Ignoring Life

The clock in my room observes a twenty seven year old wearing mismatched prints and a pair of precariously placed reading glasses, poring over a book with her mouth half-open, till a few hours before dawn. If these discrete hours of reading every night are gathered and calculated, it would amount to nearly two years of uninterrupted reading. Two years of my relatively short life had been spent in scanning words of unseen men and women to crowd my imagination with new stories, lives, places, ideas, stirrings, perspectives and often discovering a hitherto unrealized or unexplored thought, or a trace of familiarity. It brings a new plot to my life where things head in a specific direction, reach a climax/anti-climax, and i don’t have to wait for ages to see how things will turn out; i can skip decades with the flick of a page.

Real life introduces new plots and unexpected twists too. But they don’t come frequently and take ages to develop into something substantial; also the restlessness of not knowing what is to come is just too much for me. It is our prerogative to decide whether our life will be an open book that stands revealed and unapologetic about its contents; or be as private as an adolescent girl’s journal, with stories that are open to a select audience of choice. I have chosen to be an open book after years of being the latter. But what are its contents? I open my journals and all i read are accounts of the people i have met, the conversations i had, the funny thing that occurred, the disappointments; people walked in and out of these pages with no definite pattern or purpose. My days have no specific continuity as i run helter-skelter through life; there can be a wide discrepancy of the events of one day from the other. Milestones are often insidious and realized in retrospect. And so is love. He might be an irregular visitor on the pages of my journal, but all of a sudden i mention his name with the intimacy of an old lover. I miss the transitions. My life’s plot is confusing even for me to follow; it’s all over the place, going in every direction, and hence stagnant.

It is somewhat tragic to be reading old journals, only to be acutely reminded of the passage of time, the surges and dwindling of hope over the years, the unforeseen curve-balls, and the things that never amounted to anything substantial. Love had come into my life, and i waited with bated breath, wondering where it would lead. A few departed with the usual fuss and drama, and the hurt reached an early crescendo before ebbing away. They were easier to let go. And then sometimes things fell apart without a distinct snap of ties, without drifting apart, without monosyllables replacing conversations, and without a heap of failed expectations; they were just a clean and abrupt end; no explanations, no mess; it was just that over, and just that uneasy.

I am here now, experiencing these feelings, having these thoughts, writing these words; and a hundred years ago there must have been another girl pouring out her heart, believing in the permanence and relevance of her world. Where are those thoughts now? Didn’t they end with her life? I am just another person and my thoughts will end with me too. It is alarming to dwell on the impermanence of our hopes, thoughts, love and secret desires;and  i feel like spilling out the chaos in my mind, the love in my heart, so that it doesn’t wither away with me. But then i wonder if it is even wanted, whether it will be valued, and grudgingly accommodate the word repression in my life. And continue my quiet reading about lives where things happen. 

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life”~ Fernando Pessoa

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What is Stopping You?

“Mother, have you noticed that this society we’re in tends to be a little…repressive?”

“What does that mean, Eugenie? What does that mean, that strange new word, ‘repressive,’ that I have never heard before?”

“It means…it’s like when you decide to do something, and you get up out of your chair to do it, and you take a step, and then become aware of frosty glances being directed at you from every side.”

“Frosty glances?”

“Your desires are stifled.”

“What desires are you talking about?”

“Just desires in general. Any desires. It’s a whole…I guess atmosphere is the…word…a tendency on the part of the society…”

“You’d better sew some more pillow cases, Eugenie.”

– Donald Barthelme

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A Book, A Tear-stained Pillow

Certain books take my hand and walk me into their melancholic core. I think about them for a long time afterwards, but I’m the passive and often distant reader. It’s only sympathy that wobbles up.

But rarely I come across a book that makes me cry unabashedly. The tears just refuse to stop. Empathy is the only emotion. The heart gets involved unknowingly, one can no longer be distant. I don’t remain a mere reader. Their pain is mine. Their love is mine. So is their despair.

Khushwant Singh’s classic novel, ‘Train to Pakistan‘ is the reason my pillow is wet with tears tonight. The novel is set in one of the most harrowing times this country had witnessed less than a century ago. The brutalities of Partition always makes me shudder. People, who cohabited quite peacefully, suddenly starts slaughtering, looting and raping each other in the heat of communal violence and a seriously convoluted sense of religious faith and patriotism. Lives became statistics; they kill one, you kill two. The thought of a single corpse is disturbing, the end of a life that still had so many hopes perhaps. Thousands of corpses filled in trains, floating down the river, mass graves; Singh’s clear, vivid prose makes every detail achingly real.

Nothing much has changed since then. Religion, borders, intolerance to other faiths, castes, wealth; we still use them as reasons to shed blood, and kill within us every trace of humanity. It is so easy to rouse a mob; to manipulate minds in the name of religion and loyalty; to ask them to leave behind all reason; to exact revenge out of innocent and unintended victims. I wonder if it will ever stop.

Even the few sane ones who understand the true reason of having a faith, not coloured by communal overtones, when faced with such blatant hatred, reacts in myriad ways. Some give up; turn mute, blind and deaf. Few idealistic ones prefer armchair activism, everything is dismal around them, nothing has any hope, why even try? Where is the audience to acknowledge their bravery or sacrifice? Why waste one’s valuable life by being just another casualty of a hopeless cause? Some try every tactic, cunning they could muster; they look for loopholes; they manipulate, but for the greater good; sometimes they are trapped in their many half-baked plans; so they cry plaintively, kneel down and pray. Some just pray from the beginning, it’s easier to leave everything to a higher power, and be freed from any responsibility.

Then there are some crude hearts and simple brains, who don’t know much, don’t even attempt to understand. They know hate strongly. But they know love even better than their own selves. And even loyalty. When the whole world is ravaged by wars, inhuman acts and sectionalized into different religions, classes and countries; only love in all its selfish desire to protect its loved one from every possible harm, to just give without seeking anything in return, and just being its plain and simple whole, sans any calculations and justifications, offers hope.

That’s why even though the novel portrays an honest picture of wars and communal violence in all its brutality, it ends on a mixed note, a tragedy laced with a feeble hope. When nothing seems to work, no respite seems in sight, a heart quietly sacrifices itself to protect the one it loves. The worthlessness of war will keep you awake and distressed for a long time to come. So will the futile and irrelevant boundaries we have created in the name of religion, countries, race and money. Hatred is infectious; but so is love. Vouch for love. It’s all but a choice.

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Duet: On People who Gifted Me Books. On Love.

 On People Who Gifted Me Books

Only four persons gifted me books I love and thus brought upon them the misfortune of being gushed over for life by yours truly.

Ruskin Bond’s autograph

There is Mannan, my classmate from medical college, who is straight out of an Austen novel- brooding, intense and frighteningly intelligent. He was in Mussorietraining to be an IAS officer and I had asked him to try to get me Ruskin Bond’s autograph. A few months later he sent me a book autographed by an author whose stories populated my childhood. Thank you, Mannan. I really appreciate the gesture. He gifted me Dust on the Mountains by Ruskin Bond.

Reading it now

There is Shakeel, a friend from high school who writes like a dream. He is living a life I covet and admire; writing and getting paid for it. Someday I hope to read a book written by him. Our mutual friend, Snata, is an amazing writer too and I’m simply happy to know this talented duo. I received a book from him today; and it was so unexpected and it made me so happy. Shakeel, prepare to be gushed over for life that would embarrass you enough to hide behind doors and duck under tables whenever you see me. He gifted me The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi.

Mystical

The third is Amrita, who is nothing short of my soul sister. We have conjoined hearts and minds. She is a quiet person weaving her own world; and it’s a beautiful world peopled with soulful thoughts. I’m glad she invited me into her world where we can talk about books, movies, love, life, men and hills. She has gifted me a lot of books including Paulo Coelho’s The Fifth Mountain.

Heart-felt essays and poems

Then there is Priyanka, who is courage personified. She brims with intelligence, wit, confidence and a passion for writing and for making the world a better place. She has taken risks in life that I highly admire; she is vibrant and full of infectious energy. She recently got into MIT as the prestigious 2012/2013 Elizabeth Neuffer fellow and it makes me proud beyond measure. I cherish you, Priyanka. She gifted me Kora by Tenzin Tsundue.

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On Love

I write about love, but I’m not a lover. I read about love, but I don’t live it. I see love, but I am a mere observer. Even when I was in love, when I was a lover, when I thought I was loved, it was emptiness and detachment wrapped in a thin crust of passion, that was a ghost of some earlier self, and a dollop of forced interest. This detachment and ambiguity of feelings scared me and I tried to be involved; I became neurotic about it and felt re-assured when I experienced symptoms of romantic jealousy or missed someone, which gave a false sense of being in love, or capable of being in love. I am often swept off my feet, but never by a person; it’s always a singular attribute: a warm smile, owning a common set of books, very often it’s the eyes, or kindness, sharp wit, ambition, intelligence, a fancy pair of shoes, arrogance, clean nails, someone who dines with family, writes poems, well-travelled, chivalry works every time too, or sometimes it’s just a mix of serendipity and hormones.

I can’t define love anymore. I was naive once, not so long ago, in a time when everything seemed possible and there were no missing puzzle pieces. I knew it once, this love, without having to say it in words and I poured it copiously in letters and gestures. But one day it slapped me out of my reverie. Singular attributes continued to lodge in my heart instead of a whole person. Now that time has lifted the veil off the pretenses I had forced myself to believe, I wonder why I ever considered it to be love. The conversations bored me, the laughter was hollow and I longed to be alone and with a book instead. But instead I talked for hours, laughed out loud, was a finicky and clingy lover, as if the love was real! I planned strategies, I made lists of pros and cons, I observed the duel of my mind and heart, and I was scared of acknowledging that it was doomed from the start or that I was passing off a fleeting attraction as love or worse, that I was incapable of love anymore. At twenty three! I was scared of letting go lest I don’t meet anyone before I turned thirty, or forty, or fifty.Knights on white horses were a cliché even when I was just ten. The concept of ‘casual dating‘ and testing the waters is lost on me too. So I settled for the first decent person who confessed his love for me. Sad, I know.

My friends call me the ‘most romantic person ever’ and I squirm in discomfiture. I worship romance. I love to love. I crave intimacy. But on actual confrontation with it, I panic and withdraw into a shell. It baffles me. Why do I get attracted to men who I know for sure will break my heart? Why am I incapable of living the romance that exudes from every single fiber of my heart? Have you watched the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is making love to Diane Keaton and she just lies there in bed, inert and passive, and her soul has an ‘out-of-body’ experience and walks around the room, lights up a smoke and reads a book? That’s exactly how I feel when I convince myself that I’m in love!

I have thought about it and have come up with few half-baked theories:

a)  I have set certain standards for the man I want to fall in love with and so far I haven’t met anyone who had lived up to them. Practicality convinces me that the standards are high, and I should settle even when just a quarter of my expectations are met. I did so; but deep down I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for and it would only damage me; so I clammed up, emotionally and even physically. One called me prude; the other thought I was sexless. But I tell myself it’s just about not meeting the right person.

b)  I can’t believe that anyone can love me. I have my own set of insecurities which leads me to wonder why would a person decide to devote his time and love on me when they could do so for the millions of other girls who are prettier, can speak well, can make them laugh, can walk on high heels, have lustrous hair, independent and knows how to dance. Why would anyone love me? And this question leads on to another disturbing query, ‘Do I love myself?’ Over the years I have started liking ‘me’, even though I am not bursting with love for myself. If loving self is tough, it becomes tougher to believe that one is worthy of love. Cynicism sets in. Sometimes it takes deep roots. It’s tough to see ourselves through a lover’s eyes, which in my mind is always scanning for flaws! ‘You had been bad relationships. Once you know love, all your cynicism will go out of the window’, my friends tell me. I give them a wry smile and my eyes mock their optimism, but my heart thumps with hope.

c) I worry about the word ‘forever‘. Intolerance is rampant. Who has time for love? Or the patience to make things work. People jump from bed to bed, memories fade, and all that remains of what started as a promise of growing old together is a tattered  Hallmark card. You start cautiously; you exchange likes and dislikes, you move on to dreams and hopes, then comes the stories of childhood and secrets you don’t tell your friends. You remember anniversaries of first date and first stirrings of love, and get wooed by flowers and dizzy kisses. Then one day when you least expect it (or expected and dreaded since always), everything vanishes. And you are left wondering why you invested so much time and effort on the relationship. It disturbs you that your declarations of affection and confessions of your innermost thoughts are in the mind of a man forever lost in the crowd. You despair that you are back to square one; you have to lay a foundation again, and build block by block another relationship. Just the thought of the effort tires you. So you remain passive.

d) I am scared of infidelity. I have seen it at close quarters in people around me. I question the existence of monogamy. And it disturbs me that I have reached a stage when I feel fidelity is a blessing. I try to be nonchalant about the end of a relationship and feel liberated from a worse fate in the future. But lurking in the subconscious is a cautiousness that’s overwhelming and sometimes damaging, nipping opportunities in the bud.

e) I am selfish. I want it all. The wooing, the proclamations of love, the romance, the right amount of possessiveness, the loyalty, the opposites that attract, the similarities that bind, the conversations that are endless and effortless (Before Sunrise hangover), the adequate space, public displays of affection (not bordering on perversion), the flavor of newness, the comfort of familiarity, the intimacy of knowing looks unknown to the rest of the world, the respect, the honesty, the book-lover, the laughter, distinctively ‘I’ yet ‘We’, a team of two in this world or against this world, growing together in life (not in chronological sense), and a disarming smile is always appreciated. And yes, soulful eyes. Since re-incarnation is not an established fact and I’ve just one life to live, why compromise? So, I wait.

A cynicism has seeped into my attitude towards love that I largely attribute to certain bitter experiences. But in the past week I watched three movies, three unusual love stories that have dusted off some of the cynic crust layering my heart.

Hypnotic

The first is Wong Kar-Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’. This movie seduced me! It curled my toes, sent a shiver up my spine and unspeakable parts of my anatomy, and haunted my dreams for the next few nights. The simple act of passing each other on the stairs on the way to buy noodles can be orgasmic for the viewer. It told of a love that crept up unknowingly, discreetly; a love that would be illicit yet the purest form of love. Intense gazes, dark passageways, metaphorical rain when the tension brought you to the edge of explosion, a haunting melody that intensified every gesture-a bend of the neck, a touch of the earlobe, a wave of the hand. ‘It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.’ The agony stayed with me, I lived that tale of doomed love for two hours and a long time thereafter. It reinstated something I thought I had lost.

Subtle longing

The second is Before Sunset. Its prequel is one of my favorite movies of all time. But this movie edged ahead with a subtler love and longing that I could identify with better. It’s set in Paris over the course of an hour; two people who met just once and had spent an amazing and meaningful night in Vienna, meet again after nine years. They are still in love, but are cautious and bound by new commitments. They walk around and talk about everything under the sun. The effortless conversation portrayed in the movie is what I crave. No mushy talk, no promises, no flattering. But the love is palpable as it surfaces with every passing moment. The fragility of it all and the fierceness with which they protect it and hide it is touching. The way he looks at her, the way she looks at him, secretive yet fully aware, melted my heart.

Melt! 🙂

The third is Barfi! I don’t need to elaborate on this; by now everyone and their uncle must have watched it. It felt like a warm, fuzzy cocoon. Misty hills, the humor (Saurabh Shukla takes a nervous bow when he is caught peeing in the field by the hidden farmers), the dizzying visuals, the refreshing silence that spoke volumes, the Chaplin-esque acts, the lifted sequences (like the train scene from Fried Green Tomatoes) that blended so well and thus forgiven in an instant, the charming Barfi and the adorable Jhilmil ignited in me a love for the whole world! So this weekend I feel everything is possible and good things will happen. I put Libya and Egypt and diesel hike away for a while and basked in the mellow Barfi daze. But it’s the tender innocence of a love so giving and so enduring that rejuvenated my sense of romance.

I’ve a filmiheart!

 

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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…

(Photo Courtesy: kikimatters)

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Holiday from Hell

I took a sudden decision to go on a short vacation to Bangalore in the second week of May. My sister had a medical entrance exam there and I decided to accompany her and my dad and hoped to explore Bangalore while they were busy with exams. We set off to Bangalore on the fourteenth of May. We stayed over at my brother’s place and my brother and bhabhi went out of their way to make our stay in Bangalore quite enjoyable. Good food, shopping, sight-seeing, and just enough time off to curl up with a good book. It was bliss! It was also quite wonderful to watch the young newly-weds, my brother and bhabhi, run their home so efficiently.

And then things went horribly wrong. After a humongous shopping spree on 16th, we decided to have lunch in a restaurant on MG road. Pa along with the rest in the group ate seafood, while I being vegetarian stuck to typical North-Indian fare. Pa had slight indigestion the next day. But after I gave him some OTC medicines; he felt quite okay. On 18th we had an early morning flight to Mumbai and from there an evening flight to Guwahati.

After reaching home on 18th night, Pa felt seriously ill and had to be admitted to the hospital. at 10pm. He was shifted to the ICU that midnight. Everything was so sudden, that we were at a loss of what to do. He collapsed and his vital organs began to fail. He had food poisoning which spread in his entire body in a matter of few hours, aided by the fact that he is a diabetic. He was diagnosed with sepsis and multi-organ dysfunction. He was slipping away and doctors said that he had very little chances of survival, but they were fighting hard against controlling the infection. All our relatives from every nook and corner of the country gathered in the hospital. My mother who had recovered from a recent myocardial infarction was another great worry, and I had to make sure she was able to cope with whatever the outcome was.

And then on the third day in the ICU, my father’s spontaneous breathing stopped. I felt my whole world had collapsed. Nothing mattered and nothing will matter ever again. All I could think of was how four days back we were happily discussing the national election result and making guesses about the likely cabinet ministers, and then on the flight back home how I was busy reading a novel and hardly checked on him. I vomited in the corridor outside the ICU. I can’t describe in words how I felt. My sister fainted and I had to take care of my mother too. This can’t be happening to us, this wasn’t how it was all supposed to be. And then my uncle came running to us, and said that the doctors had been able to successfully resuscitate Pa. He was breathing again. I immediately ran to the ICU, forced my way in despite visitor restrictions and confirmed what my uncle said. I, who was never so much of a religious person, began praying day and night after that moment. After ten harrowing days of battling for life in the ICU, my father was finally out of danger. He was shifted to the ward. Two days after that, he was back home. But he needs to be on complete bed rest for a month. So, here I am, thankful for every moment to God, and the amazing critical care specialists in the hospital, esp Dr.Vandana Sinha. I will always be indebted to her for the miracle of my father’s surviving sepsis at the age of 59yrs and with the complicating co-morbidities of diabetes and hypertension. I’m thankful to all my relatives, near and far, who made every effort to decrease this ordeal for us through comforting words and actions. The help my dad’s office colleagues offered is something I will always remember and be thankful for.

It was a bad time for our family; fear, tension, anxiety and pain. Fear of losing the most important person in our lives. Time stood still for us, as we waited day and night outside the ICU, praying for his recovery, dreading every time the doctor called us in for an ‘important‘ talk. But they fade into oblivion when I see Pa at home now, reading the morning newspaper and watching cricket. So many times I’ve taken this man for granted, his very presence as something I would have for life. But this incident, least expected and so sudden, shook me up completely. Never ever I would give my parents a reason to worry or grieve because of me.

A lot of things have changed for me in the past month. My whole life was on the verge of coming to a standstill and picked up at the last minute. At times like this, we realize the true value of family, relatives and friends. And the need to believe in a higher being with the power to drive away all your troubles. I started believing in God instinctively, when I saw Pa in the hospital bed.

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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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