a child, I could comprehend the graveness of the adversities faced by them. But no one in their family sulked about the apparent unfair and cruel blows life had dealt them. The whole house was a riot of laughter and activity. Sketchbooks, crayons, plastic trucks, glass marbles, frisbees, half-eaten packets of potato chips and a football were always strewn around the living room. Since the children were the biggest fans of Michael Jackson, they often used to rev up the music volume and give impromptu performances. They continued to quietly celebrate the birthday of their departed daughter, just the four of them, huddled around a chocolate cake baked at home, and the kids were oddly solemn in the remembrance of the elder sister they had never known.

There was none of the expected shadow of gloom hovering over their home; in fact often we could hear their laughter from the street as we turned into their home. But I was not convinced that not even a shred of anger, disappointment or sadness lingered in the lives of their parents; and was always on the lookout for hidden signs. But they were no more exasperated about their children than my parents were about my sister and I. I was suddenly disappointed about the hue and cry my parents raised about the glass of milk we refused to drink at bedtime or procrastinating on homework. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and bewilderment at their amazing coping mechanism and asked aunty how she managed to accept whatever life had brought her so uncomplainingly. Didn’t she ever get angry that this wasn’t exactly the life that she might have envisioned when she was young? Wasn’t she scared of what the future held?

They weren’t sticklers for religion, but they believed in the presence of a higher being who would look out for them, as they continued to make the best of whatever life brought them. She told me that the slightly detached overseer of our lives brought such obstacles into the lives of only those who had the strength to tackle them. She grew angry a thousand times every day but over the same causes that every parent frets about; untidiness, temper tantrums, excessive TV hours etc. And yes, she had found everything that she had always wanted in life; a loving husband, two happy children, a wonderful job, good health and lots of laughter. It is all about perspective. The journey was tough, and peppered with losses and obstacles; but the destination more than made up for that. She was content with what she had made of the sufferings life brought her. She was proud of it. As for the future, who can say what it held; it is useless worrying about the things we haven’t come to yet and giving up the pleasures of the present. She preferred to spend her days equipping her children with life skills, good education, ensuring they were healthy and happy rather than worrying about how they would cope in the world later.

These words had stayed with me and I still find them oddly consoling. Even now when I want to scream my lungs out, every time a cascade of new obstacles flow into my life and wonder if there will ever be any respite; I think of her words. I remind myself that I am resilient enough to handle this. Last night I had another health scare as the word cancer sprung up again, barely one and half months after I had lost my elder sister to it. I had lost three family members in quick succession in the past five years to cancer. And frankly, I am tired of it. I am tired of people dropping dead, when they are young and full of dreams, leaving the rest of us to battle the loss. All I crave for is a life where all my near and dear ones are healthy and happy; and I can get to worry only about things like what to wear for an evening out, long hours at work, the bad food at cafeteria, and get adequate time to lament about and pine for a lost love.

Sometimes I feel envious of those people whose lives had run such smooth courses, but then I remind myself that I haven’t been singled out, every one has their own private sorrows; and into each life some rain must fall, some more than the others. It has taught me to treasure the apparently mundane, everydayish things where nothing much happens; and revel in the infrequent but real joys that come my way.

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Quiet Dignity

I had allowed others to dig their heels into it, and the resultant dents still gives me nightmares. Loss of dignity by revealing one’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses to people who don’t value it, and the inability to say ‘no‘ to self can leave deep scars. There is a tendency to indulge in self-pity, blame others, and refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of one’s own decisions. But good sense eventually drifts in with the passage of time as one gathers the scattered pieces of life. The only lesson that stuck with me from the past is that absolutely nothing or no one is worth compromising my own dignity and self-respect for. It comes from being unapologetic about who I am and the choices I make, with full responsibility for their consequences. It would be sheer idiocy to give the reins of my life to those who have the ability to hurt me, and lament about it when they eventually do. Only I know what I feel and what I want in life, and that shapes my character. Others can only speculate about it, and these speculations shape reputation. I prefer the former and tend to be fiercely protective of it, shielding it from unworthy influences. 

Everything else that I treasure in life-family, love, work, books, travel- comes after it. My world revolves around my family and loved ones. But in my extended family, after years of revering age and being a mute observer, I stood up against few injustices; and even though it caused irreparable damage to certain ties, it brought to me a sense of relief and bolstered my sense of moral responsibility and dignity. I have even learnt to disguise my love and vulnerabilities. I would rather die than admit to the one I love that he has the ability to hurt me. I have done that in the past, and it is not a good feeling. It is tempting to tell out loud how I really feel, but then such confessions require a listener who understands it. Or else it ends up leaving a tornado of unrest that I have to rein in and quietly carry within myself for a long time. And that again is not a good feeling. As for career and work, it all comes down to doing what I love (or learning to love what I do) and carrying it out with utmost sincerity. It can be the most insignificant job in the world, but if it is done without any compromises of  integrity, it brings in a happiness and satisfaction that is hard to explain.

No matter how many skies fall, if your dignity is intact, you get the courage to go through another day.

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Shame

Last year, I was on night duty in the obstetrics& gynaecology department of a hospital and towards the early hours of morning, when all the babies that were supposed to be born sometime in the night were born and lying snugly against their mothers, and the doctors were enjoying a rare moment of calm, a young girl of fifteen and an EMT wheeled in a girl who was completely drenched in blood from her waist down.

She worked in a call center. A cab dropped her at the gate of her house every night. That morning she had told the driver that he needn’t take the trouble to turn into the her lane, he can drop her there, which was just a minute away from her home. Hers was the second house to the right. I keep repeating this sentence in my mind. How many times I had said it myself. It’s okay, I can walk from here. It’s okay, you can drop me here. But that night sixty seconds away from her home someone gagged her, pulled her into the bushes and raped her. When she didn’t reach home at her usual time and her phone turned unreachable, her younger sister called the cab. When the cab driver replied that he had dropped her half an hour ago, she called her neighbour and they went out into the street, already fearing the worst. They found her unconscious and bloodied right in the middle of the road. 

I saw her injuries. Her vagina didn’t stop spurting blood. Her blood pressure was barely measurable. I had witnessed so many emergency medical scenarios at the hospital. But this stumped me. I was too shocked to react. If this can happen a few metres away from your home, where can you be safe anymore? She had an emergency surgery to arrest the bleeding. She regained consciousness later that morning. She didn’t emote. She didn’t even cry. Her parents arrived later that day. The police came in for questioning. The matter was hushed up at the family’s insistence, who will marry their daughters! It never made it to the papers.

Nor did the case of the seven year old girl who was raped while she playing near the brick kiln where her mother worked. Professional ethics and humane responsibility don’t allow us to discuss about the rape victims even among ourselves, so as not to threaten revealing their identity and ordeal to the public. So we quietly watched as they got discharged after a week or two. I have no idea whether the criminals got caught and convicted. What shocked me is that the staggering number of rape cases that are reported is just the tip of the iceberg, so many go unreported and hushed up due to a collective shame of the victim’s family. That realization was hard.

I did it too, when I was molested in broad daylight in a shared auto while coming home from my college. I didn’t go to the police, I went to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist nervously laughed, “so the lesson is never to get into a shared auto. Think about the bright side, you weren’t raped“. I didn’t know how to react to what was being said to me. It’s been four years now and I am in a position where I can talk about it with some detachment and without any suffocating and nauseating disgust. I no longer re-create the various scenarios I could have come home that day without getting into that auto, I wasn’t in hurry whatsoever. The only remnant is an intense fear for letting my sisters roam around in this world.

A few months earlier of what happened to me, a friend of mine was stopped on that same lonely stretch of road on the way to our college by a man, who took out his penis and ejaculated on her dupatta. When he heard a car approaching, he escaped into the surrounding forest. The police was informed. They came three days later, and searched the forest for a ‘supposedly‘ madman (because in this ideal world only a madman holds up a young girl and shows her his penis? Ya, right; keep telling yourself that!) and didn’t find anyone.

When a Manipuri girl was raped a few years ago, near DU (or was it JNU), even my cousin and his father had raised questions about her character and then at her carelessness instead of anger at the heinous crime of which she was the victim. And I am ashamed to admit that I had nodded in affirmation then.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t know what is the solution to all these. It’s just that fast track courts and death penalty are only solutions for the aftermath. How to prevent it? It’s our mindset, our upbringing, our thoughts, our perceptions that needs changing. While growing up, I was told of the bad things a man can do to a woman; and it was passively accepted that if I will ever be careless enough not to abide by certain precautions, I will have brought upon myself the consequences of whatever might happen to me. I walk alone at night in skimpy clothes, obviously a man will rape me! That is what we are warned about at home and at schools and colleges.

No one warns the men. What about teaching them to respect women? I was aghast recently when I heard from my thirteen-year old cousin that the new girl in their class had taken a mid-term transfer to their school, because she was raped by her boyfriend in her previous school! I don’t how much of it is the over-active imagination of hormone-ridden teenagers, and how much of it is the truth; I am afraid to probe. I did ask my cousin how and what did he know about the word ‘rape‘? He sniggered as if it was a joke. They don’t even understand the ugliness of the word. And if they aren’t taught about it at this stage, they will be the one leching at women in a few years.

It’s all very distressing when you think about where to start, even the attempts seem so futile. But small changes at home and school, if each parent/teacher made genuine efforts to inculcate a mutual respect among the genders, without any discrimination, without any one feeling  that they are powerful enough to do whatever they want with the other, maybe things will change few generations from now. But as of now, it all looks very glum.

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When Can You Be Sure?

“They are young now, and in love. He meets her family over dinner. Later she takes him up the stairs into her room. They can’t stop laughing, and roll all over her bed. He has brought her a song, not a lame song shared by others. They listen to it together; lying on her bed, he taps his fingers to the rhythm, she stands with her hand on his knee.

She sat in the car and watched him flung his wedding ring into the bushes. She waited for him; he got into the car and slammed the door. The next moment he gets out and runs into the bushes to search for the ring. She helps him. Even in the throes of despair when their love was ready to topple over into unseen depths and never recover, they have this moment of frantic search for the remnant of earlier vows.

They are strangers. He came from a broken home, questioned the need to utilize potential and had an open heart. She came from a family whose shards were glued for the sake of appearance, jumped from one bed to another in search of love and believed in her potential. He can’t get her out of his mind. She reluctantly indulges his wooing. They end up tap dancing and singing goofy songs. He tells her on the subway‘Let’s be a family’. She comes home, shuts the door, lies down and waits for the feeling to sink in. A shotgun wedding follows; a baby is in the offing. Their story starts five years later.

He teaches their daughter to eat breakfast like a leopard; and reminds his wife to wear seat-belts. They are monogamous. They hold each other in grief. They make efforts. She plays along to his whimsies. But when he tries to kiss her in the shower, she turns her face away. She cries over a dead dog and so much more. One day they let unequal ambitions and achievements creep in and grow roots.

He is forced to walk away.”

When can you be sure? When can you put your feet up and relax? Will love ever be enough? Why leave? Why stay? How long will hope triumph? Do you have the courage to let go? Do you have the courage to get the one you love? Will it survive?

Unanswered yet.

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Judge Me

So, you think you know where I am coming from. You label me. You don’t say it aloud, you don’t have to. The implied can speak volumes.

I am far from being non-judgmental too. I try not to be, and it takes a lot of effort to come out of my own confined perspective, step out of the sidewalk, march onto the other side and know what it is actually like to be someone else. It’s tedious, but worth it. Opinions are created in a jiffy. I like you. I don’t like you. Opinions are based on others’ opinions. Why bother to know for yourself? Who has the time?

When I was posted as an intern at the Nephrology Department, I was overworked and constantly irritated. A 40 year old man who was admitted for dialysis. Every morning, after the clinical rounds, he tried to tell me about his life, his job as a school teacher, his daughter and his political views. I reluctantly indulged these conversations for the first two days. Then I avoided him. He felt confused and hurt by the sudden restraint in my demeanor. But I justified it to myself that I can’t always have a sunny disposition or have enough time for every single patient I encounter. His continued attempts to converse with me irritated me enough on the fourth day and I told him quite coldly, “Well, unlike you, I have work to do.” I had already formed an opinion about him in my mind, a social leech. He didn’t bother to talk to me after that. I cringed inwardly but I just let it be. I came in to the ward at 9pm for the night duty. I found him asleep, and tiny hands wrapped around his neck in an embrace, as his daughter cuddled next to him. My heart melted. It was the exact way I cuddle up to my father. This man was a devoted father, loved his family, and tried to keep upbeat during his illness. I had hastily decided he was unworthy of being heard based on few minutes of interaction. I knew it was unfair and felt ashamed. This is just a minor example. We do it more often than we are aware of. Every single day.

A friend is a highly accomplished journalist and social activist. She travels into dreaded jungles, meets Maoists, sleeps on their cot and eats the food they cook. She traded heels for sturdy chappals, traveled all over the country and raised her voice for the unheard. She recently got accepted into a fellowship abroad and found love there. I am glad to see her so ecstatic, cherishing the changes in her personal life. But her well-wishers cluck in unison how Umreeka has changed her, she thinks about her own petty wishes now! Well, dear well-wisher and armchair activist, what she had done in the past five years,we won’t be able to do in a lifetime. She has every right to enjoy her youth, rise in love or wear heels. Why can’t she? Just because you have labeled her as a jhola-slinging, chappal-wearing, opinionated woman meant to work forever in the grassroots level. Let her choose the direction of her life, the only one we get! And if you talk about change as scandalous, I salute you for being the only person who had resisted the tempting winds of change from the moment you were born. Good for you.

Changes shape our lives. We love, we falter, we make mistakes, we hurt, we get hurt, we lie, we rise…it’s a never-ending roller-coaster ride. I have changed dramatically over the years. Not always for the better. But you see only what you want to see. You are boring, you say. Yes, I can’t giggle for hours or talk about vampire novels. You are a pushover. I believe in doing all I can towards the people in my life. You are fat, you say. I am glad you noticed my curves, no stuffings! You are ugly too. Thanks for making me feel insecure about the way I look all throughout my childhood and adolescence. Last year at a class reunion, all the girls were made to stand on a podium and the boys were asked to name their favorite girl. It was sexist, but done in good fun. But I felt trapped and very uncomfortable. I lurked behind the other girls, not daring to even look up. I knew no one was going to say my name, but I didn’t know how to prepare my face for that eventuality. Then I heard someone shout my name. It was a classmate of mine, someone I barely knew; someone I had made an opinion about as being haughty based on his measured words and frightening intelligence. He must have sensed my discomfiture, and relived me of it. I felt deeply grateful towards him and regretted my earlier opinion. Hasty opinions lead us to go through life in an uncalled for straitjacket manner.

What do you know about me? Were you privy to my childhood and adolescence? Do you know what makes me cry? What makes me snort with laughter? What do I treasure? What I abhor? What are my dreams? Why do I talk less? When can’t I stop talking? What scares me? What have I lost? What have I learnt? How I spend a quiet evening at home? Have I loved? What am I looking for?

You don’t know. Yet, you judge me. Hmmm.

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They Haunt Me In The Shower

Five sentences crowded in the left column of the newspaper jolted me this morning. I read about earthquakes, bombings, accidents, murders and cardiac arrests everyday; newspapers make sure we wake up to witness the end of lives in solemn obituaries or gory details or just few indifferent words. But these are snippets of wars in foreign lands or riots nearer home or a bespectacled old woman lovingly remembered by her sons and grandchildren, and even though these deaths aggrieve me, their anonymity cushions the blow and makes it only a fleeting presence in my memory.

How does the death of someone you know affect you?

I don’t mean the intimate circle of family, friends and loved ones or the innocent victims in distant, war ravaged lands. I’m writing about those in between, the people one might have known, met at some point in their lives and maybe had talked about the weather.

A good friend of mine from high school traced me through an online social network and we ended up sharing the latest gossip, reliving old memories and promises to meet soon. She used to ask the weird questions and when we were in the eight standard she made me choke on a burger when she asked out loud ‘Does pubic hair turn gray?’! She spelled it ‘trigonometry’ but pronounced it ‘trikonometry’. Her hands were never tired by the animated gestures that accompanied every sentence she spoke. Every night her mother shook her curly hair to drive out any mosquitoes before she got inside the mosquito net. Time and distance had faded her from being a close friend into the sphere of a mere acquaintance and I forgot about her in pursuing the mundane activities of my life. And one day I received a text message informing me that she had died following complications of a regular cholecystectomy! I wasn’t devastated or cried throughout the day. I envy people who can do that. I was sad, and profoundly so, but I didn’t shed a single tear. I was amazed at my own calm and strength in handling the emotional blow. Two years on, I avoid any conversation that brings her up. The grief refuses to ebb away in a gush of tears.

My pehi (paternal aunt) died two nights after I had scolded her about eating potatoes. She was a diabetic who never comprehended the seriousness of her ailment. She gulped down rosogullas in secret, as if discreetness would shield her from the ravages of diabetes. Her feet had sores which she hid in the folds of her saree. She thought it was a game her body would win as long as she plunged a syringe into her abdomen twice a day. She got hospitalized frequently, but always recovered in a few days and the family breathed a collective sigh of relief. Five years ago she didn’t even have the time to reach the hospital. She died on her bed in our ancestral home in the village. I had called up to know if she got admitted in the hospital yet and I was informed that my aunt had expired a few minutes ago. It is this phone call that will haunt me all my life; how my heart had stopped beating for a few moments and it was momentarily difficult to move my mouth to form words.

Today the newspaper told me that another life had ended and it threw up a familiar name. I sat transfixed for a few moments, then rationalized that it might be a namesake and called up few people who might help refute the newspaper claim, but the news only got confirmed. He was an acquaintance who I had worked with nearly two years ago. Through the little interaction I had with him, I knew him to be a good-hearted, calm, intelligent, unassuming, hard-working, sincere, sober and kind person with a wit that took time to get used to. He had warned us about the futility of a doctor trying to advise family members regarding health issues. He had said, “Ghar ki murgi daal barabar!” and all the interns had laughed. He had once admonished me for rushing into the NICU with my shoes on. We drank piping hot cups of tea on a winter night and talked about treatment protocol of asthma! I remember him with the ubiquitous muffler around his neck and a brown jacket. He wasn’t a friend or a close acquaintance, just someone I had known fleetingly. But I am distraught by this sudden end to a young life full of so many hopes and dreams, a life that had just started out, a life which was backed by achievements and a life so gentle. Tongues have started wagging about the cause of death, but is it necessary to know how, where, why or who drove him to the ends of despair and end his life? It’s a sad enough fact that we lost such a good person from amidst us.

The melancholy of young lives cut short by untimely deaths haunt me every moment till they merge into the subconscious only to erupt in moments of solitude. I am scared to close my eyes in the shower, for the thought of the dead haunt me in the claustrophobic, hazy cloud of steam. In morbid moments I feel guilty to be alive and breathing when someone my age, someone I had known, someone who might be more deserving of a place on this beautiful earth is no more. I am disturbed by the unpredictability and the abruptness of death, of dreams and hopes remaining unfulfilled or fading from the memories of loved ones.

Today the sky was the bluest blue and the sun had cast a golden glow and a pleasant breeze had rustled the leaves of the tree outside my window. The traffic continue to harass, new books are getting penned, movies will release this weekend, iPad5 is yet to release, fuel prices continue to rise, people will continue to fall in and out of love, the ruins of Atlantis might be discovered and Venice might sink; but the lost lives will no longer witness them. 

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When God Overdid My Fervent Teenage Wish For Feminine Curves And Turned Me Into A Ball Of Fat!

Children are impressionable and quick to soak up nasty comments that deter their self-image, sometimes for life, which can be a problem because none in the world can be crueler than school children.  My childhood and even my college years had been generously peppered with unkind and uncalled for comments about my weight, my unruly hair, my mannish jaw line and even my dark skin. I had been the pampered daughter of a large household and never made to realize that I lacked the physical attributes of beauty that ‘society’ had set down. The only comment about physical appearance I had ever faced till then was being affectionately nick-named ‘Baah Khori’ (bamboo stick) by my youngest Khura(paternal uncle) due to the effortless size zero figure I had and was blissfully unaware of such prejudices till I moved to Guwahati the year I entered my teens. 

I remember being in awe of a friend who wrote like a dream; but sighed and withdrew the pedestal from underneath her feet when I learnt that and she had nicknamed me ‘defective piece’based solely on the beauty I lacked (maybe she was just being a ‘regular’ teen and I was wrong to presume that her intelligence freed her from prejudices that afflicted the hoi polloi). When I saw the ‘early developers’, I resigned to the sad fate of forever remaining a mere thirty eight kilos despite unabashed gluttony and never having to buy a bra (or buying one and stuffing it with socks) in my future. Soon I turned a veteran of accepting such shallowness in my stride, and toss it off without a second thought. I wasn’t exactly a saint either; I too had joined in the raucous laughter when the object of ridicule had been someone else. It’s an uncomfortable truth that people judge others on their physical appearance, always or at some point in their lives.

But (-um, Robin Scherbatzky!) there has been one issue that I had struggled with for a decade, and that is my body weight. When I turned thirteen my super-fit cousin and a highly sought name in the Indian modeling circuit, Aryan Baruah, advised me to join a gym and jump in the newly emerging trend of fitness in Guwahati. I enrolled for an aerobics class in a gym in Dispur. I was eager about gaining some much needed curves, because people had started to look annoyed by the rude boy (yours truly) who sat on the seats reserved for women on the bus! The high point was when a group of ‘cool’ college girls told the gawky fourteen year old me that they would kill for legs like mine! That was it, even my father’s frowns couldn’t stop me from wearing mini-skirts for a blissful two years; although I overdid it the day I wore an outrageous ‘leopard print’ skirt to attend (cringe in shame now, eeeesh) Math tutorial class! But the increasing demands of college life with medical entrance examination preparation squashed out gym and the only flicker of consistent physical activity from my life. The local grocer’s fortunes doubled when I started buying out entire shelves of potato chips, colas, butter to go with my Aloo Paranthas breakfast and Maggi noodles. God too decided to grant my fervent teenage wish for feminine curves and he felt so apologetic about being late that he transformed me into a big ball of fat! I didn’t have a waist and no one could strangle me because they would have to find a neck first. It took me a year to realize that I had multiple chins and the stores no longer carried the sizes of the clothes I liked.

Did I wake up to the horrors of my sedentary lifestyle and do something about it? Of course not! I just sat there with an imbecilic belief that I would lose it all in a few months if I tried. I went on dumping junk food and mountains of rice into me (my father once told my ex, ‘Look how fat she has become. She doesn’t listen to me and eats thiiiiiiiiisssss much rice’ and compounded it with appropriate hand gestures that killed me then and there), and the only exercise I did was flicking the buttons of the TV remote. I panicked when the scales tipped over seventy kilos and tried to lose it with internet-researched-and-self-implemented diets and early morning jogging and swimming, which I skipped on the days it rained, the days it was too hot and humid, a certain four days in the month and the days when I slept in late! I didn’t lose a single gram of weight and my father got hoodwinked by salesmen selling all sorts of home-fitness equipments. The treadmill, the stationary cycle, the pair of dumb bells and a dozen other exercise machines gathered cobwebs in less than a month, and amused visitors to our home who looked at the treadmill once, then looked at me and then awkward silence!

My sister, who had always been very active in sports during her school days, suffered a similar fate and was plagued by the curses of obesity like fibroadenomas and cholelithiasis. I too had the sword of family history of diabetes hanging dangerously low over me. I felt defeated and accepted that I would always be fat, donated my wardrobe of short skirts and jeans, and started wearing shapeless salwaar kameez and baggy jeans. I wore only black outfits for two whole years! My self-image took a serious beating, but I kept repeating to myself that physical attributes shouldn’t bother me, I was above all that. But bother it did, not just ‘looking fat’ but also the health risks associated with it.

My sister lost twenty eight kilos last year, using the gym facilities in her college and following a healthy diet, and has maintained it ever since. Now I was the only fat person in the extended family and the cornerstone of all weight-related discussions! I huffed and puffed while climbing stairs in the hospital, I turned crimson while giving dietary advice to patients, I was convinced no one would ever be attracted to me (not that I wanted to be with a man who judged women on physical appearance, but I didn’t want the poor guy to settle for ‘The Hulk’!), I was used to matronly well meaning women patting my hand and asking ‘Fourth month, Majoni?’ on noticing the unsightly lower belly bump,  and the dismay I felt when random people gushed over my cute daughter (read nine year old cousin)!

What I lacked was motivation!To get up and do something about the extra twenty kilos of weight I had lugged around with me, and ‘maintain’ that motivation and hard work all throughout (that applies to everything in life, doesn’t it?).  So, I joined a gym four months ago. The gym is quite a popular one especially with doctors who form nearly 95% of its clientele; and if you stand in the middle of the gym floor and throw a stone in any direction, ten doctors will go crashing down like dominoes. My usual conversation starter is, “Which hospital do you work in?”, and I have a pain in the neck bowing down politely to my former professors.  We are enticed with special workouts (just 4000/- a month!! Oh wow, really? Let me shake my money tree!), personal trainers that guarantee results in three months (and I am sure they do), Swedish massages and a soy-happy dietician; I couldn’t afford their exorbitant prices, but had the floor trainers, the exercise equipment and the motivation of joining that elite club of toned and lithe bodies that sauntered around the gym, oozing confidence and flaunting washboard abs.

On the first day my lungs were at the point of a violent outburst after just ten minutes on the treadmill, and the rowing machine was the only consolation after the unmerciful and continuous assault on every fat-laden cell of my body. I tried to strictly modify my diet limiting my rice intake too (which is a herculean task that involved combating the ‘bhotua’ gene empowered people of Assam); but gave up after a month, although I continue to avoid caffeine, sweets, fried foods, pizzas and pickles. The restaurants in Guwahati, especially the ones with pizzas on their menu, woke up to my conspicuous absence from their loyal clientele and started spamming my phone with all sorts of discounts.

I started losing weight and gaining muscle mass at a pace that would shame even the proverbial tortoise! But I was losing weight after a decade, and in three months I happily threw out my size 32 jeans, and felt smug when a salesgirl bought out ‘L’ size clothes (that’s an improvement from the days when I was told politely that they didn’t stock ‘my size’ just by the sight of me!).I am yet to lose another dozen kilos to reach my ideal BMI and I hope to get there in six more months, provided I don’t hit a plateau.

I took up Pilates for a couple of months and although it didn’t cause the muffin top and the arm jiggles to disappear, it strengthened my core muscles, increased flexibility and loosened up my stiff joints. The biggest reward was when my battle with insulin resistance tilted in my favor! I’m happy with the routine that the floor trainers have chalked out for me and the assistance they provide in the workouts. I have lost a little more than six kilos of fat and gained two kilos of muscle mass in the past four months but I feel like giving a bear hug to my friends and family when they ask ‘Have you lost some weight?’ Music to my ears!

Yesterday I had my fourth end-of-the-month fitness assessment done by a new gym trainer who looked hardly out of his teens. The conversation while filling up the details in my assessment form went as follows:

Trainer: Your age?

Me:26.

Trainer jots down ‘56’!

I want to say ‘Are you mental?’ but calmly repeat that my age is 26 not 56.

He smirks, “ARE YOU SURE?!!!!”

The first phrase that came to my mind was ‘Kaan Toliya Sor’ (a popular form of expressing anger in Assam) and it’s a miracle that he didn’t bleed to death on the carpet, considering my infamous temper outbursts (which unfortunately many had witnessed till date) and that too when I had just started feeling good about my weight loss! I spent the rest of my day seriously considering Botox, but woke up today to the happiness of fitting into an old pair of jeans.

Women, who can understand them!

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The Harmonious Uniformity Of Falling For The Underdog And The Wrong One Too

The storm had abated. Sleep and sanity restored. The question that went on in a loop: “Was it even love?”

I wonder why I put myself through these sporadic instances of total loss of reasoning; from which I come out with a battered and bruised ego, drained of precious energy and time, priorities gone awry, mind plagued with self-doubt, sabotaging my goals in life, repenting in leisure the consequences of my impulsive actions, a memory tarnished with unpleasantness, questioning my decisions and choices, and most importantly making a fool of myself.

Why do I do it?

Because fools rush in. I fall in love too easily; initial triggers may be a smile, kindness, intellect, assertiveness, a love for books, sarcasm and sometimes even questionable wit! The person is just incidental; I am more often in love with the idea of being in love.

But I don’t realize it until it’s too late; till I sit back, put my feet up, take off my rose-tinted shades and analyze why I do what I do.

The Current Tally Of Romantic Follies: (excluding the momentary infatuations that last no longer than a week)

1. 1997-Being a Conformist and Crushing on the Teacher:

A humongous crush on my history teacher which lead to nothing more than remembering the Mughals and Chandragupta for posterity. I studied history with a fervor that would have taken me to great academic heights had I applied it ever again!

Why did I rush in? 

He was the only person who noticed the timid girl everyone overlooked in a class full of boisterous students, and boosted her self-confidence with kind words of encouragement.

2. 1999-The Movie Star…err…Person:

I wasn’t aware of the movies that would follow, and the non-entity he would become. But when “Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi” came out, I was overcome with admiration for the intense, brooding and caterpillar-browed Sanjay Suri (What was I thinking!!!). I tried to immortalize his influence in my hormone-ridden teenage years by writing odes of love and pasting his photograph in my diary, which my sister later displayed in front of my guffawing friends.

Why did I rush in? 

All the schoolgirls fantasized about the blue-eyed poster boys of romance Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic was a craze then) and on the home-front Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan (it was before the debut of Hrithik Roshan). I had to find and love the underdog. I had to be contrary.

3. 2005-Blush of First Love:

I was all of nineteen years, shy and awkward. And there he was on my computer screen, talking to me about books and movies, hearing about my day and making me double up with laughter with his quick wit. We met only thrice and wrote long letters and emails. The long distance tired him after a year. I failed to understand why trivial details like distance mattered when two people were in love. My flabby cerebrum gathered much later that I was the only one who was in love. I spent the next six months digging up the songs one is supposed to listen in times of extreme anguish and hearing them in a loop. I couldn’t take to the bottle, and it was physically impossible for me to grow a beard. But other than that I resembled Devdas in entirety.

Why did I rush in?  

 It was the love of an unsullied heart. Simple.

4.2008-The Rogue with Superficial Charm:

You meet a person, you share hometowns and your old school, he charms you with his undivided attention, you are wary of his intentions, but he becomes your friend, he says he loves you, you laugh it off, he repeats until you believe, you feel obliged to reciprocate his love, you get to know his family, you talk to his friends, you compare notes about growing up, he meets your friends and your family, and he puts a ring on your finger. Nowhere in the story would you feel the need to hire a private eye to do a background check on the person whose ring you wear. Then inconsistencies in conversations crop up and to your horror you find yourself at the center of the web of lies and deceit he had spun around you. Job, education, fidelity…everything was a farce. You go through denial, anguish, anger, disappointment, shame and feelings of worthlessness for lack of good judgement. It ends abruptly; leaving you with a violently disordered life and a distrustful heart.

Why did I rush in? 

After the fiasco of my first love, I was flooded with wise words of well-meaning people who cared about me. My hippocampus was receptive to only one, “You’d be better off marrying the one who loves you than the one whom you love.” Bad advice. Wrong man. Flawed judgement.

5. 2011-The Butterflies in My Adrenals and Tibia:

I had started a new phase of my life, coming out of the shell I had retreated to three years ago.  But I steeled my resolve never to be carried away by the idiosyncrasies of my heart. Murphy smirked and applied his laws on me during the last month of my internship. There was this ordinary face in the crowd, a tongue that vocalized so fast that I had to beg his pardon thrice before I could note down anything he said, and a sarcasm and smirk that highly annoyed me. I detested his ordering the interns around, stressing on military camp punctuality. But gradually I liked working with him. I was his ‘Woman’ Friday, in strictly Robinson Crusoe context. But I was still unaware of the dirty trick Cupid would play on me.

I struggled to curb my feelings of extreme elation every time he walked into the ward, or said something appreciative, or crinkled his eyes in laughter, or told me random happenings of his day, or elongated the vowels in my name adorably, or just sat there with a frown of intense concentration. I couldn’t explain why my heart somersaulted if by some happy accident he came for his evening duty early or our duties coincided. Butterflies not only inhabited my stomach, but my jejunum, spleen, adrenals and pisiform bone too. I kept asking myself what I saw in this guy. Why would I like someone I barely know and whose relationship status remained elusive to me? But the ways of the heart had flummoxed mankind since eternity and I was born human too despite the reasoning power of a gorilla; I just had the harmonious uniformity of falling for the underdog and the wrong one too. My internship ended. But I couldn’t still the frenzy of emotions that threatened to overpower me. I knew I was going to be impulsive and would cringe in shame later. Apparently there are no limits to idiocy. I confessed to him what his thoughts were doing to me. It was a leap of faith even when the other shore donned the cloak of invisibility. I wasn’t expecting a confession of an undying love for me (there was still some residue of good sense in me) and I was prepared for the rejection (I’m not pretty, smart or sassy), or that he had a girlfriend or worse, a wife. But he never replied. One year has gone by now. What stung me was his abject inconsideration for the words that took me all the courage I had to write. My feelings weren’t even worth a reply; I was totally non-existent in his world. That hurt, bad.

Why did I rush in? 

There was this somewhat rude boy, with a perpetual frown and impish gaze, and he made me happy by just being there. I know it wasn’t love (too strong a word), or lust (there was no scope for anything remotely sexual when you see a person disheveled after umpteen night duties at the hospital), or infatuation (too feeble a word), or obsession (I don’t make any attempts to see him or contact him). It was a girly butterflies-in-the-stomach, smile-lighting-up-the-room, laughter-ringing-in-my-ears, I-want-to-know-all-about-you and I-feel-good-when-you-are-around feeling. And I’m still waiting for it to fade. It has faded finally!

I hadn’t been fortunate when it comes to matters of the heart, and my belief of finding the love of my life seems cruel every passing year. But I am not writing off the existence of love. It’s there; I see it in the lives of those around me. It has only eluded me. 

But considering my consistency of falling in love (or whatever it is) and doing something stupid every three years, I am dreading 2014.

(Photo Courtesy: ‘Fools Rush In’ by Gil Conradis)

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The Dirty Word

I visited the Sunday Book Bazaar at Daryaganj recently, and I felt faint with excitement at the awe-inspiring treasures in front of me, rows and rows of books scattered in the pavement, waiting to be picked up by readers for less than the price of a cup of coffee. I did what any self-respecting book lover would do, ignored the mortified glare of the people who accompanied me, and sat down at the pavement next to a huge pile of books that included New York Times best-sellers, rare editions with yellowed, well-thumbed pages, translated works from all over the world. I looked sadly at the size of the two totes my sister and I carried; and considered dialling a taxi to take a greater haul home. I added twenty new books to my library that day. And one of them was Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘We Were the Mulvaneys‘.

It’s the saga about a perfect American family; a Dad with a flourishing roofing business, a cheerful Mom who was more of a friend to her children, three talented sons, an angelic daughter, a quaint farmhouse, adorable pets, a bustling social life, devout God-fearing hearts and the happiness of making a perfect little world for themselves, the perfect world of the Mulvaneys. Then ‘it’ happened. The incident. That dirty word. And the world sided with the ‘rapist’. The Mulvaneys fell apart, the family disintegrating gradually, time playing a cruel trick of engraving the hurt deeper each day, the knife turning in their hearts a little more each day. Each individual of the family, Mom, Dad, the three brothers and Marianne Mulvaney herself, the angelic girl to whom ‘it’ happened; were a ‘casualty’ of the incident. They didn’t crumble immediately, but the helplessness and the frustration of justice denied, falling prey to social stigma, disappointment at each other’s reaction to ‘it’; the failure to protect the lovely Marianne, their world, ‘The Mulvaneys’. How it breaks your heart! Knowing the Mulvaneys at such close quarters, having been handed such an intimate view of their lives, their goodness, their love, their perfect life; and the slow destruction of everything they treasured, the love fading behind uneasiness and their misery. Oates’s is at her finest, describing the trauma of this family, turning to obscurity. But time heals the scars, or at least makes them strong enough to endure it.  There is reconciliation, triumph of hope and compassion at the end. But, why? At what cost? Why them? Why anyone at all? It’s fiction, yet it can be anyone. It can be about me, about you. I couldn’t help the tears brimming in my eyes, as I leafed through the final pages of this remarkable book, this moving account of human emotions, flaws and redemption.

And in the evening, I watched Barkha Duttinterview a rape victim of the 2002 Gujrat riots and sat listening to the trials of her family. It’s a ten year old trial of her family fighting for justice, fighting for survival, fighting to bring up two daughters unscathed. The husband’s eyes gleaming with tears as he talked about the troubles they had to face, the threats they had to endure and how they kept it all aside for what is right, what is just.

I remembered the various accounts of sexual abuse I’ve heard through the years. A friend’s sister, who had a problem of bed-wetting till the age of 23, was a victim of incest at the age of 3 years. A neighbour was a victim of marital rape every time she had an argument with her husband. A classmate was groped by few men during a Durga Puja crowd.

Many women. Many stories. A dirty word in their lives; Abuse, Incest or Rape.

It had been coming for a while. I couldn’t see it outright, but the signs were there; creeping along the subconscious, an occasional peek now and then; the dirty word glaring at me from the front page of the newspaper as I nervously flip it over to the light-hearted page 3 gossips, a scene from a TV show-the girl running, thinking ‘will she escape?’ and the helplessness of knowing she won’t; the muted paranoia of letting my sisters go out into the world where unknown dangers lurk at every corner and I’m not there to watch over them every moment; the constant efforts to ‘blend in’, worried of being singled out, of sending any wrong signals, not ‘too quiet, too shy’ any more, as I try being social, to blend in. My mind tries to remind me of ‘it’. There had been too many signs recently; a newspaper headline, TV shows, this book. And I unconsciously shut out these triggers, not dwelling on them out of habit. My memory is remarkable, not in retaining, but in ‘forgetting’, in ‘undoing’, in convincing myself ‘It never happened’, congratulating myself on moving on so effortlessly, dreams and hopes in life still intact, nothing ravaged. My memory saved me, burying unpleasant details, hushing out any voices from the past, those words in the newspaper, that helplessness of the girl running, that muted paranoia.

I too had been through it. I was led to believe I had been lucky. I was ‘only‘ molested. Once that tricky portal of thoughts open, the sentences from my past escape and crowd in, vying for my attention. “Only molested”. “Not raped”. “It could have been worse”. “It happens to every woman at some point of her life”. “Girls get molested in crowded buses every day: a pinch, a rub”. “If you don’t dwell on it, it’s like it never happened”. There are rare times when I wonder how I got so close to being another Marianne Mulvaney, but I didn’t. I escaped; from the bad things that a man can do to a woman. But I had a narrow escape. Was I lucky? Hell, yes. I thank God for sparing me the trauma, and my life. But the questions like “Why did it even have to happen?”, “What could have been?”, “How can my parents not protect me?” still haunts me when I lessen my guard over my subconscious.  Family support and therapy can go a long way, I have heard. I can’t imagine what rape victims must go through; their feelings towards self, towards family and friends, towards society at large, and towards the unfairness of being singled out, disrupting their life’s course; the life that wasn’t supposed to include ‘it’.

My family had supported me through my jittery nervous existence, through the bouts of depression that followed, but I was disappointed that nothing could be done to punish the guilty. I consulted a psychiatrist and all she said was, “so, the lesson is to be cautious. And never to use a shared auto.” And nervous laughter. As if it was a joke. As if we are discussing a trivial matter, as if it was a moral science class in school with a ‘Lesson’ at the end. I knew she couldn’t help me, only I can heal myself and move on. Only I can trick my memory, bring my life back on track, and make up for lost time. I have done it, I don’t think about it anymore. I can write about it now, even though I don’t bring it up in conversations. I can watch the scene of a girl being molested on TV without wincing. I can watch my reflection in the mirror and not feel self-disgust. I can talk to people, chat with friends, fall in love, and enjoy life every moment. Sometimes I am aware of it being a little forced, this determination of mine for an untainted memory. Few aspects will take time to get used to; like to trust someone.

 

It’s still taboo in our society. Sex in movies, live-in relationships, homosexuality etc is being accepted gradually. But the uneasiness of society when dealing with sexual abuse is still prevalent. My heart goes out to those women who have suffered ‘it‘. Not just the street hooligans, there can be a beast lurking in that friendly neighbour, that teacher you idolize, that man sitting next to you on a flight. Who knows? Who can say? Where can a woman be safe? In homes where incest is “not seen”, wife swapping among brothers still prevalent in certain communities, and maintaining family relations triumphs over moral justice? In offices where lewd remarks, sexual harassment-outright or suggested, uncomfortable male gazes prevail and again “not seen”? In a society where news of ‘a woman raped at 1am after a party’ gets out and all one hears is the contempt for the careless woman staying out so late at night and questions about her character? On the streets where a young school girl returning from school is stared down from head to toe by road-side loafers who comment on her breasts and thighs?

  

Who has given men right to abuse a women at whatever time of the day it might be, at however lonely a place it might be, and however skimpy her clothes may be? How can one say ‘she had it coming for her’? How can one violate another person in such a brutal way just because she’s a woman, correction, she has a vagina? Who defines these moral codes? I know I am being too hopeful in wanting a society where a woman’s dignity is never unduly violated just because she’s there, within reach of groping hands.

The best we can hope for now is looking after ourselves and being cautious, fighting for justice, and support victims of such crimes-be it incest, sexual harassment of any sort, molestation or rape.

I pray for a world when this dirty word vanishes from the surface of the earth.

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The Blur of my 20s

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Of all things I didn’t expect my ’20s’ to resemble the opening line of “A Tale of Two Cities“.

Everything overlaps in my memory. I can’t pinpoint what happened when.

My 20s has been a blur: the years, the events, experiences, people who drifted in and out, people who lingered, the hard-earned and the surprise successes, the vicious cycles of failure, the ennui of adulthood, the simple or extravagant joys, deceptions and lies, the foolish heart that refuses to learn lessons, the heart that has learnt to be and even accept indifference, journeys of self-discovery, the indirect search for the meaning of it all, nights of fervent prayers, indulging in frivolities, still reading books with the same love and worship for the written word, still being the pampered daughter and doting sister, paranoid driving, learning compassion and responsibilities, healing others and not just because it is a job, learning the hard way to follow the advice of my parents, waiting for I know not what, laughing at how far I’ve come along yet how long I have stood still, sometimes mourning an untarnished memory, kicking myself often for wavering in the most important thing in the world-discipline, uncertain steps into writing, accepting deficiencies and along the way accepting myself, wondering what my ten year old self would say when my dreams of a settled career and being happily married and traveling the world by the time I turned twenty seven seems impossible now, telling my ten year old self that it’s okay the way things are now and meaning it, still skeptical about most of the people I meet, creating my own happiness, and not even close to learning how to cook.

When I was sixteen, a person who was over twenty-five was OLD, a fossil. Today I have turned 26. I don’t feel like a fossil. I have yet to embark on many journeys. I have yet to find the utopian true love. I have yet to get kicked in the guts by life and learn few more lessons. I have yet to find contentment. I have yet to make my parents proud. I have yet to travel to places I’ve read about in books and compare my mind’s imagery with the real beauty. I have yet to do something meaningful for the causes I believe in and support.

Miles to go…

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I wish I was in your class again.

“The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth’.”

You might remember me only as a face in your classroom. But I will always be grateful for your support, belief in me and guidance at crucial points of my life. I feel blessed to be your student.

This is for you:~

Ma’am Deepti Singh: For that encouraging smile, a pat on the back, and developing a healthy competitive streak in me. And it touches me that you remember me even though it has been fifteen years since I last sat in your classroom. You were, are and will always be my favorite teacher in the whole wide world.

Sir Bijoy Handique: You were a lot of firsts for me. You were the first person to notice the ‘biggest introvert’ (me) in the classroom, the first to appreciate my work, the first to believe that I could achieve something big, the first to create a genuine interest to learn something instead of mugging up for exams and what do you know, you were even my first crush! I will always like history 🙂 And the fact that you still remember me as the little girl in a grey skirt, wearing tiny, hoop earrings and traveling to school in the old fiat…delights me no end.

Ma’am Manjula: Your smile comforted me on the first day of kindergarten. You taught me the alphabet. You didn’t laugh when I said that I sent my sports shoes to the ‘barber’ for cleaning!

Ma’am Ruprekha: I still remember the first thought that crossed my mind when I first saw you, “If my grandmother dressed up in chiffon sarees and wore lipstick, she too would look as beautiful as Ruprekha Ma’am”. I think your maternal aura made it impossible for anyone not to like you. How you patiently listened to my fanciful imaginations about ETs, doppelgangers and the ghosts in the school church!

 Ma’am Anita: You were the woman of 2011 in 1994! You made learning such fun. You brought beautifully crafted jewellery boxes to class when teaching about indigenous craftsmanship of Jammu and Kashmir, you taught us to appreciate the beauty of a song’s lyrics (the example was ‘ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga‘), you striked the perfect balance between being amiable yet someone we didn’t dare anger!

Sir Joseph: You introduced me to the world of books…novels, poems, short stories, essays, and even limericks. You let me borrow 4 library books every month when the rule was a limit of maximum 2 books. You played chess with me and didn’t make a big fuss when I bunked PT class. You also bought me pastries in the school canteen, when the queue was long. You are awesome 🙂

Ma’am Srivastav: You always saw through my trick of feigning stomach ache when it was my turn to read a passage from the Hindi textbook, but you didn’t scold and embarrass me in front of the class. You gradually let the love for the language grow on me, even though it never reached substantial heights. But you managed to hold my hand and walk with me through my living hell of writing Hindi essays!

Fr. Philip: I am yet to see a person as dashing and as charismatic as you. I doubt whether I’ll ever see one. The way you spoke, the way you walked, the way you taught us the values of life was awe inspiring. But during tiffin break you patiently answered the questions of two enthusiastic little girls, my best friend and me, ranging from the contents of your lunch box to ‘why bad things happen to good people’. You let us rummage through your personal library every day. And when I left my hometown and joined a new school, you uncomplainingly passed on my long letters, addressed to the school principal, to my eagerly waiting friends in that old classroom. Yes, I will never meet anyone like you again.

Sir Angelus: You were aggressive, and you never missed the target when you threw a chalk piece at an errant student. You scared me when you threatened to clip my long nails in front of the whole class. Yet, when I came to know you better, I thought you were the most gentle person I had ever met! Your razor sharp wit, your quirky assignments, your exciting tales, and the fact that you were the lone inhabitant of the school at night (as your living quarters were on the spooky top floor of the school) made you quite the interesting character. You disciplined us when we needed it the most.

Rafida Ma’am: You taught the most boring subject on earth. Social Studies. Yet, I never dozed off in your class. You helped me adjust to a new school. You handed me important responsibilities, so that I felt more involved in the alien environment. You advised in hushed tones to each of the girls individually when it was their time to start wearing a bra. I anticipated the dreaded moment and it lived up to the most awkward conversation (or was it just nodding my head) of my life. You left us all bereaved early this year, but I would always remember you fondly. RIP, Rafida Ma’am.

Sir Ratul Rajkhowa: You instilled in me a love for life sciences and consequently medicine. Your tuition classes were so much fun. You showed us the bottled gall bladder stones of your wife while solving genetics problems, you showed us your Bihu music cassette while classifying bacteria, and told us about your stint with the Indian Navy when we discussed ecological hazards! I so enjoyed those two hours of biology tuitions every morning.

Sir Balwant: I excelled in mathematics in school because of you. I was a dunce when it came to numbers, but your teaching showed me how mathematics could be fun. Your black diary with the toughest mathematical problems, invoked in me such a competitive streak to solve all of them before anyone else, that it scared me. You are such a down-to-earth and humble person. I will always appreciate your confidence in my abilities.

Sujata Ma’am: English seemed more than substance writing and grammar. Poetry awakened dreams instead of being monotonously mugged up for exams. I loved that you understood and took care of the individual needs of each of your students. You are such a witty, and for a lack of a better word ‘spunky’ woman. I liked your ideas, and everything you had done in life. You will always remain my idol.

Sir Jnanendra Sharma: I can’t picture Gauhati Medical College without you. You are a great teacher and one of the most tirelessly hard working person I’ve ever met. During undergraduate days, you always encouraged this “Jorhat’or suwali” to work hard, and I really did during Pediatrics, which still is my favorite subject. Even when I was going through a bad phase of severe anxiety and cut myself off from the whole world, you were the only teacher who was supportive and gave me hope. You are a busy man and you didn’t have to care if your past pupil was having a problem, but you did. And I will always be thankful for it. You didn’t even make me feel awkward by questioning about my past problems, when I resumed my normal life. You made it very comfortable for me. I hope someday this “jorhat’or suwali” will be able to make you proud in her own small way.

Sir Sahid Ali: You are knowledge personified. And you are genuinely interested in sharing your knowledge with all your students. You care. A lot. And that’s why I respect you so much.

Ma’am Gayatri: You are an epitome of intelligence, hard work and positive attitude. I always wanted to work hard in your classes. Especially pediatric ward classes. You are one of the finest women I have ever met.

Sir Suresh Chakraborty: I always looked forward to your questions about Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Satyajit Ray at the end of the psychiatry class. You made psychiatry come alive. I loved when you encouraged us to make diagnosis, validate it with strong arguments, and supported it with that happy smile of yours. You had always encouraged me to write during my undergraduate days in GMC, and I’d always be thankful for that.

Probodh Da: I hated it when you cut short the evenings, meant for having fun with my cousins, with boring homework assignments. But you never missed a class for 8 years, and made sure I stick to the books. I enjoyed the chat sessions at the end of the class, and playing scrabble with you.<

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Unbiased Love

‘The child is deformed‘.

That’s the first thought that crossed my mind when I first saw him. The mouth hanging open, rotund belly, protuberant saucer like eyes, muddy complexion, disproportionately thin limbs and a very questionable hygiene. He wore a blue sweater stained with the contents of his breakfast.  I surveyed him as I walked towards him to monitor his vitals before the morning clinical rounds. His case file said he was ten years old; it was hard to judge from his appearance.

My approach scared him. He perceived the stethoscope hanging around my neck with apprehension often seen in young children but not usually a ten year old. He put his thin arms around the old man’s neck who was sitting on his bed. His grandfather, I presumed. I gently pried him away from around his grandfather’s neck and put the cuff  around his thin arm to monitor his blood pressure. I tried not to look at his face with the saliva drooping from the corners of his mouth and remnants of his breakfast still stuck on his face. Something wet hit my hand. I inwardly cringed as I rubbed away a drop of saliva that fell onto my hand from his mouth. I hurriedly examined him and went out of the room.

‘I love children‘, I reminded myself. ‘All children deserve unbiased loving‘. But even during evening duties, relatively less hectic and allowing me the leisure to chat and play with the children admitted in the ward, I never could bring myself to approach his bed, caress his cheek and ask him how his day went. I avoided looking at his bed, at him, at his grandparents who looked defeated by everything in the world. I didn’t despise him, but I couldn’t feel the love and care that gets naturally evoked towards all children.

The day after Christmas I had night duty at the ward. At one-thirty AM I lied down to rest on the creaky bed in the room assigned for interns. Hardly ten minutes later I heard loud cries of a woman coming from a distance. I presumed it was from the adjacent female medicine ward. But just to be certain, I opened the door of my room.

It was the boy’s grandmother. Howling and running towards my room, her faded yellow sari trailing behind her. I went to check on the boy and found him breathing rapidly in short gasps. His grandfather stood rooted to the spot even when I asked him to carry the boy to the adjacent ICU. Eventually another attendant helped me carry the boy to the adjacent pediatric ICU. I alerted the senior doctor on duty, and started the boy on oxygen and monitored his vitals. His grandfather still stood transfixed in the room, and his grandmother lay sprawled on the floor outside the ICU and crying even louder. I tried to calm her down while the senior doctor examined her grandson.

I looked back at his body; his protuberant belly rising rapidly up and down as he struggled to breath and his thin arms lying feebly by his side. His oxygen mask slipped from his face and as I fixed it in place he held my finger in his palm. His eyes were closed but he could sense someone’s presence near him and held onto that person for comfort.

At that moment I could see the child in him, the lovable child that I had failed to see earlier. I felt very protective about him suddenly. I wiped the drool of saliva from the corner of his mouth. I didn’t cringe this time. I looked at his grandmother, her face pressed against the glass door of the ICU. I heaved a sigh of relief every when I saw his vitals normalize.

I left the ward at 8 am the next morning and had a twenty four hour break. I came back to ward on 28^th morning and found his bed empty. My heart stopped beating for a moment. I questioned the post graduate trainee on duty about him, inwardly praying that nothing bad had happened to him. His grandparents had taken him home a few hours ago. They had left against medical advice. I don’t know whether I will ever see him again or whether he will even survive for long, since he would be devoid of medical care.

Doctors meet hundreds of patients every week, hear different stories and encounter many families in distress trying to cope with illness and death. They interact with people at their most vulnerable moments. It’d be hard to survive if one emotionally connected and felt for every patient and their family. Life would be perpetually depressing to see human suffering at such close quarters and get emotionally attached to all of them. So, an emotional detachment is vital just for basic survival!

But once in a while I can’t help being emotionally attached with a patient and their families. It’s difficult to predict what triggers such an attachment. But it renews a compassion and care that is often forgotten in this busy world. And I feel grateful to that ten year old boy for reviving it in me at the right time.

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Lost and Found

It feels strange typing these first words after neglecting my blog for so long. I actually fumbled around the blog dashboard to find the ‘New Post‘ compose button. I had been busy. But not so much that I couldn’t have squeezed in a few minutes of writing every week. I could have but I chose not to. I had started doing what everyone else around me were doing, mimicking their pastimes and their routines. It was work, studies, watching movies, getting together with friends, eating out…the usual stuff. Not just my habits but my whole personality went a sea change. I became more ‘social’; not extrovert, just more open to mingling with other people, small talk, taking the initiative to talk to people around me. I actually chatted up random strangers, which is so unlike me, given my total lack of social skills.

I got so involved in this routine, this ‘new‘ me, I had long neglected the things I loved to do. Writing, watching obscure foreign language films, reading and re-reading the authors I cherish, traveling, amateur photography, sketching…stuff that had always created and contributed to my happiness, a world I loved escaping into. But once I got stuck in this new web of superficial pleasures and pastimes, I became too lazy to get back to doing things that I love. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, when I’m unusually chatty, I halt and mentally stare at the person I’ve become. And I realize it’s not the real me. Being more confident, the feeling of belonging to the ‘normal, everyday‘ people has been fun. But who am I fooling? It’s just so not me.

There had been surprise in their eyes and an awkwardness in the air when I interacted with the people I’d known for long and who were well-acquainted with my introvert nature. And there had been moments when my ‘friendly‘ attitude, new and clumsy, seemed too upfront to people and created misunderstandings that were totally uncalled for and embarrassing. And my idle mind crammed with just exam MCQs and small talk of the day, devoid of any creative pursuits, fell prey to daydreaming. I did few pretty stupid stuff. I don’t like this new change anymore even though I had secretly always craved it!

Each person is unique with their unique quirks and flaws and passions. I am a shy person. I prefer catching up on my reading on a Saturday night. I freeze at the thought of making small talk. I don’t like reading novels about vampires and girls addicted to shopping. I don’t like rowdy parties and large crowds and prefer small, intimate gatherings. If I fall in love, I love to love alone, cherishing the secret. I love being silent and contemplating a thousand thoughts even amidst a crowd. And in the past few days my mouth hurt from grinning inanely at jokes that I didn’t even find funny. However boring it may sound or is to others, but that’s me. That’s who I am; and who I have been in the recent past is totally contradictory to my real self.

Be true to who you are and do what you love irrespective of what the world thinks about you. Life’s too short to be wasted on pretense of any sort.

This post was my advice to myself. It feels great blogging after a long gap and to have finally found and accepted me.

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Living with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Losing a childhood friend to a rare and fatal post-operative complication of a minor surgery or hearing the news of second relapse of my cousin to breast cancer would have broken my spirits had it occurred a few months ago. I would have been a nervous wreck.

I can’t adapt well to stress and bad news. Anticipatory anxiety, fearing what might happen, over-analyzing little details, brooding over hard facts of life that can’t be changed…my life at 24 was a never-ending series of worries of varying magnitude.

I used various adaptation ( mostly immature) techniques to avoid stress; avoiding confrontation with the real issue and procrastinating indefinitely, whining and cursing my fate, perennially questioning ‘why me?‘, retreating into a self-created cocoon; and the worst, obsessing over the worries and compulsively acting out irrational acts in an attempt to negate the bad thoughts that came to my mind. Like if I let the books on my shelf remain disorderly, scary thoughts that come to my mind regarding my loved ones will come true! So, I would spend a lot of my time arranging and re-arranging the books alphabetically, or by author, or by genre and spend a good 2-3 hrs unproductively! Absurd? Yes Irrational and impulsive? Yes. I knew it? Yes. So, I stopped doing it? Hell no!

Life had come to a standstill for me. Growing up with a strong sense of cleanliness and organization, it never occurred to me that severe stress will create havoc with this very organization fetish! It started gradually with breaking of basic discipline of my priorities;studies and household chores. I got distracted by superficial, fickle gratifications rather than a sense of satisfaction of completing my responsibilities well. Once distracted, it was hard to go back to my earlier routine. Acceptance of this problem and seeking help didn’t cross my mind. Anxiety built up during exams, family crisis, expectations not met…the cumulative effect of which I couldn’t anticipate. I felt if I did everything 16 times, bad things won’t happen to my family! I studied each line 16 times and completed a mere two pages of studying every day. I was busy with ‘pseudo work’. Making schedules and time-tables, procrastinating and again making new time-tables. Vicious cycle!

I had emotional breakdowns, woke up in panic, had insomnia, suffered from hormonal imbalances, gained weight, was lethargic, had hair loss, joint pain and an incurable headache; which a string of physicians couldn’t cure. My self-confidence had taken a beating. My obsessive-compulsive habits increased, fueled by my anxieties and in an effort to negate them.

If my mother was late in coming home after her weekly shopping trip, the first thought that crossed my mind that she had met with an accident! Not that she could be caught in a traffic jam, or she ran some other errands on the way, or that she stopped by a friend’s place on the way home. If my father had a bout of cough and sneezing at night, I would remain awake whole night dreading that we would have to again rush him to hospital like the time when he had sepsis! A mere cough and cold equated in my mind to sepsis! I became suspicious of people’s comments and doubted ulterior motives because of few inaccurate judgments on my part earlier. Generalizing men and their intentions became a habit modeled on my exes and their flaws!

Then came a time when  my career and personal life started getting seriously hampered by my inability to deal with stress and acting out as OCD. I sought help, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), to recognize, halt and remove obsessive anxiety-inducing thoughts. It took me few months of CBT, a healthy diet, a yoga regimen, deep breathing exercises, a conscious and deliberate desire to overcome my problems and reach out to others, like I used to earlier.

Now I’m back to leading a normal life; the competitive streak in me returning, self-confidence boosted up, and anxieties a thing of the past. Sure, I get anxious but I know now where to cut it. I’m the master of my mind and not the other way round anymore.

A big help was the book, “How to stop worrying and start living” by Dale Carnegie. A single quote from the book kept me going through all hurdles: “Every day is a new life for the wise man.”

Past regrets, future worries, what could have been, what might happen…erase all these from your mind. Just concentrate on today. Live ‘TODAY’ well. Make ‘TODAY’ worthwhile. Love, laugh, work, have fun…do it all today. It’s the only thing we’ve control upon…’NOW’, the present moment. Live it well. Rest will take care of itself. And when obstacles threaten to overpower your resolve to keep going, just remember that ‘Every man can carry his burden, however hard, till nightfall…”.

One day at a time, one step at a time, forget multi-tasking…That’s the mantra. And seek help if you have OCD. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a disease you’ve to combat, just like diabetes or hypertension, but which can be paralyze your life more than a physical illness. Don’t be bothered about social stigmas associated with consulting a psychiatrist, or being branded weak-willed. You can control your mind, you just might need guidance during stress.

Leading a happy, fulfilled life with OCD is not just a possibility. It’s my reality.

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Healed

Flawed can he be?

When he unfailingly corrects my mistakes,

Even the ones I never knew of.

‘You can never do anything right’,

A pitying smile across his face,

He reminded me ever so.

Disrespectful can he be?

When politeness exudes from his every pore;

As he instructs how I should behave,

And the millionth time I should touch his parents’ feet.

After all one can never be too well-mannered,

He reminded me ever so.

A pervert can he be?

Calmly explaining that true love yields to groping hands,

How eye fucking every passing female is a male right.

Describing his past in uncalled for sexual detail,

Explaining how my prudery can’t be true love

He reminded me ever so.

A liar can he be?

When there’s a reason behind every mistake,

Reasons that put the wildest imagination to shame,

Fully sure of acceptance by a loving heart.

‘I never lied, I never lie, and I will never lie’,

He reminded me ever so.

Fake can he be?

As his self-proclaimed virtues become never-ending,

Every detail about him gets shady each day.

But he knows a foolish heart would overlook it,

Dare he lie to my heart about his whole existence?

He reminded me ever so.

Excruciating shame,

Unparalleled anger,

When my foolish heart finally saw through,

How I’d loved a scum,

How I’d hurt my family,

How precious years were wasted,

How self-respect was belittled,

How I fled too late,

His memories reminded me ever so.

Let go of the dirt,

Uncluttered my mind,

Snipped off memories,

Of mistakes, wrong choices,

Healed, Healed, Healed.

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The Change

Rrrrrrrrrring. The alarm goes off. Eyes half-shut, I fumble to hit the ‘snooze‘ button. But I’m denied those blissful five minutes of extra sleep. My mother noisily draws the curtains open; the sunlight nearly blinding me. Then starts the usual early morning lecture, primed to perfection by twenty years of uninterrupted practice, about the horrors sloth will inflict upon my future. I grudgingly accept defeat and get out of bed. And the day starts just as grudgingly. Why should I wake up early?  What for? What awaits me today? Unlimited rest, boredom, uncertainties about future, battling my own personal demons each day.

Two long years pass by…each moment of inactivity weighs heavy on my mind.
 
Rrrrrrrrrrrring. The alarm goes off. Eyes wide open, I fumble to yank the curtains open and greet the morning light. I stretch my arms, and get out of bed. A quick shower follows. Read the news, gulp down my breakfast, pack my bag. My mother watches me half-smiling. I love this morning rush, the spring in my step, the revival of a long lost enthusiasm. What awaits me today?

A day at work. Finally. The long craved change has finally begun. 🙂 🙂

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http://www.galantysgameplan.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/istock_000003781332xsmall.jpg )

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The Walk Between Sunset and Moonrise

I halt at sunset, forever it seems;
The darkness unsettling,
Mirroring the shadows I take refuge in.
Caught in a tiring dilemma;
The day I cannot return to,
A night I dread to enter.
Past failures, present indecisiveness,
Future unpredictability haunts me.
Time is past, the battle lost;
And I must never emerge from my shell.

And then a brave new hope…

I walk towards the moonrise,
Stepping on, are those past failures?
Emboldened each moment,
I take small steps, surer steps.
Something brings hope,
Blows away uncertainties.
I search for my old self,
Perhaps looming in the distant horizon;
But a better self is mirrored back,
Now, this moment; I am she.
Unburdening the inferiority and pessimism,
I break into a run.

Is that a brighter light I see?

I run towards the dawn.
Time’s ticking away;
No use mourning the moments lost,
I would lose some more.
To catch up would be tough,
To surpass, euphoric.
I see it now, my goal, definite and clear;
The remoteness doesn’t scare me,
Nor will that darkest hour before dawn,
The one with wagging tongues, critical stares,
Deadly impatience and relapses into self-pity.
Translating this strong self-belief into action,
I shape my destiny;
And I run, like never before,
Towards the inviting new day.

Photo Courtesy: http://larsvandegoor.deviantart.com/art/Count-Your-Blessings-155154145

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The Unrest Cure

I needed an “Unrest Cure”.

Saki (H.H.Munro) had mentioned it in one of his many delightful short stories. Stressed and harried individual retires to a relaxing environment, enjoy the sunshine, take a few long walks, laze around with some music or a book, spends some quality time with family and goes back to their usual hectic lives well-rested and with renewed vigour. That’s the “Rest Cure”. The exact opposite is the cure for those people who feel annoyed if the disturbing monotony of their lives gets altered, even the minute details. They find comfort in the predictability of what the day holds for them; they become mere spectators of the outside world and all the excitement it involves. It is such people who need an “unrest cure” to jolt them out of their routine and often complacent existence.

The past couple of years, I found myself getting more inclined towards leading a life planned to the last detail; soaking in the comforts of home and the known. I sought solace in the fact that I have my life planned to what I’d be doing five months and three days later (the answer: what I’m doing today!). I googled for articles on “How to wake up refreshed in the morning”! I had a hard time fighting Monday blues, and Tuesday blues, and you get the idea! I heard about, watched, felt awed and delighted in the spontaneity and excitement in the lives of those around me. But I was reluctant to disrupt my quiet existence. And I was just 23. It’s sad. But sometimes one gets addicted to the sort of days when nothing happens, and living life in a leisurely pace (which is highly over-rated!). It’s not so that I was seeking constant excitement or thrills. I just needed a break from this mind-set of seeking comfort in the familiar and the known.

I’ve started making small changes in the career front. I know I’m taking huge risks in terms of money, job security, and time in veering away from the expected (read secure) options. I admit I am scared. Not “what-was-I-thinking” scared, but “this-is-new-but-I-am-so-going-to-do-this” scared. Travelling, taking up new hobbies, learning a new language and meeting new people are small steps towards my “unrest cure”.

Two things had been of huge help in adopting these changes. The first is a healthier lifestyle (less mental and physical lethargy, more zest). Secondly, there should be perseverance and belief in following your passions without being bothered by those who ridicule your non-conformity.

I love this restlessness.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67603667@N00/945757852/

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When Was The Last Time You Did Something For The First Time?

She asked me.

I thought. The minutes ticked by painfully slow. But I still couldn’t recall.

And it’s a sad thing.

In the past two years, I’d undergone a disillusionment towards the way my life has shaped out to be. It’d been a gradual process; stifled emotions squeezing their way out from the depths of my heart and thoughts I’d vehemently refused to ponder upon all these years.

A middle-class upbringing grounded on its own definitions of success and a future planned out to the last detail for me-a secure job of a doctor, a job in the US, a six figure salary-painted a pretty picture and I took the plunge.

In junior college my friends opted for biology as an elective. I wanted to continue hanging out with them, so did I. They brought application forms for medical entrance exam. Again I was scared of exploring new territory so, I stood in queue to get the application form. I cleared the exam at one go and my friends didn’t. It was only when I was sitting among unfamiliar faces in a class of a hundred and fifty students on that first day of medical college taking the Hippocrates oath I realized that I had chosen my career. This was it.

Hectic classes followed. I was forced to be a part of the race to survive the grueling years in medical college. I played my part and well too. I loved the power to heal that the doctors held. It’s the most powerful thing of all. You can give a new life to others. Some doctors realized the great responsibility that this power brought along and humbly offered their services to people. Rest were a bunch of inflated egos and a smirk, a retort, a snarl were the first things they had to offer to patients.

Many factors contributed to my disillusionment; the stifling and rigid curriculum, few biases, my own gradually escalating obsessive compulsive disorder and the most important of it all, I was finally beginning to think for myself.

I was a good student in the sense that I molded myself well to any situation you put me into. My parents could have put me into any career and I would have survived in that just by the inherent desire of trying to do well whatever I do. I could’ve been an engineer, a lawyer, a businesswoman, a teacher. Anyone. Whatever was the flavour, as a friend rightly put it.

I wasn’t the only one who had this mind-set while growing up, many of my peers and family has the same story to tell. Conservative Indian families have rigid rules about what a girl ought to do. Success was defined to me as a good job overseas, a few cars, a grand house, a flourishing career; this was the benchmark set before me. A close friend recently told me her parents had told her to enjoy her life once she passed the hurdle of matriculation exam. Then there were the hurdles of engineering entrance exam, engineering exam and now a MBA degree that she had to overcome before getting a chance to enjoy life, by which I’m sure she meant exploring her own hopes and aspirations and just for a moment enjoy the simple pleasure of not thinking about the next exam to clear. I wonder if she’ll ever get the chance.

We have mastered the art of loving what we do. During the past two years when I struggled with the thoughts of a life based on my own wishes, I was startled by my own and others’ responses. I am no writer. But I love to write. I want to learn the art of creative writing. I want to give serious thought to my interest in history and ancient scriptures. And I want to travel. Not fancy spas and luxury vacations. Just travel for the sake of travel. Maybe even the previously unexplored nooks of a nearby town. Travel is a liberty I crave for. But solo travel is still a dream. I only get to go on planned vacations to the usual tourist spots. And yet again, I have no option but to love what I get.

I still haven’t been able to cut my umbilical cord. My parents are the best parents I could’ve asked for. They have given me everything I want. Pampered a lot. But their over-protectiveness have led to such a situation now that I can’t go anywhere without another person accompanying me. It’s not the travel restrictions, it’s just that I’m still not allowed to be self-reliant even at the age of 24. I’m leading the life of a dependent 12 year old! And I haven’t been able to do anything about it. I can’t hurt my parents. I’ve tried discussing with them this problem, but there was no change in their protectiveness. Everyone comments on how it’s high time I pave my own life path. I know I should do that too. It’s already too late. My whole life has been sketched to the last detail by others. My whims were catered to but major decisions were already taken for me. Abandoning the noble profession of a doctor to pursue writing was frowned upon. Who in their right mind does that? Is success guaranteed? No. Will you make as much money as a doctor does? No. Is it a secure job? No. Are you aware of the hard life out there? No. Do you have the talent? Not yet. “So, shut up and concentrate on your career as a doctor. Time runs out fast for a girl. Your friends are getting married. Concentrate on getting PG in a good hospital, get married, have kids; and then you’ll have abundant time to follow your hobbies“. Will I?

I don’t have an aversion to being a doctor. I feel blessed that I’m given a chance to serve people in need. I have gone through instances in the past where I came close to losing my father to critical illnesses but it’s through sheer dedication and skill the doctors overcame all hurdles his age, his co-morbidities posed along with the critical illness. I have nothing but true devotion to this skill bestowed on doctors and which I’ve been given a chance to be a part of. But who goes to a “simple” MBBS degree holder these days? You need to have a string of degrees behind your name, fight out the fierce competition in private practice or positions in reputed hospitals. Do you know many hours of studying brings about these? Your entire youth. Do you have time to pursue on the side-lines your so-called “hobbies”? As an amateur? Yes. As a professional? No. They remain just “hobbies”.

I’m finally taking a stand on how my life is run. I deserve a say in that, don’t I? I’m officially not in the race anymore. My life, my pace, my dreams, my aspirations. Will the people who talk now about their idea of success and condemn me for losing the competitive streak provide a solution to the ever-increasing emptiness that grows with time in the runners of this rat race? They won’t.

So, why should I live my life according to what the world wants me to be? My definition of success: Being myself and doing what I love in a world that is constantly trying to make me do something else.

And here’s a huge thank you to Priyanka, my friend who asked me this question today. Thanks for being so supportive 🙂

Photo courtesy: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01408/happiness_1408507c.jpg

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TaT Contest # 1: My Childhood Dream

A true story.

Five sons, two daughters, a tiny hut, some land, and a salary of Rs.48 per month. That’s all he had in life. He brooded day in and day out about where he went wrong, while his children were left to fend for themselves. His children were extraordinarily hard-working and slogged for many hours everyday ploughing the fields, selling vegetables, doing odd jobs for neighbors; somehow gathering two meals a day for the entire family. They were overworked, perpetually exhausted; but they never ceased to dream about a way out of the drudgery of their daily lives. They thrived on this single hope.

And one day, the elder two sons joined school on their father’s insistence. They braved the opposition from the rest of village about two boys from the “untouchable caste” mingling with the higher caste students. On the first day of school, they woke up at three in the morning and went about doing their routine chore of ploughing the field so that they can attend school on time. The school was at a distance of sixteen kilometers from their home, but they were too excited to notice the long way ahead of them. They took their slates and pencils for the first time in hand and nervously copied the letters the teacher penned on the blackboard. They learnt to count. And suddenly a new world of infinite possibilities opened before them. A world where nothing was impossible. Despite being the poorest of poor in a remote village, they can now dream of being high officials, lawyers, teachers and even Prime Minister of India! They realized for the first time their capacity to think, to mould their own futures. So, for the rest of the decade and half they diligently studied; and even enrolled the younger siblings in school. They worked day and night to earn money but somehow fitted few hours of school every day.

The eldest son was more academically inclined than the rest. So, the second son took over himself all the responsibility of running the household at the tender age of 15. He attended school and college about twice or thrice a week, and rest of the days he slogged to somehow make ends meet so that the rest of his siblings’ education doesn’t get hampered. Even though his own future seemed bleak, he still nursed his childhood dream of becoming a high official, earning a decent salary, buying a good house and a car. Simple dreams, but way out of his reach.

He was 28 years old by the time his siblings completed their education. He had a commerce degree at hand and no job. And still the responsibility of running the household, as his siblings went for higher studies or on job hunts. One day a girl he had met and befriended in college forced him to appear for a job interview. He refused as he had no time to waste job hunting as his daily income runs his family. But she was adamant, and he finally relented. He got a clerical job in an insurance company. And by dint of hard work over the years he not only overcame his poverty but rose to the position of a high-ranking official in the insurance company. He married the girl, who changed his entire life through a little coaxing. He built not one but two houses, and bought two cars. He surpassed what he dreamt of as a child during the daily sixteen kilometer walk to school. But his greatest satisfaction was that his siblings too had broken the chains of poverty and were all well-placed in life. There was a bank manager, an engineer, a high-ranking government official, and a professor. He had the satisfaction of knowing that his years of sacrifice for his siblings didn’t go to waste. And nothing could surpass the smiles he had put on his parents’ faces. Theirs were the first family from that remote village to have dreamt big, worked continually towards it, and finally achieving it. Others followed their example, having understood the value of education, sheer determination and hard work.

No childhood dream is unattainable. That’s what I had learnt from this story. That’s what I’d learnt from the story of my father’s life, the second son in the story. And he’s the biggest inspiration in my life. And I too am halfway through of attaining my childhood dream of becoming a doctor.

Once again, nothing is impossible! So, dream big!

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Riches to Rags- the shortest trip ever

MONEY! CASH! BUCKS! MOOLAH! PAISA!

I don’t crave for billions or a 60 storey residence or even a luxury jet on my birthday. I’m talking about having a fortune enough to lead a life of comfort by my family and myself, and enough savings to overcome any unexpected crisis. In today’s world money is the most important requirement for survival. “Roti, Kapda aur Makaan“- is too outdated. If you don’t have enough savings to see you and your family through bad times, it’s going to be a very difficult life ahead.

I do crave for and are accustomed to a few luxuries- a car at my disposal, frequent travels, indulging in my love for buying books etc. That’s it. Nothing fancy. No addiction to extravagant expenses of jewelery and designer apparel shopping. I come from a regular middle class family, and have led a comfortable enough life without having to experience the want of something essential. It’s all about how much you crave for, and fortunately my needs are few. But even though I’ve never faced a financial crisis, growing up in India made me a spectator to poverty right from my childhood. You can’t help but see it on the streets, in villages, and it is even rampant in urban India.

I’ve grown up hearing, “Money can’t buy you happiness“. But it sure can buy a sense of security and comfort to a family. Education, pursuing your dreams, looking after your loved ones; money is not the only criteria in achieving them, but it is the only basis. Recently I’ve been a close witness to how even family and friends tend to distance themselves from the one on whom bad times have befallen. No matter how close a person is to his family, once he becomes financially dependent on them, resentments tend to develop in a scale varying from “you better be thankful that I’m providing for you and be happy about whatever you receive without voicing any opinion” mindset to downright alienation.

A distant uncle, my chaachi’s brother, who was suffering from cancer expired yesterday. He was a distant relative, but had been an important part of my life while growing up. He lost his job about a decade back, lost all his savings and house to deceitful and conniving siblings, and since then he and his family had been surviving on odd jobs and occasional financial help from relatives. But gradually, even the relatives used to dread his visit because he’d obviously ask for money. My father used to give him money whenever he visited. I used to resent the fact at times about my father offering help to every person in need of money. I felt people took Pa’s generosity for granted. He draws a fixed salary every month and is the sole earning member of the family. So, the fact that he spends nearly half of it in helping others and supporting two additional families in our Jorhat home every month, irritates me no end. Because I am scared of lack of savings for my sister’s and my education, and having a tough time in case some calamity befell on our family. But my father comes from a very, very poor family and he and his siblings had struggled very hard in life to reach the positions they are in now. Therefore, Pa can’t tolerate to see anyone struggling for the basic amenities in life. Moreover, he is a firm believer of the fact that if you help others, God would see to it that you won’t be in need of anything ever. Sure enough, despite Pa’s habit of financially helping others by giving away more than half of his income, our family had never been in a severe cash crunch. Somehow, we always manage to sail through any crisis. So, I can’t even argue that my father’s belief is irrational!

My uncle, who expired yesterday, were avoided by relatives because of his compulsive borrowing and to be honest, even I resented his visits at time. He was a good man, had always helped people around him, adopted a girl child, and was liked by all…when he wasn’t financially dependent on others. But within two years of unemployment, his very existence became a burden for his brothers and he was out in the streets with his family. He did odd jobs to support his family. But recently when he fell ill, I realized the importance of money and its value not only to sustain life but also it’s power to dilute and distance even blood relations. He was diagnosed with cancer and was looked after by his wife and two daughters who stayed in the hospital, as they had no other place to live. My father footed only the medical bills, as it was all he could afford to spare at that time. But for daily expenses, his wife had to take up the job of a sweeper in the hospital! This is a woman who comes from a well-to-do family but had been alienated over the years. I shuddered to think how times change. This is what happens in real life. And until now, I used to think such things happens only in Bollywood formula movies. His own sister, my chaachi, offered to pay only a measly 1000 rupees because that was the only amount her husband could spare! His other siblings refused to even visit him in the hospital, in fear of having to financially help him out. Our family, even though distant relatives, were the only contacts of them at this hour because Pa considered him as his younger brother.

When it was diagnosed that he had terminally ill, the hospital told the family about the futility of any further treatment. So, they shifted to a lodge awaiting his final days. His wife called my mother at 3am yesterday and told that my uncle was on his deathbed. My mother rushed to the place where they were staying, but by the time she reached there he had already expired. She called us from there to inform us about it. None of his relatives visited him, except for his wife’s brothers. The cremation was done by his youngest daughter, hardly twelve years old. His siblings inquired about his death only after the cremation was over, because they didn’t want to bear the expenses of it!

By the time he was diagnosed with cancer, he was past the stage of getting cured. Money wouldn’t have helped to save him. But it would’ve ensured he died a peaceful death, satisfied of his family being financially secure after his death. But he died a difficult death and has left his family in a very bad financial situation with no job and no home. My father would help them in any way he can, but having a fixed income puts restrictions in his ability to help their family only to a certain extent. Pa and I had a long talk yesterday, about the importance of money. He emphasized on the importance of savings, helping others in need, and also warned me about how lack of cash can reveal the true identities of people around me, an ugly side I may not be prepared for. He told me the most important thing in life is financial independence and the capacity to take care for self and loved ones. Money can buy happiness after all, just like the lack of it can make life a living hell. Sad, but true.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.targetwoman.com/image/money-saving-tips.jpg

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Letters I Forgot To Send

I’d seen this being done in several blogs. Indi’s and Tasha’s at first, I guess. It consists of letters to certain people in my life without revealing their identities. What I’d really like to say to them, but couldn’t do so for whatsoever reasons.

1) I was so proud of you always. Everything you’ve achieved till now. The way you’ve achieved it. The love you showered on me. Then slowly I discovered that even you were flawed. And that you had continually hurt the person who loved you the most. I detested you for that at times, wished you’d change for the better. Sometimes I even wished you’d die in the moments when you hurt her a lot, but the very next moment I prayed hard that nothing bad happens to you ever. I can’t even think of my life without you. I never hated you. Can never hate you. I cherish each and every moment I spend with you nowadays and prefer not to think about the bad times anymore. You’re a good person, but one single flaw of yours made me lose the respect I had for you. I’m regaining it again. And I like that as an adult, I can talk to you about anything that had bothered me in the past, without feeling weird and that has changed the whole equation of our relationship. I like our relationship now. It’s what I’d always wanted. You wonder aloud whether I’ve forgiven you. I can feel it in the way you look at me at times, but had never gathered the courage to ask it yourself. I have forgiven you. And I’m still proud of you.

2) If I’m asked to choose just one person whom I can’t live without, I’d choose you. Always. You know me inside out; you’ve seen me make a fool of myself, you’ve seen me stumble at various phases in my life, you’ve seen me at the worst moments of my life. And you had stood by me, listened to me, offered advice, and never once judged me. You were the one dancing with joy at all my achievements, even the not too significant ones. I can be goofy with you. I can tell you anything. I can be plain stupid. I can watch corny tearjerkers and even the “No. 1” Govinda comedies with you, knowing fully well that you’re not judging my IQ. You have an uncanny sense of knowing when I need you, and when I need my own space, without my even telling you so. You love me a lot, but would rather have your toe nails plucked out before admitting it. You can always make me laugh. We think alike, but it amazes me that still we’re so different. You know all my secrets. And although I’m much elder to you, I look to you for advice on anything bothering me, because I know it’d be genuine and heartfelt. And even though while growing up, there were angry moments when I was ready to sell you off, but then I would have lost the sole witness to every little detail of my life and the one who loves me despite my shortcomings. I feel blessed to have you in my life.

3) I don’t know your name. And I don’t ever wish to know it. I dread seeing you ever again in my life. Not because I’m scared of you. But because I don’t know whether you’ll survive if you cross my path again. You are the lowest form of being on earth, I pity your existence. I wonder how you can look yourself in the mirror without wanting to kill yourself with shame. I presume it’s not difficult for you, because you obviously lack a conscience, and repentance is something one doesn’t expect from your kind. You probably will have a long life, a long marriage to an unsuspecting wife, and maybe you even have kids, and I wonder whether you lust after your own daughter even!

4) Thanks for introducing me to the world of books. That’s the best gift I’ve ever received.

5) I take your presence in my life for granted. And it’s such a comfort. Eleven years of friendship. No matter where life takes us, the bond we share will grow stronger each day. It’s one of the few things I can be sure of in life.

6) If I could go back in time, I’d make sure I never let you in my life. Lies, deception, fraud; your whole life and existence can be summed up in these three words. Now, when I think back on our time together, I realize I was never in love with you. I did care for you. I believed when you professed your love for me, and thought it was my DUTY to reciprocate your feelings! It felt good to be loved by someone with such strong intensity. I reveled in that attention and care you showered on me. And when your deception began to unfold gradually, I couldn’t bear to lose the one who said he loved me so much! It hurt my ego that the love I received was a farce. And since I had begun to be so much emotionally dependent on you, the very thought of being alone scared me. I devoted years to the relationship and everything turned out to be pretense. I was ashamed of facing friends and family because I had let you into my life and didn’t recognize your true nature! I was feeling guilty for your mistakes. You are living proof of all that’s bad in the world, and it’s not just because you broke my heart. You have made me too cautious to fall in love again.

7)You were a lot of firsts for me. I loved you. And now I miss being friends with you. And that quirky humor, and that shy smile, and that confused frown you always wore on your face. Hope you’ve a good life, “genius reborn”. If we ever meet, hope we can be friends again. I’d really like that.

8) Distance and time has crept into our relationship lately. Job, new friends, new place. I’m possessive of our friendship, and I’m afraid of losing the one I grew up with.

9) I’d hurt you so many times. I had a bad day; I took out my anger and irritation on you. For no fault of yours, just because you were always there, the available target. And you never mouthed your disapproval. I had been unreasonable, cranky, and plain intolerable. And I’m so sorry for all those times. You’d led a difficult life, devoted your whole life to the happiness of others. And often these people took you for granted. You never complained. And I hated you for being so weak, and was angry with you instead. I was wrong. I realize your strength now. Your enduring power marvels me. Not everything is as simple as I think. Love is a complex emotion, and the extent we tolerate for love is something I’m beginning to fathom gradually. I understand you now. I realize my anger was misdirected. I’d never be able to repay for what you’ve done for me. And even the thought of repaying back, you’d perceive as an insult. But, I want you to know that I’m everything I’m today because of you, and I love you so much. Thanks for giving me my life.

Photo Courtesy http://www.crane.com/content/images/letters-you-keep.jpg

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The dreaded "C" word

Someone’s got fever or stomach ache or his head hurts or loss of appetite or bleeding gums or a weak heart, whatever be the ailment, you hope it’s going to be alright after a course of medications and in worse cases maybe surgery. You tell them, “Sure, everything’s going to be okay. Get the required tests done, take the medicines and you’ll be up on your feet in no time”. That’s what we tend to think when we or our loved ones fall ill. But when the dreaded “C” word looms large on the horizon in some cases, all hope drains out of us even if for a moment. Cancer. It still evokes the same horror in us when we hear about it, as it did when the disease was first discovered.

We all plan our lives assuming we would live at least till the age of seventy or eighty. “In ten years I’d be doing this, and in twenty years after the kids have grown up I’ll be doing that”. At that time the thought doesn’t cross our minds that our lives maybe cut short any moment by some accident or illness. And cancer is the cause for many a life cut short. Recently, Jade Goody’s death has increased the awareness of cervical cancer. A few years ago it was breast cancer awareness that had started on a massive scale.

I lost my grandfather to cancer twenty years ago. He used to complain of irregular stomach cramps, a couple of routine tests didn’t yield any results, so the doctors gave him some antacids and let him go. But the stomach cramps continued, and one day while he was teaching me how to make paper planes (I was three years old then), he collapsed. By that time his gallbladder cancer had reached its terminal stage, and the doctors predicted no more than a month to live. My father worked in Guwahati then, while the entire extended family lived in Jorhat. My youngest uncle wrote a letter to my father telling him of my grandfather’s illness. Telephones weren’t too common back then. My father arrived by night bus, and that was the first time I saw him cry. He didn’t cry when my grandfather died a month later. Two of my younger uncles got married within two weeks of the diagnosis of the disease, because my grandfather wished to see them settle down into family life. I didn’t even realize he was gone forever. I remember I was so irritated I took my drawing book and crayons to sketch, away from all the hue and cry going on in the house! It started to sink in only when I sensed his continued absence that stretched beyond a month.

This year my elder sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s just 39 years old, and a mother of two wonderful girls. She called me up a couple of months back and told me she had felt a tiny painless lump on her breast. She was worried because on my mother’s side there’s a history of breast lumps. Even in our family, my mother, my younger sister and I had battled with fibroadenomas, but we got away with just a minor surgery. She repeatedly kept asking me, “Since it’s painless, it’s nothing serious, right?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it’s the “painless” lumps that were mostly malignant. I was hoping it was a benign lump, and asked her to get a mammogram and a FNAC (Fine needle aspiration cytology) done. The tests came out to be positive of malignant cells. The whole family went into a collective shock. This can’t be happening to her, she’s so young and fit. But my sister was so brave. Her husband and her entire family’s support and her own will power helped her tide over this crisis. She lost a breast, she went through a harrowing period of diagnostic tests to detect the spread of cancer to other parts of her body, and she lost all her hair in the post-operative chemo and radiotherapy that she’s undergoing now. I marvel at the courage with which she has fought the situation. I was shocked and crestfallen when I first heard about it, but she is the one living the ordeal, and each moment of her battle with cancer has been a lesson to me. About the unpredictability of life, about how insignificant and petty our everyday troubles seem compared to these battles with death, about the strength of human spirit, about hope, about tolerance, about perseverance, about the support a family offers, about love that endures such tough tests and grows only stronger by the end of it. She had relapsed again after three cycles of chemotherapy. But I pray that she doesn’t suffer much agony.

Then there’s this uncle, my khuri’s (the wife of my father’s younger brother) brother, who had been a constant presence in my life while I was growing up, even though our interaction has lessened in the past few years. He was the one who accompanied me and my father when I went to watch a movie (‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak’) on the big screen for the first time, and he had got all the scolding from the audience when I got scared and started howling when the fight scenes were on. He was the one who brought me a square tin box as my first school bag! And I happily carried it through kindergarten. He fell ill a month back, lost his appetite and became reed thin. The doctors in his town ran a lot of tests but nothing was found wrong with him but still his condition worsened every day. I asked him to get transferred into my college hospital last week. The doctors here suspected a colorectal malignancy and the results are due on Saturday. When I talked to him and his wife today, they expectantly asked me if he was going to be alright. They had never ever even heard of the word “biopsy”. I said he would be alright. But with the “C” word again popping up, I am praying each second that what I assured them would be true. Whatever the test results maybe, I hope he gets over this hurdle in perfect health.

There had been an immense development in the field of oncology (study and treatment of tumors) in the past two decades, be it research for causative factors, treatment, surgeries, diagnostic techniques and screening procedure for cancer detection, study of the magnitude of the disease. The survival rate has gone up. But it still kills a millions of people every year across the globe. The lifestyles we lead today, toxic agents in the environment, addictions like smoking and alcohol, familial factors etc contribute to the millions of people affected each year. It has slowly stopped being the disease of the old age. A frightening number of children and young adults are being affected by it every year. And although there’s increased awareness among people nowadays about cancer and they go for tests at any suspicious symptoms, some cancers hardly show any symptoms till terminal stages and remain undetected. That’s the sad part of this disease. It can hit you anytime. But people have started fighting hard against it. Their families too. And the fight for survival leads to successes, miracles. A cancer survivor knows what’s it’s like to be alive. Their bravery astounds me every second. Few of these brave people’s chances of survival become bleak, but they fight on till the end. Every time I visit a terminal cancer ward, I can’t explain the gamut of emotions I go through on seeing these people’s calm courage at the face of death, trying to live as normal a life possible with tubes and pipes restricting their movements and confining them to beds, pain affecting most of their waking moments, living on with the knowledge that death is close by, carrying on normal conversations with friends and family. They’re living wonders of hope, bravery, and perseverance.

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Of Ethics, Morality And Virtues

Ethics, Morality, Virtues, Vices; I never really put much thought into them, and instinctively followed the values I picked while growing up. Some were deliberate conscious decisions and some were ingrained habits of my life. I have always judged what’s wrong, and what’s right according to my own principles, not biased by other people’s views. And have earned scorn for that at times. But ethics, virtues and vices are very subjective terms. What may seem perfectly moral for me, may not seem so to another. And we should accept the fact and not jump into a tirade denouncing the views of others unless it brings about deliberate harm to someone.

My views and opinions regarding these topics have been both pliant and staunch at different times and my current set of beliefs and values have evolved through the years. I learned from various experiences, mostly by trial and error method. My ideals are distinctively mine, my own individual set of values and others can like it or lump it but I’m going to lead my life within the boundaries of those rules. I’m open to change and my ideals may get modified over time, but certain values are so deep-rooted and so influenced by one’s upbringing that there’s but little change in those specific ideals.

What is ethics or morality? “A code of values to guide man’s choices and actions; a system of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct”. But it evokes the question of what’s acceptable conduct? And do we need a code of values and if yes what should they be? How does an individual decide the principles of right and wrong and should he/she strive to get them accepted by the society at large? And who should these values primarily benefit? The individual or the society? One needs to thoroughly clarify and answer these questions before deciding their life’s ideals.

I faltered many a time at various ideals I believed in and each time the only reason was because I put others’ interests over mine. And, the results were far from what I’d predicated and diminished my image in my own eyes. That’s why I say I’ve learnt through trial and error method, I know what works for me and how I should lead my life; not being bothered by the socially acceptable “virtuous qualities” and not being an “sacrificial animal” yet again. The beneficiary of my ideals should primarily be me. I’m not talking of material and monetary benefits, but the joy and satisfaction that arises from achieving my goals without compromising my values.

The present social scenario leads me to question how the society views what’s immoral and moral. It’s based on few very irrational and archaic principles. Firstly, if an individual’s actions benefits himself more than it benefits the others around him or the society, it’s evil or selfish. Altruism is the keyword for being the epitome of morality! And being concerned with one’s own interest is synonymous to evil! If a person sacrifices his life’s ambition for the care of other people, he is considered far superior than the one who struggles all his life to fulfill his ambition. “For the greater good” is the motto. “There’s no greatness in working for oneself!” Secondly, the self-custodians of morality are hell-bent on reforming the society of everything that they perceive threatens its existence. The rights of a person to live the way they deem fit is frowned upon. One has to answer to the society at large.

There are obvious flaws in this outlook towards life. Every person on this earth has the full right to pursue their goals and ambitions irrespective of whether it pleases others or not. I’m NOT talking about indulging in irrational whims, or harming others in any way on the pretext of “doing whatever pleases me”, but working towards rational goals. But we tend to be bound by the expectations of others, and get motivated to do what’s considered virtuous in the eyes of others and thus lose track of what we always aspired to do. Dare a girl who has the responsibility of her parents on her to pursue her dreams single-mindedly without being condemned for her actions. And dare a single girl live life on her own terms without questions being raised on her character after she passes the conventional marriageable age. We live for others! I used to do feel that’s the proper thing to do too. But it suffocated me.

After a long rumination based on my previous experiences, I’ve decided on my code of ethics. I decided never to renounce what I have in life for the sake of another person, anyone at all, at the cost of hampering my own progress. I know by now few of you’ve conjured up a image of me as the ‘evil’ one. But I don’t want to further arrest my progress in life by self-inflicted pain and sacrifice for the sake of others. I feel that’s the best decision of my life so far; something I should have done a long, long time back.

I feel the following values are enough in leading a life of happiness, a life one can be proud of. I will try my best to always uphold the following set of ethics I believe in and not just preach but actually put them into practice in my life:

Responsibility: Of achieving my goals. Of making my parents proud through my actions. Of never letting my self-esteem falter. Of a constant thrive to aim high in life. Of never sacrificing for the sake of another individual, nor asking anyone else to make sacrifice for my sake. I first read this line in the oath taken in one of my favorite novels, Atlas Shrugged. I used to think that’s not possible to follow; not any more. I would strive my best to live by it.

Rationality: In exercising my choice on the course of actions to be taken at every step of my life. In originating the goals of my life. In my thinking.

Pride: In leading my life on my own terms. In not being prey to the schemes of other people. In never harming any one for my benefit. In achieving what I’ve set out to do. In the power to think.

Independence: And knowing it’s importance, cherishing it and never misusing it. Freedom doesn’t equal to drinking, smoking, using abusive terms in everyday conversations, pub hopping and whatever the youth of today associate it with. It’s okay for those who indulge in these for pleasure or out of habit, and I’ve nothing against them; it’s all about the choices we make in life. But that doesn’t and shouldn’t pressurize me to ape them to assert my freedom.

Justice: And standing up for what I believe in. Of knowing the boundaries I’ve set for myself and being true to them and not letting the moral guardians of society influence my life. And not tolerate self-interest schemes masked by altruistic approach, like the power seeking politicians “working for public good” or the the ‘moral duty’ of supporting a leech (of the human kind!).

Selfishness: Being concerned with my own interests. Doing what makes me happy, and once again, I don’t mean indulging in irrational whims.

Self-esteem: Never losing it again. For anyone at all. Absolutely no one’s worth it. The loss of of self-esteem hurts and stings the deepest and the longest.

Productivity: A focused approach towards my goals. And not doing pseudo work. Of understanding the value of the opportunities I have received and utilizing them fully.

Integrity: A moral soundness that comes from living a life that I’m proud of. Of helping the ones in genuine need without making them leeches, but never at the cost of my own survival.

Knowledge: Of striving to achieve the best of it. Feeding the most precious treasure of man, the mind.

Trust and Honesty: Of valuing human emotions and understanding the hurt that comes from lies and betrayal. Of being honest in my career always, and never settle for minor neglects that I feel won’t harm anyone. Of being honest to myself and my priorities in life. Its neglect might not bring any immediate harm, but its cumulative effect can cause major upheavals.

Love: Caring for and nurturing my relationships with my loved ones and standing by them through thick and thin. And being careful in judging who deserves my love. Not let just anyone stray into my heart.

Effort: Relying on hard work alone and never luck to progress in my career. And not shying away from hard work ever.

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