Silent Eloquence » Personal

Of love…and love story

Surya — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:49:17 +0000

Have you ever felt like there is so much inside of you that it can hardly wait to get out? That the voices in your head just wouldn’t stop talking? Constant travel, personal tragedy and changes in life have all been playing havoc on my writing. And when I have kept away from putting words on paper for so long, I feel bottled up. Like a stream boiling underneath a mountain ready to spring forth. Yet the stream has no clue how to be born. There are no how-to books for stream dummies. Should it be one angry swish from the weakest spot that would change the landscape forever? Or should it try different spots across the terrain, to possibly form a calmer landscape of intertwining little streams?

As my metaphor gets confusing, I abandon it for more practical ways to channel my writing. For quite literally, I don’t know where to start, there just seems to be so much buzzing around. I decide to pick up the first random book in my bookshelf for inspiration and follow its lead. Secretly I was hoping for Erich Segal’s Love Story which has been missing in action ever since we moved, which I had been dying to reread and also because I wanted to write about love (and I swear watching reruns of Sex and the City had nothing to do with it). As luck would have it, I picked up Shashi Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad.

How does a collection of random thoughts inspire one to write a coherent piece? Well, it can be interpreted as nothing but the license to write a collection of random thoughts, exactly what I was trying to prevent. Well, some days you just can’t seem to win. Or rather, no matter how hard you try to lose, you win.

How do you know you love someone? In the spirit of randomness, I will give you my answer without the explanation. The one that I recently figured out. If I had picked up Segal’s Love Story, I promise things would have been different.

If you can cross every mountain, swim every sea, just to see someone smile, that’s what they call love. If you can give up all that you held dear and fought hard for, just for a glimmer of hope that it might make someone else a little happier, then it must be love. But above all, if you can feel someone’s pain and someone’s joy as if it were your own, it has to be love. When a tiny tear tripping down his face pulls your heart apart and it wouldn’t stop hurting till his pain is your pain, his tears are your tears, you know. You just know. This must be love.

Where is that goddamn book? Have you ever wondered why people flock to fiction? Why writers write fiction and why readers read fiction? Why create a world of your own, not knowing whether anyone else would want to visit and if people were to visit, you are unable to dictate that they leave their baggage at the door? Why lovingly carve out characters when they may never meet a soul beyond yourself or your immediate friends, and even if your book were to be a best-seller, knowing that the characters you envisioned will never be met with the same love and care that you nurtured them with? Why spend hours scribbling word after word, sentence after sentence, and sometimes going back and editing so that the gaps your pen skipped because your mind glossed over, because it is too familiar or too painful, can be filled – not because your mind doesn’t want to skip it, but because you want someone else to understand it too. Precisely because of that. Precisely because you want someone else to comprehend it too, and feel what you feel, and connect at the most human, most basic level of all. And fiction gives us the façade to do it.

Which is why we read too. Reading is easier than writing, because someone has done the hard work for us. They have created the house, put the furniture in, and they are inviting us in. I need Segal’s Love Story because I want someone to tell me what I feel. I want to share without giving. I want to lose myself in an imaginary world, an alternate reality, as an affirmation of the reality I am living in. I want to take out just one aspect of my everyday life, and blow it up out of proportion so that that bit becomes the whole. Love becomes the world. Everything else fades into the background. And I am consumed by it. As is everything else.

I have a vague suspicion about what happened to Segal. While we were moving countries and houses as a consequence, for what seems to me the umpteenth time, Srijith had separated a pile of books. I come home one day to see three dismantled bookshelves, five hundred odd books strewn over the floor and a neat pile of about twenty kept away from the rest. They were to be sold!! What treason! He was destroying my home. Every nomad eventually comes to a definition of home. It is sort of ingrained in our human nature – the need to define a home, to identify a place, or sometimes a concept, or rarely just an abstraction where one belongs. I have a simple definition – home is where my books are. I guard them with an almost fanatic fervour. Imagine my consternation when I find that there are twenty books – twenty bricks from my home – about to be sold, handed over to another mortal for a few meagre euros. And imagine my disbelief, for I was unable to muster any other emotion, when I find among the doomed, Segal’s Love Story.

I was recently reading an interview with the poet laureate, Kay Ryan. A celebrated poet, she seems in every way so different from me that I could not find even a shred in that personality that I could identify with. Yet I like her poems.

“A bitter pill / doesn’t need / to be swallowed / to work. Just
reading your name / on the bottle / does the trick./ As though there
were some anti-/placebo effect. / As though the / self were eager / to be wrecked.”

I can’t even put my finger on the sense of rhythm that I feel when I read it aloud. Yet it resounds again and again, as if a lullaby sung to make you think while you sleep. May be that’s why I like her – poetry is the song that connects. The equivalent of fiction where the author requires the reader to do a lot more of the work. Deceiving in the simplicity of words, disguised in the rhythm of a musical note, it makes us believe that we have heard it all before, but there is more. There is always more.

In any case, the point of bringing up the Kay Ryan interview was a specific discussion on how she does her work. She said her mind is a blank, an empty slate, most of the time. And it was so incomprehensible to me. My mind is always full. Overflowing is how I usually feel. And for a long time, I thought that’s how everyone feels.

It’s difficult to accept people who are different from you. Yet that is love. Ability to accept the difference. Not just accept, but embrace it. And never let it go. Never wanting to let it go. Flourish and let flourish. And not insist that the flowers that bloom need to be this way or that way, it will most probably bloom in an altogether different way.

I do not love Kay Ryan, well not in the socially accepted conventional sort of way that one reserves for the dearest in their lives; certainly not even the most touching of poetry moves me that much. The emptiness of mind discussion made me think of how difficult it was for me to accept that concept. How difficult it was for me to comprehend something that I had never experienced. They say that once your mind is stretched by an experience, it never regains its original shape. You cannot “unexperience” something, or “unthink” a thought. Yet there are concepts, which may be everyday realities to some, but are abstractions to me, because I can never experience them, and will always remain abstractions for me, because I will never be able to.

Yet one day I got over it. I woke up one morning, and I believed it is possible. My mind will always be overflowing, but perhaps it is a possibility, however rare and improbable, it is a distinct possibility that some people have blank slates for their mental states. Blessed are they, who can then choose, what to scribble on their fresh consciousness. Believing without experiencing, trusting without knowing, embracing without questioning, that must be love.

Srijith tells me he took out Segal’s Love Story from the pile before he sold the rest. I believe him.

Perhaps it has a lot to do with growing up. Does everyone go through all stages of life – childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, old-age-in-denial and eventually old age? We all have pre-conceived, often romantic notions about each of them, no doubt augmented by fiction whichever media it chooses to be told in, yet I wonder whether we all experience them. Of course, none of us can stop the march of time, and physically we will all do the inevitable journey through our life cycle, yet how long each stage is depends on each of our lives – and it comes under constant pressure, with ever increasing life spans and changes in expectations across generations. The stage our parents experienced in their young adulthood (which is what I choose to call my current phase) is not what we experience. The stage our parents find themselves in now is not what our grandparents lived through. We have no precedents really. So do these stages of life hold any meaning, if there are no definitions to go along with them?

Till recently, I used to say, “When I grow up, I will become…“. Someone approaching the big thirty would have been considered quite grown up in almost all places, across all times, yet I think in my generation I am not such a misfit. To not have your life figured out by the thirties is not a disaster. But I have stopped saying, “When I grow up…“. Very recently. I wonder whether it is a reflection of my growing cynicism or just me taking responsibility for my life. Growing up is probably about realising there are many answers to a question and that one is not necessarily more correct than another. Growing up is knowing that you have to choose a path, in fact you actually have chosen a path, and there is no turning back. Growing up is feeling happy and contented in the landscape you see around in the path you have chosen, and in case it strikes you as not what you signed up for, may be doing something to change it.

I picked up Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad from my bookshelf for inspiration, yet I think this essay is as much about Segal’s Love Story, if not more. Guess it just goes to show that life may be a box of chocolates, but whether you decide to eat ice cream instead is entirely dependent on you.

The center of my universe

Surya — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:23:37 +0000

It’s a sunny summer morning. I am reading the news. I laugh uncontrollably at the ridiculous youtube video someone had sent me a link to, and then, look up from my computer across the table, to share my joy. The big black chair is empty.

I can hear the ticking of the hallway clock and it is distracting me from my reading. Somehow the perfect music to fit my mood doesn’t magically fill the room, like it had never before failed to do.

I find myself in the kitchen, distractedly making breakfast, amused by the antics of the tabby cat who lives by the window next door. I have made two bowls of cornflakes and now have no idea what to do with the second one.

Hunger strikes at 12 and I decide I still have enough time to head to the supermarket. Hunger strikes real hard at 2 and I realize I still have nothing to eat. I curl myself up on the sofa for my afternoon siesta, remembering the sweet rebuke that finds its way into my ears every time I miss a meal.

I never miss an evening coffee. But the thought of sitting across a table from the big black empty chair makes me skip the whole coffee ritual. It’s a beautiful evening and I don’t know what to do.

I decide to pick up a new book to read. I stare at the unread section of our bookshelves. I keep staring – perhaps if I stare long enough, I would hear the familiar voice recommending a book, persistent even after all these years, even though I never fail to remind him I need to really pick the book out on my own, and just to prove the point, pick something else.

It’s almost night, and the neighbor upstairs hasn’t finished fixing her Ikea cupboard. I look over the soft toys strewn across the sidetable and choose the ragged Winnie-the-poo, not least because of some cruel law of ageing magnets that had separated him from Tigger, to gripe to, about my neighbor’s impending nocturnal carpentry.

Some things are never easy, no matter how many times you have said them before. Goodbyes are one of them.

Some things are never said, no matter how easy they should have been. Telling someone that they are the center of your universe is one of them.

Little deeds of love

Surya — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 21:45:22 +0000

Someone asked me today if I missed home. I laughed and said, “Its been a decade since I left home. I am used to it”. I don’t know why I always lie when someone asks me that question. Or even to myself, for that matter.

My father would fill ink in my crooked Hero pen every morning before I went to school. First it was because I used to get ink all over my hands. And after that it was because he didn’t realise I had grown up.

Sometimes I would wake up at 4 in the morning to study. My mother always woke up with me just to make me a cup of coffee.

My father would pick me up at school every evening. He would be there at 3:55pm and I would almost always be the first one out of the school gates at 4:01 pm. It was like a silent pact.

Whenever I was bad, I was afraid my mother would cry. And that was so much more effective that any fear that she would be angry. So I tried to be good.

Whenever my father dropped me off at school before an exam, he would tell me I would definitely be the first in the class. And he never ever flinched. Or looked like he didn’t believe in it. Even when I told him I hadn’t finished reading half the syllabus. That faith made up for more than half the unread portions.

I was once in a bus in Mizoram’s mountains and the driver left the bus for a minute without pulling the brakes properly. The bus started rolling down towards the suicidal hairpin curves. We narrowly escaped. My parents called me up early next morning, because my mother couldn’t sleep the whole night. She was worried about me and felt something was wrong. I will never know why she felt that way that night.

Whenever there was an important cricket match, after my mother had left for work, my father and I would skip work and school and stay home to watch the match. And we would have omelettes for lunch because that is all he knew how to cook.

On most days, long after the alarm has gone off and after many angry faraway shouts from my father, I would still be sleeping. My mother would make her way up the stairs to my room. She would kiss me on the forehead and I would wake up with a smile. Even now, when I wake up in the morning, I often think of my mother.

I know my parents don’t know what a blog is. And they will never read this. So I can safely say what I have always wanted to tell them, but never could – I miss you. Terribly. Every single day. And it doesn’t get any better just because I am all grown up. Nor do I get used to it just because its been a long time.

Of love…and love story

Now, Germany is in the Netherlands?

Surya — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 07:55:15 +0000

Some time back, I griped about how people thought Singapore was in Germany (and everywhere else except where it really is). Now, check out how American Express addresses my credit card bills!

Sure, my previous address used to be in Holland, but that’s no reason to think Germany is in the Netherlands. I also don’t know how the West Germany sneaked into my address.

Seriously, even if they never went to school, don’t they at least watch soccer?

Calculator Woes

Surya — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:27:05 +0000

Just one of those days when the world definitely doesn’t seem to be on my side. After surviving with a scientific calculator (legacy of my engineering degree), I decided it is time I graduated to a professional financial calculator. After I decided on a particular Texas model,I discoverd its not available in Duesseldorf (or at least I dont know the right places to get it).

Amazon.de sells it at a price which is more than double that of the US counterpart. And not just that, I have a sneaky feeling that the manual will be in German. Who knows, even the keys may have German equivalents. So, I ain’t gonna buy it online, without making sure I can read it.

After bracing myself to pay the shipping charges from US and the unreasonable German taxes on goods shipped from US (plus, I recently found out that UPS charges you another 11.6 Euros as administrative fee, just for paying the tax on your behalf!), I decided to buy my calculator from the US Amazon. Guess what! They don’t ship calculators outside of US! @#$*%#%!

I am just flabbergasted at how difficult it is to buy a simple thing as a calculator! Well, the bright side is – I am now more motivated to expedite my German lessons, at least to be confident enough to read German instructions on a calculator.

Apathy

Surya — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:36:34 +0000

I had my doctor’s appointment today and much against my better judgement, I decided to leave the safety of my house. Srijith had repeatedly assured me that “he would kick anyone’s ass” if they stared at my rather ghastly scarred face. I needn’t have worried at all, no one we met on the way so much as threw at a general glance in my direction. All this made me rather bold and I have been craving some Indian food for a while now, so we made a short detour to an Indian dhaba near my doctors office. We were just gonna pack some stuff and get away and I kept inconspicuously behind Srijith, hiding my face like a shy bride. But yet, to my surprise, the old man at the Indian shop decided to give advice on how to best get rid of the marks on my face! Not that I was looking for advice, but just the fact that the man cared to notice, made me smile. Across all these miles, it took an Indian to show some concern. And I never thought I would ever say this in my life, but I do miss that about India.

When I am home, I complain about how just about everyone loves to give advice, totally unasked for and often unwelcome. If I drive, the policeman at our street corner will wave and say “Ma’am, drive carefully”. If I wear a blue salwar to the temple, the old lady there will tell me, “Kutty, you should wear red saris. Red colour will definitely suit you”. If I am at the bookshop, someone is bound to give me a book recommendation. And how I long for all these to come back, because now everyone in the 1 kilometer radius of my home is stuck with the refrain: “Hmm..you have been married for a while haven’t you..hmm”. While I had found all these annoying, its even worse when no one cares, not even to annoy you.

And the apathy is definitely something I am very much guilty of. Having lived for quite a while in Singapore, which I call the king of apathic lands, its rubbed off quite a bit on me too. If I see a girl sobbing in my neighbourhood, I probably wouldn’t ask her whats wrong. I will justify she had a fight with her boyfriend and just needs to be left alone. The thing is, if everybody just leaves everybody else alone, we are all gonna be very lonely.

The next time the old lady advises me to wear a red sari, I will just nod and smile and maybe even wear a red sari the next day.

Sudoku – on my terms

Surya — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:31:30 +0000

I am a novice at Sudoku and I have promised myself I wont be lured into it. Some promises are hard to keep. One always finds a way out. I have promised myself I wont be lured into solving Sudoku. So I made my own.

The easiest way out in Sudoku ( ok, this is just IMO – I think there are lots of other theories out there) is to crack the cells that are most restrained first. ( Call it restrained/constrained/limited whatever – I dont know the technical term.)

Anyway, the way to make the puzzle inherently more dificult (Using larger grids to make “super”sudokus does not make it inherently difficult) is to minimise the constrained cells, preferably to 0. Once I figure out how to do that, no more Sudoku for me.

No related posts.

The Episode of the Mannequin

Surya — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever seen a mannequin getting a change of clothes? Thank your stars if you haven’t. In the Shopping centre nearby, I was treated to the gory sight of a lady pulling out another lady’s (she looked so life-like) arms – both of them – and screwing out her head, so that she can fit the rather complicated costume onto it. Eeeks, either they shld get mannequins that don’t look like humans or they shouldn’t do it at a glass window in full public sight at lunchtime.

My mother used to complain how fussy I was abt my clothes when I was a kid – if they were slightly uncomfortable (read not baggy-loose or has a hint of lace in it), I would bawl and refuse to wear it. It had to be plain simple and extra roomy and in my mother’s words – ugly. Somehow, the mannequin episode made me very grateful that my mother did not resort to any scary ways to force her choice of clothes upon me – no, she wouldn’t have screwed my head out – but twisting my arm just might have helped.

Apathy

Are you feeling under the weather?

Surya — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance”
-Jane Austen

Why does the weather play such an important part in one’s lives? I remember, when I lived in Singapore, the ‘air-conditioned nation’, you are hardly ever really physically affected by the weather – all offices and most homes have air-conditioning, most walkways are covered so you can get by without getting too drenched in the rain and in most malls, you cant even see the outside world so you wouldn’t even know what the weather is like. And yet, my moods used to be affected to some extent by the vagaries of the weather.

The first spell of monsoon in Kerala always used to bring a sense of hope to me. The smell of fresh mud is something that one associates with new life and fresh beginnings. But then that early drizzle gives way to never ending downpour and I would begin to feel blue – maybe it was just the annoyance of sitting in a crowded classroom in drenched skirts or perhaps the inconvenience of carrying an umbrella around, but except for the first drizzle, the rain was a sure depressant for me.

Why all this weather talk all of a sudden, you might wonder. The weather in DÃ¼sseldorf has changed! And all of a sudden. The spring (or is it summer?) is definitely here. From 10 degrees on Saturday, we went to 30 degrees on Sunday! I had to strip off my jacket and roll up my jeans and keep licking at my icecream to feel sane. Now that might seem surprising coming from someone who claims to miss the tropics, but truth is that I had gotten used to the chills and I am gonna need some reverse adjustments and I might be forgiven for being taken aback by such a sudden change. Plus, Germany is definitely not equipped for hot weather. I am told that one needs to get special permission to install airconditioners, and for that you have to prove a whole lot of things, including that the air conditioner wont mar the beauty of the apartment building! I am grateful for the little fan that I sneaked into my shipment from Singapore, more for sentimental reasons than practical ones – it sure is gonna be a life saver if this weather continues.

I often wonder why the weather affects people in different ways. Whenever there is a shower outside, I say it is a great time to be snuggled in bed, while my German colleague would invariably retort that it is a great day to be indoors and working! At first, I attributed it to his industrious attitude, but that’s not the case – on really sunny days, I feel cheerful and am extra productive at work, while he gets all jittery and jumpy and would like to go out and enjoy the sunshine.

After all these technological innovations and advancements, man is still affected to a large extent by nature. As much as he likes to live a modular life, he cannot be insulated from the nature and her whims and fancies.

Tada!

Surya — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Finally on online to-do list that I like : Tadalist

I have tried to have a centralised online tracking system for my chores – never really liked any – but I think I like Tada. Its:
- simple (hate those complicated ones which try to do too many things at the same time)
- allows me to have multiple lists (upto 10 I think – if u have more than 10 to-do lists, maybe you should consider hiring an assistant), so I can prioritise and compartmentalise my chores
- allows me to share some of my lists ( I dont have to call up Srijith everytime I buy something on our shopping list, if i can convince him to use it too, that is)

Good enough for me!

My life begins at 2.30 pm!