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Move over Sainsbury’s

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The nearest village to us is Shukravara-sante, which means Friday-fair. Sante is a periodical gathering of buyers and sellers at a particular place. This coffee-growing region has huge plantations where hundreds of people work. They get the day off to rest and do their weekly shopping. Hence, Friday is Sunday. It is the highlight of the week. The nearest town is miles away and why would one take the trouble to go there if the freshest produce is available nearby?

A collection of temporary and permanent sheds with people sitting on the ground, selling glass bangles in fancy colours, coconut-graters for a pittance, honey-mangoes, unfamiliar greens, dried red chillies in heaps, dried fish emanating its peculiar smell, plastic buckets and mugs in bright colours, cardamom and pepper, clay pots made locally to set curds in, snacks being fried on the roadside, fresh cane juice with ginger and lemon. A hundred yards of pure delight.

We’ve been here three weeks and visited the market three times. We can get most of our weeks shopping and see all those smiling faces again that are becoming more and more familiar every week. My flimsy Kannada and their meagre Hindi and English are sufficient when stretched. In the moment inadvertently provide live entertainment to the locals and laugh with them at myself.

The milk collection point is just down the road. It’s where the villagers bring milk from their farms for being sold and sent to a big dairy 40 Kilometers away. At 6.30 every morning when Simon brings a litre and a half of it in the steel milk churn, it is warm.

Opposite the chicken shop is a general store that sells eggs. The lovely family that run the chicken shop can’t sell their eggs in their own shop as people expect them to give them away for free. So, they sell the eggs to the general store and people buy them from there. An egg costs seven rupees which is roughly 7 pence.

Saagar would be surprised that I was trying to learn a new language, that we had moved to an unfamiliar part of India and started afresh.  Simon and I have wanted simplicity for a while and it’s finally coming. Couldn’t agree more with Charles Bukowsky who said, the less I needed, the better I felt.

Looking forward to the market tomorrow. Move over Sainsbury’s.

A shadow and a friend.

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One little girl arrived with bare feet on the site. May be six years old. Tiny. The odd one, out of place. Unflinchingly prancing about on the dry prickly ground, then sitting quietly, watching her dad clear the tall brown grass with his strimmer. Not a word from her. No toys. No books. No company. No food. Simply watching men working with their tractors and JCBs and one woman watching the men do their thing. Six egrets curiously dancing about the Hitachi and whatever else.

I wondered what her bright little eyes picked up on. I wondered what went on in her little head. What did she think about? School? Mum and Dad? Brothers? Friends? TV last night? Did her family have a TV? Who decided what to watch? What did she have for dinner last night? Where were her slippers? Her father said she forget to wear them as they left home in a hurry. Was that the real reason?

I wanted to talk to her and listen to her but wasn’t sure if that would be okay. As I walked past her I smiled lightly and waved my right hand at her. She gauged me as she turned her head to look in my direction. I continued waving my hand as she considered her response. After eight waves from me, she finally waved back once and I think I detected a hint of a smile.

For today, that was enough.

An excerpt from the poem ‘Kindness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

PS: The building of a home for CORe has begun. http://www.core-community.com

(Ref: https://poets.org/poem/kindness)

The C – Word

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It might explode like a grenade thrown into a small room. I worried that everyone might be put right off by it. They might log out, log off, shut their laptops and go for a walk.

What do you mean ‘Celebrate’? What is there to celebrate? Nothing. NA – Not Applicable.

After a severance such as this. The death of my child? How can I? To me, it does not apply. I belong to another club now. Here, the air is laden with a sense of exclusion and non-deserving. Here, the rejection of invitations to celebrate is automatic.  

Memories of our kids. The foods they loved, toys, TV shows, films, books, nursery rhymes, practical jokes, school and Christmases. Our hugs. Sweet stories revealed through their friends after they died. Their hidden kindnesses. Laughter. Tears. A whole life worth remembering. Worth honouring. Celebrating.

What of us? Parents. Alive. Old labels stripped off and new strange ones slathered on. The ground beneath our feet taken away and replaced with quicksand. Our identity shattered. Life in the After becoming something resembling life. An unthinkable exile. Aloneness, inside the non-understanding of the world. Every day, a fight. A reconciliation. Every day, showing up and facing whatever shows up. Keeping the broken bits of our hearts held together with the glue of love inside our silently sighing chests. Still alive.

The invitation at the Circle of Remembrance was to celebrate ourselves for being here. Now. It did not go off like a granade in a small room. No one left in a huff. It was accepted graciously. At the end of an hour and a half, the virtual space was filled with acknowledgement of things to celebrate – our love, patience, resilience and compassion reflected in this poem by Lucille Clifton written in the 1960s. We can replace ‘nonwhite and woman’ with any other phrase:

won’t you celebrate with me

what I have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in Babylon

both non-white and woman

what did I see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

star-shine and clay

my one hand holding tight

my other hand;

                        come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

PS: Circle of Remembrance is an international online peer-support group for bereaved parents that has been effectively working for the past three years and four months. Please visit the website http://www.core-community.com to learn more. Please recommend it to any parents you know who might be struggling alone after a tragic loss.

How we do it is important.

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They said that Saagar was discharged from the Mental health services because he wanted to return to his education. His parents wanted the same. Correct.

The Home Treatment Team decided it was the best thing. Great. They handed over his care to his GP.

After his death, carelessness was found to be the root of the problem. His Discharge Summary did not name Saagar’s illness. The person who wrote it had never met Saagar. He was carrying out a formality without understanding its significance. He didn’t quite grasp his role in the business of keeping a person alive.

His GP, on the basis of the information he had received went on to treat Saagar for an illness he did not have with medications positively dangerous for young people. He believed he was doing his best by maintaining Saagar’s confidentiality and not sharing his para-suicidal status with us while expecting us to look after him at home. He did his job but his patient died.

They all did what they thought right but how they did it determined the outcome, which was tragic.

The same applies to small things. I can request someone to stop smoking in my space but how I do it matters. I can ask someone to pick up their litter, take their shoes off the train seat and use ear-phones while watching videos on their cell-phone.

Multitasking is not to be glorified.

Doing one thing at a time and doing it well is of much more value than doing five things simultaneously and all shoddy. For instance, being a 100% present during a conversation without checking my phone once. Leaving it on silent mode in the other room with the door shut is my secret for getting into the flow of writing. Being fully present to the page and the pen and the soft scratchy sound that the tip of my pen makes as it moves in a squiggly line from left to right.  Letting everything disappear except the ink freeing itself into the world.

Ugadi

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We were in a small coffee-growing village of Karnataka, South India earlier this month. We were invited out for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the 9th of April. It was a special festival for the locals, first day of the new year as per the Hindu calendar.

The ladies were wearing crisp bright new silk sarees and strings of white and orange flowers in their hair. The ground just outside the front entrance of each home was decorated with a colourful geometric pattern made of white rice flour and colourful flower petals, to welcome guests and Gods into their homes. All the doorways had a string of auspicious green mango leaves strung across the top as they drive away negative vibes and infuse a positive energy into the environment.  

As always, food was a big part of the festivities. As soon as we sat down at the table, a fine wheat chapatti stuffed with a thin layer of jaggery was placed on our plate, rich with the warm fragrance of cardamom. A big spoon of homemade ghee was poured on top of it. I was transported back to when my grandmother made these for me when I was five and we were oblivious of the existence of such things as calories.

Then came a small bowl of yellowish powder, called Pachadi. I had never seen it before. Our hostess picked up some of it in the tip of a teaspoon and placed it in my right palm. It was to be taken just like that. Dry. I did as I was told and was perplexed by the taste, which was a mish-mash of this and that. After a moment of utter confusion, I had to wash it down with water and ask what it was. The gentle hostess explained that it was a mixture of Neem flowers, chilli powder, tamarind, raw mango, jaggery and salt.  But why? I asked. It’s not very nice.

It reflects the various facets of life she said – Bitter. Pungent. Sour. Astringent. Sweet and salty. Ugadi signifies leaving the past behind and embracing the beginning of a new phase in life with a positive frame of mind, knowing all these facets exist and always will. Happy Ugadi.