Oye. Sorrow, what are you here to show me? Oye!
First, that you are alive.
Second, your capacity for joy.
- Inspired by the one and only, Khalil Gibran.
Fall like snow on tall peaks
There are laws followed by falling things
not humans
but things cannot determine the conditions of their fall
humans can.
Since childhood I was advised, if you want to fall, fall inside the house. ie. not outside
ie. fall onto the letter but escape from the envelope
ie. fall into the eye but escape from the glasses
ie. escape from words but fall into the meaning.
I, of average height could not have fallen more than five and a half feet
but how high was that?
My falling is not coming to an end.
The reality of falling things is revealing itself to me
in the middle of my 70th decade.
Look around and observe the falling of things.
fall like the snow atop glaciers from where sweet rivers erupt
fall like a sip of cold water on a dry throat
fall like drops filling a clay pot with music
fall like a teardrop in someone’s sorrow
fall like a ball amongst children playing
fall like the first leaf in autumn making space for a new one in spring
for if there’s no autumn, there’s no spring
fall like the first brick in the foundation of a home
fall like a waterfall on a turbine setting its fans in motion
fall like light on darkness
fall like sunlight on moist winds, making rainbows.
But stop.
Up until now only rainbows have been drawn.
No arrows have been drawn from rainbows.
So, fall like an arrow of a rainbow
onto barren earth and
cover it with flowers and leaves.
Fall like rain on parched land.
Like a ripe fruit,
fall and offer your seeds to the ground.
My hair has fallen.
So have my teeth.
And my vision.
The shells of memories continue to fall.
Names. Dates. Towns. Faces.
The pace of blood-flow in my body is falling.
My temperature is falling.
Why are you still standing, Naresh?
Before all of your existence collapses
for once
make a decision about your fall,
the correct cause and timing of it, and fall on an enemy
like lightning
like a meteorite
like a warrior
like thunderbolt.
I say, fall.
- An excerpt from a poem by Naresh Saxena. (Translated from Hindi, by me. It is customary for Urdu and Hindi poets to insert their pen-name into the last verse of their poems. I enjoyed the instructional tone of his voice and the ebb and flow of all his metaphors.)
Raintree
This is not a monastery, a hermitage or a cave.
It is our one-bedroom house. No bellringing to tell me it’s time to go to the church hall to pray.
No fixed routines. No group meditations. No tedious chores.
This is my home. I have been here by myself for 6 weeks. Mostly silent. Listening. Being.
The wind, whispers and then howls, bashing the banana plantation outside my window, pushing all the birds back into their nests, felling trees and forcing me to stay indoors.
The monsoon makes a dramatic entry, takes over the skies.
The morning ritual of making ginger tea. I sit by the big window, drinking it, present to the light of the day. Grateful for it, I smile.
The luxury of silence and solitude!
I drive to the farm. Today is the day to plant a raintree. Early monsoon is a good time for it. The three feet tall sapling has travelled on an overnight train all the way from a friend’s garden in Goa. Known for its fifteen-meter-wide umbrella shaped canopy, it needs a lot of space. We mark the spot on a clearing, dig a hole, put the root ball into the moist soil, add some compost and cover it up. Two sticks support the young tree and it’s on its own. Good luck, Buddy.
My brother calls in the evening to inform me about the air-crash in Gujarat.
I light a candle and sit with my eyes closed. Tears streaming down my face, my chest bursting with pain. God bless their souls and their families. God bless them all.
Night arrives. Si calls up. He asks if I was aware that yet another war had begun in the middle east. I didn’t.
Why? Isn’t there enough suffering in the world already?
I think about the raintree. I wonder if it will survive this sharp heavy monsoon. Who can say? No one.
Silence. Solitude. Surrender.
That’ll be a NO.
The singing lesson online was ending. My teacher is a good one, possibly a couple of decades younger than me. She suddenly declared that there will be a test next week.
What test?
It’s just a small one. Everyone must take it after 25 lessons.
I complete assignments every week, and you give me feedback. That’s enough for me.
This is the rule. Everybody is doing it.
I am not everybody and I shall not be doing it.
Well, all teachers have been told every student has to be tested. By the management.
Is it the same management that makes you wear that boring hospital-blue jacket on top of your nice clothes for lessons and you trust their judgement? I wanted to say but did not.
They make the rules. We have to follow.
I am too old to follow rules that don’t make sense to me. I don’t do tests.
It will only take ten minutes.
I would rather spend ten minutes doing something else – listening, learning, singing.
It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.
If it’s nothing, then let’s not do it. I was thinking of buying another ten lessons but if I’m forced to do tests, I will not. Please would you tell the management for me?
Yes. I will, she said, as she shrunk a little.
Pause.
It’s not an exam. It’s only a test.
I am not fifteen. You can’t make me do it.
The emphasis on testing and scoring in India is possibly the reason why most students are into rote learning rather than enjoying the process of gaining skills. It is also the root cause of much anxiety and shame.
Students accounted for 7.6% of all suicides in India in 2022. The number is an astounding 12,000 per year which amounts to 32 per day and rising. There is a fundamental need for culture change for these numbers to come down.
Reference:
https://qz.com/india/1728666/indias-high-stakes-testing-culture-needs-to-be-dismantled
Vincent and James.
2017 – 16. Male. RIP.
2024 – 19. Male. RIP.
Brothers. Second generation Chinese immigrants in USA. Their mother, a writer who lost both of them to suicide.
Where Reasons End (2019) by Yiyun Li, after Vincent’s death.
I read this book when it was first published. An imagined conversation between her and her older son, Vincent who lived ‘feelingly’. Sixteen chapters, one for each year of his life. It has a witty and mischievous tone. Nicholai, a name he gave himself, chides his mother’s new embrace of cliches and adjectives. “If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary,” he says. (“Dying is highly unnecessary too,” she shoots back.)
Things In Nature Merely Grow – Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025, by Yiyun Li, a memoir. She wrote it within two months of her younger son, James’ death. I feel deeply for her and with her but I am not sure I want to read that book right now. A few lines from it sing true:
“I am in an abyss. If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat.”
“My children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden.”
“I am very realistic in that I would always acknowledge that I am limited as their mother. I was limited, and I am still limited as a mother, so I can only do my best.”
When people hold an expectation that her grief must have an end date, she retorts, “How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on its life as usual, business as usual.”
“This is a very sad fact of our lives, they took their own lives knowing we would accept and respect their decision.”
Could I accept and respect Saagar’s decision one hundred percent? I believe it was not his decision. It was his utter helplessness and desperation in the face of his illness, his unsuitable antidepressants, lack of medical care, his isolation, his inability to recommence his education, our inability to talk about it and so much more. He was driven to it. It was not by choice. Anyone who knew him, knows that. I do understand though.
I understand, my darling.
References:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/05/where-reasons-end-yiyun-li-review#
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/17/author-yiyun-li-on-the-suicide-of-both-her-sons
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