So time goes by, and much changes: O' Leary is going to look at it; SA will write board exams this year; the farm now grows vegetables; there are lilies in the pond; S is a teenager.

I could write a book about him growing up. At the moment his curiosity is about sex. Is it OK to watch porn? was the way the last session began. Apparently, SH opened up some site and they watched. So I say, it's the natural thing for those his age to do, it's part of growing up. I try and tell him that porn destroys when it is made to function as a template; when he asks how he will learn, it's difficult not to giggle as I tell him that one really must learn on the job!

Two funny things. Having heard of Kamasutra and spotting it sitting on my shelf(N tells me I should hide these things for him to find, he will get complexed when other boys say their mothers would punish them etc)he picks it up an reads, and not realising that this is Kakar and Donigher's annotated translation,not the sort of thing his friends are likely to have been describing, asks "So what's all the fuss about?"

"So brothels are kitchens, right?"
Why?
"Because they say 'Too many cooks spoil the brothel'". This is what happens, my mother would say, if mothers don't spend enough time teaching their sons the idioms that normal people use normally. Hee hee.

It's raining out.

Am spending more time with S's studies! God, how different he is from P and G, we are constantly in combat mode. I guess because he's a boy. Ya,his studies, it began in self-defence against my mother's " All the mothers, even the ones who have software jobs...", but I find that it works better, just knowing what's happening in his books, and with all the things he's supposed to do, so that I am not taken by surprise when he decides not to toe whatever lines he's supposed to at the moment.

In contrast, G describes her classes every evening; I wish she could be in my class, her writing class is so boring. Today we worked at how to make a humdrum assignment a little more exciting.

I'm feeling the lack of solitude very strongly, if only there was a little room to be alone, to pause all activity, to not be looked at, talked to, asked of, touched. A week away from home, a week on top of Manjinakkare, if I could manage that. I need to write, like I did in the holidays...been dreaming strange dreams in which the outside is intruding, but like KD says, one needs that foot in the outside world.

Memory

Must begin taking notes, listen to him remembering his past. Why did I not inherit his gift of speech? How fluid, magical, how appropriate and evocative his choice of words is. I feel like that but cannot speak like that, though perhaps it's a choice I might have made at some point, not to say, but to indicate?

Whatever.

Today I found this old poem, many many years old. It feels odd, it reads odd, but is probably the beginning of my now me's way of looking at the world.

Witness

All I did was stand there,
under the blue sky turning gray. How it began to rain as he sang,
you must also by now know.
Before we left home,
he had said to me,
"I do not like to prove that things must be
as they are meant to be."
Forgive my momentary deviation,
I was talking of rain,
which is a truth that you and I will never be.

Writing

I started the book. Opened a new folder,for, like KD said, it is a new story. And began with the patriarch at the river's bank,on the return journey from his uncle's house; the story begins with him rolling up the medicine pouch into his mundu, knotting it turban-like around his head, then swimming across the river.

He said: 'She sent me to get the medicines; I was little more than a child, wasn't it wrong of her to send me?' and it was difficult to stop the sting of tears or the goose flesh.

This is the story I must tell, rather than the girl's, because the girl's life is a continuation of the patriarch's. This story-telling is the way to uncover all these many secret lives I am leading, and I think it's time for me to stop wondering if it could be of interest to anyone, because no one talks about the things others are interested in. We are all longing to tell the stories that we are part of, those that have meaning for us.

Walking up the slopes of Eravikulam, hoping that a herd of Tahr would magically appear over the hill's rim - which we could not climb on this day visit, the three-day trek could have taken us there if we had we more time - I had an sense of separateness. It was the sort of feeling I would be flooded with during the years between university and marriage, also when I first began to work with haiku.

And at that moment there was a clear hierarchy to everything I knew, did and wanted, an order that did not quail to say No to anything not in it. This, I think is what that much abused word "vairagya" means: to know that the world is a crowded place, a place that creates contexts in a flash and makes you want to be in those contexts, and then to work towards not getting drowned, you have to exclude.

I like that idea. I like that it is joined to 'wisdom'; I like being separate.It not only scales things to the same measure, but also, somehow makes work more attractive, god knows why.

Haircut yesterday. S was not distracted, though she did have a new bracelet from Bali, but as I said, not distracted, so the cutting was not on-the edge-of-my-seat! Hmnn, interesting to have a Page 3 Hair Person!

These rains are strange, suddenly there's a burst and then it's gone and you walk a few feet and find it's all dry. Are they poking the clouds into raining? Whatever it is, makes nights interesting.

Strange feeling of detachment; the last dream seemed so much a "message", I am tempted to work on it. I think the time's come for change.

Work is exciting, the kids are inspiring, and it's a shot in the ego to know one is good at this. The rewards are tremendous in what finally turns out: V,B, Sh, K, R, K...and the others' work is proof enough.

The rest of it is a drag, though, and after that week at Manjinakere, I am impatient to shed some of the people growing into my days.

There's light showing at the tunnel-end of the course and its methodology, which appears to be suggesting that it is possible to guide students towards a strategy for learning to write and in the doing of it, also learning about themselves. I am old fashioned enough to want learning to be about self-knowledge.

Looking forward to TODH.

So now I'm on soya milk - not even a drop of cow's milk,my physician said, in chocolate, cheese, butter or anything - and black tea with jaggery, mashed green leafy vegetables and brown rice.

I feel better...the week at Manjinakare was full. Healing, even if only I did not have things to see to. Productive:I sat alone in the grass and many days, on a ledge with rain pouring past me and wrote,thought, sorted out thoughts and set free some old goblins.

And sexy. Not only because he was there - manly in a way that he is not in the city -but also because my body woke up after months and months of hibernation. It was impossible to look at all that fleshy green, listen to all those many birds, feel the cold cold wind or to taste the mist rolling in from the valleys without my body shivering awake into an Ah! So, I'm feeling sexy again, feeling the world.

Up there in the hills, I remembered many things: the old man- now gone- who first taught me to trade in words; the Nijinsky diaries where first I saw the fierce madness that artistic journeys can suddenly turn into; the idea of myself as a teacher...the idea of me with him; those walks.

Something from that week changed something inside, perhaps it's the new diet, perhaps it's the body's waking...after returning to the madness of college, where manipulation and disregard are commonplace - I am floating through what I don't want...without trying.

A week leaning on trees and sitting just outside the reach of rain, composing words onto a page and doing things with him now leaves me listening for rain and sniffing the air for birdsong.

The garden here is lush and bursting with green life, the butterflies have gone with the cold, but there are hundreds of baby ants on the stems of the peas and hanging in stalactites from the upstairs window ledge.

So I've been teaching this class writing for a whole semester...And do they write any better? Have the classes worked?

Many days later

This post was started a long time ago; I took it out today after Vaishali's Thank You. She's with a magazine in Mumbai, subbing...and wrote this morning to say how "rewarding" it is to take a piece of bad writing and rework it till it reads well. She also said, "Thank you Ma'am, really!".

And Bhanu mailed saying that writing is the most "satisfying" thing to be doing, and to my Can I take some of the credit for that?, she said "All of it". That's her being kind... I brought the same virus to a class of 27, out of that some only were infected, but those who were have caught it bad!

So I guess the answer to that question is Yes, in more ways than one, these classes do work, sometimes even if only to the extent of not making the same errors!

To the question of how I "make it work": that I write assures students that I know the ins and outs of these tricky paths; that I can look at their writing and gauge if it will float or sink and - more significantly - tell them how to arrange word, meaning and punctuation so that the vessel sails easy, reassures them that when I say that I am interested in what words do, I'm in dead earnest.

The more I work with students and writing, the surer I am that the first step ought not to be to "expose" them to " good" writing, but rather, it should be writing itself - get students writing and excited by their writing. Go over it and see what it's doing. After, they will read with a great deal more purpose. And pleasure.