Once upon a time there were two best friends A little boy and an elephant Finn and Ele spent their days Playing in the shade of the greenwood trees And among the bright forget-me-nots by the lake
Finn’s mama had planted the ‘nots When Finn was just a baby in his cot They grew into bunches of beautiful flowers Like puffs of blue clouds on the ground Ele and Finn would run through them for hours
Finn and Ele shared everything Taking turns swinging from the vines That dropped like ropes from the great big trees They shared their gummy bears and their ice cream And raced each other through their carrots and peas
They got up to all sorts of exciting games Among the trees and the forget me nots The foxes, squirrels and chameleons Watched them from afar with shining eyes As the friends played together under the sun
One day little Finn did not come to play The woods were quiet as a sleeping mouse Ele the elephant tried to play on his own He chased his tail and tried to stand on his trunk But try as he might, it just was no fun
One, two, three, four, five days passed Then six, seven, eight and nine days too But Little Finn was nowhere to be seen Ele walked alone through the quiet woods He even saw his friend in his elephant dreams
Then on the morning of the tenth day He saw little Finn from far away In a cloud of swaying forget me nots He was sitting at the very edge of the lake Ele went bounding as fast as he could
“Hello Finn, where have you been?” Finn didn’t reply, he just looked away Ele had never seen Finn look so sad He did not say more, but sat close to his friend With his trunk he gently touched his hand
After a while little Finn spoke He said his mama had gone away “Where did she go?” Ele asked looking at him “To heaven. It’s a place far away There are no cars and no special planes Or super speedy bullet trains That can take you on that trip You have to get a special invitation Mostly when you’re very grown up But sometimes also when you’re not so big”
“No one really knows how it works But everyone gets to go sometime And meet all those who have gone before Some have grown wings there, they can fly Some can turn somersaults ten feet high Grandmas and grandpas and even pets And sometimes even mums and dads Ele nodded, he understood And so he held his best friends’s hand As they both sat among the forget-me-nots
And then little Finn remembered again His mama’s familiar, sweet smell Every time that she hugged him close He cried a little as he sat with his friend And then for a while he cried a lot … But by and by he felt a little better He blinked and looked across at Ele Finn’s eyes were red as strawberries But he had a little smile now too He had begun to feel better in Ele’s company
Half of Finn’s tears had turned to mist Up into the sky they had flown For his mama a dewy little kiss The rest of his tears had gone into the roots Of the smiling, bobbing forget-me-nots Next spring they’d grow again Reminding Finn and Ele too Of Finn’s beautiful mama, full of love Finn closed his eyes, he could now feel again The forever-happy warmth of his mama’s hug.
For my beloved sister who is swept in the constant tides of farewells and then meeting-again-for-too-short-a-while. And for all the other parents whose fledglings have taken wing, may you continue to find your joy and serenity.
They are the quickening parts of you That you bestow upon the world Beings that become other people Independent. Adult. Then there’s the anxiety and tumult Of letting them go From the safe radius of the home From the proximity of your everyday touch From the protective circle of your sinewy arms Each muscle a testament To years of being superhuman A perpetual hero, a champion And now you also have Your own growing pains to bear Of them not being there As they make their start In places you can’t be Coming back to rest To lay down tired heads On other pillows, other beds Their childhood rooms Stirring softly with their scents But my dearest, don’t despair These aches pass, they morph They bloom into other things A kinship deep as all the seas A bond of care that is more even-keeled Conversations, confidences, the sharing of dreams
They are out there now Let them live and love With all their might You’ve done your part They know the tree The orchard, the seeds That they’ve sprung from Now let them go Let your fluttering, bursting heart Give them wings to fly Fly, fly, up, up high Into the vastness of the sky Let them whoop with joy Let them go Where the soul moves them Out into the brilliant world To take a little bit of it Make it their own Let them imprint it With their hearts and their minds Let them be quirky, let them be kind Let them be funny, let them be full Of passion, of hope, of tenderness Let them roar and cheer and also tear up At life’s beauty, excitement, its bruises and cuts Let them show all their own shades of loveliness Let them add to the shimmering throng Of all that’s vital, new and strong
And you, dear beloved With your empty nest Now filled with books Or paints or pets You who have begotten them Stand fast and true and wise Behind them. Cheer them on As they sing their own songs In the great choir of life.
You Are Too different Too controversial Too weird Too quiet Too absent
You Are Too passionate Too frigid Too pushy Too gregarious Too reserved
You Are Too opinionated Too invested Too indifferent, disinterested
You Are Too much but You Are Also not enough
These arrows used to fly East and west Between the bazaars and the mosques Down and up From my beating heart To my silent mouth, forging Right angles containing me In burnished boxes glittering bright But in the moorings Of all these paradoxes writhing out Like strident dirges from treacherous lyres Howling of brimstone and hellfire Now I hear only one thing I only hear that one constant thing
YOU ARE!
In the refrains that ring Thunder and break I hear it sing:
YOU ARE!
In all that cacophony In the clarion calls of propriety Pounding, rounding endlessly From the steeples of society That is all I ever hear now
🌸 YOU ARE! 🌸 YOU ARE! 🌸 YOU ARE! 🌸
Yes I am! I finally am! This is me And that is all I ever need to be.
If I could live another life with you I’d talk of a few more things More palpably, more honestly with you Of things that gnawed At my mind; at the way my gut wrenched Balling up inside, or even when The pit of my belly dissolved In a fluttering crush of butterflies I’d speak of love light-footed and pure The kind that knocks you to the floor And the next instant pins shimmering wings On your tingling spine so you can fly High high, breath-catchingly high!
I’d talk of heartbreaks too That shred the organs into little bits Where the pain ripples in screaming peals Your thoughts marking time with the cacophony Where you stumble on your own feet Where you want to just lie down and feel Nothing for a while I’d share secrets that I have held deep inside Now frozen, frigid, petrified Mute scars of speechless agonies Never named, never identified
I’d also tell you that I loved My quiet, my solitude When it was just me in my room Or just you and me Sipping tea In the lounge, watching tv And then I’d tell you about the things That would make my tone-deaf heart sing A constant humming underneath Beneath the sheath of my skin Of peace that was soothing, softening Of flame-bright hope and quiet joy
I’d talk to you Of beginnings and of endings too Some tragic some tender Of sometimes going under But always re-surfacing, I would Talk of spirituality, the ethereal kind That makes the hair stand on end The kind that quickens your breath That makes life and even death A fleeting, splendorous enterprise A mystical trip with no finish line
And when your time here or mine Was drawing to a close Together we would Strum those notes One last time Of all the things that we’d talked about And all the times that we had spent And then I’d have held your hand in mine We would have laughed and cried And laughed again Because nothing would have been left Unsaid at the end.
There’s a shop down the street Where you can buy consciences Gentle pin pricks around your heart For when you want to sense something For when you want to feel A tiny paper cut, a delicate weal Most times you buy a numbness though Cloaked in velvety greys and yellows They’re tailor-made to fit around Your never-racing, constant heart And your ever-racing, chasing mind The greater you can muster Put down on the counter The finer the swaddle To enshroud your qualms To feel the vaguest of twinges Of right and wrong When to see and when to be Sightless, without sound Unconscious, uncurious, asleep In the thick, creamy fabric Numbingly, comfortingly bound Gut-driven compass buried deep Six feet below the ice and the snow The tsunamis, the floods and the hurricanes The droughts, the disease, the misery Interred in darkness, entombed underground In the meantime there’s a shop that sells Custom-built, free-of-guilt scruples in town.
There’s a girl in the sunset Her hair is ablaze Her dupatta streams In the arid breeze I can’t see her face I catch my breath She stands there still So still I see the horizon seethe and rage Scorch her in its red-hot rampage I close my eyes I’m afraid to look Afraid to see the heavens burn Afraid to see the ashes blown Of the girl that is standing there alone
But then
My stinging eyelids fly open, I see She’s still there She looks back at me The blaze of the sun Now a shimmering red Halo around her head Like a crown She won’t go down When her world careens When her world burns all around Grey smoke rising from the sea Of charred, asphyxiated dreams She stands there serene She gathers the light around her being She smiles, she gleams She is the fire queen.
When I look inside of you Into the very depths of you Do you know what I see? Two stormy mushroom clouds Looming wetly in your eyes Grey harbingers of doom They roil and linger in the room I’m afraid; I’m mesmerized Then Boom! Everything is gone In the ferocity Of your atom bomb Atomic, Anatomic, Catatonic The fearsome stillness after the storm Your atoms ravaged out of form
When I look inside of you I see vanquished fields beneath The clouds of smoke and acid rain I see the skeletons of trees The mucid ashes of flowers and bees They were rustling, bustling, hustling Their atoms dancing merrily You plucked each atom from its orbit In the fierceness Of your tragedy Calamity, Catastrophe You heaved your mighty weight upon it Smote your world beneath your feet
When I look inside of you I see the heaving cosmos Suns and planets whirling, swirling In the vast blue-blackness Meteors like fireworks Blazing exultant trails Shimmering tails, Star-burnished sails The firmament a holy grail You crush the heavens in your fist You flick your angry blue-bruised wrist The sky comes crashing down Molten lava on the ground Seismic vapor all around I can taste it in my mouth
But when I look at you from here You sit there statue-still Not an eyelash moves at all You are transparent, mystical Ethereal, Apparitional But within Clandestine, Hidden There are raging storms Carrying sand and ice alike I feel a chill in my bones And all of hell’s feverous might And all the while you look at me Your skin shrouded in serenity While in a loop, relentlessly You break and shatter on the inside.
She looks at the leaf Its serrated edges holding together A cosmos of possibilities Of alternate realities Of burgeoning opportunities She looks at a vein A cholorophyllated pathway of dreams A vital, verdant, emerald seam Running like a stream From the heart of the leaf to one serrated edge
Nearest To her wrist
Where her own veins have seared a path Specific, stark Chiseled from the magma of predestined fate Pre-blessed, pre-set, per-fected Once a rolling ocean of fluid dreams Now quiet, grief-stained, shadowy seams Of still water that never skips Never dances, it stays gripped Even as it drips In the finite space of one blue-purple vein
My book SHIMMERING SCRAPS OF POETRY AND MADNESS is now available at the following locations:
SRI LANKA: - THE BAREFOOT BOOKSTORE - THE JAM FRUIT TREE BOOKSTORE - PENDI - SARSASAVI BOOKSTORES - EXPOGRAPHICS
PAKISTAN: - LIBERTY BOOKS - PARAMOUNT BOOKS - READINGS
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The book is a collection of poems and essays, and as the name suggests, the contents of the 243 pages range from the sublime to the ridiculous; from soaring on the wings of ecstacy to struggling with overwhelming despair; from the capricious joys of matrimony to the dubious delights of singledom; from the profound ecstasy in a mug of steaming latte to the ardent disappointment in a less than perfectly brewed cup of tea; from the comedic to the somber and from the customary to the controversial, this collection of poems and features encompasses them all, and like a sore-throated bulbul (who also has some clear-voice days) I have sung them all for you.
The red roses were out In full bloom Riotous, cheerful, swaying in their beds Wearing their full petalled crowns on their heads I looked from afar Day after day As the roses danced and played In the not so far off distance Something was stopping me Something in my heart Was whispering, telling me that these flowers Were best adored from afar I listened and stayed away From that little paradise As it burgeoned with beauty Day after day But one morning when I came out to the garden I felt a lightness of being And so I strayed further afield To that joyful bed of red roses at play
There I looked at the perfect blooms Each one’s heart lay glistening in the sun The petals dancing in unison Around their pulsing cores And then I saw The soil below There strewn in little pools Of red, unravelled - unspooled Lay the fallen petals Fallen … resting … resting … fallen petals Some bruised, some new Some already a part of the earth As she hugged them close, each delicate edge Soaking back into her infinite depths The scene took my breath away Whisking me back to another day Full of bittersweet memories When I’d seen the same petals Strewn where you rested In earth’s boundless embrace.
Do you sometimes ask yourself if you’re alright Do the burdens of life come down hard on your joy Do all the schemes of gladness that you deploy Seem bound to falter, sink with the sun Making you despair, come undone Do you sometimes wonder if you’ll ever be alright?
Do you sometimes worry if you’re alright If you’re treating your body like it was meant More like a temple, less like a tent Does it respond with resilience and grace Does it show up as a gentle glow on your face Can you smile and say that you’re alright?
Do you sometimes brood about being alright If the crimson, beating, streaming path From your analysing mind to your ruminating heart Is clear and bright and lit up with calm Where thoughts and memories are like comforting balm Do you feel your spirit lift because you’re alright?
Do you feel your atoms dance, your heart sing Then soften to a gentle, constant hum again Do you feel your blood flow in passionate storms And then settle into tranquil crests and falls Do you sometimes in your moments of quiet Feel a gratitude because you’re alright?
I hope that when you lie in your bed at night On the cusp of sleep, with your guard down When your truth shines unfettered, unbound That with your eyes closed you can look within And hear it in every fibre of your being I’m alive, I’m still here, I am alright.
Where are you going my little one With your hands full of summer flowers? Why do you have that smile on your lips? Why do your eyes shine like stars?
I’m coaxing with play the Summer away She’s never ever happy to leave She’ll pout and she’ll wallow, go all shades of yellow She’ll moult in the throes of grief
But when I pick up her bloom-strewn dresses And laughingly whisk them away She follows along singing a song And her sister takes up the reign
I’m the whisper of the breeze flowing in the trees I’m the drops of morning dew I’m the patter of rain on sun-kissed earth I’m her fragrance as she breathes anew
I’m the usher of times, of blossoms and snow I’m the forger of grand season farewells I’m the music and cadence of the rhythm of life I ring all its wistful and joyful bells.
She steps into the car Its gleaming surfaces Adorned with gladioli and motia* She’s the bride tonight Garlands also lovingly Entwine in her hair Their fragrance filling The nighttime air Eyes bright Face shining with expectation She glances behind her Just for a moment One last time At that spot where she stood Leaving behind her childhood Marking the end of her maidenhood She smiles Nostalgia now sits there Young, hopeful and light Eyes bright Face shining with expectation Waiting to fill the space That has been so tenderly placed Into her sacred embrace.
This is for all those who have survived emotionally, mentally and physically abusive relationships. For those who have discovered the precious blessing of sleeping deeply, peacefully without being haunted by crippling anxiety and the renewed torture that every new day would inevitably bring in its wake.
I look at him Threatening, raging Berating me The cruel words sidling in Between his verbal pounding I recognise, I see His enterprise To humiliate me To agitate, to fluster me To intimidate To paralyze me. I’m going to leave you One of these days If you tell Anyone anywhere About any of this I swear I will make you into the beast The one unfit The one tearing down this relationship
I look at him Frozen in place My heart still I’m incapable Of seeing beyond My fear I’m incapable Of seeing anything Beyond the terrifying sacredness Of the union We signed together I’m incapable I’m powerless I’m numb All I hear is a hum A white noise in my head Autonomous, involuntary Humming humming humming Preserving my sanity Maybe my life …
And then one day He followed through On all the threats That he had let loose Into the fabric Of our togetherness I’m l e a v i n g y o u He said, emotionless This time there was no Placating hum No cloaking thrum Inside of me Hiding me, shrouding me I looked at him Cold sweat gripping My face, my neck The insides of my thighs Dripping, dripping endlessly But my mouth was parched My lips were dry I felt like I was going to die
But I didn’t crumble In the wind Whirling in the murky Depths of things I survived I stayed alive That shared horizon Spilling blood Dirty linen streaked with mud Was washed into the sea Decaying into infinity A whole new realm had suddenly Stretched out in front of me Full of peace and gratefulness Gladness and serenity Where I was calm and I was whole I had my body and my soul There was no fear No agony No trauma filled spaces Beckoning me
Like Kafka’s Metamorphosis* In reverse I have broken through the curse No more thrashing, crashing heart Petrified and frozen limbs No more grim hellishness Of emotional poison stings Making me cry, making me cringe I’m still here. I’m here still My lungs now take in their fill My heart is beating rhythmically No suffocating anxiety Once more I hold the hand of the child That has lived in my soul all this while For her Nothing is impossible.
* KAFKA’S METAMORPHOSIS: Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915 and is considered one of his best works. The main themes revolve around the burden of responsibility, isolation and alienation, and sacrifice.
I look at the leaves Serrated edges, little flowers And I wonder About its identity The shrub growing under the amalthas tree You would know You always knew As we walked in the street Outside the house You could name every flower And every tree Every creeper Even the sickness That gripped some of the leaves
You looked at these Concerned, everything else forgotten The fact that your own body Was racked with disease That ever-present pall softened By the enormity of your being Your own pain erased And at that time, in that moment I too forgot The wheelchair that you were in That you were ill; that we were grief stricken I dived right in, feeling, seeing You weaving magic around everyday things Flowers and trees grew chimerical wings
The swaying kachnar The beskirted Ashokas Bobbing profusions Of jasmine and phlox Fragrant bunches Of nargis and freesias You pointed them out with happy ease And worried when any of these Were less than their perfect selves And I too smiled and looked In wonder At how joyfully you revelled in it all Holding infinity in your lit up face Offering up so much love and grace
And for those moments I too forgot The pain and the grief It was you and me Sadness free While you took me on ethereal trips Where nature in all her fullness Unfurled - beautiful, calming, brave We were carried away on a gentle wave The pitted leaves Still vital and green Were the only things we needed to save
Wanted to share with you the first ever review of my book of short stories “The Girl with the Paisley Dupatta and other stories”. The review was done by Maha Qazi of the YouTube channel Maha’s Musings.
She’s done a pretty good summary of the book in general and has also mentioned very relevant specifics from within some of the stories.
Take a look!
(P.S. I would describe myself as a “corporate RUT absconder. A bit of a Nutty enigma in the intro there! 😅)
Attached below is a video introduction link to “The Girl with the Paisley Dupatta”, the significance of the title and the recurrent themes that run through the stories.
Dedicated to the memory of all those young people who struggled to fit into the norms dictated by their communities and who lost that battle. May the second wind in your sails be glorious and joyful.
I’m going to tell you a little story Of a girl who loved too much, Lived too much, hoped too much. They said, she was too much! She was a queen, a young one But she had that zest for life That is so rare and beautiful That is also so ominous and direful
The story goes that she was born In the wrong place at the wrong time Nothing seemed to feel right in fact. She was told to be someone that She wasn’t. She was taught, against her will To be the clone of a fantasy That had persisted for centuries
And so the queen crumbled Atom by atom, bit by bit, little by little She fell apart like a young sapling That has been buffeted and knocked about By righteous winds whipped up By those who were afraid of her Of our queen getting out of the box That they had so faithfully built for her
She finally broke into a million pieces And she plummeted She had once known how to fly like an eagle To soar up to the top of the world. But that memory was gone; pounded out And so she fell Hitting the ground six feet deep And that is where she now sleeps.
“I love you and only you You fill my heart in every way I will be but a shell if you Call it quits and leave me some day” Said the man with the twisted lips As he held her close, hands on her hips He’d done this a lot and then changed gears The words felt absurd even to his own ears.
She looked into eyes that were gleaming with fire Was it hope, was it love, was it lustful desire? The three entities then followed behind As she walked into the space of her heart and her mind There she sat them down, the judicious sleuth And looked into their faces now lit up with truth Hope sat there wilted, there was hardly a trace Of sincerity and faith on its mottled face Love was like a wraith of its radiant self Like old dust that had drifted off of the shelf Smouldering away in the furthest corner With sly little tentacles sat covetous Desire It looked at her trying to hide its true hues But in the light of the soul that was hard to do.
She lifted the heavy hands from her hips Bestowed a smile from her beautiful lips “I suppose I should say a heartfelt thank you But I won’t; those words, they just don’t ring true”.
Despite its inherent catastrophic nature, the end had come quickly, almost mechanically. Its very swiftness had robbed it of the tragedy and chaos that usually accompany annihilation events. Some say it had started with the largely unnotable skirmish on the Russo-Ukrainian border. President Putin had fallen gravely ill at about the same time. His infirmity somehow catalysed the inscrutable little exchange of fire into an all out war as Russian troops marched belligenterlty into Kyiv. At about the same time, there was a devastating tsunami that whipped up in the Indian Ocean, a formidable ghost of its 2004 predecessor. The deluge ravaged twenty countries across Asia and East Africa in its deadly wake. In the space of a week, half the world had gone into emergency mode. The other half watched in a stupor of pandemic fatigue even as the new horrors unravelled. Two days after the tsunami, the Ukrainian troops fell to the wayside. No blood was shed, no words were spoken, no flags were raised or lowered. The invaders and the invaded sat together watching the world fall to pieces around them.
That is when she had come; the Mind-bender as she came to be called: Arfaana, a 35 year old woman who had until recently also been a mother of two. She had walked into Lafayette Square in Washington DC and screamed. She had screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore. And then she had wailed, her rhythmical moans echoing like the tolling of a doomsday bell. People had stopped in their tracks frozen. At first. And then something extraordinary had happened. There are many versions of the event but they all agree that somehow in that moment of tremendous anguish and pain, humanity had connected. At some combined cosmic and primitive level, the energy across the square had come together and found a harmony of purpose.
There was an almost communal climax of wretchedness and despair as one and all, the people had screamed and bellowed and wailed until there was not one unbruised throat left in the square. Arfaana had walked into the Capitol building then, her eyes wet and blazing at the same time; propelled onwards by a force of over five thousand strong. There she had spoken to silent, awestruck law makers and executors of the Republic. They had listened when she had called for the laying down of all arms; of creating a colourblind society; of sharing the world’s resources with all; of de-weaponizing the world. They had heard her speak of a new community, built on the vestiges of humanity that still remained in their current world. They say, Arfaana, the first Wise One, had summarily robbed them of their will that day. She had bent their minds to her way. Everything had changed after that. In a bizarre balancing act following The Fall that was marked with such colossal swells of angst and pain, the societal shift had happened quickly, almost mechanically.
T + 10 years
December 24th, 2032
Arfaana sat in the Discourse Room in Serenity Dome 1, in Washington. These safe havens had mushroomed after The Fall and now mainly housed within their impregnable, tranquil cores, the women of the planet. She had just had news that the two thousandth dome had been erected, this one in Lahore Pakistan. She had called her contemporary in South Asia to congratulate her on the milestone. The fissure in the Subcontinental patriarchal structures had been one of the hardest to make. But when the women had risen, the change again had been swift and mechanical. Hotels and guest houses had been converted to makeshift shelters for women across the subcontinental land mass. Ultimately, heritage buildings had been commandeered and lovingly converted into the very first Serenity Domes. There the female collective had regrouped and reformed their communities, one troublesome, caustic law at a time. It had taken the better part of the last decade to purge the South Asian society of its ingrained psyche of male privilege. From the roti seller* at the tandoor* to the testosterone driven CEO in his boardroom, they had all had to relearn the new ethos. There had been countless incarcerations as age old gender roles battled in the new environment. Many of the men had been “shifted” to shanty towns just outside city limits. These meandering, heaving masses of corrugated iron roofs, scrap material and sheets of plastic had burgeoned and blustered for years with the full might of the patriarchy.
In the sixth year of The Fall, the slum population had evened out and by the eighth year, it was finally in decline. Mindsets had been changed; the new norms had been learnt one bitter lesson at a time. There were still the odd ragtag bands of ex-society men who had refused to assimilate and who still blew off steam by plastering city squares with old world propaganda. The Wise Ones took a largely tolerant view of these muscle flexing shenanigans, letting the idiots tell their now obsolete “tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”(1). The adage adapted from old world literature had become their mainstream maternal approach. Indeed, the Wise Ones made every effort towards non-violence. They knew that their primary focus needed to be the new generation of men and women across the globe. They would be brought up with new codes of morality, community and awareness. They would be the ultimately balanced beings – both genders at ease with their masculine and their feminine sides.
By the fifth year, another epic milestone was achieved – planet-wide nuclear disarmament. By the eighth year of The Fall, global military spending had been reduced to less than 0.3% of world GDP. The planet was recovering in big and small ways as fossil fuels were steadily replaced with alternative forms of energy. By the end of a decade of the event, as resources were redistributed, lifestyles across the globe had become more or less consistent – typified by the western middle class before The Fall.
It had been a momentous journey of the mind, the heart and the will, thought Arfaana as she emerged from her musing. The women had finally triumphed! This last thought crossed her mind with almost academic stridency, repeated as it had been at so many pivotal moments in the last ten years. She paused, just for a moment. The slightest of pauses for a twinkling of a moment. And yet, in that tiny instance something had taken fledgling root. An awareness of imbalance; a new kind of an imbalance. Earth was transforming into the proverbial Venus. Hidden in that romantic confluence were dark shadows, whispering their own doomsday songs. Songs of a new, belligerent, unsound matriarchy.
Arfaana blinked, willing away the disturbing thoughts that were now crowding at the very edges of her mind. She knew these unsummoned visitors would bide their time, until they had gathered in their vastness aided by that formidable Truth teller, her Intuition. Arfaana rallied. They, the women had changed the world, one rotting, crumbling societal edifice at a time. They were saving the very humanity of human beings. They were building back compassion, harmony, cooperation and culture into their societies. They were building back better(2) … the hackneyed phrase from old world politics came stomping in, marching alongside her bolstering, purposeful train of thought. The hypocrisy, the bigotry and the irony that accompanied the catchphrase also came sashaying in, looking into her soul with their smug little faces. Venus Rising indeed! they seemed to say.
Arfaana picked up her com-set to call her Planning Manager. She wanted to make a change in the Earth and Science curriculum – the historical, mythical, science fictional allusions to Venus as anything but the second planet from the AM Star were to be omitted. There was still too much counter-matriarchal ammunition out there for the nay-sayers and the satire writers; their reformed world structure was still too new for such erratic emotionalism. The “Sun”, now called the AM Star had ceased to be called by its old name because of its masculine phonetics and the psycho-circularity of the word: Sun = Son = Sun. Venus too would be relegated to its astrophysical purity without the dubious romanticism given to it by old world patriarchy. One of the Wise Ones had said something about Earth too … even “earth” had begun to sound mannish.
They would have to revisit academic curricula around the world, review the very semantics of language itself, to purge it of its inherent masculinity.
Arfaana took a sip of her steaming mug of tea. She sat up and gazed into the distance, her determination strong and unwavering. Even if their new collective ethos was somewhat imperfect; even if their matriarchal restructuring sometimes seemed like barely cloaked knee jerk reactions to their gender-biased past, it was now the women’s turn.
* Roti-seller: Seller of Indian/ Pakistani flat bread.
* Tandoor: Also known as tannour it is predominantly a cylindrical clay or metal oven used in cooking and baking. The tandoor is something of a transitional form between a makeshift earth oven and the horizontal-plane masonry oven.
(1): Quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
(2): The Build Back Better Plan was a legislative framework proposed by the 46th U.S. President Joe Biden ahead of his inauguration
I’m the colour of fresh spring grass And the colour of peas in a pod I’m also what many a parrot looks like And the colour a grasshopper’s got
I’m the tint on crunchy, young apples On honeydew, pears and grapes I’m the colour of the Nile crocodile and the slith-slithering grass snake
I’m the colour of the beautiful jade stone And the rustling leaves on trees Im also the the colour of your lovely face when you’ve had too much ice cream!
I’m the colour of the deep dark woods, The loveliest marble you’ve ever seen! I’m sometimes also called Mother Nature I am the beautiful colour GREEN
I am Laughter and I am Tears I am the apex of my most lucid Fears I am Joy and I am Peace I am all that the tranquil dove sees I am Chaos, I am Discord I am the Trodden, I am Master and Lord I am Winter and I am Spring I wither, I fade and I waken again I am Rage and I am Love I’m the depths of the ocean, I am the heavens above I am the Devil and I am the Saint I’m rampant, unbridled and also restrained I am the Thundering Eye of the storm I am the Deluge that it brings along I am the Space Dust whirling around Deformed defacements that once were sound I am also the Centre of the Universe I’m the Infinite Beauty of prose and verse I am Kindness and I am Faith I am Hope and I am Grace I am the Atom, I am the Whole I am the Body, I am the Soul I am whoever that I want to be I am Maya*, I am Cosmic Energy.
* MAYA: The personification of the idea that the material world is illusory. Maya is a female name in various languages. In Sanskrit, for instance, it means "illusion or magic", and is also an alternate name of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. In the Tupi language, of southern Brazil, it means "mother". In the Māori language, it means "courage" or "bravery".
Happy to say that my infinite number of monkeys clacking away at a keyboard trying to produce a lucid piece of writing phase seems to have borne some fruit! Presenting to you my first children’s book: CURIOUS ANIMALS, A CLOUD, A FRUIT AND A FLOWER. This collection of poems comes straight from the funny, quirky cockles of the heart. With little stories ranging from the grumpy caterpillar, to the shy tomato, to how the okapi got its name, these short stories entertain, inform and also bring out a giggle or 4! Both, children and adults will enjoy this vibrantly illustrated, lyrical story-telling. Print copies will be available in Sri Lanka next week (hopefully!). I’m going to try and make them available in Pakistan soon too. The KINDLE e-version is currently available on Amazon at:
Saqib Zaka looked at the sheet of paper in his hands. He stared at the short pithy statements that descended down its length, as they looked back at him accusingly, tauntingly. There was some colour on the paper too – an angry red gash against three of the statements. Four-letter gashes in fact, that had blurred before his anxious scrutiny; FAIL they proclaimed loud enough for the whole universe to hear. Saqib shook his head slightly, willing away the buzzing swarm of desperate thoughts that were crowding out all sanity, dignity and even his ability to read. He looked at the transcript again and finally set the truth free: he had failed his pre-engineering exam, for the second time.
Thirty years hence, that memory had stuck to him like rust; constantly eating away at his calmness and purpose. He had tried, in his intrepid moments, to shake the constancy of the memory off, to replace it with the triumphs that had also since found their circuitous way to him. But the recollection and all its accompanying sinking, shrinking, benumbing sensations had prevailed like insidious tenants in the space of his mind.
Saqib sighed and looked around him. The imposing room that had been his father’s office and was now, by default, his, shimmered in the late afternoon light coming in through the window. Despite his best effort not to, his eyes came to rest on the canvas that hung on the wall directly opposite his desk. It was a complex piece of Gestural Abstract art which had hung in the stately room for at least the last twenty years. In its monochromatic palette of random splashes, he always saw a figure, broken down and disjointed reaching for the ground with such desperation that it was almost like he was willing the earth to swallow him whole; annihilate his whole existence. The hugeness of the canvas added to the enormity of hopelessness that spilt from it; flowing into the room like a constant, unending stream of emotional sludge. He hated the piece. And yet, it hung there smug and superior, intimidating and authoritative, alive and kicking. It was one of his father’s favourite pieces of art.
A knock at the door halted his mangled introspection. The rest of the day passed in a flurry of activity that slowly abated around 6 O’ clock. Saqib then picked up his Smythson Panama briefcase and headed for his car. His father would be in tomorrow. Over the last year, more and more, the reigns of the company had been shifted officiously, almost belligerently from father to son. Even so, Sikander Zaka Khan swept into the office once a week, taking everything by storm. It took a day for the dust to settle, while his own reputation as the able scion of the family business was depleted slowly but surely, like the helium escaping from a balloon that had the smallest of perforations in it. With each passing week, even the most stoic of Sikander Zaka and Son employees had seen the boss’s offspring for the chip of the old block that he was definitely not. Ever so gradually, almost imperceptibly, there had been a change in the organisational culture as boardroom debates became more lively, just short of being heated, and the ambient murmur of the executive floor rose a few, not unnoticeable decibels. Saqib had watched all this silently, knowing it was just another counter intuitive ploy by which his father was toughening him up for the role of CEO of one of the largest textile spinning units in Karachi.
While a myriad ungracious, unforgiving thoughts passed through his mind about his unemancipated state, Saqib was also keenly aware of how his Harrods Roquefort bread was buttered: he knew he lacked the rigour and the character for a regular corporate job. He couldn’t see himself slogging 9 to 5 with only thirty days of paid leave. If he was absolutely candid with himself, he knew also, that he didn’t have the requisite skill set either, armed even though he was with his Bachelors degree from the Imperial College London. The couple of Finance courses that he hadn’t quite cleared in the first go, were another echoing reminder of his failure. He knew that to live in the lap of luxury that he was used to, he would have to sacrifice his life choices to a considerable extent and his sense of self, quite entirely. If it had been up to him, he would have become an interior designer … moonlighting as a chef. He loved the aesthetics of furniture and food. He had singlehandedly furnished and decorated his beautiful home. The fact that his wife was quite happy to let him take the lead on all home improvement projects had helped considerably in helping to keep his heart where his home was. His glamorous home on Khayaban-e-Shamsheer was the envy of many a well heeled housewife with whom he readily and fondly shared his vast stores of knowledge, from the best upholsterer in town to the florist who had the freshest imported blooms. His home was indeed, a loving tribute to all his most precious and unrequited dreams.
“Hello Abu”, came the cracked voice from the lounge as Saqib opened the front door to his house. Despite the burden of his innermost thoughts that had today descended upon him like a flood, he smiled. Shuja was growing up and his body was being put to the age old test of the transition from boy to man. His voice had started to break a couple of months ago, a fact that had quickly become a point of many light hearted moments between father and son. He was sprawled on his favourite lounger, his PS4 controller in his hands. Father and son had picked the soft blue fabric for the sofa together and the reupholdstered seat had become Shuja’s favourite chair in the house. His Velvet Dream he had once called it. Saqib had smiled at the aptness of the name for the chair and also for his own secret little stash of them. Shuja was a good child. He was also very creative and talented. And brave. Saqib acknowledged this last characteristic with some trepidation. There was so much potential danger embodied in that attribute that he couldn’t quite bring himself to look upon it as a quality, a gift. With his unusually honed skill as an artist and his love of cooking, he was quite the apple of his father’s eye. And in the sanctity of his home, Saqib allowed his heart to swell with pleasure. He looked at his fourteen year old son, his eldest, with a mixture of pride and joy.
For all the girls, and the women young and old, who are made to feel less, inferior or impaired because they have dreams that are different to the ones dreamt up for them by others. May you find the strength and the passion to be you.
Why must I be what I don’t want to be? Why must I change the state of my dreams? Why must I cower in fear of my world? Why must the story of my life stay untold?
Why must I hide myself away? Why must I look behind me always? Why must there always be danger to me? To my spirit, my soul, my mind, my body?
Why can I not laugh out loud when I want? Why must I hide all my joy in my heart? Why can’t I turn my face to the sun? Why must I hide in the shadows you’ve spun?
Why must I bear the ball and chain of my roots? Why must I remain invisible and mute? Why was I born if not to revel In life’s ever cresting and falling swell?
I’m a child of this world, let me roam free Let me think, let me speak, let me be me I’m a creature of this earth, I belong everywhere Let me spread my wings, let me lay my heart bare
Let me be, let me be, just what I want to be Let me dream, let me dream, what I want to dream Let me walk in this world unafraid and kind Let my life tell the story of my heart and my mind.
This is a tribute to all the women in fact who are oppressed, reduced and shamed in the name of religion, and who still find the strength and dignity to go on another day.
O Talib*, O ye self-professed Learned One,
I have something to say to you. You can whip up monsters from the air and call them your Shariah*. You can torture and mangle “your” women, break their spirits and their bodies and call it the Word of God. You can wear your imperious lungee* and as it swishes around in the wind, you imagine the very angels dancing around you. You grow your hairy beards, and hide your malevolent grins behind them. You rumble and you roar and that is your devotion. You maim and you kill and you call that Divine intervention.
But then secretly you also glance at your reflections and you see what we all see: imperfect, angry, reviled men trying to validate their existence in the only way they can - by wiping the planet clean of the scourge of the Double (H)Ex*. But then you pause with the greatest effort known to the Men of God and you think: How can we annihilate this evil, garbed in soft flesh if we are to propagate and procreate? How else are we to add to the rank and file of Allah’s soldiers?
The conundrum is excruciating. So you continue to brutalize and ravage just short of pushing her six feet under. Just so you can crush her under you instead and make her pay for staying alive. To bear and to beget your many sons. To nurture and feed your rabid army of the Men of Allah.
O Ye Men of Allah,
I have something to say to you. Hear me.
I am the Daughter of the Universe; the Yin to your Yang, the ultimate balancing act of God’s will gone wrong in your hands.
Hear me. We will be who we are: the proud women of Afghanistan. Our honour lies serenely, supremely, completely in the depths of our own eyes, not in yours.
Look at me. Don’t hide behind your fragile male bravado. Look at me. Don’t turn your suddenly shameful eyes away.
Look at me. Look at me.
Look at me as I rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you kicked aside. Look at me as I look at you. Look at me and see what you have become. Look at me as your heart Drains … Shrivels …. Breaks …. Burns in its own hell.
Hear me, my voice will echo through my sisters even if mine falls silent. You will Hear me.
Look at me, even if it is at my corpse as I go to meet my Maker. You will Look at me.
For Allah hears me. For Allah sees me.
Allah stands behind me as we both look at you. As we both await you.
The “Where is My name” campaign. Laleh Osmany campaigning to have the mother’s name included in the birth certificate.Her study centre was bombed. But Shamsiya, a Coal miner’s daughter still tops in Afghan University entrance exam“A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.” – Marge Piercy
* Double (H)Ex: Word play on the double X chromosomes that all female mammals possess. Hex is a spell or a curse.
* Talib: Scholar; Learned one.
* Shariah: Islamic law derived from the teachings of the Quran but mainly from the Prophet Muhammad. It is not a list of rules but rather a set of principles on aspects of life, including marriage, divorce, finance and rituals such as fasting and prayer.
Nighat pumped the accelerator and the clutch in frustration. The traffic on Murree road at this time was absolutely crazy. The end-of-school rush was upon everyone and it was mostly the hapless parents or their designated drivers who were on the road at this time. The only other people who dared to brave the snaking snags of congestion were responding to some emergency which only the Murree road route could resolve or, like herself, had been struck by temporary insanity. Her mother had even told her not to venture out at 1.30 in the afternoon, but she was on the adrenaline high of new clothes.
Nighat lived in Rawalpindi but much preferred availing herself of a handful of essential services from its twin city, included among which was her Darzi*. And so, when her tailor had called to say that her latest batch of shalwar kameezes* was ready, she just had to get to him, despite the snarly perils of the mid afternoon journey on Murree road. Her enthusiasm was now as wilted and droopy as was her hair in the August humidity. She touched the inky black mop on her head, patting it gingerly. She really needed to fix the airconditioner in her car – the fault-finding thought clipped up to her smugly as so many others had over the last thirty minutes – like censorial mother superiors.
An hour and a half later, she was at the Abpara market in sector G-6 in Islamabad, ensconced in the cool interior of Alamdar Tailor shop – Specialist in Alteration of Ladies and Gents. The proprietor, a portly man in his 60s was observant, agile and practical like most of his fellow dressmakers tended to be. When you’re a women’s outfitter in an Islamic Republic, you either need to be overtly homosexual or a man who is very obviously living a fairy tale perfect family life – in either case and for all to see, not having any need for minor titillations obtained at the expense of his female customer base. Master Alamdar was a happy hybrid of the two avatars. He wore pristinely stitched, bright coloured kurtas accentuated with antimony filled eyes, and his person surrounded by the heady bouquet of Ajmal Black Rose (unisex) attar. He also had a picture of his children (when they were all four of them, under eight years old), sitting on a shelf right behind him and in plain sight of all his customers. That same picture had been prominently displayed for at least the last twenty years, for the visual reassurance of all who sought his services. And so, both Master sahib and his motely brigade of begums happily played along with the ageless, faithful family harmony that emanated from his place of business.
Nighat however always liked to go just a little further in all her interactions with the opposite gender. At sixty one years old she was still a teenager at heart, abetted in equal measure by her own excitable nature as by the ironhandedness of her mother, the inimitable matriarch of their home. She now smiled coyly at Master Alamdar who smiled genially back while they both sipped on ice cold fantas. Nighat’s clothes were ready but after her hair raising, brake and accelerator fury of the last two hours on the road, she was inclined to sit back a little and enjoy a cold drink in the attar-redolent company of her tailor.
Master Alamdar was also an expert at deciphering which of his clients he could be extra chatty with and Nighat baji* was one of them. The two would wax eloquent on everything from the state of the weather to the weight lost or gained by Nighat. He had a talent for gauging and dressing the yo-yoing proportions of many of his lady customers. Tailors in Islamic republics are trained to observe from afar and can get a lady’s measurements pitch perfect from a handful of wary, discreet glances at her dupatta clad body.
Nighat was a burly woman, built more for the wrestling ring than for the more delicate shenhanigns of the catwalk. But her heart was bound in ribbons of old world romance that fluttered around her ample stature at all times. She was fond of imagining herself as a damsel in distress or a damsel in copious demand or a damsel on the fashion ramp; always a damsel of dainty things. This delicate demeanour exuding from her big frame was oddly endearing and so she had had a couple of brushes with real life romance too. Both times, the men had been retired army captains with twirly moustaches and receding hairlines that were assiduously cloaked in the inkiness of Bigen BB1, Blue-black hair dye. Both times too, she had been in her 40s and had considered herself “too young and impressionable” to have furthered the love interests: Those two opportunities to settle down had come and gone, and she had wisely put down her failure to romantically launch into either, as a late blooming on her part. Now in her 60s she felt readier than ever to become someone’s doting better half and a stay-at-home wife.
Nighat came from a family of modest businessmen and redoubtable matriarchs. Once in a while however, the one-off daughter with delicate sensibilities who was in constant need of protection, was born into the family. And so it was, that after four generations of formidable women, Nighat had come along as that dubious exception; the providential balancer of the Amazonian equation of their household
For all her social guilelessness, Nighat was a good teacher and had risen slowly but steadily in the academic ranks of her school system. She had started out as a Social Studies teacher twenty years ago. At sixty one, she had officially retired a year ago and was currently on an extendable three year contract as the vice principal of one of the flagship branches of the school in Rawalpindi. In her current senior capacity, she also conducted Teacher Training sessions for new entrants into the teaching system of the franchise. This meant frequent travel in and around the smaller cities and towns in Punjab and KPK*. She relished these week long trips away from home, even though she was accompanied most times by her eternal chaperon, her mother. She didn’t mind having her along: Her days were busy at work and the evenings were devoted to relishing rich pulaos* and mutton karahis* from the bazaar and watching movies from the limited repertoire of the guest house television cable service. She always found some park or walking area in town where she went for her early morning constitutional: a 45 minute ramble. Her mother was usually fast asleep at that time and she enjoyed the solitude and serenity of her sunrise circuit around the track in the city she was visiting.
* Shalwar Kameez: The traditional dress of women and men in the Punjab region of northwestern India and in Pakistan. The outfit comprises a pair of trousers (shalwar) and a tunic (kameez) that is usually paired with a scarf (dupatta).
* Darzi: Urdu for Tailor/ dress maker
* Attar: A fragrant essential oil, typically made from rose petals.
* Baji: In Urdu, term of respect used for older sister or an older woman.
* KPK: Abbreviation for Khyber Pukhtun Khwa - the northwestern province of Pakistan.
* Pulao: pilaf or pulao is a dish originating from the East, consisting of rice flavoured with spices and cooked in stock, to which meat, poultry, or fish may be added.
* Karahi:A Karahi is a tomato, ginger and garlic heavy curry cooked with various types of meat.
Faith: more and more, a tenuous ideology as it has traditionally existed. Increasingly, we are seeing how conventional belief systems are becoming less and less able to minister to the spiritual needs of believers at large.
As our spheres of existence evolve, leaping and bounding into the digital age; as we progressively become part of a smaller and smaller global village, we are also increasingly being faced with unprecedented challenges in terms of how we interact with the communities we live in, and others around the world. More and more we see how intolerance, hate and suffering are being directly perpetrated in the dubious paths of organized belief systems. The way I see it, we have slowly but surely lost our humanity to the relentless machinations of modern day religious powerhouses.
What is Faith then, in the current times? What does it mean to be devout and devoted? Is it a copious measure of ritual practice while the heart continues to race in fear and the mind is a cacophony of discord in times of trial? Is it the demonstration of exalted acts performed in the way of glorifying one’s particular belief system which, at its very core, is selfish and ungenerous? Where every “good deed” is performed on a quid pro quo basis: you are charitable primarily so YOU can go to heaven, and not because someone is needy – (that’s just a circumstantially advantageous outcome). You go to church and to the mosque so YOU can get into the Almighty’s good books so YOU can skip into Eden, not because you have the well- being of your community at heart. All, spiritually depleting ideologies of faith practised solely from a fear of consequences, rather than the simple desire to embody and celebrate our humanity.
What is it then, to truly believe? Could it be simply, the genuine attempt to be the best version of oneself spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically? To be able to look within to become a force for good without? To be able to think for oneself more and to rely less on the divisive narrative of neo-evangelists? Is it to finally pay fit tribute to our innate “God-given” spiritual and mental prowess? To finally breaking through the webs of intrigue and confusion woven by self serving belief systems and sifting through the spiritual antimatter for ourselves.
Look around you. Nature itself has manifested how irrelevant caste, creed and racial differences are. How even more insignificant religiously wrought community and political boundaries are: The recent Corona virus pandemic didn’t pick political or religious sides. No one was beyond the reach of its pestilential nature. Why then are we not heeding what we instinctively know to be true: That our shared humanity is bigger than any individual religion. That our communal joys and sorrows are more spiritually potent than any Sunday service or Friday ‘Khutba’*. That together we are a stronger, better, more spiritually evolved species than we are when projecting our differences of Faith. At the end of the day, the very essence of all religions is entrenched not only in equality, kindness and charity among “our own flock”, but in thoughtfully and inclusively channeling these attributes to ensure one becomes a more universal force for good.
It is time. Time to break through the inertia and the paralysis of our different religions; of the illogical but deeply ingrained ways we are taught to hate one another. It is time to start having the difficult but essential discussions on renewing and revitalising our counter intuitive belief systems. It is time to take back our hijacked/ distorted ideologies of belief and once again breathe the essence of universal humanity into them.
* Khutba: publicly held formal sermon, especially delivered after the communal Friday prayers in the Islamic religion.
Dharshini got into her red Honda Fit, wincing in pain. The visit to the orthopaedic specialist had become essential after a week of agony; her whole right leg throbbed like the devil! She knew she had weak knees, troublesome joints and yet, she’d whirled about that room like her behind was on fire! God! Hormones … or was it the lack of them … she thought wearily, the thrill and the motivation of that performance both now squatting in her head like large stupid birds, staring blandly at her. She grimaced as she gently pressed the accelerator, and drove into the Galle Road traffic.
Dharshini, known fondly and unfondly as Dharshi by her various circles of friends and frenemies was 57, bold and beautiful. The perfection marred, just as all sublime things tend to be, in this case, with osteoarthritic joints. Still, she carried herself with the easy confidence borne of almost always standing out in a room full of people. The occasions where she was upstaged, were few and summarily forgotten under dutiful bouts of social amnesia; both, by her and her coterie of cohorts. She was hands down, the alpha of her group, a fact that nobody could deny or indeed, had the temerity to.
A month or so ago, Dharshini had signed up for social dancing classes. She’d heard rumblings of this venue of perspiration and contortions being the place to meet “Good” people. “Eligible” was of course not what she was looking for; after all she was a married woman. Not entirely happily, and not quite cohabiting with her somewhat estranged spouse, but still to all intents and purposes, secured in sacred wedlock. That fact had been conveniently relevant thus far in keeping at bay, the droves of ill suited middle aged and senior hopefuls who constantly vied for her hand and her heart. She had developed a rejection strategy all her own: with every new admirer, although she knew from the outset how it would end, she would only gently, gradually pass on that knowledge to him; after exacting a few lunches, a trip or two for herself and her girl friends and maybe even a bauble or two, in at least silver. It was a sweet, harmless enterprise she always thought coyly, where both parties benefited. She was not one given to dwelling on the aftermath of a broken heart; her moral due diligence ended with her making it resoundingly clear at some point, that she was only ever a friend. And that even if there was some misunderstanding that she hoped that her most recently crushed courter had enjoyed their camaraderie and that they’d continue to be genial with each other. She’d bestow her most beatific smile and come away contented and cheerful, warm in the glow of a problem solved and her moral compass pointing truly heavenwards.
It was on the Dance floor – that battlefield of laborious leg work and fitful grace, that she’d met Danny. A 45 year old divorcee, Daniel had recently moved back to Sri Lanka after a 10 year stint at marriage and business in Brisbane, Australia. Both had come crashing around him about a year ago. He’d decided then that home was where the heart really was and had, bag, baggage and a dog, returned to his hometown of Colombo. He had always loved dancing and was quite consummately professional at executing the lusty, physical moves of the salsa, bachata and the waltz. In an effort to forget the last decade, he plunged into everything that had defined him before he moved abroad and that ironically, went against many of his predilections now. And so, one of the first things he’d done was to sign up as an instructor at his old social dancing school. A decade ago, he’d been one of their more popular teachers with an avid throng of female admirers who were obliged by their fluttering hearts to sign up as students too. It was a lucrative scheme for dashing Danny and a two hour theatre of titillation and thrills for the dancing brigade. Danny had in fact, met his ex-wife at that very school. She had no talent for the Waltz but had sure-footedly danced her way into his heart. That was really the only time they had ever danced for the sheer pleasure of it. After matrimony settled them into its no-nonsense folds, she realized that she quite despised the art form and he realized with some alarm and then resignation that that fact was the least of his marital woes.
Like the other women, Dharshini too had found herself responding to the agile charms of her dance instructor. He had, on more than a few occasions, taken her as his partner to demonstrate to the rest of the class, a particularly complex move full of wild, rousing acrobatics. She came away from these twists and spins breathless and reddened with exertion and excitement. She was sure he too felt his heart strings being jiggled and jostled in all that animated physicality and closeness. He was different though. He wasn’t smiling too readily at her; or babbling; or otherwise showing any signs of being under the influence of her enchantment and allure. Traditionally she was the pursued and the besotted men did all the labour-intensive pursuing. He was congenial but just distant enough to show that he was in control of the situation and if this … this thing… had to go anywhere, it was for her to make the first move. This realisation was both heady and new. She had smiled to herself. There was something else that was new here too: her heart after ages, was beating for someone else!
And so Dharshini had thrown herself into her Salsa and Bacahata lessons, three times a week. A fortnight into the enterprise, she had slipped and fallen on the tiled floor, landing directly on her knees. In the heat of the moment and in the insular glow that now surrounded her at every class, she didn’t feel the pain nor the ominous creaking of her joints every time she bent her knees or leaped deer-like out of her partner’s arms onto the hard floor. She went to bed in a haze of contentment and love. She even felt a random gentle wave of affection rise for all her other unfortunate suitors who had gone their own way. I hope they’re all happy just as I am, she’d thought charitably, big-heartedly. And with that she drifted off into a dreamless, restful sleep.
‘Why was I jumping like a monkey on steroids? Why? Why?’ Dharshini complained bitterly to Sabeena on the phone the next morning. Her mid morning phone chats with one or another of her friends marked the start of every day. She always came away feeling invigorated, light of load and rearing to get on with the rest of her day. Sabeena too came away from the phone call, her inner calm now quite shattered by the torturous raving and ranting of her bossy but well-meaning friend.
The morning after her fall, Dharshini hadn’t been able to bend her right knee at all, and had thought it was best if she stayed in bed. These restful, placatory measures had often worked when her joints occasionally rebelled in the tropical rains and humidity. This was the first time, however, that she’d subjected them to such pounding, ceaseless torture. For two whole weeks! They were obviously going to act like petulant, griping grande dames. For Dharshini, her ankles and her knees were like a twinsome of spinsterly companions that had set up permanent residence on her person. While everything else felt youthful and sprightly, these joints never matched up. They creaked and complained at the slightest intrusion of weather or activity and it took large doses of rest and relaxation to get their grumbling soreness to settle.
The pain had not subsided even after a week of missing classes and tending to her knees. She had finally decided to see her orthopaedic specialist. The doctor and she shared a love-hate relationship on behalf of her joints which he quite practically considered his wards too. He knew that Dharshini only ever came to him when things had gone from bad to worse and when he’d have to resort to strongly advising, cajoling and then threatening, to have her be more compliant. She knew that the good doctor meant well but he was always so grim and pessimistic; always making her feel old and doddery.
‘Mrs. Gunaratne, have you been trying to run relays lately?’ he asked feeling her swollen right knee. She grimaced and mumbled something unintelligible. The universe and he both knew what she meant.
‘You have weak joints Mrs. G. There is hardly any cartilage left in your right knee and the gel* injections are soon going to be insufficient to keep it going. It’s knee replacement surgery for you if this goes on’, he said darkly but also with some satisfaction. He was really quite at his wits end with patients like Mrs. Gunaratne who refused to take supplements, had congenital osteoarthritis and were always up to some joint-jarring misadventure.
‘Doctor Herath, please just give me the injection and I promise to take the pills. I have to go soon. I have another appointment’, Dharshini said somewhat testily. But not too aggressively. He was after all the best orthopaedic surgeon in town. And when it was absolutely necessary, he would be the one to endow her with a set of new knees. She always balked at the idea of surgery and not even the prospect of agreeable, maiden knees could dispel her horror of the surgeon’s scalpel.
* Gel injections: One of the more effective treatments for arthritis is gel knee shots — also referred to as viscosupplementation or hyaluronic acid injections.
Global politics, our collective Moral Compass and the Palestinian tragedy
Funny what our world has become. We grow, we evolve, we hope to become ever better versions of ourselves, and then life gets in the way; our pursuit of success and even our quest for happiness gets in the way. Somewhere down the line, we’ve lost the actual essence of those pursuits; we’ve lost touch with what makes us human – the heart and soul equation we call our Moral Compass. This degradation of our will to distinguish between what feels wrong and what doesn’t, deep in our gut, has gone on for so long that now we don’t even recognise when we are party to cruelty, injustice or irrationality in the name of ideology, faith and correctness.
We, as a species however, are not innately bad. The overwhelming majority of us mean well. We want to do the right thing; we want to stand for the right causes; we want to speak up where it matters. But so insidious and crafty is the state of our global politics and the malicious power mongering that goes on in its toxic folds, that for large swathes of humanity to be duped, brain-washed and even numbed to atrocities is now completely normal.
The one double edged sword where the glint of steel can go either way is digital media. While it is rife with conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies, there is also a healthy spectrum of enterprising, truth telling news and information sources on there. What becomes a necessary obligation on behalf of us, the bulk of humanity using these platforms, is to do the work to separate the grain from the chaff; the truth from the lies; the sincere from the duplicitous. That will depend heavily on first, how true we stay to our own value systems and then, on how we navigate through the tortuous labyrinth of information surrounding us.
Case in point: the Palestinian tragedy. The bare-faced atrocities have gone on for so long, that we seem to have lost our collective capacity to see them for what they are. And all the while, they have become ever more brazen and cruel. If this was a hypothetical study, it would be an open and shut case long before it had even reached its current levels of criminality. And yet, while we are ideologically devoted to fair play, we appear to have lost our will, our voice and our moral authority to really make it happen. The overwhelming reason: Because the global power brokers, deal makers and profiteers continue to blast their deafening megaphones with cooked up intrigues and imagined threats, confusing, bewildering and paralysing the rest of us.
In the wake of the recent unrest however, despite all the grossly biased journalism and political posturing, it’s been heartening to see the entire international community come together as one, to voice their concerns; to make their genuine feelings about the situation heard. This time, our collective moral compass seems to be swinging in the right direction. We have proven that the vast majority of us still believe in basic decency and justice.
This then is something of a hope and a prayer for the truth seekers and the compass bearers out there. May we continue to find the moral and ideological strength to discern, weigh in and be heard. For the Palestinians and for all the others that are disenfranchised, marginalised and oppressed. Let us take back the global diplomacy narrative from the politicians and their funding platforms. Let us put back some soul and some humanity into the voices that we are raising for a more just and honest world.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
* Title inspiration from Fassbinder’s 1973 movie of the same name.
Teatime- a word that invokes so many nostalgic memories, while also carrying with it the promise of another little social do right around the corner. I write this from the subcontinental (read: classic) perspective where tea means exactly that, and is not in fact a culinary codeword for another meal…like dinner perhaps!
Having lived in a country, nigh upon six years now, which is known for its magnificent tea plantations, I came here expecting to be swept off my feet with supremely flavourful tea served with as much fanfare. But oh, the lost pleasure of the perfect cup of tea! Not only has the stately beverage been woefully overshadowed by its more robust cousin, the sinewy coffee, but the genteel art of tea making itself has been all but sabotaged by our time-constrained lifestyles.
Tepid tea, (whatever happened to tea-cosies?) just this side of being too anaemic or too vigorous, is the norm at most places. Tea brewing is a lost art that even tea timers haven’t been able to revive (those aging relics that lie there, unused, taunting tea drinkers; and then fading a little more into oblivion as they realise the futility of their efforts). Tea strainers are further dying remains of the classic tea trolley. So, even potentially good cups of tea will quickly take on a bizarre, almost bovine experience as one chews the leaves along with each sip.
The silver lining in all this post modern annihilation of the elegant art of tea making is the teatime legacy my sisters and I have carried into our lives. Having grown up in a home where tea and the accompanying panoply was the norm, this has been a delightful happenstance. Teatime at home consisted of lavish spreads of everything from pastries and sandwiches to biscuits and dahi bhallas*. And of course it meant steaming pots upon pots of Kenyan tea laced ever so delicately with earl grey. It became an affair, synonymous with togetherness, laughter and chatter. A time for capricious banter and tender confidences- a caffeine-warmed embrace of the ebb and flow of our lives. And at the centre of this lovely intimacy was my mother, the gracious matriarch who made this teatime magic happen.
In conclusion, of all the tea connoisseurs/ growers/ curators of the experience on the island, I ask that you breathe fresh life into this exquisite tradition. It is the assured panacea to many a dreadful day, of which sadly, we have all seen our fair share lately. In the words of Bernard-Paul Heroux, “There is no trouble so great or so grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea”; the “nice” there being replete with all manner of ambrosial and soul and spirit uplifting possibilities.
*Dahi Bhalla: a savoury, yogurt-based snack indigenous to the subcontinent.
We have all, at some time or another been overwhelmed, overpowered, bested by our grief, anxiety and wretchedness. At those times, some of us have also been lucky enough to have that one place where we have, for a while, found some degree of quietude and peace. This is a tribute to those secret little places and spaces of comfort and healing in our lives.
There is this wooden bench I like It’s not fancy; quite the common type. Cloaked in by the dappled canopy Of a gracefully pirouetting Mara tree, It sits in the park like a dear old friend It’s well-worn embrace ever welcoming. A young couple walks up, caught in the grips of wrath Love is lost; it’s the wretched aftermath; Words are exchanged until the fury’s spent Frustration - Anxiety - Sadness - Silence. Then they sit down on the wooden bench ... Gradually, muscles relax and nerves untense. Even if it is a passing interlude, Loads are lightened; hearts are soothed.
Wild flowers grow lushly around its feet Bobbing bright heads to Earth’s vital beat. The bench sits there like a quiet friend It’s well-worn seat ever welcoming. A man sits down in a state of unease Holding on to his hat in an errant breeze. He picks up his phone and looks at the screen; The unlit glass reflects the tranquil scene ... He looks up and around him his brow somewhat eased Fleeting albeit, he’s found his moment of peace.
Songful birds and their terrestrial friends Roam warbling and chittering around the bench; Hoping for a serendipitously fallen treat They browse busily around the seat. A wheelchair-bound man looks up at an overcast sky; His female companion already has water in her eyes. They sit side by side in worlds of their own Reminisnce weighs heavy of days that are gone ... A mynah trills as a light drizzle falls And a sweet petrichor briefly dispels the pall. The man looks at her, takes her hand and she smiles For now they’re alright; tomorrow is still a while.
I too have sat in Nature’s restoring arms On that bench where she weaves her alchemical charms. I too have unburdened my hopes and my fears I too have laid my bursting heart bare; And I have heard her soothing murmurs That have quietened my deepest despair. I’ve looked into her soft eyes from that corner in the park For a time, my soul too has emerged from the dark; The clouds have parted; the sun has shone through And I’ve breathed more easily, sitting on that wooden pew.
Earlier this year, after decades, the island of Sri Lanka welcomed the Pakistani cricketing legend of yore. Thankfully, the political mantle is still too new to disenchant the international fan base. Not that I think he is a corrupt bag of officious bones in the manner peculiar to many of his South Asian compatriots and indeed, his very own predecessors. No, he’s just a little soft in the head; a natural affliction, I have come to believe, when one decides to not go down the oft trodden path of political corruption and depravity. The cerebral mush of course, leads to an entirely different set of bureaucratic disasters. The long and short of it is that Imran Khan’s heart is in the right place but his brain is an addled brew of eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog*... And so, even with the best of intentions, the empire double doubles, toils and troubles!* But i digress… and can you blame me! Like everyone else in our beleaguered country, I too am a devoted armchair warrior and am wont to vent.
So why did our PM Imran Khan visit Sri Lanka?
What an interesting question, full of intrigue and the promise of riveting conspiracy theories (rubbing my hands gleefully and wanting to quote more eccentric old world verse!)
So here’s my take on it. The global power structure is gradually changing, and the South Asian bloc wants to be ready to play its part. Colonially-seeded geographical antagonism is seeming more and more irrelevant and incongruous as our unipolar world dithers on its North American weighted axis. As the US struggles with its burgeoning domestic issues, its inconvenient truths, it seems less and less likely to hold the moral mantle of global leadership. And when that dignity, skin deep though it may be, is shaken, the fall of the rest of the edifice is not far behind. No one wants to be told what to do by someone who can’t keep peace in their own backyard. And so, when some little but worthy nation somewhere tells Uncle Sam to mind his own business, we need to be ready to play our parts in catalysing the new equilibrium. Who those game-changing tRICksters* will be, is anyone’s guess. What is pertinent is that success will depend on there being some semblance of peace and harmony between the mighty neighbours of the Eastern hemisphere. And that peace has to begin ground up; with the smaller warring nations politely brought to heel first, so to speak. And so it was that on a swarthy February day, in the golden arms of the south Asian tear drop island, Pakistan was brought into the loop of the Global Reset. Because having two bickering nuclear armed neighbours in the region is generally not favourable to the efficacy of grand plans. And so, a meeting of the two estranged sisters, India and Pakistan, was arranged.
It is also interesting to note that hot on the heels of the Pak PM’s visit, the citizenry was treated to rather strategic Indo-SL combined military aerobatics, showcasing the battling might of mostly the Indian airforce. A polite but stratospherically overt reiteration that while there is some appetite for absurd but fit-to-current-form alliances, it’s best not to forget who the Saber Holdersare and who the Saber Rattlers are.
All this of course is a funny-feeling-in-the-gut conjecture; the waxing eloquent of conspiracy theories. But these days, when truth has so often been stranger than fiction, the civic mingling of sworn enemies is not such a far fetched ideal. The proof of the gesture will of course be in how the two neighbours deal with each other going forward. (Watch out for startlingly long periods of peace along usually tempestuous/ skirmish-ridden borders).
Wade Davis’ words are a reverberating mantra for our times when he said, “No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. [By the 20th century], the torch had long passed into the hands of America”.
Let’s hope America continues to scratch the surface of its domestic/ social inequities, leaving little power vacuums across the globe. Let’s also hope that the Prodigal Sons of the East (daughters are in scarce order!) rise to the occasion. When the time comes, it will take a concerted effort of going against the grain of everything we know to be our patriotic truths, to seed a new epoch.
In politics, absurdity is not a handicap. – Napoleon Bonaparte
*eye of newt.... verse quoted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth *tRICksters: the RIC in the word stands for the 3 global powerhouses of Russia, India and China.
It was slow I admit, the glimmerings of a connection with the ST-DS9* characters and their Deep Space shenanigans. But by season 2, I had developed a mild fondness for the Captain and his Federation crew. And by season 4, the affection I felt for the space Station denizens was deep-rooted and personal. By season 5, I was already forlornly anticipating the end of the series and feeling at odds with the rest of the Netflix science fiction repertoire.
That is not to say that i was blinded to the obvious shortcomings of the production; they just became tenderly blurred as the characters became increasingly larger than life. I still remember cringing slightly during season 1 and wondering for the 347th time why i felt such a compelling commitment to see every series through, dubious and otherwise, that I’ve embarked on. Here’s what I remember even as I dredge up the memories from the practical, unemotional series-bingeing depths of my mind:
The characters were more than a tad over-dramatic – Captain Sisko often comes across as a stand up comic endearingly poking fun at would-be space bigwigs; while the good Doctor Bashir appears so entranced by his own look, feel and sound that one would be forgiven for mistaking him for the English, Space version of a Doogie Howser impersonator. Major Kira (Colonel now!) is relentless in her adolescent knee jerk outbursts of anger, vengeance and the insatiable need to be the biggest bully in the Alpha quadrant…. nah… all Space. Then there are the dated special effects: the barely camouflaged fluorescent primary coloured lights blinking on 24th century tricorders and control panels; the landing/ disembarkation pads which look like ponderous railway tunnels; the defiant, brave little ships in space, dithering ever so slightly against their starry backdrop – trembling reminders of their actual minuscule size and mass; the phasers and other laser weapons put to shame by the contents of aisle 15 in Toys ‘r’ Us. But…. like i said, i had to laboriously dig up these first and not so lasting impressions.
What I do remember effortlessly is the superb characterisation of Quark the quintessential Ferengi who’d grown a heart and a bit of a conscience over the course of the 7 seasons; Garak who was as devious and resourceful as he was genteel and intrepid; Dukat the bipolar Cardsassian who fought a war of conscience for most of the 7 seasons, finally relenting with a Bajoran bow and a twisted flourish to his dark side; Weyoun, the Gamma quadrant clone who was as duplicitous as he was “god-fearing”; and of course Vic Fontaine, a holographic throwback to the 1960s Las Vegas rat pack style entertainment who was as good a singer as he was a psychothera-pal for the DS9 crew. All in all, the alien characters of DS9 delivered a far superior performance to that of their human counterparts.
The piece de resistance of the series however, is definitely its ability to take its viewers on a compelling, emotional journey into the lives of its main characters. The cloak and dagger plots set a million light years away from earth still took place in what was essentially a little town with its very own set of the good, the bad and the alien. And that was ultimately what made the series so memorable.
Other Deep Space Distillations:
-The mainstream ethics/ moral compass portrayed by the Federation of planets, while being lofty and aspirational by our boorish 21st century standards, was still shown to be insidiously riddled with intrigue and deception; its Section 31 dutifully and covertly performing all its ungallant business. I suppose some things are so hard-wired into our psyche, a basic distrust of anyone different from ourselves being at the top of that list, that no amount of evolution and sophistication can wring it out of our DNA.
-America, as is customary across the Hollywood universe, bravely endeavoured to save the day or lead from the front. And so unremarkably, Uncle Sam continued to fill in most of the shoes of the DS9 and the Federation nawabs*.
-I discovered a new-found love for Frank Sinatra’s soulful crooning. I’ve had his vocal jazz and swing numbers on quick recall on my phone for the last fortnight. Vic’s repository of the legendary tunes pulls at all the heart strings!
-The MC at Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony sounded eerily like Worf, the Klingon!
I watched the last show of the last season last night. A net total of 176 episodes viewed, imbibed and psychoanalysed nostalgically during the last 4 weeks. Almost made me forget we’re in the middle of a pandemic as I traversed through space and time with the crew and the citizens of Deep space 9/ Terek Nor.
I leave you with a nostalgic old Sinatra refrain sung by DS9’s own Vic Fontaine, just because it’s such a lovely old song and even half a millennium on, it resonated richly, poignantly, on a space station somewhere in our cosmos.
*ST-DS9: Star Trek – Deep Space 9
*Nawab:a male title which literally means Viceroy; the female equivalent is “Begum” or “NawabBegum”. The primary duty of aNawabwas to uphold the sovereignty of the Mughal emperor along with the administration of a certain province. In modern times, it is often used to denote men of power.
I probably would not have been able to write this piece as intrepidly as I am doing now had I been in the motherland. And therein lies the basis of the conundrum that is our religion: an ideology that is deeply, consumingly rooted in loathsome patriarchy with a formidable intolerance for debate and discussion.
1400 years after the Prophet Muhammad brought the message of peace, tolerance, equality and most importantly, the elevation of the status of women in the fabric of our religious and social structures, we have not only forgotten the essence of that message, but have regressed in ways that would be considered somewhat extreme even in the wild misogyny of ancient Arabia. Islam, in the developing world, led ideologically by our oil-rich Arab brethren, has degenerated into a cacophony of fear mongering, at the heart of which is a gender bias so sick, it is boggling to the mind in the 21st century. So embedded is that illogical, bald-faced chauvinism that its nefarious cultural roots are no longer visible in the milleu of religious (mis)interpretation and ritual. In the masterful manipulation of all organized religions, Wahabi/ orthodox Islam too wields its power by staunching all debate that questions its ethical and moral viability for the current times – for to question is to be a Kafir* and thus branded, you may be exposed to the unwitting but ferocious wrath of the rest of the believers; or if you’re lucky enough to escape that gory end, you are forever a pariah in the fatherland.
I consider myself privileged for growing up in that little bubble of sanity that floats just atop the rest of the malignant mass that is our socio-religious national fabric today. Our generation of females in the family, led by absolutely prodigious women of substance, has been bestowed with those critically strategic opportunities to break through the debilitating and handicapping proverbial glass, nay granite ceiling. We have been raised to believe that the only people who are better than us are those who bring more to the the table as human beings, and that does not include their inadvertent Y chromosome. And yet, during my time working in the corporate sector which is known for its gender inclusivity with its strategic human capital goals of at least 45/55 percent female to male ratios, I was reminded on not infrequent occasions, that to be a man regardless of your professional acumen was to have a clear advantage. One example of this state-sponsored misogyny is the weight/ bearing of a woman’s signature on a legal document. Two female signatures are required for every one male signature for the document to hold up in a court of law. And so on more occasions than I care to remember, the resident tea boy who had nothing to do with the legal gambit or the event (except for the steaming cups of tea in our hands) has put down his testosterone-fortified signature as a legal witness, because I, the woman who was leading the charge on the matter, was not deemed fit enough by our state legislatures to understand it as well as any male can, including our tea boy – who, quite frankly, was a good soul but had limited knowledge of BPRD* circulars and responses to the State bank.
And so this system of overt bias is perpetuated to keep our gender from ever reaching its full potential – an unmitigating stream of psychological and jurisdictive attacks cloaked in fuzzy patriarchy to keep 50% of the country in a constant state of entropy.
Despite these disabling encumberances, our generation has forged ahead – thinking, questioning and expanding our minds and our hearts to become more of the emotionally, mentally and spiritually replete beings that we inherently are. This has also led to a sizeable denominator of women being essentially left in limbo viz-a- viz workable/ aspirational personal philosophies. On the one hand, the religious and cultural ideologies of their forefathers no longer fit their lives in any manner that is respectful, empowering and enriching; on the other hand, any discourse or analysis that could lead to a more gracious and inclusive embodiment of religious tenets is tantamount to sacrilege. This is the state of half the population of the Muslim world; the state of almost a billion people on the planet. I am one of those women.
As we continue to the top of the personal ideological food chain, the number of denizens occupying those upper tiers get very much fewer. The ironic paradox with this food chain is that the apex means surefire disenfranchisement, backlash and predation. Like I said, it is still a rare privilege to be born a female in a truly enlightened Muslim family – I am grateful to be one of those. But our numbers are few and the patriarchal landscape is vast and riddled with a hatred for dissidents that has only become more fanatical through the centuries. However, every revolution of the hearts and the minds begins with a few intrepid idiots calling out the injustice and the oppression. I am also one of those women.
And so I’m diving into my ideological debate with some essential satire on a salient reward of the Hereafter; a lustful vision so unashamedly made synonymous with goodness that it has compelled the righteous to decimate entire populations and on frequent occasions, themselves too: the 72 Hurs or splendid female companions of Paradise. Promised to every believer. I’m a believer and I think I’m a good human being; (I’m also as straight as they come!) So is that vision, touted as it is in every inspirational Khutbah*, an enticing end to a life well lived? I’m going to hazard a guess on behalf of us Muslim women who are almost a billion strong: Nah!
The religious conversation needs to evolve beyond the all male-corridors of our masjids*; beyond erotic visions of the afterlife as the penultimate reward, to a wholesome, dignified ideology of life itself.
It is time, ladies and gentlemen, to take Islam out of the Neanderthal man caves into the light of the 21st century.
*Hur: a “splendid female companion” in the afterlife epitomising the spoils of a righteously led life for every devout Muslim man
*Kafir: unbeliever/ infidel. The term refers to a person who rejects or disbelieves in God as per Islam
*BPRD: Banking Policy and Regulations Department of the State Bank dictating the rules of business engagement for all banks
*Khutbah: A Muslim sermon that is delivered at places of worship mainly on Fridayswhich are considered holy daysinIslam
*Masjid: Islamic places of worship predominantly visited by only men.
It has now been over 6 years since i decided to take a sabbatical if you will, from my corporate career. I embarked on it more in the spirit of a healing process (life had thrown a few curveballs at me in 2012/13), rather than a wild abandonment of the work rigour, resulting precariously also, in the sudden and definitive staunching of a hitherto steady income!
Even so here i am, half a decade on, happier and probably somewhat healthier and wiser too! However, you can take a person out of the corporate halls of slog, but you can’t take the corporate exactitude out of the person. And so, i have over the last 5 years, approached all my experiences across the service industry spectrum, from the hospitality to the airline to the internet service providers with my customer experience hat adroitly perched upon my head. I have, quite a while ago, given up even the pretence of being a congenial, everyday customer with a heart full of forgiveness and a kind blurriness of mind reserved especially for appalling episodes of experiential breakdown. I notice everything and while i have made earnest efforts to not treat every service gaffe/ misdemeanour like it was committed by a flawlessly trained prodigy, i do pick my “service battles” from the point of view of identifying those likely eliciting the maximum bang for the buck. So while i won’t voice the mental angst of grossly delayed service followed by fumbling/ bumbling remedial efforts, I will respectfully opine on the myriad different withdrawal regulations that are applied to my NRFC* account – each disparate rule a tribute to its creative forger and executor of the day. The subsequent explanations to central bank auditors could make for a whole new banking science fiction genre; not to mention the plethora of post facto documentary and explanatory toil that I, the customer, would likely have to undertake to help the institution to regularise its stream of inadvertent but almost lovingly repeated foibles.
And so, to cut to the chase, i’ll go right to the helm of affairs – to the leadership of the organisation. That seat of power that can make or break the best and the worst of enterprises.
So what does a good Management Team do to create organisational success?
There are a few simple but utterly alchemical factors here that can convert even a seemingly jinxed piece of corporate enterprise into a decent success. I will explain each in successive blog posts.
Creating and Nurturing a Distinct Organisational Culture: There have been a couple of times, (twice for those inclined to use “couple” to mean a scattering!) where i have become part of a company culture where i felt like i was working for a home enterprise. The work environment being so disparate across the board that it ranged from an all out gestapo reenactment in one unit, to a space bubble with barely a shared ethos among its occupants, in another. And although the 2 units were highly dependent on each other in a particular product value chain, the twain barely ever met in purpose, harmony or delivery. Left unchecked, this work culture dissonance had added over a month to the end to end delivery turnaround time of the particular service. Complaints were rife; staff had been changed multiple times; bonuses were withheld. But despite the best of intentions, the issue stuck like the karmic backlash of a past life. Simply because there was no defined work culture, ethos or a shared Big Picture.
This work culture incongruity is a death knell for companies, especially in the service industry where, unlike in consumer goods producing FMCGs*, the end-user gratification is a sum total of their experience at that point in time with the organisation. Think of opening an account at a bank; your entire takeaway is nothing more than the knowledge that you have a new account in a particular bank underscored by the experience that accompanied that fact. Therefore, leaving the objectives of a mid-sized to large corporation undefined to its daily drivers and facilitators translates into the inevitable gross dilution of end-user experience that in time leaves nothing of the original/ intended USPs* of the company
Enter the dual magic of the Vision and Mission Statements*.These vessels allow management to clearly, concisely and effectively embody not only the existential purpose of the company; but also right to the T, what it means to be a part of the company as staff, customer, supplier and advertiser. (I’m personally not a big fan of shareholder stakes being vocalised in these statements). Building focused understanding, enthusiasm and energy behind these formal statements help to create and perpetuate a distinct company culture. People respond because by nature we are social creatures, and these statements of purpose then become the catalyst for nurturing a community of professionals with a clear unified end goal. A robust company culture though, is not a static thing. While the primary values remain unchanged (e.g. an FI’s* focus on technology, accessibility and financial security), the culture around those values is ever evolving to successfully accommodate the continuous diversity of its people, systems, customers and the external environment. The openness to change needs to be learnt/ imbibed at the get-go; imparted with veracity, in the very earliest of company orientation training programs.
Company management, the ManCom*, is the rightful custodian of the Vision and Mission statements; while every staff is the practical incumbent. In the best organisations, Management role models these values in visible ways to give them meaning, relevance, and to embed them into the DNA of the organisation at large. A game-changing organzational culture is one where its staff members are recognizable almost anywhere in the positivity of their bearing, attitude and pride of affiliation. For me, one such organisation was ABN AMRO bank in the late 90s into the mid 2000s in Pakistan. It was a poster child for hitherto unknown brands taking the market by storm; and continues to be a professional alma mater for so many even after it has ceased to exist in that particular market.
And so, a cohesive organisational culture which brings people together into a work community of purpose, is the first cornerstone of an organisation that successfully leads the charge and is able to cement its position as a leader in the industry.
*NRFC account: Non Resident Foreign Currency account
*FMCG: Fast Moving Consumer Goods
*USP: Unique Selling Proposition
*Vision and Mission statements: AMission Statementdefines the company’s business, itsobjectivesand its approach to reach thoseobjectives. AVision Statementdescribes the desired future position of the company. Elements ofMissionandVision Statementsare often combined to provide astatementof the company’s purposes, goals andvalues.
*FI: Financial Institution
*ManCom: corporate parlance for the Management Committee
I’ve been meaning to put this hitherto confusing, emotionally wounding mass of thoughts to paper for a while now. So far, through all the varied attempts over the last 10 years, I’ve always choked on the words in my mind; cocooned in a kind of benumbing Writer’s Block if you will.
So here i am today, feeling a little more intrepid, a tad more emotionally sound and spurred on by a medley of bittersweet reminiscences, to finally reflect on the vital importance of End of Life acceptance, dignity and preparedness.
To die is inevitable; to lead a life well-lived is a choice. And yet, we leave so much to providence while we can still exercise our power to choose, and put up formidable bulwarks of resistance when faced with the inevitable. This is a construct and a bullheaded perpetuation of our modern times, urged on by medical advances and their preserving effect on our life expectancy. While we are living longer, we have also developed an almost combative relationship with the End of Life. Even when everything is pointing towards the inevitable final exit, we choose to fight. We push back, we suffer, we agonize and we degrade, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually as we try and keep the “monster” at bay. A lot of times, that militancy is dispensed by the people closest to the terminally ill; and despite their good intentions, end up reducing their already suffering loved ones to little more than vulgarised shadows of their former selves.
In 2008, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. She lived with the disease for four years with the dignity, grace and courage of the superwoman that she was. Never once did she put on the mantle of the reduced or the afflicted or the invalid. Right to the end, she remained the gracious matriarch of her warm, welcoming home. Towards the end, the final two days to be exact, when she should have been allowed to make that Final Walk with the same beautiful poise with which she had lived her life, we, her family and her medical specialists intervened with all of our might to fight off the inevitable. She was taken to two different hospitals over the span of the last 3 days where the vitally alive battled to avert or at least delay an end, that became heartbreakingly beleaguered.
My final memory of her last day with us, has nothing in the way of any gentleness, love or the deep peace of final goodbyes. It is a memory fraught with fussing, poking, prodding Medical Staff intubating, pulling and pushing her as they, with determined professionalism, executed their Hippocratic oaths. The memory of her looking right at me, confused and exhausted as they inserted the ET tube down her throat is still searingly painful.
For a full two years after that, I thought of that terrible, terrible last scene every single night before i allowed myself to sleep. Perhaps it was my form of emotional self flagellation for being a well meaning party to the inadvertent indignity and torment my mother suffered towards the end.
And then, I’m not sure whether it was a providential helping hand reaching out from my own subconscious to finally pull me out of my emotional abyss, or the tender, cosmic reverberations of the maternal bond that helped me to transition to my current state of mental well being. That said, it was a dream that gave me back some semblance of my peace. So lucid, potent and reassuring was the vision of my mother being well and happy that i woke up with the sheer visceral force of the feeling – the warmth of her touch still lingering on the skin of my hands. (I have written about the dream in another post: https://theroamingdesi.org/2020/03/09/thank-you-for-the-joy/ )
And so, I finally did surface from the viper pit of guilt and grief and i have since, forgiven myself.
All living creatures are the sum total of their experiences and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my experience of losing someone close to me is the ability to see death for what it is – unavoidable. While I have lost my fear of the end, i also now understand the profound blessing a quick (relatively painless) exit is. That a departure that is underscored with acceptance, essential conversations, tranquility and quality time spent together becomes the blessed catalyst for more fully celebrating the lives of the loved ones we’ve lost. That the ability to see life and death with more ethereal eyes, to help us to grieve a little less and remember with joy so much more, are the cornerstones of a loving, respectful parting.
These End of Life conversations need to logically start in the hallowed halls of medical science. Medical caregivers need to bring more depth to their oaths taken for preserving the well being of human life, to include the dignity of death. These conversations need to become mainstream; to change the culture of the crusading and contrariness around death. In our current approach, we are left with too little in the way of the love and grace of final farewells.
It will take a consummate change in our emotional and social makeup and temperaments to begin to ennoble death even half as much as we do life. Given the current state of our world, this gracious labour of love around Final Partings may be the panacea for reminding us of both, the wonderful alchemy of the state of being alive and the eternal fragility of life itself.
Some background to this piece is essential I feel, to give it that bit of relatable relevance. Felicia’s character is based on an old family friend in Sri Lanka who is as lovely as she is absolutely, delightfully eccentric. Donald Rajapakse is a more sinister inspiration, based on the character of a man whom i know nothing of but who has been in my coffee shop writing space for the last 6 months – loud, obnoxious and a bit of a hassler. (I had to have the cafe management intervene to have him back off). Ruwani is a happy figment of my imagination, introduced to bring life and depth to the madcap machinations of my 2 main characters.
(I)
Felicia looked around her with the air of the resident matriarch, her gaze more acicular than that of a quality control inspector at a pharmaceutical manufactory. She noticed everything; from the brand of shoes on a toddler’s little feet to the caliber and concentration per square inch of a counterpart’s cosmetic applications. She sniffed delicately, her scan of the Cinnamon Grand lobby complete, and picked up her mug of double chocolate drizzled mochaccino.
She turned to Ruwani, her friend of 60 years and a bulwark of a woman in bearing and bulk.
“I’ve had a new salwar* stitched for the next meeting of the International Ladies’ Club. It’s from Pakistan. That Shihani thought she looked like a beauty queen with her Janpath market purchase. Did you see the cheap gold lace on her shawl?” She rolled her eyes as she spoke disparagingly of her social arch-nemesis.
Ruwani laughed her high tinkling laugh, delicately belying her ponderous mien. Her eyes twinkled as she said, “imitation is the purest form of flattery darling. She’s always looked up to you as her role model”. She laughed again at the mental image of Shihani looking up to Felicia as a role model of any sort. The two women could barely coexist in a social environment, and when they did somehow manage to come within six feet of each other, there was almost always a thrilling finale to the affair. The stuff of Page 3 high adventure.
Felicia frowned and took a slurpy swig of her saccharinus coffee, letting the heady brew course through her body, giving her the mental vigor to “drop it for now”. She had recently been diagnosed as a prediabetic and on the behest of her Ayurveda* guru, she had begun meditating to “will away the extra sugar” as she called it. She had also realised more recently that her willpower increased dramatically when her blood was fortified with caffeine or spirits. Still, she gave a last withering look to Ruwani before allowing the sugary caffeine to whisk away the wisecrack into some not so obscure recesses of her mind; the memory to be retrieved later, brazen and embellished, when she needed stirring reinforcements of lividity in the wake of an especially karmic day.
Ruwani watched Felicia’s face as expressions of resentment, detachment, reanimation and a final ferocity played out in the fond encore of an oft repeated act. Despite the bluff and bluster, Felicia was a good sort. The kind that needed copious scratching of the surface before any glimmers of goodness shone through though; a diamond in the consummate rough. Felicia Pelpola and Ruwani Edirisinghe had been friends for 50 years now and had had their fair share of fall-outs and run-ins. But time and grace (mostly on Ruwani’s side) had brought a bristly tenderness to their equation and their friendship had triumphantly weathered multitudinous storms in teacups and the occasional tsunami.
Felicia had, in her heydays, been quite the social starlet. She was the debutante that had changed the norms of the party circuit with her boisterous manner and her delicate anatomy. Her demeanour and her countenance were at such odds with each other that the resulting befuddlement of the senses became her piece de resistance. She provoked a serendipiptius sensation of attraction and discomfuture that pulled at all the male heart strings and incensed, in equal measure, the traditional ladies of leisure. Ruwani looked at her now robustly girthed friend and chuckled. Time had diminished her beauty yes, but had also compensated her unsparingly with a persona that strode into most rooms before her person did. She was absolutely, delightfully formidable!
“Oh look who’s here!” Ruwani, still grinning, looked towards where her friend was gesturing. Donald Rajapakse had just walked in, behatted and bellicose, loudly berating someone on his way into the coffee shop.
“Donnie! Donnie! Aney!* He’s getting deaf as a door nail!” crowed Felicia.
“DONNIE!”
There was startled hush in the cafe which neither Felicia nor Donald noticed as the one shrieked back a “Hellooo!” and the other cackled in what was meant to be a guileful titter. Donnie came towards them, swaying from side to side in his quintessential rheumatic lurch.
“Hello my beauties! How are my favourite ladies?”
Felicia smiled affectedly and in the high pitched, adenoidal voice reserved only for eligible men and her hair dresser, she quipped, “We are fiiiine! Having cappuccino. You want? Come sit aney!”
Donnie sat in the chair that afforded him the best view of his surroundings and looked around. Felicia continued to smile like a loon and shifted her bulk at a precipitous right angle towards Donnie’s chair, her hand delicately supporting her chin. But Donnie was already distracted by a solitary woman sitting two tables away, engrossed in a book. He stared hard, only half hearing what Felicia was chirping into his ear. When his hypnotic stare didn’t get the creature to look his way, he devolved in his trademark manner into Neanderthal mode and then there was a bustle and a frenzy as he guffawed, bellowed and produced all manner of primitive-man noises to hassle the object of his current coffee shop infatuation into acknowledging his presence. She did finally, by calling for the bill, casting a disdainful look towards the voluble, senior party of three and sauntering out into the sunshine. Donnie was woebegone as his buoyant hat came off and he sat there with an inadvertent twinkle on his bald head. But not for long; you can’t keep a socially catastrophic but tirelessly optimistic man down for long. And so the next couple of hours were spent sipping coffee and annihilating plates of mutton pies and smoked salmon wraps over boisterous conversation.
At 3pm, Donnie left the group to join another party at the 70s Club. Felicia took back command of her person and her surroundings and the next thirty minutes were spent in a focused wardrobe and character breakdown of the other coffee shop patrons. All in all, it had been a charming afternoon!
(II)
On the way home, both women were thoughtful mostly because of the stupor of all the food consumed and partly because of the waning day…. Life. Ruwani glanced at her friend who had leaned her head against the seat and closed her eyes, blocking out the world perhaps, after spending an afternoon in its fervid embrace. Ruwani looked outside her window. They had stopped at a traffic light. A young man on a motorbike was arguing with his female pillion as she pushed away from him clutching a Beverly Street bag to her chest. A snot-nosed boy ran across the road with a dripping ice cream cone in his hand, following a hassled mother. A tuk tuk driver looked at his phone in distressed anticipation while glancing every so often at the red traffic light. The only quietude in the scene outside surrounded a duo of mynahs promenading along the sidewalk in perfect creature harmony.
(III)
Back home and post a shower, Felicia sat at her dressing table looking at her reflection. She brushed her hair slowly, the once lustrous strands now feeling meagre and inadequate in her grasp. She looked at the lines in her face; each had become a more avid companion as the years had gone by. She looked away and out of her bedroom window. In the waning twilight she saw a pair of mynahs, frolicsome and songful, performing a last little dance before being blanketed by the stillness of the night.
*Salwar: local colloquialism for the Shalwar Kameez, the long shirt and loose pants indigenous to the northern subcontinent
*Ayurveda: An alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent.
*Aney: a colloquial Singhalese expression meant to show mild irritation/ concern.
This political farcical piece was written in September of 2020 in the wake of the American presidential elections.
May 24th, 2021:
The President Is Dead.
It was not exactly a shock but it did put the Administration into a bit of a tailspin. DT’s* tenuous hold on his vitality and even his lucidity, had begun to loosen quite quickly after he won the 2020 election – through the electoral college loophole yet again, trailing as he was by a popular vote count of 4,321,786 to be exact. It had been sad to see his trademark animated crazy-man persona take a nosedive in the aftermath of a Covid 19 attack in February 2021. Respiratory complications had led to double pneumonia and a heart attack from which he had never quite recovered. And thus it came to pass that with a sniffle and a stroke, the “Wuhan” virus had finally triumphed over its greatest Detractor and Denier in Chief.
Mike Pence Was Confused.
Mother* had been anticipating a turn in her otherwise vapid husband’s fortunes. She was a devout Christian and believed that because of her prodigious equation with God, her Mike was destined for greatness. Privately, Mike was terrified. He was used to doing someone’s bidding- the more autocratic the bidder, the more effectively Mike Pence tended to advance the [political] will of God. Mother said that when the time came, he was to “rise to the occasion”….
He mopped his brow and picked up the phone to call Mother. He put it down almost immediately. He looked across at Ivanka, squinting in anticipation.
Ivanka Glowed
In the wake of her father’s battle with the Chinese scourge, Ivanka had stepped up just like the chip off the old Trump timber that she was. In fact, she’d been the defacto Head of State now for the last 3 months while the President elect had relegated himself to laboriously showing up for the necessary photo and video Ops. In the short course of 2 months and through unrelenting public interactions and fact-repelling, fantastical incendiary speeches, she had expertly manipulated his fiercely loyal electorate to look on her as the heir apparent to the American throne. When the time came, she was going to gleam; she was going to be queen!
June 9th, 2021:
Bloody Wednesday
A million Trump supporters marched on Washington DC on June 5th, 2021. They had one mission in mind: to ensure the legacy of Donald J. Trump endured in the only way possible/ plausible. Ivanka Trump was to be President – some said Sovereign Leader.
Over 5000 people were killed in that endeavour (which came to be called the Lafayette Square Massacre in clandestine, ragtag liberation groups). On June 9th, 2021 Washington fell and Ivanka was installed in Mar-a-Lago, Florida as the Supreme Leader of the Republic of America.
June 9th, 2023:
The Immaculate Assimilation
There are still hopeful little insurgent clutches that come up here and there like miniscule trickles of water in the desert. They raise tenuous battle cries for the old values; for equality and justice. They are brutally crushed every time. The QAnon* governed, Portland based torture chambers, i have heard, rival none.
A newage caste system, inadvertently borrowed from the 1500 year old Vedic period in ancient India, has been installed as the elemental social fabric of the Republic of America. It is a fundamental alchemy of economic and racial hierarchy; and it is thriving in all its unstifled, newly-released glory. Washington is now home to the Mass Re-Cognition Camps where participants are concertedly reconditioned on the values of the new republic or Great America as it is now called.
I am a working class brown woman in this new America. And I have ‘volunteered’ to relearn the manifesto and the ethos of our new country, my position in it and especially, the very definite limits to my aspirations.
Where We Go One – We Go All!*
Long live the Aryan Republic of America!
Glossary of Terms:
*The Age of Stupid: Title inspired from a namesake 2009 dystopian movie. This feature is the follow up to the original OPINION |The Age of Stupid*
*DT: Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the USA
*Mother: Mike Pence’s (and indeed, all of America’s) endearment for his wife
*QAnon:A far-right cult of conspiracy theorists alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them
*WWG1WGA: Where We Go One We Go All– a QAnon credo based on the “Great Awakening” of the public to sharethe load of restoring faith in the rule of law in a post-media age.
US Hegemony, Its Lingering Pakistan/ Afghanistan Embarrassment and Media Morality
It was the early 80s. I still vividly remember as a child, standing on the side of the iconic Mall road in Murree (a mountain resort town situated about 30kms northeast of Islamabad in Punjab, Pakistan, and also home to a number of missionary boarding schools) with compatriots from my school and others, waving little Pakistani and American flags as President Zia ul Haq accompanied by the then US Vice President, George H. W. Bush (Bush Senior) drove by in their endless cavalcade of black luxury sedans. For us it was a joyous day out of the regular rigour of boarding school life; for Pakistan it was the beginning of the end of its Rising Star status in the region.
Pakistan, so geostrategically well situated to catalyse the downfall of the Soviet empire- the one thorn in the side of the Americans and the only obstacle to an all out USA dominated planet- was requested to become Ally Numero Uno. And we complied in the then considered most shrewd and cunning manner – through religiously radicalising, arming and mobilising an entire nation in a war that was to turn in on itself for decades after the USSR fell. By God, did we comply! And for very little in return. A statesman at the helm of affairs at the time (or even a half-way successful businessman like Donald Trump armed as he is with his career collage of bankruptcies), rather than a religiously devout military man, would have at least got us better trade deals to help shore up the economy once the dust of battle settled. But these are wishful conjectures…and the rest as they say, is history.
Soviet Russia sputtered and fell and the USA couldn’t get out of the region fast enough, leaving two countries with populations in the area of 130 million (circa 1992) to clean up the mess. But radical religion has a way of festering, sometimes out of sight, and emerging multiplied, more virulent, more destructive and deadlier than before. And that has been the dubious Vestige of Alliance bestowed on the two countries, the “rewards” of which we are continuing to grimly reap. Kabul, once considered the Paris of the East, is now a wraith of its former self, and the country has been declared a failed state. Pakistan itself has been teetering on the edge of the abyss of Pariah States. It’s people have undergone decades of global dismissal at best and damnation at worst. Despite being the fifth most populous country in the world and a nuclear power, it has fallen behind all its compatriots on almost every index of progress, prosperity and nationhood. The war on terror in fact, has purportedly cost the Pakistani economy a total of almost USD 130 billion since 2001.
Ironies and hypocrisies are rife as the countries in the West continue to strengthen themselves in nuclear armament while using every tactic in the book and outside of the realms of international law to bully the weaker/ developing nations into maintaining their globally vulnerable positions. The touted purpose: because these countries cannot be trusted with independent nuclear arms for they may wage globally destructive wars. The ironic truth: almost all the wars of the 20th century and the 2 decades of the 21st century have been initiated or aggressively intervened in by the USA, whether it was Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria; or Cuba, Panama, Kenya and Yemen. We, the developing nations, have sat on the sidelines, watched our economies bled dry, our social systems dragged into the Middle Ages and our international reputations ripped to tatters. The 20th century has indeed been a bloody epoch despite all the noble peace-promoting intentions of the victors of the 2 world wars. We as the human species have remained true to our baser instincts: power has tended to corrupt; and absolute power has corrupted absolutely.
And now enter the new devil! The mainstream digital and broadcast American media which in the blink of an eye can school millions of viewers around the world onto any hypothesis, conspiracy theory and interpretation of facts…and fiction. For the Global Village such as it is, besides making the world that much smaller and more accessible for its citizens, also ensures that current affairs are copiously and constantly coloured only with the pens of the victors of the 20th century, the USA.
Case in point: A few months ago, Pakistan displayed quite remarkable success in not only reining in the Covid-19 pandemic in the country while the wheels of economy continued to turn; but it was also reported to currently have the best performing stock market in Asia. Hot on the heels of this positive press, the major American media conglomerates began blitzing their screens with how Pakistan and Afghanistan are still the only countries in the world which still had rampant wild strains of polio. And so there it was again – the habitually insidious carpet-pulls from under our beleagured feet….
The Avengers of the Digital Age then, are not the politicians nor the military Strongmen. They are the Media. And granted that on the Information Super Highway, it requires great ethical tenacity and character to claw through the putrefying onslaught of political bias, power and oneupmanship. But never have the stakes for the preservation and endurance of our collective ethics and morality been higher than at the present time. Now more than ever, this fraternity needs to people itself with the most courageous visionaries, opinion makers and informers who bring an unwavering moral predisposition/ force to the sacrosanct task of building a higher globally shared ethical instinct and awareness.
God save the Queen, the USA, the Sheikhs, the Despots and the Champions of our collective moral integrity!
I’d been hearing its haunting whispers for a while, and so there was a sense of urgency of the spirit if you will, to go off into some wilderness sunset somewhere. It was in this chakras-in-a-flux kind of state then that the opportunity to soulfully recoup befell me. And so it was at the tail end of a tropically balmy July that i found myself taking the scenic route to Habarana – home to a number of national parks, eclectic wildlife and the majestic pachyderm, the Asian elephant.
We (my travel adventures partner in crime and I), drove to Habarana which is located in the Anuradhapura district of Sri Lanka. It is ideally situated as the departure point for safaris in the Habarana jungle and a throng of nearby wildlife sanctuaries. It is also home to a number of beautiful hotels one of which is the Cinnamon Habarana Lodge. Boasting sprawling grounds alive with the sounds, sights and smells of nature, the Lodge offers fabulous walkways replete with forest trail-like pathways; water bodies straight out of a Monet painting; and a profusion of chittering, chattering birds and primates. Nature truly is free and floating at the Lodge, dancing in a mesmeric carnival of greens, browns, blues and reds. Needless to say, we walked off many a lavish meal in the midst of this resplendent profusion.
Cinnamon Habarana Lodge, Habarana, Sri Lanka
Our first deep-dive into nature was a trip to the Minneriya National park situated a half an hour drive away from the Habarana Lodge. Close to the culturally historic city of Polonnaruwa, it is home to 160 species of birds, 9 species of amphibians, 25 species of reptiles, 26 species of fish, and 75 species of butterflies. The park offers majestic views of wild elephants foraging in the shrub. The famous Gathering of the Wild Elephants occurs at this meeting place, also known for the largest gathering of Asian Elephants at one place anywhere in the world. During the dry season of August and September each year, herds of up to 300 elephants are seen within a few square kilometers of the vast Minneriya Reservoir. The whole experience is almost meditative as these gentle giants go about their foraging activities while the calves romp, play and trunk-wrestle one another. We also had the unique good fortune to see 1-month old twins born in the wild – a fabulous rarity in the pachyderm species. The day of our visit, there were only 5 other jeeps at Minneriya, where there are usually over a 100 on any given day. The pandemic has definitely put a spanner in the wilderness works at Habarana! In an ironic way, as is true for so much in our lives, this break from the human horde has been greatly psychologically salubrious for the resident elephants, who have been known to occasionally charge at the safari jeeps. Not in any harmful way but in more of a display of self preservation as they protect the herd, especially their juveniles and infants.
We were also able to spot wild Axis deer, Jungle fowl, Peacocks and wild hare. Curious troops of Toque Macaque monkeys and Tufted Grey Langurs greeted us at almost every bend in the road, sitting on their haunches like so many subcontinental men who, done with their daily toils, congregate on sidewalks to watch the world go by, while also wishing for some serendipitously divine change in their fortunes. Many are carrying cute as button infants who are chips right off the old blocks – inquisitive, sociable and perpetually waiting for divine (or homosapien) manna.
Wild elephants at the Minneriya National ParkWild elephants at the Minneriya National Park and the quintessential squatting south Asian homosapiens
With the copiously tranquil vibe of Minneriya still reverberating in our city-wearied bones, we were hooked. So on the morrow, we embarked on yet another safari, this time to the undulating plains of the Kaudulla National Park. Situated about 40 minutes away from the Lodge, the park is known for sightings of leopards, fishing cats, sambar deer, endangered rusty spotted cats and sloth bears. On a typical trip, one is guaranteed enthralling views of a variety of birds including resplendent junglefowl, peacocks, ibis, egrets, hornbills and rain quails. The piece de resistance again however, are the herds of wild elephants and their calves, observable in their wild habitat; and of course the habitat itself. Lush greenery amidst undulating plains meets the eye for miles. Kaudulla Park is yet another close up zen experience with Nature and her great and small beasts.
Wild elephants at the Kaudulla National ParkA peahen leading her brood of chicksWildlife at the Kaudulla National Park
The national park sojourns are as much journeys into the great outdoors, as they are into contemplative/ meditative spaces replete with the sounds and smells of the peaceful wild. I came away from the Habarana trip revived, rejuvenated and rested. It was like the spiritual letting down of my hair while walking barefoot on rain-moistened grass. Indeed, it was like living, for a few delightful days, in a Khalil Jibran quote: Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
For my beautiful, wise mother on what would have been her 72nd birthday on the 8th of July 2020. And to all the other wonderful mothers who have left us too soon ❤️🌺
Sometimes I wake up in the morning Feeling a little less vibrant, a little more melancholy... I get dressed, and I look in the mirror My hairbrush poised in my hand... And I see a flash of someone familiar A fleeting gesture, a nuance, an expression, And I smile, a gentle joy touching my cheeks. And then I look into my eyes And I clearly see the lingering glimmer of someone resting in my heart And my heart bursts, my throat chokes up and my eyes twinkle And I know that I have shared A special mother-daughter moment in my dressing table mirror.
O Beauteous one This is for you For all the times that you have bloomed When all around have burrowed deep Into the coolness of earth’s breast Hiding away, biding their time Until gentler, lighter climes Bestir them in their loamy beds But you, O Intrepid one You have always overcome You have worn your gem-like garb In ways that made me catch my breath Racing, chasing to my heart Wondering if you’d shimmer on Or if your time here too was done But you wore your jewelled crown Glittering in the scorching sun I looked at you, O Enchanting one As you cavorted with the breeze Those molten gusts upon my skin I gulped in then, the oxygen That sat timorousky in the air But I was pulled By the oasis that surrounded you Perfect, paradisiacal Unsundered by the elements There you danced so full of joy I came to you pulled by the spell Of your vivid hues, O Alluring one You swayed your head Spangled whorls overspread Across the fretwork of your boughs Mesmerized I reached out Into your magic latticed web You pricked me then, O Bewitching one Your thorns were invisible, hidden I knew then that your glittering grace Your wild gumption to face the sun Aren’t just in the softness of your blooms But in the armor that you’ve chiseled from The tempests - stormy and searing I looked at the ruby that had sprung On my fingertip that you had stung It dazzled on my glistening skin Its precious seams filling my lungs My essence and throb, O Wondrous one I found that day in the scorching sun.
Had to share this bit of a silver lining in my tropical monsoon sky – my poem, “Veins” got longlisted in THE PLOUGH 2023 POETRY COMPETITION out of over 2000 entries. Launched my writing career such as it is, two years ago and this is the first formal accolade that has found its meandering way to me, so I’m quite chuffed. Here’s to creating more shimmering scraps of poetry and prose, and to occasionally finding the universe conspiring, encouraging and smiling down too🙏🏼🌸
I know we haven’t talked in a while I know I haven’t seen you wear your soft smile We’ve said things to each other we didn’t mean Tearing and splitting the vital seams Of the fabric of our togetherness I know that I have felt desolate, helpless We have sat in silence, cold as frost The glow of our closeness long since being lost Somewhere along life’s bewildering way I let your warm hand slip away
I know we haven’t talked in a while I know I haven’t seen you wear your gentle smile
Through the years we have journeyed on Along the same path but each on our own Forged by our children, we treaded their dreams Only seeing shadows of you and me Still together we walked into middle age But it’s been a while since I really saw your face It’s been a few years since the air around Was filled with your familiar scent and your sound Somewhere, somehow I lost the quickening string That bound us together through thick and through thin
I know we haven’t talked in a while I know I haven’t seen you wear your lovely smile
But I know you’re still here, your pulse still beats warm Even as we’ve both whipped up raging storms They’ve whirled inside, while we’ve pulled away The terrible loneliness adding to the fray I know that we are a great distance apart But I can still feel you in the depths of my heart Let me find you once again in the mists Of sepia memories, reminiscences Let me hold your hand as I once did before Let us walk together, in step once more
I lost sight of you, dearest for a while Let me love you again, let me make you smile.
I feel out of touch A tad bit rusty Cranky and creaky Tinny and such The words clump together With a grind and a grate I wonder if a month away Has dulled my tapestry of verse Shimmering skeins that advance and traverse Embroidering and stitching Notions and qualms Into billowing storms Into rippling, sashaying ribbons of calm Bewildering phrases that make me guffaw Festering sentences painful and raw In bobbing waves with lacy edges In crashing, lashing, tearing deluges In twinkling stardust upon my page My blinking cursor running away With the train of my thoughts to the drum of my heart Laughing, singing, assuaging an ache Grieving, weeping, caught in the wake I wonder if my keyboard, unstirred, unscathed For two score nights and forty days Has borne my quickening string away.
It’s so soakingly humid That I swim on the pavements I glide Through the waves of moisture Like an eel, No, like a duck in water Submerged, breathing through new-fangled gills A chimerical, mystical thing The stuff of science fiction and ETs In a universe of visions and dreams Morphing, dissolving, changing Even as I wade on
When I bring a glass to my lips To quench a thirst that sits Uneasily, timorously in my throat There, but not really there More habit-driven than the need To drench a parched desert inside my skin I swim into the water Like a goldfish, lips turgid Gut kicking against the liquid intrusion But the impulse of living Compels me to sip, sip, sip Until I think I’ve had enough
When I dress in the morning Each garment feels like cellophane Stuck tightly to me, I’m cling-wrapped Even though each begins its day airily Lightly. I look at myself in the mirror My forehead is already wet In the heat of protest Against the layers I must don Linen - lying-in wait to suffocate Cotton - caught-on my liquified bones Fabric, propriety, a proper-riot Of ceaseless stickiness More fabric, more properness I ignore the tangled wrangle within I now wear also my morning smile Even as my upper lip glistens With the sweat of struggle Ageless now, muscle-memorized I step onto the pavement To swim, swim, swim In my designated line.
I see my shadow lengthen With the ebbing of the day I feel it suck up all the sadness From the bowels of the earth With its purple, glistening hoard Of melancholia and hopelessness I move ceaselessly, restlessly I will my never-stopping feet To sever the tortured bond That my swelling shade has formed With the darkening world around But my shadow just spreads out Ever further on the ground It suckles at night’s dreary breast Absorbing all her suffering So that nothing should remain In earth’s mighty store of pain With its ravening tentacles My twilight shadow reaches in Never faltering in its aim It will not stop it will not rest Until it has gorged itself On a sorrow that is infinite It’s bloated edges Endlessly dredge The gloom from earth’s wounded veins My shadow ripples and it writhes Waning only when daylight Breaks the tragic coupling Of the shades and sadness of nighttime.
Theme: Growing pains with the arrival of a new brother or sister
“I don’t want a little sister! And I don’t want a brother too!” Said Adam with his cheeks puffed out He was angry at the news He did not want to share his toys Nor share his mother and father With another child who would Live in his home forever
And so he stomped and huffed and puffed And said “Nooo! The idea stinks!” His parents looked at each other And quietly tapped their chins What were they to do they thought With their one and only child Adam never behaved like this So angry and so wild
“Darling son, it is but natural To have a balanced family With a brother or a sister Who can grow up and be Your best friend, your playmate Someone you can love And you will always be our Adam Our precious, oldest one”
But Adam still felt moody And went up to his room He couldn’t find his happy smile So he wore his maddest frown He looked at himself in the mirror His reflection stared right back His pouty face looked so silly Hahaha! Hoohoo! He had to laugh!
When little Amara came into the world And his parents brought her home Adam looked at her for a while At her cheeks and her tiny nose He touched one small chubby hand And when she held his little finger He laughed his happy laugh and he knew That he already loved his baby sister.
She’s caught in the rush of hurrying feet Snippets of conversations Of laughter, exclamations She’s caught in a tidal wave Of teeming, streaming life She’s caught in the swell Of people of voices, of sights and smells Riding the vital wave Pushing ahead Her silk scarf catches the breeze Of swelling, surging humanity She feels it pull Floating just a little in front of her She quickens her step Her feet instinctively keeping up With the urgency of life She feels something In her gut, the pit of her stomach A ripple, almost a laugh! She inhales deeply, she can’t place This sudden lightness of being It feels out of place This morning, mourning She had felt like lead Now like vapor she rises up Colourless, clean In that moment she’s someone else Propelling her body like a comet Lighter, brighter almost serene
She arrives at her gate 8A The same number, the place Where this very morning She had buried them She had forgotten For a few moments Who she was She was desolation and grief itself Wearing the bruises of loss Mourning only this morning It all came back dawning As she came to herself As her blood remembered And curdled inside A freezing, heaving cauldron of chills She sank into the depths of her seat 9B There was a sequence Monumental, compelling To her agony She had to remember She couldn’t forget Her world had ended When she had buried her dead.
PART ONE: Pin me, skin me Kick me in my shins please Bring me buckling, crashing down Then grin as you haul me up Dust me down, make an act of freeing me When I’ve lost all my will to be me
Churn me, burn me Laugh in my face, spurn me Then adulate, adore me But airily, lightly Politically-correctly When I can’t feel your torment or love Or anything else inside me
PART TWO: Juice me, use me Mangle and abuse me Then write up columns flush with New found awakening A social issues deciphering All the while computing, Measuring, forecasting Your own index of hero-worship For calling out brutality Other demons, other sins Out of your realm of reality But you orate and preachify Because it is your deliverance From mundaneness, insignificance
Roar out, be devout Let your new found arousal Wash over everyone “Not all of us are like that” Shout it out, don’t hold back Declare it with panache You are righteous no one can forget Everyone else’s moral compass Is a fickle sickle, directionless You’re guilt free with that homily With your ringing voice and sacchrine smile You present it proudly to me When all I can see are lips and eyes A Leviathan dripping honeyed lines Onto a transfixed audience They watch and gently chew the cud Of the weed that they are fed By evangelical heroes of prime time
PART THREE: Boot me, loot me Strangle me, shoot me Then have a ball in my name Found a charity, earn some fame Let the posthumous heroine With her tomb-tough shoulders Become your newest Taj Mahal Let her catapult you to the top Always from her deadest parts A pillaged body, a spirit crushed A tragedy censored and hushed From her countless cuts and gashes She now hides under her eyelashes While YOU and YOU and YOU and YOU Rise like a phoenix from her ashes.
A lit up sky The stars shine A bit too bright tonight A glittering mask To hide behind Their fatigue lies cloaked On the other side Here for the world to see They shine endlessly Their brassy edges Invisible, unseen But on the other side Hiding in day-light De-lighted They just seem Like ancient divas Bested by life But by habit and by pride Still cutting through The famelessness The agonizing namelessness Their jagged lightning Stumbling through the firmament Tearing at the vaulted heights One more time One more time Just one more time To light up the sky.
Mahvash Mohtadullah - The Roaming Desi 