It is one of my biggest regrets (and a testament to my ’90s upper middle class convent school Indian upbringing) that I cannot read or write or dream in the language of my ancestors. So I came to reading books written in Malayalam really late – I think I was in my twenties when I first read something by M.T Vasudevan Nair, one of the modern stalwarts of Malayalam literature and that too in translation. I know some poets in Malayalam but I can’t recite even a line of poetry in the language though I still remember lines from my high school Shakespeare text well enough. In any case, my current book obsession are with those translated from English to Malayalam, and because I know enough of the language, I feel like I can grasp the nuances of a well-translated book that captures the soul of the text compared to something that is translated literally from Malayalam into English without grasping the context or the subtext and this is almost as good as it gets to reading it in the original. I don’t feel like this way about translations from other languages into English, because probably there isn’t another parallel reading going on in my head in the original language as I read the words on the page. I recently went through this with Jayasree Kalathil’s award winning translation of S.Hareesh’s Moustache (which created a ruckus when it first came because it apparently objectified/sexualized religious Hindu upper caste women) – my family belonged to the agrarian society depicted in the book – the upper Kuttanad in Kerala – I have heard my father tell stories of how things were ‘done’ when he was a kid, I know how caste and feudal politics and family connections still influence the daily lives of people in these biggish small towns and even though the book blurs the lines between fantasy and realism, it worked for me. I can only imagine how powerful this book must be in the original Malayalam. There is one other translation however that has stuck with me ages after I read it that I feel is even better – Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbag and translated by Srinath Perur – this translation is so beautifully and finely done that it feels like the sentences couldn’t have been conceived in any other language except the one I am reading them in.
2021 – An exercise in waiting.
This part seems familiar to me – the anticipation before a new year, the feeling that some things are about to change forever while others will stay the same. 2021 was a weird year for me – I didn’t feel like writing a word and so I didn’t. I didn’t feel like reading anything – and I rarely did. Even the books I did read were mostly non fiction, murder mysteries, and true crime. Most of the time I let myself be carried away by moving pictures on a shiny screen – tv shows, music videos, and movies. I fancied myself a critic and compared actors and shots and artistic trivialities and felt myself superior for noticing these.
If nothing else, at least I am self aware.
I also discovered how to mindlessly scroll through TikTok while mostly swearing off all other forms of social media – whatsapp and facebook and instagram (the holy trifecta). I don’t think people in my real life know me as well as that TikTok algorithm does, honestly.
My only goal this year is to write 10 minutes a day for 365 days about anything that comes to mind. No resolutions about my weight or my family or renovating the house or travel (ha!) or anything else that I wish would be different but am too tired to revamp. Thankfully, I have grown too old to believe that the beginning of a new year can magically fix a broken motivation but hopefully returning to this quiet, old space can.
When the buck stops with the Bull
As I write this, thousands and thousands of people are camping out in Marina Beach in Chennai and across Tamil Nadu, fortified by bottled water, biscuits and righteous outrage, to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban on Jallikattu. IT professionals, mothers, college kids – most of whom don’t participate in Jallikattu or probably even watch it – insist that this ancient and bloody form of bull wrestling is a vital part of Tamil culture.
I have heard of Jallikattu before – but what do I really know about it? Or Mattu Pongal? Or agricultural legacies from a more rural time? Exactly. Nothing. So I watched a couple of videos on Youtube to understand it a little better. The videos range in length from about 5 minutes to about 15 minutes and most were filmed before 2014. From what I could tell, the most famous Jallikattu competitions take place in and around Madurai, in Palamedu and Alanganallur.
In the one video from 2011 that affected me the most, at least a hundred skinny young men in bright tshirts crowd around a narrow entrance. A terrified bull, also decorated in loud colors, waits hesitantly at the door, facing the hordes. It turns away nervously, but then is pushed into the ring. There is no Jalli (coin) or kattu (package) on the bull, like there may have been a hundred or a thousand years ago. Instead the stakes for both the animal (desperate to escape) and the boys (eager for a reward) seem crude and mundane – if they hang on to the hump of the bull for about 6 minutes till they cross a certain marker on the ground, then they get to collect a reward from the organizers of the festival. If not, the owner of the bull gets the prize instead. There are no slashings or slaughter, as there would be in Spain, but the whole spectacle is a little painful and nauseating to watch.
Yet there are real issues at play here – bulls that participate in these festivals are apparently reared from indigenous breeds of livestock. Unless there is a public incentive to keep rearing them, these breeds will disappear into slaughterhouses. Then there is the political angle as well – old tensions between the national and state government are rearing their nasty little head. Previous Supreme Court decisions about sharing the Kauvery waters with Tamil farmers have been blatantly ignored – so why the rush to enforce this particular ban on an ancient, rural sport that is an integral part of an important harvest festival? Also, protesters ask – what business is it of outsiders like PETA to come in and tell us to how to treat our animals and how to spend our holidays? Make the Kardashians stop wearing fox furs first.
All of the arguments that Jallikattu supporters are making right now may be true. And in any case, it looks like the Tamil Nadu government will finagle its way around the ban anyway – but Tamil culture is rich and magnificent and so incredibly vibrant. So when celebrities and movie stars chirp earnestly into the twitterverse : #weneedjallikattu. Really? Does anybody really need this complicated tormenting of an animal to feel proud about their cultural identity? What a waste of all of this vast outpouring of people’s emotion, time and energy toward protests to keep alive a practice whose time has come and gone already.
There are real issues in Tamil Nadu and India that we need to fight for, real traditions of value that we need to preserve, real external influences that we need to guard against. But not really for Jallikattu. Not this.
Image borrowed from here
Happy 240th Birthday!
I am an unwilling immigrant – I didn’t want to leave India, but I wanted to be with my husband, and when we got married, he didn’t want to live where I did. So. Okay then.Whatever.
However every year since 200X, I have told myself that next year, I am going back home for sure. I plot and scheme and try to engage my husband in futile arguments about why we should move back to India with the kids.
But after living in Boston for so long, I find that I can no longer go ‘home’ to India. I vacation in India, and then come back here, with stories about the ‘corruption’. ‘the pollution.’ the ‘noise.’ the ‘traffic.’ the ‘hospitals.’ the ‘water.’
I still talk about moving back to India for good, but only in a half-hearted dreamy sort of way. I am also starting to recognize what G has been telling me all along – that life is very, very good for us in the United States. But I also understand that this is mostly because *we* are good – G and I, like thousands of other immigrants, take special care to conform almost exactly to the stereotypes that populate the hard working, law abiding, over achieving Indian-American community.
Yet, despite my restless, fickle heart, slowly but surely this country has lured me in.
Seduced me with her wide roads, clean neighborhoods, big restaurant portions, her obsession with polite but ultimately meaningless small talk. beautiful well maintained green spaces, amazing opportunities for social mobility, crazy work ethic, relative freedom of expression, racial diversity and her constant introspection.
It has taken me 10 long years, but I am starting to fall in love with you, America. Don’t break my heart.
It is a New Year (But not a New Me.Yet.)
This past December 31st, instead of going to the Lotus Club with my parents, I listened to my inner Grinch and went to bed promptly at 10:00 pm. I woke up around 6:00 am on January 1st in one of my favorite cities in the world, to my mom chirping “Happy New Year, mole’.”
“Hmmph.” I grunted before I realized that I am a mother myself and I probably shouldn’t do that to her. Karma is a ….etc etc..
So, “Happy New Year, Amma.”
“This year, everything should be different.” my mom told me “You should plan ahead if you want things to happen.”
I want to tell her that planning has never been a problem for me. It is the execution. I take a deep breath and choke down this thought. “Yes, I really should do that.” I answer.
I then got up and had a bath and the two of us went to the Sri Krishna temple near our house. Three weeks after that conversation, I am back in Btown and since then, I have gone back to shouting at the kids, shouting at the husband, not doing the dishes as often as I should, wasting time on the Internet reading Bollywood gossip, fantasizing about moving to a bigger house and being scared of my phone. On the other hand, it is only February still – so, I am still hopeful that this is the year that I will eat less sugar, make time for my muse and wear more sequins.
At the beginning of a new year, some things change all at once and suddenly; and other things continue to stand still. I am grateful for both.
Post Partum thoughts: Things that come to mind on the birth of the Second.
Some women get pregnant quickly, deliver their child (or two or three) in an unmedicated, blissful haze and then quickly get on with the business of regular life, Others don’t. I am pretty sure that I am an Other.
For the last seven years, it feels like all I have been really doing is either thinking of getting pregnant or being pregnant or dealing with the post pregnancy *stuff*.
“I just want is a healthy beautiful baby, Is that really so unreasonable to wish for?” – I would bargain with God. As it turns out, it is not unreasonable at all. Just a desperate prayer that I wasn’t ever sure would come true.Yet here we are, seven years after G and I started trying to have children and five years after our first son was born. Here I am – the mother of two.
S. was born at 39 weeks, via c-section. It was an uneventful pregnancy for me – just the usual depression, paranoia and regularly scheduled meltdowns,with a little gestational diabetes thrown in for fun.
I cherished the last few days I had alone with Apu before Kannan was born. Apu had called me ‘Amma’ first; everything and everyone else came later. I still have no idea what I am doing at any point of time with Apu, because all that I do with and for him is new for me and therefore, a little scary.
Things may be easier for me with Kannan, because he will have the benefit of my experience (I hopeIhopeIhope.)Yet, when he was born there was a big part of me that was terrified. So far, the laser sharp focus of all of my attention has centered around Apu. How could I love another being as deeply as I love him? But almost 6 months after the birth of my second child, I am thrilled to find that my love is actually vast and not selfish – it can transform and bloom and grow to include another.
***
Unlike my last c-section, I was barely awake this time around when the surgeon held up the baby and said (again) “A boy. And he has such beautiful eyelashes!” But as the fog cleared, what I remember are the following:
1. Breastfeeding was still really tough, but better overall because I knew the pain would eventually stop and I knew to get help from a lactation consultant right away (Best $150 I ever spent on myself).
2. I was more sleep deprived but less stressed out about it.
3. I do much better with a (flexible) structure and routine. (But really, you can’t really fashion a structure or routine for the first month after having a baby, but keeping that goal in mind was vital to getting through the new-newborn phase.)
4. Less is more. I brought much less stuff than I did with Apu. The one thing I did buy that is a total life saver was the Fisher Price Portable Rocker. Completely absolutely worth it. Kannan had a hard time sleeping flat in his crib, and this is what I used for him at night.
5. Little Apu was not so little. He was capable of dealing with inevitable chaos of a newborn in the house much better than I would have expected a 5 year old boy could. I think I had more post partum tantrums than he did.
6. When it comes to my family, as suspected, my heart is both smaller and bigger than I imagined it.
Things I learned from 2014. Things I hope to learn in 2015
I think this is the first time that I can remember that I don’t have a single interesting/odd thought, memory, or observation from the last year to start my new year post with. I also don’t have any resolutions for 2015:
I probably need to lose about 40 lbs but I am not sure I will actually lose any this year
I don’t smoke. I don’t drink (too much) – so no need for restraint here.
I hope I can get a better job but I am not actively trying for anything in particular.
More money would be nice, but I would like to save more and reduce our overall spending than chase a bigger paycheck.
I would love to travel more, but where? how? when?
Last year was spent mostly running mad dashes between my workplace in Cambridge, and my doctors’ office in Dedham, cajoling my body into submission using the twin powers of desperate prayer and Western medicine, and fighting with G about sharing household and childcare chores.
But 2014 was also the year that I finally found my way from a dark place into a space filled with light and hope. Here at the end of one year and the very beginning of another, I can see both how far I have traveled and how far I still have to go,
I don’t know what 2015 will bring but I know I am going into it blind, like a small child and without expectations or fear but always onward, and forward.
The Man at the head of the Orchestra : On A.R Rahman, Music et al.
Around 2003 or so, after reading Nick Hornby’s Songbook, I wanted to write about my own all-time favorite musician. Immensely Talented Curly Haired South Indian etc etc. But when I actually sat down to complete this exercise, I was disappointed to find out that writing an essay about A. R Rahman felt about as impossible as compiling a list of songs that best represented his spirit of genuine spontaneity. Not that I didn’t try.
I must have listened to Minnale(May Maadham, 1994) at least a 100 times in my efforts to put down on paper exactly how it made me feel. But Rahman’s music is rarely just that, and even though it is never too smart or too obscure for those who prefer the Backstreet Boys to Bjork, there is something greater there, behind the rhythm, that is vigorous and deft and momentous.
However at the time, I couldn’t think of a more sincere or honest way to persuade somebody about this (especially somebody who had never heard of Rahman ..this was way, way before Slumdog Millionaire of course.. ) than to just direct them to a collection of his songs. The best ones are those he composed for Tamil and Malayalam movies between 1993 and 2002. Any kind of written description of them seemed imperfect or worse, superfluous.
I remember the 12 months after I read Songbook as a time in my life marked by both vague unease and considerable apathy towards the world. For one, I completely stopped listening to Rahman. Instead I brought a lot of angry chick rock CDs, mostly Bif Naked.
Back in college, nobody ever describes me as an introvert, but I suddenly found myself delivering bossy, misshapen opinions,all with an air of confused passion and rude detachment, to anyone kind enough to pay me attention.
I was only saved from being marked permanently in that way, because I found someone who understood perfectly what I had once wanted to say about Rahman’s music and indirectly therefore, changed forever how I felt about my future. This is What He Said:
What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But it is in love,
our hearts have mingled,
like the red earth and
pouring rain.
– Cempulappeyanirar, Kuruntokai
All poems but especially those about relationships, are half personal-opinion and three-quarters heightened-imprecision. The really good ones are timeless and infused with a strange sort of impersonal cunning that its reader is left to unravel by examining the words over and over. And over. This, I find, is like Mr. Rahman’s music. You have to give his albums a couple of listens before you are convinced that the man is a genius. For instance, I hated every song on Iruvar(1997) when I first heard it, but now everytime I hear Hello Mister Ethirkatchi, I want to burst into tears.
And never mind what that tells you about me, but what does it tell you about the way Rahman arranges sound?
If A. R Rahman were ever to tune Cempulappeyanirar’s love poem into music, I imagine it would be something sweet and playful but also something just a little violent. Maybe, a delicate Korg synth pattern grounded by the dry steady beat of a drum and sung in Tamil by P. Unnikrishnan with a high smooth voice. If listened to in its entirety, Cempulappeyanirar’s woman will find impossible not to be touched by this song, I think. Her face might still look unimpressed when the last chord shudders to an end, but her eyes will have become tender and her mind will be clear: all that anguish and doubt Cempulappeyanirar hints at will be swept away to uncover older, happier memories.This is one way to describe A. R Rahman’s musical style. And here is another.
Everyone knows that the lyrics don’t matter when it comes to appreciating truly great music, but honestly, what man wouldn’t identify with Cempulappeyanirar’s strange little poem?
“But it is in love/ our hearts have mingled” the poet writes, using that sly conjunction to imply that if, when this flimsy rope of feeling wears thin, there will be nothing to bind this couple together. Their mothers and souls and fathers and bodies, strangers once again.
But see: if this were a Rahman song, that wouldn’t be all there is. Even when his tunes no longer sound new but only familiar, like one’s heartbeat, you always get something fresh from listening to them a second, third or five hundredth time. And it’s not that I am gloomy about my prospects of ever finding the kind of inordinate happiness that Cempulappeyanirar offers, but when I play a Rahman CD, that becomes entirely irrelevant.
Everytime I listen to Minnale, every time that feeling of love-not-lost-but-never-found wells up, I find that I can press my heart against his music, and if I let it, its warm, liquid notes usually pull me through to the other side. There’s this knotted turn in the violin harmony towards the end of the song that promises to tell me everything I will ever need to know about life and love and passion, and better than a poet ever could.
The Birthday
of an old lover
is easily forgotten,
like an umbrella left on the seat of a bus
during rush hour.
Dark clouds rise over the horizon.
Stride Right.
Today morning was rainy, gloomy and very grey – not the kind of day that makes you jump up in the morning at 7:30, and say ..oooh..I should do a charity walk for Breast Cancer research…but that’s what I did anyway..:-)..I did the lite version (2 miles, along the Charles River ) instead of the hardcore(5.7 miles over the BU bridge etc..) part of the marathon..but felt awesome at the end of it regardless. It helped that there were friends and plenty of easy conversations about family and books to keep me moving along.. Afterward, I took a nice long walk by myself through the Public Gardens, taking pictures of the fall foliage, and the ducks. I ended up getting home only in time for a late lunch, and now don’t feel like doing any of my usual chores..but I feel calmer and happier than I have in a long time.
Because I Said So. 