Writing

Fall like snow on tall peaks

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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

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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.

Vincent and James.

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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

Stories are us.

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Why are they here? These random strange-looking foreigners? One is white and the other we’re told is from the north of India. Wonder which is worse. At least one of them is easy to steel from. Surely the other is obnoxious. But she teaches English at the Primary school for free. Wonder what’s in it for her. Oh yes. She’s using our kids to learn Kannada for free. That must be it.

The minds of the villagers are desperately trying to make sense of what we’re doing here, in this remote village. The nearest airport is 5 hours’ drive away and the closest decent hospital, at least an hour from our village. We don’t speak the local language and hardly anyone speaks Hindi or English.

The first story of us was that I am a film director and Si, an actor. We’re scouting a suitable location to shoot a period drama. But then no camera or crew showed up. So, that was discarded.

The next tale was that we are here to set up a petrol station. That’s how people with connections in high places syphon off their black money. That fits, they believed, knowing nothing about us. But then no signs of construction appeared for months.

The next guess was that we want to open a bar and restaurant. As we are close to the highway, it’s a great place to open-up something for the travellers to rest and refresh. That didn’t seem to be happening either.

What can it be? Oh. They both have seriously grey hair. All their friends must be old. They must deeply empathise with old people. They must be planning an old people’s home. Well, no signs of that yet.

What are they about after all? The dogs and kids seem to love them. They seem like nice enough people. Maybe they’re planning to start an orphanage?  Don’t know. We’ll have to wait and watch.

Well, all they seem to be doing is planting more trees and making more compost and playing music to their plants, setting up irrigation systems and so on. Maybe they’re doing all the groundwork to ultimately grow cannabis.

Oh! How we need stories!

The older I grow, the lesser I know.

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A book with frayed edges sat tucked inside the pocket behind the driver’s seat. After an overnight train journey from Sakleshpur to Goa, we were going home in a taxi. No coffee yet. I was not quite switched on. Bleary eyed, I pulled the book out of the elasticated edge. It was Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Some poor tourist had mistakenly left it behind while traveling to the airport to fly back home.

Thoreau wrote this book while he lived in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, hundred and eighty years ago. He was testing the idea that divinity was present in nature and the human soul. He stripped his life down to the barest of essentials and secluded himself as much as he could, living off the land as much as possible. He wanted to find out just what in life is necessary and what is superfluous.

(Picture, courtesy Maria Popova )

Having chosen to live in a place where, for hundreds of miles very few people speak our language, with no cinema halls, restaurants, therapists or book shops, where the food is of one particular kind, but nature is abundant, that question has arisen for me too.

A few weeks back, a quote by Thoreau had whistled right into my heart:

“Life! who knows what it is, what it does?”

Such a beautiful sentiment. I had wished for more of his writings. After learning some more about him and his love of birds, streams, woodlands and meadows, I got busy with other things.

When I brought this question to CORe, it generated a rich discussion.

“What is our relationship with not knowing? What feelings does it provoke?”

Some excerpts from our conversations:

  • It is a real test of oneself, dropping how things should be and taking each day as it comes. It took me a long time to realise how much my mind was tied to certainty. In Africa, the relationship with death is very different. They have many ways to remember a loved one. They believe they’re still here and it gives them great joy.
  • Anxiety of the need to know at work. I have to change my mind set to curiosity. Some things we’re not meant to know, such as, where is he? It would spoil it. I must accept that I’m not meant to know.
  • When he went, I didn’t want to be here. Now I do. I have a life that I want to have. I have lots of godchildren who have promised to take care of me. I have a vision of him and his dad, which I hope will come through in my own death. Maybe when it’s my time they’ll be there, and their peace will be shattered.

Yes. The older I grow, the lesser I know. There is a freedom in that, to be with whatever is happening. It allows for the mystery of life to unfold as it will and it allows me to witness it without conditions, with an open heart. The smallest things. The book that I had wished for a month ago, appears right in front of me after I had forgotten all about it.

Life. Who knows what it is, what it does?