On why the personal is also political.

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.” - Bertolt Brecht

Via Arpan on Facebook.

On the home and the heart.

©Paroma Ray

“Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts”- Oliver Wendell Holmes

This post is a part of wordless wednesday.

On sleepless nights.

I haven’t been getting too much sleep lately. I find it difficult to fall asleep. When I do, I wake up in a couple of hours, toss and turn on my side of the bed before falling asleep again.

You see. The husband, R, he umm, errr, he snores. Yes. R snores. He snores a bit much these days. So much so that he sometimes wakes himself up with the sound of his snoring!

And yes R is going to kill me for putting this up! *Runs and hides behind the sofa*

But seriously. I looked up treatments for snoring and courtesy Wikipedia, I found that snoring can be treated in various ways. Some of them had me rolling my eyes to an amazing extent and my eyebrows begging for mercy since they just could not go any further up on my forehead!  In the end, I stumbled upon an immensely sweet mushy thing to treat snoring.

And this is exactly what I am going to try out for a few days now Wish me luck! Please?

“Love is…when “cold feet” are a cure for snoring”

Source

The wind this morning.

Today, in the morning, I woke up to a sound of a flower pot crashing. When I rushed out to my balcony I saw it was not one of mine. I opened the balcony doors, the windows in the bedrooms. Things fell, photo frames collapsed. R stood around trying to balance a vase in his hands and stopping the bedroom door from slamming shut with his foot. My mother was blissfully sleeping, snoring softly and completely ignorant about things crashing all around. I was in the kitchen stirring some sugar in my very large cup of tea and suddenly found myself wondering rather aloud “Where is the wind coming from?”

No one really  knows. Do they?

Wind on the Hill

A.A.Milne

1882- 1956

“No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows”.

 

On one moment.

Written in September 2010

***

You sit beside me. Tired. Upset and a little sad on having to leave your best friend of twelve years and walk away. You waved one last time before stepping into the coach. You sat beside me.

You sat beside me and cried. You had to leave your best friend of twelve years and get on a train.

We talked for a while. About what we always talk about. Reassurances. About life five years from now. About having children. About working, about living. We try to watch a movie on my laptop. But your tired eyes give up after a few minutes. You shut your eyes and after a few restless minutes you drift off to sleep. You sit beside me and sleep.

You sit beside me and I watch you sleep. The way you snore softly, your arms crossed over your broad chest, your legs crossed and not sprawled, your head tilted towards my right shoulder.

I finish watching the movie and stare into the darkness from this moving train. A Bach plays during the acknowledgments and I lose myself in it.

I feel every bit of this moment. The rhythm of the train. The night outside and the vague shapes of trees. The quietness in this coach. The way you sleep. The way your body moves even when you sleep. The sadness that I saw in your eyes moments before you drifted off to sleep. The frown across your forehead and the confusion in your voice. The strange ache in my heart. Longing for things I do not even wish to have.

I feel this moment. A very lonely moment. A lone sadness between us. Within us. Always. The moment. This moment. Always between us.

***

Inspired by: “To look life in the face always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is at last to know it to love it for what it is and then to put it away. Leonard: always the years between us always the years, always the love, always the hours.” (The Hours)

On my friends

Today is friendship day. And what can explain my emotions better than the eternal Bill Watterson.

And this is an ode to my favorite people. What would I ever do without you guys?

“Even though we’ve changed and we’re all finding our own place in the world, we all know that when the tears fall or the smile spreads across our face, we’ll come to each other because no matter where this crazy world takes us, nothing will ever change so much to the point where we’re not all still friends.” *

*I found this on google while looking for something else. It almost brought tears in my eyes. I don’t know who wrote it since there was no author’s name mentioned. If you happen to know who wrote this, or if it is written by one of you readers, please feel free to leave a comment here.

On companionship

Inspired by a true story

***

It is a quiet evening in the two room apartment. He is watching an old Amitabh Bachhan movie on TV while flipping to the sports channel in the break to check on the cricket score. He lets out a sigh. His team is losing. Again. He smiles and reaches out for his cell phone. “They are losing again. 86/4. Did you buy the shirts?”.

She is alone in an empty apartment in Delhi. Visiting her younger daughter for ten days. She is  busy taking out the Raajma rice from the fridge. She checks the chicken to see if its marinated properly. Her cell phone beeps in the living room. She walks briskly to the pick up her phone from beside the floor cushion. She checks the message and smiles to herself. “Gd I m not wtchng mtch. Bght 2 t shirts 4 Rishi n 1 pajama 4 u. Shud I buy bedsheet for Bhabi?”

“Yes. If you have time. Buy something for Divya.”

“I wnt 2 buy sarees 4 Nitya. She nvr gets 2 buy anythn.”

“Ok. Do you have money? Should I send you some?”

“I have 2th now. I wl take 2th more frm Divya.”

“Don’t take from Divya. I will send money to Divya’s office by courier.”

“Ok. Finish th mutn today. Dnt kp it in th fridge nemore.”

“When will your train reach on Sunday?”

“930am. Wl u cm? Drvr wil b thr?”

“No. I’ll take auto and come.”

Two days later.

A small envelope is delivered to Divya’s office. Divya absent mindedly tears the envelope open while glancing through a long and important email. She restlessly looks at the small piece of paper inside the envelope. The paper is folded and is stapled from three sides. She rips open the paper and finds three thousand rupee notes and one five hundred note inside. The note said:

“Divya, Please hand this over to your mother. The 500 is for her phone recharge.”

Divya smiles to herself.

Divya’s parents never hold hands in front of her. They never cook a meal together. Her mother steps out of the house only with her father to buy mostly what her father approves of. Her father never steps into the kitchen and makes a cup of tea. Her mother stayed and took care of her in laws throughout their lives. Her father meets his in laws only twice a year.

Yet, Divya knows that they always watch cricket matches together. Her father never forgets to bring the ‘mogra’ for her mother on his way back from work. Her mother, in spite of having her own job, always asks her father for money for her daily needs. Her father always relents, giving her some extra, never questioning her on her expenses or her income. Her mother reminds him about the medicines they take in the mornings for their blood pressure. Her father keeps a track of her regular medical checkups. Divya has never seen her parents exchanging any ‘I love You’s. No roses. There has never been a diamond ring. Never a song for each other.

But after thirty five years her mother smiles every time she hears his voice. Her father always messages cricket scores to her if they are not watching the match together.

***

For a little while in her busy day, Divya is reminded of a Graham Greene novel where it said “At the end the only love which lasts is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire as deep as the simple desire for companionship”. She smiles as she folds the piece of paper and tucks it away in the envelope neatly with the money and wonders if it’s true.

Hilarious…

This column from the New Yorker made my day today. I almost fell off my half broken chair at work laughing my a** off.

You can read it here in the New Yorker. Or right here where I am reproducing it. Wherever it is, do read it. And tell me if you can connect with it. I can. I can totally see myself with that wet dishcloth cooling my hot face. Read on ahead to see what I am talking about!

“The cursing Mommy cooks Italian- Ian Frazier

Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop clatter chop skitter crash bang—FUCK!

Stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir skid bang skitter bang crash—SHIT!

Hello. For those of you who don’t know me, I would like to apologize for my brief outburst there at the beginning, but I am the Cursing Mommy, and occasionally I do blurt curses, break crockery, give people the finger, and hurl objects to the floor. Well, all I can say about that is, anyone who can make a Bolognese sauce and not get a bit flustered has my heartfelt admiration! I expect we’ve seen the last of that behavior today, however, as I turn to one of my favorite dishes, a delightful and relaxing seafood risotto in the Venetian style.

Whipping up a risotto is a marvellous way to give a sense of occasion to an intimate dinner party, because of the careful timing that is required, and the pinpoint attention to detail right up to the moment of serving. If done correctly, every risotto will be unique, its own irreproducible concoction. That’s the fun of a risotto, you see! In order to pull off this feat of cookery, the chef must be completely relaxed, and to that end I like to start with a robust Chianti such as I am pouring here, forestalling any necessity of immediate repouring by using an ample glass like this snifter-type thing in which my ten-year-old recently brought home two goldfish after some kind of a project at his school. (Don’t ask me where the goldfish are.) A little more than halfway full should be fine.

At some point in your past, all of you have no doubt been under pressure to prepare a dinner party in which everything is really special and “just so.” As it happens, that is the very situation I find myself in tonight, when the party will be for only six—two other couples besides Larry and myself. The men are both clients of Larry’s, and Larry, who is as a rule somewhat worried, anxious, and useless when it comes to almost anything, has been talking rather wildly about how he’s going to be fired and we’ll end up on the street. I know, and you know, that this is another of Larry’s whiny manipulations that his mother was always dumb enough to fall for and I’m not, but, in any case, this dinner party seems to be sort of mandatory, which means the risotto had better be up to par. Now, you may ask, will Larry himself be around during the preparations for this important dinner party?

Well, actually, no. Larry will not—beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-

As you see, when I set out to make a delightful seafood risotto à la vénitienne, I always like to get off on the right foot at the very beginning by HAVING THE FUCKING GODDAM SMOKE DETECTOR GO OFF!!! Fucking goddam piece of useless stupid garbage—what could have set it off? The steam from the fucking dishwasher? beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-

Thankfully, this is nothing I can’t deal with, because I have learned in past encounters with this lousy piece-of-shit smoke detector that although I cannot turn the fucking thing off once it starts, because it is the ridiculous battery-less kind or something, all I have to do is stand on a chair, remove it from its ceiling-attachment thing, and take it down to the basement, as you observe me doing now. Then I simply place the smoke detector here in the corner, and bury it under an enormous heap of bedding near where my son has his TV. beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-

Ah, that’s better. . . . No, it’s not. Because, as I stand here once again in the kitchen, I notice that the stupid fucking smoke detector can still be heard. The sound is faint, but definitely still quite annoying, and enough to distract me, or any skilled cook, from the concentration necessary to pull off a high-maintenance dish like risotto. Luckily, though, I have just the solution for that: my Three Tenors CD, which I was planning to play anyway! I’ll put on the Three Tenors, let them take me to sunny Sicily or wherever the hell, and drown the fucking smoke detector the hell out. Larry’s new CD player, which I have already plugged into the kitchen outlet here—is there a CD already in it? why won’t it open?—if I push this—no—fucking goddam stupid Larry can’t even get a CD player that works—beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-

All right—you know what I am going to do? I’m going to drain off the last little bit that’s left in my snifter, pour myself a nice big refill, imagine a lovely and relaxing tropical vacation scene, and scream “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs. Then I am going to go back down to the basement, get one of Larry’s hammers, and “disable,” as they say, the smoke detector. Meanwhile, I will leave some onions browning in a skillet here on the left front burner so as to have a head start on my risotto when I return.

[Pause.]

beep beep beep beep beep CRASH SMASH CRUNCH POP SMASH beep

With that little detour behind us, we can now proceed to the preparation of the lovely bits of fresh seafood—the shrimp, squid, and snow crab—which we are going to add to the risotto when the time is right. I begin by giving the seafood a thorough cold-water rinse, like so, and then—beep be…e…e…p, bip—

What was that? bee bee beep beep, bip, b’b’b’b’, beeeeeeee. . . .

Those of you who have followed this column for any length of time know that once in a while, at moments of extreme frustration, the Cursing Mommy gets so totally fucking fed up that she starts to scream curses, say what a stupid fuckhead that fuck Dick Cheney was, and generally let off a good cursing out all around. But now the Cursing Mommy is older and wiser, and she’s not going to do that today . . . unless . . . what’s that smell? Was that stupid smoke detector trying to tell me something? JESUS CHRIST, THE FUCKING BURNER UNDER THE ONIONS HAS SET THE PAPER TOWELS ON FIRE! OH, GOOD GOD! THE WHOLE FUCKING ROLL IS GOING UP! NOW THE CURTAINS ARE ALSO ON FIRE!! Oh, where’s that fire extinguisher? Behind the basement door? Yes! Thank God! But what is this pathetic drizzle it’s spraying? AHH! I’LL HAVE TO SMASH THE FIRE OUT WITH THE EXTINGUISHER ITSELF! smash smash smash shatter smash crash crush shatter smash

[Pause.]

After a vigorous session in the kitchen, I often like to relax and recharge by taking what I call a “mini vacation,” as I’m doing now. I simply recline on my back on the kitchen floor with my feet in the bottom tier of my cookbook shelves, my head propped against the useless spent fire extinguisher, and a clean dish towel, moistened with cool water, across my forehead and eyes.

Then I drift away in my mind to some far-off place and take some deep breaths to expel the remaining acrid and possibly toxic smoke from my lungs. Let Larry deal with this shit when he gets home. He can call Gianelli’s for takeout and put it on whichever one of our credit cards still works. I’m not even going to think about it. I would look forward to a future when we will be living in our car if I thought it meant that then I wouldn’t have to cook, but you know what? I will still have to cook. . . . O.K., I know people are coming. In just a minute I’m going to get up. beep…beep…beep…beep…beep

Oh, what a fucking terrible day this has been.

_______

Look for the Cursing Mommy’s next column, “Get Out of My Fucking Lane, You Fuck: Defensive Driving Tips from the Cursing Mommy,” which could be along pretty soon, depending. ♦”

On harmony

“The hidden harmony is better than the obvious one“- Alexander Pope

I was asked how I have such a peaceful marriage/ relationship with R who is everything that I am not.

This is my answer. This is what makes a marriage work just fine. This is what makes it fun.

Get my point?

PS. My second Wordless Wednesday comes on a Sunday night.

Edited to add later- And since Sherin (the kind soul that she is) asked me to, I am putting these over here.

My Cousin T.

Cousin T and I have been brought up together. We have been fed together, put to sleep together, bathed together, gone to school together, listened to the same stories, played with the same toys.

Then when the world changed with adolescence descending on us, we learned new things everyday and talked about everything under the sun over a few bottles of beer and some cigarettes.

And then, after some years when we realized that the world had never changed and actually never would, we shared a few more beers. Had a few more cigarettes. We talked to each other about our dreams, tread carefully on some broken ones and finally took off so get someplace.

I sort of reached that place. Falling all over, stumbling but I reached nonetheless. Cousin T has not. He has fallen too, struggled and paid for mistakes that others made.

He is a splendid man, my Cousin T. He is one of the very few good men I have known in my life. Every time he is hurt, my heart bleeds. Every time he calls with a heavy heart, my heart sinks. Cousin T is my twin soul. He is only one who has always truly been there. He is the one who has actually cared enough to know me in and out. And I carry his heart with me. “I carry it within my heart”*.

*Originally by E.E. Cummings- “I carry your heart with me”.