Retire? I think I’ll just retread.

In a short while I shall be crossing the demographic threshold of seniority. It’s the time of life when people generally take stock of their professional and personal past and smile wistfully, or so the Instagram world would have us believe. But here I am sitting at my study table surrounded by handouts from three different courses I am enrolled in concurrently. I’ve been a writer by profession but the only writing I have done for the past couple of months has been assignments. Written by hand. My handwriting has improved tremendously as have certain other skills. Such as walking into a classroom, flashing my best smile and repeating, “Hi, the faculty should be in any minute, I’m a student; like you.”

Sure, I’m basking in the incidental halo of a back-to-school high for a senior. Yet, at my study table I’m struggling with Spearman’s rho which I learn can be used at those times when Pearson’s correlation coefficient cannot be used. I’ve actually enrolled for a postgraduate degree in Psychology that will help me understand human beings better so someone please tell me why statistics is a compulsory subject on the syllabus. “So that your psychological test results can be scientifically validated and so that your assessment does not fall in the realm of 'it looks like you may be'...” the faculty explained to me kindly.

I take the point because, of late, I’ve been aware that nothing is what it appears to be. Take retirement, for example. The UN defines a country as “ageing” or “greying nation” where the proportion of people over 60 reaches 7 per cent to total population. In 2011 India has exceeded that proportion (8.0 percent) with 10.3 crore seniors and is expected to reach 12.6 percent in 2025. With mortality rates going down life expectancy has gone up. For women it has risen from 66.1 years in 2001-05 to 69.6 years now and is expected to cross 72 years by 2021-26. Ditto for men.  So at 50, you can expect to have 30 more years in your third phase of life and the concept of retirement as we knew it has been turned on its head.

Our second careers begin at the age that our parents walked out of their’s with the mandatory “wrist watch” in the time-honoured tradition of saying farewell to a retiring employee. More often than not second careers are also meant to give ourselves a second chance at working in a passion area that we either could not or did not choose when we joined the workforce. A schoolmate of mine teaches soft skills to underprivileged youth and S Krishnaswamy, the founder of the counselling skills course at Samadhan, Bangalore, is into his second career as well after “voluntary retirement from an insurance job”.

A second career calls for re-skilling ourselves in areas totally foreign to us, such as Statistics in my case. And while I never cease to complain about crunching numbers, my plastic brain is actually firing up a whole new set of neurones and hard-wiring areas that hadn’t known they existed. Scientists now say that the brain continues to reshape itself when it encounters new learning, even something as silly as a card trick. And when done over a period of time even hearing, memory and hand movements are known to improve.

Transactional Analysis (TA), a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth pioneered by Eric Berne explains this with the Cycles of development theory. Pamela Levin who explored this theory of  TA says each individual goes through seven stages of development roughly correlating to biological age as follows: Stage 1: Being - (0 to 6 months); Stage 2: Doing (6 months to 18 months); Stage 3: Thinking (18 months -3 years); Stage 4: Identity (3 years – 6 years); Stage 5: Skills (6 -12 years); Stage 6: Integration (12-18 years); Stage 7: Recycling - the rest of our lives.

What is interesting for seniors here is that when one cycle is over we begin a whole new cycle all over again. So if you deduct 19 (the age at which a new development cycle begins) from 60 (your age at retirement) then you are at Stage 4 – Identity. Bingo! Now I get it; that’s where a bunch of us from this generation are headed – recreating an identity that’s quite possibly not just different from what we were but also different from the transgenerational script of ageing as we have introjected it.

Look around you, there are more seniors on domestic and international flights than you ever saw before. They are giving themselves permissions to travel, learn new skills and practise new professions.

If all of this somehow sounds idyllic, let me confess it’s sheer agony. You will be required to burn the midnight oil and end up compensating for it by taking a power nap at high noon. But you can live with this. The worst of it is when you see people around you racing ahead and here you are in Kindergarten so to speak. Your new co-workers or class mates may be discussing their glowing annual appraisal reports while you may be struggling with getting your head around a key concept in your field of learning.

It was, for me a loooong moment of pause. It’s not that I have been shortlisted for the Pulitzer or the Man Booker; yet. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t coincidence that as I looked up from my slumped perch on the sofa my gaze rested on my first original abstract work that I had hung up just a few days ago. Why this should be important to me is because when I had walked into my fine arts hobby class at the Chitrakala Parishat, Bangalore, six years ago, I could not draw a straight line to save my life.

As I struggled with understanding perspective, Nithin Muralidharan, the faculty, said to me: “You’ll get this Ma’am, don’t worry.” Miraculously, I did. I’m still not Raza or Gaitonde, but thank you Nithin. You just reiterated what we as human beings should just ‘know’ - getting the perspective right is also about looking at your life in the right light.

Such self strokes are far too rare. And often I wonder if all is okay with me or I’m signing up for insanity. I mean if the whole quest of human life is ‘Being’ can we just skip a few stages and zip back to this stage without too much discomfort? The mystics knew something about this. Ahh the mystics! May be that ought to be my next stop... I can hear my husband groan at yet another shopping trip for Nirvana...

I’m beginning to feel like Dorothy Parker, the American writer, who said it best, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Don’t we all?

  

Why do we fall? So that we rise again.

Two days ago I did a 60-minute cross-country walk in the vicinity of Our Native Village, an eco resort on the outskirts of Bangalore. I couldn’t stop grinning and telling about it to anyone who would listen to me. I was so excited about this feat that I stood up, paced the room and walked some more any opportunity I had. In itself it’s not a big deal – walking cross-country for an hour. But for me it was, because I hadn’t stepped out of my house except to get into a vehicle and be chauffeured around for the better part of a whole year. 

I did not walk to any of my customary haunts such as the supermarket round the corner, the hole- in- the-wall organic store that was more a treasure hunt than shopping spree, not the state horticultural co-op 20 minutes away, or my preferred boutique for endless fittings. At 59 I was given the verdict of an arthritic knee by the friendly neighbourhood orthopaedic and told to just take painkillers if the pain became unbearable or else try some herbal supplements that may strengthen the muscles around the knee. And that’s when I met specialist in human movement Dr. Badrinath Rao, founder of Activity Heals. 

Every day of Dr Badrinath’s boot-camp regimen, whether at home or in his clinic, is sheer agony and sheer magic all at the same time. The magic is in the incrementally increasing flexibility, reduction in pain and freedom of movement that left me wondering at how absolutely self-willed both damage and recovery of human physiology can be.

About three weeks ago I fell down really hard on my butt. It wasn’t an accidental fall like slipping on a slick floor. This was at Badri’s clinic while learning to balance on what goes by the innocuous name of ‘half rubber foam’ - a plank with a curved bottom about eight inches wide and two and a half feet in length. Incidentally, Badri, short for Dr Badrinath Rao, is known by many names such as Hitler among his loyal band of clients. He is economical with his words - beginning every session with a caveat: No blood on my studio floor – it’s been freshly washed. But he’s right there when you teeter and imagine you’re going to come down in at least a million splinters. He puts you back on your feet with the least disruption.

In retrospect, my fall that day happened because I lost focus for just a split second, over-confident about walking the half rubber foam and I fell backwards. I came close to a black out, not wanting to face the reality of an out-of-commission back having regained pain-free posture after one long year. Badri asked me to lie flat on my back, raise my thighs to slip a medicine ball underneath in order to ease the impacted muscles.

When I got my breath back I asked Badri plaintively how I would cope with the slew of house-guests coming over for a family function that same week. He said ‘what’s wrong with you, you haven’t broken anything; just get up and walk around, you’ll be fine’. To my repeated queries for pain medication and pain- relief patches he finally erupted: ‘I know an agent in Hollywood, maybe you should call him, they’re looking for a drama queen.’  

Regardless, I rested my back, applied a pain-relief patch and went for my pool walk the next day as usual. The guests came, had a good time and no one commented on the strong mentholated smell of my patched-up back. In two weeks’ time I was myself as before the fall. There are two learnings from this for me: a fall is a good thing for the body, mind and spirit. Especially, if you learn the technique of how to fall in the eventuality that it will happen again. And all my experience with elders in the family tells me it will. 

Apparently, young people fall forwards and they use their hands and palms to break their fall. But older people fall backwards, mostly because they are not quick to regain balance. By becoming aware of this small fact your body may actually stow this away in memory and act on it in an emergency. Secondly, a minor fall never killed anybody or broke any bones, unless you are over 80 or in the throes of osteoporosis.

Interestingly, The New York Times recently carried an article titled: ‘Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up’.  At campuses across the US, educationists are inculcating ‘resilience is key’ in their future generations. To quote from the NYT: “What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s a feature,” said Rachel Simmons, a leadership development specialist in Smith College, ... a failure Czar on campus. ... “There is this kind of expectation on students at a lot of these schools to be succeeding on every level: academically, socially, romantically in our family lives, in our friendships,” said Emily Hoeven a recent graduate... The University of California has what it calls a head of Student Resilience on staff. While at Davidson College, ...there is a so-called failure fund ... for students to pursue a creative endeavour, with no requirements that the idea would be viable or work.”

What University students live through the duration of their degree terms is a capsulated form of what adults live through the rest of their lives. But having never interacted with a ‘resilience specialist’ in our life we just beat ourselves up for every minor and major failure instead of learning from our mistakes and leaning into failure. And that’s why it was so refreshing to read Anna Chandy’s book Battles in the Mind launched recently by Penguin.

Anna Chandy, one of the top practising Transactional Analysts and co-founder of The Live Love Laugh Foundation (TLLLF), has detailed every dark corner of life that stands in stark contrast to the illuminating work she does in mental health. At one point in her book she says: “I had been the perfect married woman, the pleasant cousin, and the quiet relative for most of my life because I was afraid that if I weren’t, the people closest to me would cut me off. I was afraid of rejection. Perhaps it was a pattern that I couldn’t shake off. Patterns, I knew from my psychological study, have tissue memory. They are so deeply embedded in our tissue, on a somatic level, that they can cause physical sensations. My body kept me in a pattern of being pliant because that pattern was familiar. I could not escape it.

“And yet I did.

“I strengthened my resolve to break away from my pattern, and to accept rejection. I had already broken away from my expected roles – social- and familial – knowing that it would wreak vengeance on my life; that I would be excluded, and that I would feel hurt. I knew that I would no longer be the popular woman whom everyone liked. Yet I also knew that it was not me they liked, but someone they could walk over. I was not that person anymore.

“It took me several years of psychological work on myself and much introspection to shed my super sensitivity, my thin skin, my inability to take rejection. I can finally deliver a ‘no’ and I can take a ‘no’. ..

“No one can make me feel small any more. At five feet three, I am one of the tallest, strongest people I know.”

But I lied earlier when I spoke of the fall in Badri’s studio. Because it wasn’t the first nor the only fall I have taken in recent times. When my father passed away just over a year ago I spiralled into a free fall inviting health issues and emotional isolation that made my life unrecognisable to me. In the time that I have taken to heal my inner self I have been able to acknowledge some truths about myself and the rest of the world. Mainly that it’s a place where you are likely to fall - into traps, into holes, into misgivings, into mistrials, mistakes... And usually there’s always someone holding out a cushion for you – it could be someone you know, someone you have never met, your own self or Faith. It helps to be able to trust that as hard as you may fall it is inevitable that you will bounce back. So yes, bring it on life... I think I’ll just create a ‘failure fund’ for myself and embrace all the failures and success with equal glee.

Thank you Badrinath Rao and thank you Anna Chandy; you’ve broken falls of more people than you will ever know. May your tribe increase.

Who do you count as a friend – someone you know? Sometimes, it could be a stranger.

We lived in Dubai some years ago. Our apartment was on the shoulder of an arterial road where the air waves were punctured by ambulance siren wails several times a day. Although we’d been there for over two years it had been hard to create a network of friends. For some reason smiles froze on lips, seldom reaching the eyes. So each time I heard the ambulance siren I wondered how an expat would cope with a medical emergency in this land of aliens.

On a fateful day, I was to find out first hand. That day, like many others, I was dropped off to my workplace by my husband. I was to go for an after-work meeting that evening but half way to the meeting venue I just felt compelled to head back home.

My cheery hello was greeted with uneasy looks from the kids. There had been a phone call just a few minutes back from my husband’s office informing us that he had been hospitalised after an accident and that a car was on its way to take us to the hospital.

As we waited in the lobby for the car, a neighbour’s child, noticing the sombre looks, asked us where we were going. We shared what details we knew and left.

Along the way my husband’s colleague explained to us that my husband had fractured his arm and was in the ICU. What kind of fracture requires admission to the ICU, I asked him and his evasive reply was a sign of things to follow.

As we entered the hospital we saw a bunch of my husband's colleagues huddled in a group while his boss broke away to speak to us. He led me first to the police kiosk inside the building to complete some “formalities” as this had been a road accident. On the way to the ICU he shared chattily about how when his wife was in the ICU during her pregnancy the sight of a Ventilator had alarmed him but the contraption had actually saved her life. The significance of a senior executive sharing personal details did not escape me as we entered the ICU.

The Duty doctor explained that indeed the fracture needed surgery and I needed to sign consent papers. The surgeon said that the elbow joint was in pieces so tiny that they would need to insert titanium plates to hold it together. And, they both said, what I really ought to concern myself about was the head injury.

My husband’s head and left eye were covered with bandages and there was the Ventilator, breathing for him while he was in a coma.

I went back to break the news to the kids and also to arrange for them to get back home.  I spotted the neighbour whose child we had met.  He had just followed us to the hospital although we had barely exchanged a few words up until then. He offered to make sure the kids had their dinner and the company driver whose 240 watt smile had lit up our arrival in the city offered to stay the night with the kids.  

As I waited outside the Operation Theatre at 3 am a nurse walked out of the OT, called out my name in surprise and said she was happy to meet me although not in the right circumstances. She was the mother of a child whose talent of photography I had written about. She said the surgery had gone off well. She promised to speak to her colleagues to keep an eye on my husband.

People who had seen the car wreckage found it hard to believe that the driver could have survived. The Dubai ambulance service had created a miracle in getting him to the hospital early enough to be able to staunch excessive loss of blood.

On the third day my husband opened his one good eye and asked in typical Bollywood fashion “where am I?” You had to be there to believe the collective roar of relief of his entire department who had kept vigil with me the whole three days.

Every evening brought visitors. Some we already knew, others we got to know better. There was never a dearth of visitors for the other patients on the floor either.  Our neighbour, a hit-and-run victim, had co-parishioners praying with him almost every day. A couple of labourers and taxi drivers, among the vast population of single expats living in the city, were visited by their colleagues or friends often. Some even turned up regularly to feed them every night. A group of good Samaritans pitched in to feed another patient who apparently had no one to support him.

The day before the discharge I chose to walk back home. It was a chill February evening when yet another ambulance siren rent the air. I felt deep gratitude for all the friends that this episode had sent me.  And I knew that in every alien place each one of us would always find people who cared. Some of them known, others strangers.

I looked up from my ruminations to notice a T-shirt clad person walking ahead of me. It was no coincidence that printed on the back of the T-shirt were the words: I am the friend you do not know. 

Are children innocent? Nah! Adults, maybe...

Grandpa had the kind of smile that reached his crinkled eyes; Grandma on the other hand, had a pout that would sometimes hint at dissolving into a smile. But she was the one us kids crowded around, each outdoing the other in poking her chubby arms watching our stubby fingers sink into her butter-soft flesh.

Grandma never grudged us these juvenile pleasures. Perhaps she enjoyed the tactile pressure of tender fingers that connected her to her grandchildren without using too many words.  Because her words got used up in stories that she told us every afternoon in the sun-dappled porch that mysteriously segued into the shadowy woods where none of us were allowed to walk in unchaperoned.

Even back then I got the distinct feeling that Grandma’s story telling was somehow just another ruse the adults cooked up to keep us off the woods where we spent most of our supervised time shooing away red faced macaques  that wanted a bite of our home-grown succulent mangoes.  

At such times the woods buzzed with the collective effervescence of  about 15 kids come home for their summer holidays each wanting to show off how much taller/ stronger/ smarter they had grown since the last summer.

But Grandma usually hit the pause button on her story-telling when Grandpa brought in her medication. Except to my childish eyes the tablets looked more like M & Ms. When I saw the red beauties spread on Grandma’s chubby palm I couldn’t resist asking her to allow me to share one. Of course she refused, it was medicine after all.

But that particular summer, all of five, the only joy I coveted was a lick of those magical red buttons. I imagined how one of those would transport me to a place of sweet adventure. And so one day I sneaked out of the story telling circle under the pretext of using the bathroom just as I sensed the pause button coming on and followed Grandpa on my quest of the red M & Ms.

He made his way to the room he shared with Grandma and walked straight to the built-in cabinet behind their humongous bed as I lurked in the shadow of the doorway. And as he tore off two tablets from a strip the foil casing flashed brightly while catching the faint glow of the petromax lamp.

It was an old sprawling house and on some summer evenings when the clouds threatened to burst with cool lashes of rain the lamps were lit early especially in the upstairs rooms where Grandpa’s failing eyesight often led him to stumble into hilarious accidents. Why one time he went in to change into his nightclothes and came out wearing Grandma’s skirt! But I digress. Soon as he turned around Grandpa spotted my tousled head and he knew by the way I peered into his hand that I had followed my yearning to his room.

“This is awful,” he said conversationally, “you think it might be sweet but it knocks you out for the rest of the night. I don’t know how Grandma has been having it all these years – the bitterest thing there ever was.”

“So you tasted this?” I asked him, I still remember my eyes wide with unalloyed curiosity. “Oh I wouldn’t do that, it’s what Grandma says.  Don’t go by how delicious it looks, it’s the invisible thing you should really worry about,” he said with finality.

And that absolutely decided it for me. Hmm so what was this invisible thing, what did it taste like, how did it feel? More important could anyone tell if I actually ate some of this invisible stuff?  

And so one evening after Grandpa had made his usual sortie into his room for picking up the tablets I quickly snuck in, clumsily tore open the strip and grabbed a few in my slightly sweaty palm and scooted out. And then I casually walked towards the forbidden woods where the shadows were already lengthening.

There I found a sheltered place and then slowly popped the red sweets into my mouth, one at a time. Sweet heaven I finally had in my mouth what I had coveted the whole long summer and was it delicious? Not exactly like M & Ms but syrupy sweet and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost spat it out, no, I actually spat it out. Perhaps the second one would turn out to be better. Or the third one. 

No matter, I made myself comfortable on the ground and went through I don’t know how many, taking my sweet time over tasting each one before it turned bitter.

When I was done I slowly ambled out of woods not really caring if anyone saw me now. As it happened nobody did.

But it was the ones that got away that actually did me in. At bed time when Grandpa walked into his room his foot crunched on something red. He quickly checked in the medicine cabinet. A whole strip had tablets missing and he definitely remembered picking out just two from a brand new strip. So where were the rest and surely he hadn’t dropped any down. So what had happened here? 

The next thing I remember is being swooped up by Grandpa and asked in the gentlest of tones if I had taken any of those red tablets. I also have a distinct memory of me sitting on his arm with my lips pursed. Slowly a small crowd gathered around us  – the whole shebang of cousins was joined by some uncles and aunts as well. Each asking me in their most persuasive tone to share a confidence about a crime I showed no sign of admitting. And I continued sitting there with my lips pursed.

Until an older cousin grabbed me by the hand and walked me briskly into the woods with the whole entourage following behind with flashlights.  

In a small clearing between two trees shown the visible evidence of my insatiable curiosity. Expecting the worst, I tried to make myself as small as possible hoping I could escape unnoticed. But Grandpa just let out an audible sigh and hugged me close. The older cousin giving me an unmistakable “we’ll talk about this later” look.

Of course I had a conversation with Grandpa who continued to nurse the fond hope that my innocence was to blame for my misadventure.

As to how do I remember this whole episode as if it happened yesterday? It just became more real with repeated retelling every summer.

But all these years later I’m still wondering why the call of the invisible is so much stronger than what I can see, touch and smell. 

One good thing came of it though: I’ve never had any illusions about the innocence of grownups who believe that small children are innocent indeed.

What's in a name? Identity, faith, geography or sum of all things human?

Recently I was introduced to Suryanna, all of five months old and rich gurgle as her calling card. Suryanna’s parents are UK residents of Indian origin but that was the first I had heard of the pretty name. A brief Internet search revealed that a few people of Indonesian origin bear the name and sometimes the identical family name too.

The hugely engaging movie The Martian has Vincent Kapoor head of Mars operations, reprised by African American Chiwetel Ejiofor who reveals “my father is Hindu and my Mom’s Baptist”.

A name or surname no longer gives us an inkling of its provenance.There was a time when If a person gave you his or her name you could safely place them in their specific region of origin; with cross-cultural migration and mixed marriages this is no longer the case.

And so when my Memoir Writing class in Staten Island, NY, gave us a prompt of ‘What’s in a name’ it set me thinking.

Roses at the New Jersey State Botanical Gardens

Now my name is Sandhya and I’m from Bombay, the commercial capital of India. Although I live in Bangalore now, which is known as the Silicon Valley of India, I still think of myself as a Bombay girl.

So what’s a Bombay girl? When you grow up in Bombay your neighbours have names and family names that declare their origin from other parts of the country. You could say the city is a melting pot of the diverse peoples that exist in India. While you know what they are you also know who they are. And you learn to hold your own, no matter what or who.

When I moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, I saw that that city state was a macrocosm of Bombay, only here we had a melting pot of nationalities rather than communities.

For a while I was the editor of a sports magazine, a glossy dedicated to everything hedonistic about sport. The publisher of the English version of this originally French magazine was a naturalized Swedish citizen of Algerian origin.

Interestingly, he had no difficulty pronouncing my name which had been deliciously mangled as Cynthia by my Lebanese ex-boss and as Sandra by my British ex-editor. 

The French educated Lebanese ex-boss, publisher of a clutch of corporate magazines for luxury brands, was always well turned out in her designer clothes. Although, with her hourglass figure she would have looked good in Salvation Army discards too.

I do not know what her family name meant but I suspect ‘mistrust’ would be her middle name. On my second day at work she called me twice on my cell phone during an interview of the scion of a designer jewellery brand. She wanted to know when I would get back to the office. I thought maybe she wanted to fire me. But all she asked when I rushed into her cabin on returning was, ‘How long was the meeting?’

The girl from whom I had taken over the position, who was also in the office to collect her dues, looked at me from under her false eyelashes and shrugged.

When I laid bare my damaged soul that night at dinner, my 15-year-old son admonished me with a, “Chill Mom! You always make friends with your bosses, eventually. Just give her time.” Maybe he knew something I didn’t, because before the year was up the Boss and I had had several conversations that opened a window into the history of her temperament.

After four years of overlooking the inconvenience of interrupted interview meetings, the Boss and I parted amicably; for personal reasons I chose to go freelance again. “Cynthia, if you change your mind know that I would love to have you back,” she said warmly. Hmm, I am a Gemini but how long would I remember this double identity?

Soon after I quit my job I got a surprise call from an UAE National. “Sandhya, I want to write a book and I need your help”, he said after the customary greetings. He was the self-appointed cultural ambassador of his people and he not only had a successful business conducting culture sensitizing workshops for top companies setting up shop in the Middle East but he was also a major media star. His book was to be a memoir that also decoded the culture and values of the Arab people. I was a bit surprised that he should choose to ask for my help when I neither had a name he could comfortably pronounce nor did I belong to his faith.

When I handed him the final cut of the manuscript I understood that people everywhere are the same – they all want the same things for themselves and their families – opportunities for growth, love and harmony.

So really, what’s in a name: culture, identity, faith, geography? And should we meld these to celebrate our oneness or wield them to separate humanity?

Perhaps names do say it all – creating an individual identity even while bringing us together as the sum of all things human.

Dying to live

Death often re-turns the spotlight back on life

A friend’s father is hospitalised with a ‘not so optimistic’ prognosis. She is understandably distraught; not knowing if he will survive and for how long. He has lived a good life. Yet in the first fury of fear there is an undercurrent of anger. Anger at all that could have been but was not. She is not unique in responding to imminent grief in this manner. Ironically, the death of a loved one gives rise to a tsunami of emotions leading to an often discomforting re-evaluation of life itself.

If, God forbid, you have had a roller coaster relationship with the loved one, as it routinely happens in real life, you could either come away with a better, deeper understanding of your own life values and step up to action them OR... spend the rest of your life alternating between blame and guilt.

A few years ago I was witness to the death of a family member; cruel in its sudden impact and relentless in its insistence on having to deal with a whole gamut of unwanted, unbidden emotions.

Every religion has its own template of rituals to send off their dead on their last journey. It may seem as if you are on auto-pilot going through the motions of these rituals. It is equally true that rituals can anchor you to the here and now when the only thing you feel inclined to do is dwell in the if only..., why me..., why couldn’t... and I wish...

It’s possible though, that a part of your ever-so-progressive thinking brain may rebel at the ludicrous irrelevance of some of these rituals. What could help is perhaps donating money or time or even better, time and money to a cause that carries the seed of creating a better life for someone and consequently recreating memories of better times.

It is only when the scheduled mourning is done that the real process of reckoning with the loss begins. And it’s never a pretty picture.

My dear friend Rose Gordon, who wears many hats, though I refer to her role as a grief counsellor, uses many tools to help relatives of terminally ill patients come to terms with loss. It’s best to begin the healing before the final good bye, she says. For me, the most beautiful take away from her tool box is the one where the patient and the family co-create a work of simple art – anything from a quilted wall hanging to a collage of photographs spanning a life time.

In the co-creation of this art they work through the palette of emotions and events that separate them; eventually bringing the acknowledgement that even while their minds were at war their souls have always looked out for each other. It is, Rose says, a powerful tool of acceptance and forgiveness, without words coming in the way of either.

My experience with sudden loss taught me the importance of practising this tool with all my relationships. I falter with amazing regularity.

A few years ago I visited a friend whose mother had passed away a week before after a long battle with dementia. The family had had enough time to prepare themselves and, in truth, not able to withstand her suffering they had started praying for an end to her misery. But what about the anguish of the impotent in providing relief; the anger of having to witness the disintegration of a strong and resourceful human being into a helpless bundle of incoherence?

My condolence visit was meant to honour a cherished relationship. Instead, it felt like eavesdropping on a conversation between life at death.

Life at Death

In the dead

The living see their own death

They see the beginning of the end

The end of many other beginnings

The death of them and their’s

And everything in between.

They see the way the dead lived their lives

Issues that they begat

And issues that they took up

What they counted for

Taxed for their weaknesses

Bonuses-accrued for good deeds.

They heave a sigh of relief

For the mercy of surviving

The memory of the dead

For all that could be

For all that was not

For all that is.

For all that will be

For all that will not be

For all that is their’s in this moment

For all that they will leave in the final one

For the love of their loved ones

And the fear of their phantoms.

But blessed are they who see

The arc of their soul’s moulting

As a butterfly flutters from a cocoon

Good karma weaving designs

For, in this they have seen

The beginning of The End – Moksha.

Our interactions in this life, even the most difficult ones, or rather, especially the most difficult ones, are designed so that we may learn those lessons that got left out of the syllabus of past births. . How willing are we to learn these? 

What fun it would be if the Universe one day said: You’ve done your lessons; now here’s your gift? 

Becoming Your Own Mother

Becoming Your Own Mother

A couple of weekends ago I checked into  Prakruti Chikitsalaya, a nature cure clinic about 200kms from Bangalore in Mandya district. The three-acre campus lives up to its name with cottages dotting the outer edge with the kitchen cum dining area as its central hub.

A doctor couple checks me out and lists the treatments my specific condition calls for. What’s common to all ‘patients’ checked in here are the yoga sessions in the morning and evening and a low-salt, no spice, no sugar diet. Which is good because you are in any case not tempted to ask for extra helpings.

But for the times when your stomach protests too loudly between meals there is the jamun tree. Anyone using the walking track has to pass by the jamun tree which stands a little off the entrance of the Nature Cure Centre next to the reception and doctors’ clinics.

Growing up in metro Mumbai, the Syzgium cumini in Latin or  jamun or jambul as it is known in Maharastra or ‘nerele hannu’ in Karnataka, or nava palam in Tamil Nadu wasn’t a favourite fruit. It has an acidic spicy mildly sweet taste, leaving a purple hue and rough texture on the tongue. But try being snobbish on an empty stomach and you will begin to understand why our ancestors were fruitarians before they cultivated food.

So I stood for a while under the jamun tree’s shade and tentatively picked a couple of fruits that had fallen on the patch of satiny grass. As I crunched into the juicy exterior and rolled the seed in my mouth I thought it’s not as bad as I remember it. I ate a few more and felt a satiation of my hunger pangs. I gathered a fistful and continued my walk.

I noticed a couple behind me stop by and go through the same motions. A young girl who had earlier in the day been complaining of a headache, apparently a result of not drinking enough water during the detox period began pepping up visibly as she worked through her share of the jamun bounty.

Of the 30 residents of the Nature Cure clinic walking that evening almost every single one stopped by to partake of this free unlimited nature’s feast. You may wonder just how many fruits does this tree shed in a day to serve 30 people? Well, there’s a soft ‘thap’ ‘thap’ of falling fruit every moment practically and whether you gather a fistful or a doggy bag’s worth, rest assured the next person will never go empty handed.

As I pounded the walking trail I wondered about the generosity of this tree and of all the other trees in the Universe.  I wondered too about Mother Nature who nurtures us. And who nurtures Mother Nature?

 I skipped back a few months to a Memoir Writing class in New York when a sprightly 80-year-old Anna wrote about “learning to be my own mother” in an essay on ‘Parting is such Sweet Sorrow’. Anna, who resides in a Senior Citizens Assisted Living Community interpreted the topic to mean saying her final goodbyes. Although, for the most part, Anna’s writing reveals her free spirit and a zany sense of humour in the life choices she has made. Coming from her this sentence gave me pause for thought.

At what age do human beings contemplate becoming one’s own mother? I know I hadn’t up until then. I mean you have your mother to do that until she’s alive and then you just think of yourself as  a ‘motherless child’ even if by then you are 60 years old and have grandchildren of your own.

Is it possible then that Mother Nature has no such expectations of the Universe? That Nature’s way is to nourish one’s own self by connecting to the Universal synapses of energy?  Consider, for example, the natural way of cultivation that Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese naturalist, propagated where you allow natural cycles of seasons and days to guide you to plant, nurture and harvest rather than intervene as per ‘market demands’ for food.

There are times in our lives when we want a gentle hand on our back reassuring us that all is well; a sweet hug that says I care for you no matter what.

Then there are times when we blame our parents for the unwanted  excess baggage that we carry and inevitably there are times when we get blamed by our children for the excess baggage we have passed on to them.

The truth is that each one of us is on our own unique journey, learning lessons from the souls that we interact with - some intimately, others fleetingly.  Working out your karmic balance so to speak. 

The truth is also that we choose the parents we are born to because we have something to learn from them and they from us. When we say nobody comes into your life by accident it extends right up to your children and your parents, not just random visitors transiting through your life.

Even so the one constant in our life is always one’s own self. If we hold others responsible for their impact on our lives how much more impact do we have on ourselves? Total impact, it would appear. And what if the ultimate learning is to give ourselves the acceptance, approval and compassion that we expect from significant and sometimes not so significant others - connect to the Universal synapses of energy in a manner of speaking?

So this Mothers Day I decided to give myself a gift. In gratitude to the wonderful children in my life and and also because I recognise that at the deepest level I truly am my own Mother. Just like Mother Earth who rejuvenates herself taking from the elements what she needs and giving to all forms of life – birds, bees, animals and humans what they need. So the gift on Mother’s Day was a gift of approval – self approval.