Stories

Love is …

Posted by

0

Her name is Devi. I see her every day. She works in the big house next door. We smile at each other when we meet accidentally. I see her in the garden, watering their plants, taking out rubbish bins, sweeping dead leaves. I see her in the courtyard, putting things out to dry in the sun – red chilies, black pepper and coffee beans. We have no common language except our smiles.

My neighbour says she was born in this village and has hardly ever left. She has been a house-help for decades. She doesn’t have a phone. She doesn’t like dogs. She doesn’t talk much. She has no teeth and loves drinking coffee. She takes Fridays off. Her husband died a long time ago. Her son moved to some big town some distance away. Her granddaughter goes to architecture school. That’s all I know.

She is a woman. A wife. A mother. Working. Making ends meet. She has suffered losses of various kinds and she smiles often, especially when someone smiles at her. She is looking after herself the best she can.

On a closer look, she is like me. We have a lot in common. While our bodies are materially different, we are nourished by the same air and the same Earth. The same sun and stars shine upon us, and we come from the same soil. We both wear green glass bangles.

My thoughts, feelings and stories are possibly different from hers, but we are both aware of our respective experiences. What is it that’s aware of all this? If my mind would journey back from the stuff of life to the source of its knowing, where would it find itself? In a field of awareness. We both have that field in common. Each of our minds shares the same awareness. The aspiration of the mind is to be relieved of all the limitations of its perception. That is why my heart is happy to see her in the mornings. While I respect our differences at a relative level, I hold a deep understanding that we are essentially, the same infinite being.

The experience of love is that intuition of our shared being with all Beings! No two. Only one. If each one of us could take this understanding into every situation, I wonder what kind of place our world would be.

(Inspired by the Advaita, or Non-Duality teachings of Rupert Spira)

Be the light.

Posted by

0

A café on a sunny beach in Goa. Lunch with friends. Rava dosa and spicy sambar. In walks a woman of European descent, possibly a few years older than me. She sits at the table opposite us. She has two deep vertical frown lines just above either side of the bridge of her nose. They seem to be fixed in place. She orders a white coffee and waits, looking at her phone and then turning to look out of the window. Looking at her phone and turning her head towards the window. This pattern repeats. The lines stay firmly in place. I wonder why. She is obviously travelling. Wonder if she has someone with her or not. Has she made some friends here? I wonder if I should ask but it might seem strange to her and others in the eatery.

I was still debating whether I should or shouldn’t, when I saw her pay her bill and leave. I excused myself and followed her out. She walked to the right with her arms crossed across her chest and her head bent forward.

“Excuse me.” I called out. She turned around.

“Sorry to disturb you. I was in the café there. You seemed to be worried about something. Of course, it’s not my business but if there’s something you want to talk about, I have time.”

‘Oh. Thank you. Things are not great at home. Nothing too serious but I feel so far away.’

“I am sorry to hear that. Are you okay?”

‘Yes. I am okay, I think.  I have a couple of friends. We’ll meet up later and talk things over. Thank you for bringing some light into my day.’ She smiled, the frown softening.

“May I give you a hug?” I asked.

“Yes. Please.”

We had a moment, said our goodbyes. I slipped back into the café, gently sat down and blended back into the conversation.

“If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.”

– Rumi.

For this new year and for ever more, I wish you be the light that you are, for others and yourself.

Everywhere.

Posted by

0

A year or so after Saagar, one Saturday morning we were driving on the M4 to see Simon’s mum. As we tuned into BBC Radio 4, my ears were assaulted by the prefix, ’committed’. Neither the BBC, nor the psychiatrists knew better. They hadn’t learnt that crimes are ‘committed’. Not suicides. Suicides came from a desire to end insufferable emotional pain. Either these people didn’t know or they didn’t care enough to modify the words that habitually barfed out of their mouths. That prefix is so firmly embedded in the English language that it thoughtlessly rolls off our tongues. Suicide was a crime in the UK before 1961. It is still a ‘sin’ according to some good men and women of God. Hence, the default prefix, “committed”. That has to change. Like people who sadly die of cancer, people die of Depression and Schizophrenia and the like. They do not “commit” a crime.
Part of me was grateful they were talking about it, even if their language was wrong. I tried not to get too put off by that. I had not heard so many conversations about it before. Had something changed or had I not been listening all this time?
My mind could no longer handle long complicated, rambling books. It forgot names, lost plot lines and wandered off, out the window within minutes. Short and gentle texts, it could deal with but nothing that puts too much cognitive load. I asked a helpful librarian to recommend a couple of small books. She pulled out ‘The sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes and ‘The French Exit’ by Patrick deWitt. Both the stories had suicide at the center of it. I have read many books but couldn’t remember this theme arising so often.
I joined a short-story writing course at the Himalayan Writing Retreat. The award-winning author, Kritika Pandey, our teacher asked us to read ‘Why I decide to kill myself and other jokes’ by Douglas Glover beforehand. My heart pounded right through those sixteen pages. I was asked to pay attention to the technical details – the elliptical way in which the word ‘blue’ appears at periodic intervals, the sub-plot involving the dogs, the side-story of Hugo’s mum, the symbolism of the car – all of these were lost on me. I was inside the protagonist’s head, feeling her dread, her quandary and her hopelessness. It was in my face again.
The e-mail from the V&A was advertising an Alexander McQueen exhibition.
The film on TV tonight was ‘The Hours’.
The book that fell off the shelf and broke its spine today was ‘The First Forty-Nine stories’ by Earnest Hemingway.
This blasted thing that came out of nowhere, is now, everywhere.
Had my eyes and ears been shut for all these years?

Or, I wonder if, like many others I was not aware of my belief – this kind of thing only happens to others?

PS: The author, Earnest Hemingway and the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, both ended their own lives. ‘The Hours’ is a film based on a book by Michael Cunnigham with Virginia Woolf’s suicide at the center of it.

Cats

Posted by

1

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at City Hospital, Belfast was a circus. Every day of the week a different clown (read Consultant) took charge of the ICU. What was right on a Monday was completely wrong on a Tuesday. The same action would be pronounced ‘perfect’ by one clown and ‘abhorrent’ by another. To make things even better, they didn’t talk to each other. The flunkies (read Junior doctors) were the in-betweeners that got lammed from both sides as their shifts crossed over time-territories. They were the pawns on the frontline that took over the running of the unit from one clown at the beginning of a shift and handed over to the other at the end of it. The flunkies dodged the arrows of conflict between the clowns – on the phones, in hospital corridors and at handovers. They were the ones that ran around all night looking after the sickest patients in the hospital, only to be lambasted the next morning. They were the buckets in which the bile of bitterness was collected, the one that the clowns didn’t have the gall to throw at each other.

In 2004, I was one of those flunkies. After about 8 months of this non-sense, I was done. I was loosing my sense of self, my confidence in making decisions and most importantly, the pride in my job. It was time to stop and take stock. After a nasty night shift, I was handing over the patients to the day team. At one point the Consultant said to me ‘you need your head examined’. That did it. I couldn’t bear to go home only to return to this hell-hole ten hours later. I walked into the Psychiatry Outpatient Department which was on the way to the car-park. There were two empty seats in the waiting area. I planted myself on one.
“Do you have an appointment?” one of the receptionists asked me.
“No. I don’t. I can wait for as long as it takes. I work here. If I am not seen today I may not come back tomorrow.” I didn’t fully comprehend what I was saying but it was my truth.

Dr Ingram was a handsome young psychiatrist with kind eyes and a small beer belly, well couched in his grey suit. He understood. He gave me 6 weeks off on grounds of ‘work-related-stress’ and started me on Fluoxetine. I was also seen five or six times by a therapist. She was a kind elderly lady who listened. She suggested getting a cat.

At the Antrim Animal rescue home an adorable black and white feline peered at Saagar’s dad and me from her cage. It was her eyes that got me – curious and twinkling, like a child. They said this little girl had been there for a month. Before that she’d had a rough life on the streets for a few months. Her right ear had a wedge missing from its edge. We decided to call her Bella. We were advised to keep her strictly indoors for at least 6 weeks, till she got familiarised with the smells of the house. She found her way to the tops of kitchen cabinets and radiator covers, squeezed behind sofas and underneath beds, inside shoes and suitcases. The only place she didn’t like was her brand new soft bed.

On our trip to the vet for a basic check-up, we were told that the she-cat was in fact a he-cat. After much discussion, Saagar’s dad’s choice of name came up tops. ‘Mr Bronx’, the old faithful. He soon became a source of great joy, comfort and hilarity for us. We had him playing with balls of wool, soft toys with bells and chasing the beam of a laser pen. He was pure joy but kept his distance. Slowly he let us stroke and cuddle him. His purring beneath the palms of my hand soothed my soul and made me feel deeply connected with this four-legged being. Within a month we were having full-fledged conversations.

The Fluoxetine made me feel like a zombie. No joy. No pain. No love.
It was dehumanising. At times it made me terribly restless but I stuck with it. It was proof that pills can’t make you happy. May be they take the edge off, but at a price. The best thing about that time was that I could rest. I was left alone. I had some control on my days and nights, which I had not had for years.

After 6 weeks, it was time to go back to work. I did. My schedule was reshuffled to ensure I didn’t spend much time working in ICU. It worked. I got back on my feet. Later I discovered that other junior doctors before me, had had similar unpleasant experiences, complaints had been made about the sad state of affairs at that hospital but nothing had changed on ground. It was an open secret, not spoken about while the abuse persisted and continued to break innocent young doctors down.

Nine years later, Saagar was home from University and I got a phone call from him at work. “Mamma, can we get a cat? I found one on Gumtree.”
That evening we went over to a tiny flat in Sydenham occupied by a black family of four – mum and three kids. On a window sill lounged another family of four, a grey mother-cat with her three grey kittens. Six weeks old. The kittens were being carried around the flat like rags by the kids. They didn’t care if they lifted them by their ears or tails or bellies.They released the sweet little things from various heights above the floor, cornered them and held them tight. They told us about what the cats ate. We picked the littlest one, a grey and white mini-punk. We got a bell, a bowl and some toys for him from the pet shop and brought him home in a cardboard box. He was christened ‘Milkshake’ by Saagar, who became his loving mum that summer.

The sedate Mr Bronx was too old and too calm for the punchy young Milkshake who developed an attitude very quickly, but they found a way to co-exist, keeping a safe distance from each other.

Not once did it occur to me that there might be a connection between the circumstances in which we got the first cat and then, the second.

Ms Helplessness

Posted by

0

During Saagar’s illness, I was helpless. Also, I was rubbish at asking for help. A few weeks into Saagar’s unrelenting and forever changing moods, I was baffled. I realised I couldn’t do this alone, I needed to ask for help. Most of my family lived in India so I needed to hurry up.

Looking back, I asked somewhat hesitantly, by sending a group e-mail to my family members in India. Some tried to help and couldn’t. Others didn’t try. Yet others kept mum. Some advised me to send him to India. Some couldn’t even pick up the phone. I was so panicked that I couldn’t think straight. It didn’t cross my mind that I needed support too. The fact that I was a hot shot doctor at a hot shot hospital did not help. At that point, I was simply his desperate mother.

I texted a distant uncle on Tuesday night to say I was really worried about Saagar and we needed urgent help. He lived 20 minutes away. He texted back to say he could only help on weekends. By Thursday, it was all over. I suppose none of us had the slightest inkling of the disaster that was hurtling towards us.

Helplessness was the darkest cloud there ever was. It was a humiliating beast of a thing. It had completely obliterated the way I saw myself – capable, resourceful. It had made me a stranger to myself. Again and again, it invaded from the past to leave me without oxygen. I imagined I would limp through the rest of my life, trying to get to a point of relief, of grace. There was no way of getting that ghost of helplessness off my back.

A few years after his death, on a warm quiet afternoon on a beach in Goa, I invited Ms Helplessness to sit with me. We sat cross legged on the wooden floor of the beach hut. We looked into each other’s eyes for a few still moments. With tears streaming down my face, I extended both my hands toward her, and she took them in hers, gently squeezing them and then loosening her grip. I steeled myself and looked harder into her eyes.

I hate you. I forgive you for nearly killing me once. Thank you for showing me I can’t control what happens.

Maybe there’s a power beyond us both, that rules.

Promise me, you won’t be so cruel again. Will you? She had her gaze fixed on the ground in front of us. A tearful silence ensued.  Then she stood up and walked away.