Dear

Dear friends,

       To many , I come across as a very balanced and calm person, not easily ruffled and with truckloads of patience. But as someone who knows me best, I can vouch for the fact that my moods change as frequently as the phases of the moon. In fact, there is a similar constancy to my mood swings.

 On one of those days, when the clouds of a particularly dark mood had come looming large on my consciousness, a feeling of extreme self –loathing had overpowered me and on an impulse I had deleted all of my earlier posts. I cannot satisfactorily explain to myself how my mind works in those spells;so there is no way I can explain it to you folks.

   And now I am filled with regret. I can easily re-post what I had written as I have most of it saved on mycomputer. But how do I retrieve all those lovely comments from my friends on the Iland.

      Anyways, I am adding some of them below. And I hope I’ll be more grown –up next time. Coming from someone who has crossed fifty, that is rich, isn’t it? J

Hello

Hi everyone,

        Am new to this space. 

        Half a century behind me and none the wiser for it. Have fallen down, bruised myself, shaken off the dirt ( at least ostensibly) and plodded on. As is the case with those zillions of travellers, who have walked this planet in search of sense and security, never truly grasping it, except when surrounded by the warmth and glow of genuine affections.

    For what else is that constant craving that underlies the struggle of all our waking hours and that which inhabits our sleep and dreams, but the longing to be known and loved, to be recognised in our separate identity, to be accepted for what we are! The extroadinary amongst us climb mountains and conquer peaks, surf the seas and brave the storms, travel across unchartered territories, take wing and soar with the wind, far above the plains and lowlands. They dare, but their daring would be put to nought ,were there no witnesses. How lonesome would they be, how unhappy, if their daring and courage did not find recognition and applause.

    As for the rest of us ordinary mortals, we scurry about like little ants, finding acceptance and comfort in merely following the line of ants before us, toiling ceaselessly and hoarding

     The incessant whisper in all consciousness, both glorious and mundane is however just  simply this….Hey, here I am. This is what I am ...Love me for what I am . Accept me thus.

      Yet, all the wise men, who have gone before us, the saints and seers , prophets and avatars, who have had glimpses of the unknown, have invariably spoken of the need for the annihilation of our ego, what we percieve as our separate selves, in order that we reach a state of pure peace and joy. In those rarest of rare moments, when this becomes faintly oh so faintly possible, when we look into ourselves truthfully, all our insecurities, fears, jealousies, arrogance and complexes ,indeed all of our negativities do melt away….for that which you are , I am and so i cannot fear you or chide you or ridicule you. I cannot be vain or supercilious for that which I am , you are too.

      I  come to this island with that spirit of oneness...easy to proclaim of course, hard to live by, lifetimes to really achieve. But we should all try, shouldn't we ?

Memories

             Certain memories have a strange way of remaining with you all throughout one's life. Try as I will, I cannot fathom why they are still there from so long ago, while others just fade and then totally disappear.

    What are my earliest memories?

   I can remember cuddling up to my father as a little child, rubbing my face against the stubble on his cheeks and gently falling off to sleep, listening to the dull sound of the sea waves in the distance. Some nights, when sleep wouldn’t come, I would stare at the pitch black square outside the windows and feel terrified of the figures that I thought I saw there. When it rained, the fear was multiplied, as the incessant sheets of the downpour would make the darkness more intense. On other  nights, however ,the moonlight  brought a kind of magic, transforming  everything. Even now, trees and foliage drenched in the silvery whiteness of moonbeams, gives me a high.

     The smell of the sea was always there in the afternoon breeze . I could watch the palm fronds swaying languourously in those lazy hours, for any length of time and not feel bored. Many  evenings were spent on the sea shore, digging out mussels and walking nimbly across granite rock embankments.

     The smell of rose water, even now, brings back memories of a distant aunt who  used to live with us in our joint ancestral home. There were rows and rows of bottles stacked on the shelves in her room. Her son used to sell them, I think and on days when she filled up those bottles with rose water(can’t remember exactly how she went about making it, some concentrate was added to distilled water may be), the fragrance would be swirling around in all the rooms. We moved out of that house when I was around eight, never saw her after that, as they too had gone off to some place, the house itself being sold off by all the family members, as there was no one staying there anymore. The smell of rose water brings back that aunt although there is nothing else that I remember of her, apart from her name, not even what she looked like.

      I remember the cranky old woman, who lived in one of the row of  rented houses, just outside our compound wall. Almost on a daily basis, she would pick up a fight with the neighbours, who were as voluble as she was. Hurling abuses on the top of her voice, she would grow hoarse with the shouting, and then would start beating on a vessel with a stick so that the clanging sound would drown out the voices of her opponents.

    I remember the death of an old man in the neighbourhood, when I was around five , of being told for the first time, that death meant no coming back  and how the cold fear and sadness swept over me with the realization that my parents could die too when they grew old. I remember standing there  at the end of the lane, crying, waiting for my father to come back home, the growing dusk adding more melancholy to the vague sadness and loneliness. Years later, there was this recurring dream I used to have of me standing at the edge of a vast desert like terrain, completely alone, with vultures flying all over, across the sky and for some reason, on waking up, I would recall the feeling of dread that I had experienced , as a child when I became conscious of death as an inevitable end of our lives.

       I can perhaps say too that the spectre of death, waiting in the wings,to take over life, has been a kind of constant undercurrent, lurking in my mind and has therefore  emphasized for me, as a philosophy to live by, why love and understanding and not negativity and hatred ,should  be the compelling factor governing the way we think, feel and act. For I would want to breathe my last at peace with myself.

       Kal ki kisko khabar?

Chumki

         Chumki was deaf and dumb and she lived in a juggi cluster near where I lived. My maid Poornima, also lived there. Poornima’s  family was one of the first twenty five “pioneers” who settled there , by virtue of which, she had an address in that sprawling cluster. The corner where she lived was referred to as the “pachis juggi”. Chumki was her neighbour.

       A group of friends had started teaching the children there, in the evenings and that had given occasion to have a peek at their lives very closely. I am sharing some of the things that I have come to learn, as many of us tend to see such slums as avoidable eye-sores, offending our aesthetic sensibilities or at best as a necessary evil. One has quite often heard it being proclaimed that “these people do not want to rise above their circumstances” or that they are not really poo,r owning land in their villages and only flock to the cities and set up slums with the hidden agenda of becoming owners of land here , as beneficiaries of slum rehabilitation schemes.

       Most of those living in this particular basti, had migrated from different parts of West Bengal. They had come here in search of livelihood, to escape starvation that would otherwise have been their fate, had they continued to stay in their villages. Sudha Bhandari Anand, in her book “Crossing the Rubicon”, which is about the patterns and problems of Tribal Women workers, says that the reasons for such migration from the villages to the cities are not many and are indeed quite obvious. Natural disasters hit the poor, the hardest. Inadequate land holdings, drought, crop destruction and  repeated crop failures push them into debt traps and eventual starvation. Migration to the cities, where at least some form of employment becomes possible, then becomes an inevitable choice.

      Sudha Bhandari speaks of a family who had owned  a bit of land in their village . The land had yielded enough for the family to barely get by till calamity repeatedly visited them for a few years. In the years immediately preceding their migration to the city, there had been two marriages in the family, which had eaten into whatever cash savings they had managed to put by, and had also consumed all of the grain that they harvested that year, which , due to scanty rains, had in any case  been, only one fourth of what had been produced the previous year. They had then mortgaged the family field to buy new seeds, but that year too , the rains failed them, so that in a couple of years more they had reached the brink of starvation. The story of Chumki’s family and many others went on similar lines.

      Some had been fishing for a livelihood back in their villages. But the pollutants in the river , had gradually killed the fish and there was no alternative source of employment. They too had migrated to find employment as rikshaw pullers or such manual jobs they could find. The women folk invariably got engaged as household help. In a nutshell, all of them were victims, trapped in the cycle of poverty.

      Anyway, Chumki loved to come to the evening classes. She would make illegible sounds in her attempt to sing or recite the alphabets along with the other children. She had a sharp mind and could identify objects from pictures shown to her. She lip- read, I guess. We coudn’t do much for her except have her examined for hearing impairment and provide her with an earing aid, which only very slightly helped her condition.

      Very often, she would trot along with the other kids, who accompanied us back to the main road after the class, nodding her head with an innocent happy smile as they sang folksongs in Bengali. These kids missed their villages, but here , living together, there was a sense of community and belonging , as they spoke the same language and came from similar backgrounds.

        Then came the fire that razed the juggis and their belongings to ashes in the matter of a few hours. It was peak summer and the sun relentlessly beat down. They sat there, huddled up in the little squares of charred remains, where their huts had stood. One wondered how they would ever be able to tide over the catastrophe.

     But then one witnessed the grit and levels of endurance human beings are capable of. In two weeks’ time , they had rebuilt their huts, borrowing heavily, of course.

     Not too soon afterwards, came the search for Bangladeshi immigrants. Whatever documents these families had kept with them , as proof of being residents of their original villages, had been destroyed in the fire.  Many of the menfolk were picked up  in the middle of the night , and taken to  the police station, where they were beaten up.  There was palpable fear all around. Mothers , whose young girls , worked as maids grew tense and sick with worry, lest they were accosted by the police on the way back home. Eventually all the men did get released, but only after money had exchanged hands.

      Fearful of police persecution, many families returned to their villages or migrated elsewhere. Chumki’s family disappeared overnight.

      Territorial boundaries, Governments, economic policies, concepts of nation states, all are necessary, I guess. But here was a bunch of miserable human beings who had left their homes miles and miles away and travelled  to this city, where they were living on its edges, with no identity or sense of inclusion.  All they wanted was to escape starvation and scrape together two meals a day and we couldn’t let them be.

      One later learnt that  Chumki’s family had gone back to their village. One consoled oneself, that may be it was better for her that way. In the basti, during the day, when the grown-ups were away at work, the place had only little children or  the old and the infirm.   Entire families living inside one hut with little space and no privacy and the age old theory of raging male hormones. Life there could be threatening   for a little deaf and dumb girl and in the morbidity of one’s imagination, I had often conjured up images of little Chumki kicking our silently at a faceless man , not being able to even let her screams be heard.

     Adversity most certainly didn’t come as single spies to this group of migrants. The following Summer, the authorities had demolished the slum. The land had been acquired. They had originally been paying rent to someone who had owned the land and vaguely knew that they would be evacuated one day, as the rent was no longer being collected. Finally, one afternoon, the bulldozers came razing down their lives once more. They did pick up the pieces and move on. But that is another story.