November Reminiscences

A prof-friend in the US reminded me that it’s Thanksgiving there. I sort of skimmed through an article on The American Scholar about ‘giving thanks’. And I got one phone call from my old friend, some minutes after I got back into the house in the eve'. So God knows I can say that I’m in the best spot I’ve ever been in my life barring maybe some months from back in 2002-2003 and for some months between 2011-2012. Many people, for different reasons, would guffaw and say that that is nothing to feel good about. Maybe or maybe not. I could have done far better and made good in one way, at least by now – I strongly think and should have – and maybe some things could have been brighter for someone else, but I don’t claim to know why certain things happen and other things don’t.  It’s also possible that I might have ended up in a lunatic asylum or have been pottering about like a vegetable at the mercy of my blood family and I wouldn’t even have known the bits that I do about one human being or or any being. This ghastly nightmare didn’t come to pass – so I do have reason to be much more than just thankful. I can actually still work. I can still think. I don’t always have brilliant ideas but I can put into practice a few or even a couple of the ideas I do or are sent my way and tend to the fledgling that sprouts from the idea which hatches. I can still talk intelligibly sometimes when I talk, considering the feedback I get. I can’t sing – which will be a regret I’ll live with – (but now I know why my melody never reaches the Lord's feet to go with Tagore's dariye acho tumi amar gaaner opaare - it's simply because I have no melody or tune in my voice to begin with. Maybe the fine and kind Lord keeps his ears shut tight or winces or grimaces or glares or simply gives me strange, tantalizing and teasing glimpses of himself instead, precisely and only because I have no melody with my insistent or continuous 'brayings' and just to shut me up from time to time) And I can’t do lots of things and I can’t be lots of things but there’s still a couple of things I can do. And my old friend and my best friend and my Fimh did and still do provide me with asylum. Not in the normal sense and not quite normally – that is what I’ll still say. But I know that this is absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And it was and is asylum akin in a sense to how Dr. Johnson defined it: a space to where she who has fled cannot be taken away from; it has been more of a mental or even a spiritual space more than a physical space across decades although sometimes it actually has been both or three or more. I can't go through all the permutations and combinations here.

Unlike some people who wish to die when they’re feeling joyous or nearly close to joyous or feeling close to bliss – I feel with this obmutacious certainty (which comes from God knows where) that I can achieve the impossible when I feel the spots, specks and flecks, glints or even the shimmering shadows of a mellow warm glow or those of laughter or joy or of the piercing light of meaning. No matter how unpredictable or how grey or how thunderous or stormy the times might be otherwise. And I worry like the dickens too. I can’t help it. I keep feeling that it’s all going to be taken away and in a sudden snap. There's Shakespeare's sonnet about 'ruin' (sonnet 64) which I can't rattle off but I remember the essence. My terror is not a misplaced terror. I’ve had that happen often enough in the past and not always for reasons that I can fathom. And I’ve watched like a dumb beast. In this sense I’ve never been able to agree with Tagore’s Bojhapora. I’ve tried that angle and I’ve failed abysmally and I can’t help but say, feel, know and even realize from the deepest part of me: so be it. There’s an advantage to placing all one’s eggs into one basket. And it has its obvious disadvantages. But advantages and disadvantages aside – at some point in life, one makes certain choices. I did. And I’ve not changed from then. I might not know and certainly do not know about a lot in life – but I know about this and extremely and exceptionally well. And over and over and over…This is the basket – one says. I don’t want many baskets or any others. So one has to and must, by that admission, take what comes with that. One cannot and must not complain and I know I’ve never even in the remotest corners of my being complained about this. There is an advantage about being schizophrenic – one has very little of any subconscious that one isn’t aware of or is completely unaware of. One is forced or is somehow made to face the murky depths and the sublime highs – whether one likes it or not; whether one wants to or not. The upshot is that the shards of joy or those of clarity and of meaning far outstrip the angst, the absolute terror, the grey and grisly, the horror, the uncomprehending sorrow…and one very quietly knows with passing moments that no matter what else – one has become a better human being for making that one choice even if one doesn’t always want to admit to the same or pay attention to the same or one feels terrible twinges of regret and sadness or anger directed towards oneself or even if one yells at God for things which might have been – and just a little different maybe – or even if one feels every now and then that one doesn’t really understand a lot of how civilizations and fate and lives get organized. But what one cannot do is to either imagine or ever want to make a different choice. Whether one chooses one's work-life or any relation or some hobby or the inner-life or whether one chooses one bit and all the other parts get organized accordingly somehow and sometimes by one's donkey-like persistence and some mysterious and invisible hand. I also can't help but remember that my old friend had written to me in November 2002 about what the French say: 'Partir c'est mourir en peu' - and I know it's true. But it's better to die a little upon parting with the lump that simply will not be dislodged in the throat and to have tears some 24 hours later than to keep dying in a grey and unbroken and desert landscape with no meetings and no partings and no re-unions. I’m not making any recommendations of how to be if one is or has been dubbed schizophrenic though. What might seem to work for one person might not work at all for another.

I’ve also been virulently grumpy sometimes even through the last year and I’ve had grey despair cloaking me and choking me too for long months sometimes and I’ve yelled angrily at God quite often through the last three years if I wasn’t yelling at myself and have even howled in silence. And yet I’ve also looked at myself quietly and said there’s nothing more I can do or be. A die was rolled and I’ve made some clear and very articulate choices. I remember them – even if I simply made them in my own head. I sometimes look at the way lives have shaped up and remember images that swept through my mind in mad bursts from 18 years ago. I’m not sure what to think of then. I can’t be a soothsayer – I think I’d have been wealthier if I’d been a real one but it can’t be possible that I’m merely a jinx or a curse and nothing but, surely? I don’t know. What I do know is that if I can’t do what I’m meant to then I am not good enough and never will be. And that has made me paradoxically feel like a bit of a matter-of-fact warrior if not a peaceful warrior.

Back in April when the ground trembled in this part of the world I had the grim feeling of ‘this is it’. My mind was finally completely bifurcating. I could physically feel it. I’d been writing something in my diary and making notes about work at the same time at that point and I could feel this eerie sensation of my mind splitting and that a part of it was floating upwards. I’ve strangely enough felt something similar back in the past but nothing so completely physical. A part of me was a little taken aback. It decided to walk around to see whether I still felt the same way. And another part said ‘it’s an earthquake, silly. You’re not becoming completely unhinged.’ I didn’t know what to think but I called out to Fimh. I knew he was there for he responded and I knew he was there if not physically right there beside me. I looked out of my little balcony and saw people on the road and I noted that I didn’t feel particularly peculiar in my mind. And just when I felt that the whole thing was just an aberration of my own abnormal mind – there was that weird feeling of bifurcation again. I trembled in my mind alongwith the ground beneath my feet. And then I was sure it was an earthquake. Fimh said so and quite calmly and quite sunnily although I didn’t see anything sunny about it. I didn’t take more than seconds to scan exactly what I’d done in life, which I considered to be of any remote value and what I was doing. I was perfectly aware of whom I valued – and I didn’t see the point in being terrified of even dying right then. If it happened, I’d know that I wasn’t meant to do anything more and that was that. An hour later on that Saturday I looked up on the internet and there it was – the earthquake in Nepal. I'd much rather not return to the month of May, not even in memory even though I wasn't in any accident physically.

In my young years, as a 6 or even 7 year old, I had not felt very far away from death and some other place and with some other being who wasn’t there in my everyday life. I missed some other being very badly and some other life but I didn’t really know the how or why about it. In my teens, I was sure that I would die young and wise and after having left my footprints on the sand. Ha? Ha? Yes, I guess. And yet to say that I was supremely fearless about dying and death as a 6 year-old would be lying. I had believed for decades that I’d never been scared about death and dying and yet it was only some two years and eight months ago when I started thinking about it again after I read and had been contemplating upon Suvro da's posts on Meditations I and Meditations II that I remembered very old memories. The memory was there and quite clearly and unabashedly. One day, after school hours, the older kids of St. Augustine's were chatting with me and one of the kids looked at my bag and told me that lightning would strike the metal clasp on the bag and that I would die. I knew that the physical pain of death would be horrible and that’s what I feared most terribly. I don’t know why or how I knew this or why it was that the physical pain terrified me so. I replied and solemnly that I would cover the metal clasp with my coat. One of them, with a cool superiority, let me know that the lightning would find that strip through my coat. One of the boys, as he left, tugged at the metal clasp on the bag, and very seriously, told me to be careful about it. All I remember in a movie scene-like way is what I did after I was off the school bus which dropped me off about two or three blocks from where I stayed back then. I ran. I ran faster than I ever had. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me while clutching onto that blasted metal strip hidden under my coat. I was terrified. The lightning forks were there in the sky and the thunder rolled. I don’t remember all of whatever happened as it happened but I remember it from what is stored in my memory bank. I remember the cold rain. I remember running and my heart pounding and the rain spraying on my face. I got back to the door and I rang the bell. I kept ringing the bell over and over and looking at the sky while covering that metal clasp with my fist and my heart was still pounding. I was looking for the lightning forks in the sky. The door was opened and I was scolded soundly and roundly and loudly  – with reason, I’d say. I had absolutely and completely and clean forgotten that the door was always kept unlocked during the time that I came back from school. I didn’t say a word and I slipped in-doors. My memory disappears completely after that but I know I never did say a word about why I had rung that bell so insistently.

I was told once, upon my asking, that I was born a few minutes past midnight on the night of the 20^th of November – close enough to the witching hour. And apparently, in those days, cats had a free rein in hospitals and there was a black cat that insisted on keeping me company, and it had to be shooed away every so often. I can’t however fly on a magic carpet or broom or make blissful magic, sadly enough. The latter especially will always be a sore point for me. Otherwise I would have made a few of the best dreams of my best friend come true by now. But I turned 40 over the weekend and it was the best birthday I’ve had. I certainly was quietly and wondrously disbelieving even if I didn’t actually go about grinning or yelling about it. So, thank you. There were conversations and moments of being and I know I’ve felt grace through mixed times across almost a couple of decades. The 11 year-old me from one particular day onwards would look with wide eyes and say gruffly and very solemnly, ‘I don’t believe you’ if anyone were to tell her. I can't help feeling bashful about it. I can’t think of anything remotely good that I did in my youth or childhood. From one perspective, it has been, a life of sudden and utterly unexpected surprises and supreme and strange and the best of surprises, in spite of the incomprehension over more things than I can count, in how I’d like to remember it, so far. I'll raise a toast to the future. I did that twice a little over a month ago. Maybe three times might work a charm.