Basho's frog Rumi's dog

The hours of days

2012-01-10T18:24:00.000+05:30

The hours of days are not all alike; when I open my eyes and wake to a new day’s asks, at first I want to fill its moments with the thrum of industry; move them like horses to rack, like packs to hunt, like hammers towards strike. And I want to be the hand that takes this day in its calloused grip and does with it what practiced hands do with things.

Then, like what the advent of deliberate birds does to dark trees in morning’s half lights, little by little, I am populated by a swarm of intent, and flighted moments bend me to their sway. Before long my steeds are gone, my dogs turned wild, my smithy run cold and I am the waiting thing this day will take into its skilful hands to do with it as it does.

2009-07-05T19:13:00.003+05:30

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.

2009-07-05T19:05:00.002+05:30

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

2008-12-25T08:46:00.002+05:30

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

2008-10-09T17:52:00.002+05:30

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.

2008-10-02T16:40:00.002+05:30

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.

2008-07-23T09:21:00.003+05:30

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.

2008-06-20T14:42:00.003+05:30

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.

2008-03-17T20:20:00.004+05:30

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.

2008-02-24T13:09:00.004+05:30

That's what happened. We couldn't leave our husbands. P was the keenest to go, and M was wavering because of her mother...I did say I would put all else on hold and join this girls' day out to a resort-type place, out at Devanahalli. Good for walks, which is what we miss most in the city, and for quiet and sleep( for me, not they; I am the one that lives in a house with 12 others, three of them my children).

But it turned out that P's husband was off work on the two days that we had scheduled this for, and that made me remember a session with K. So we haven't gone. But we will.At least now it's established that we are keen to go. And with each other!

My Sacred Hearts' email group is fun. There are a bunch of 6-7 girls who mail regularly, and it's like a blog of their days, with news of work and kids, and love. Saira wrote in to say she's in a performance in a play which was using verses from Rumi. Another time, there was news of a first date that one of the group's divorcees went on; when she mailed in a description of her evening, lots of advice poured in. There's endless strength in friendship's supplies. And for the girls abroad, this group seems to be oxygenerating.

About a week later: M's mother died. Peacefully and with dignity. M was thankful she did not linger and decay. Can't imagine how M would have coped.How would I,I wonder?

2006-08-16T23:03:00.000+05:30

It's night, winds are communing and celebrating noisily outside my window, some of it sweeps over me through the netting. Just back from my Cultural Studies class. Tired, excited. Picked up a book called How to Do Things With Words, looks interesting.

Tried to read Gayathri Spivak,again, and gave up quickly with annoyance. Why must she write in that convoluted, difficulted way? It is, you know, difficulted, made to swallow up the reader in its spread-out bogs of quickword.

How come she never learnt to do with words what words are intended to do with theory?

Reading Karol Wojtyla, the sense of work, and the sense of wording work into days' inevitable passivity, comes in a rush that mushroom magics the head. And heart. And word thought. He makes things happen with words. To use simple words is to avoid a simplistic equation of difficult/complex thought and difficult/complex word structure.

Am going to finish watching The bridge of San Luis Rey, a film about destiny and chance. And love and faith. One could die on those.

Two poems, started in the staff room, partly to stave off conversation, remain unfinished.

2006-05-17T17:40:00.000+05:30

This is about friends' part in the building and keeping of faith. And much more, if you sit and look. They come and repair not just the hearth, but the plumbing and the electricity, and paint the house over more often than we know.

Once, seriously, I had this conversation about whether friends can be as intimate as lovers, with who used to be my best friend: he on the side of friendship, I on that of love. Then love was bright and single layered. And flew its flag very militantly.

It was bound to turn an older, more knowing corner and thicken into layers of dark and wanting, turning intimacy new, taking more than it gave back, leaving inscape scooped out, hollows calling to be filled.

In a foolish reflex of shame one hides these hollows from friends, till they spread all over the backyard of being, and one keeps falling and getting broken. Then one calls: and the caravan of one's friends comes traveling through the darks, boarding over the hollows, and they sit beside you and they open out the old fat, dusty albums of you and them and of a world where hollows could be filled in, and they paint over the scratched out slate of mind, and they conjure up the magic words to rekindle your doings, and they light up the old fires that set those old shadows back to dancing on the cave-walls of the heart, and you know that friendship is as intimate as love.

A, boy wise beyond years,new friend,what makes you able to speak when those twice your age balk? What makes you soldier out into this terrain of potential explosions?

2006-04-07T08:24:00.000+05:30

My well-thumbed Shambhala Kabir has become an answer book of sorts. In need, we look for signs and imbue things with such significance that often they cannot even contain.

So here I am making choices with my Kabir. One day I brood over possible losses and open the book and it reads: "Into the looking-glass cavern
the dog goes running.
Seeing his own reflection,
he dies barking"

OUCH!

On another occasion, worrying about something I was depending on to happen, the book opens to :" Use the strength of your own arm,
stop putting hope in others.
When the river flows through your own yard,
how can you die of thirst?"

But of course, it is a strong arm!

Foolish? Superstitious? Hell no, just an unwavering faith in the magic of the word. Words are signs and spells and life is learning the how of the world through words.

I am not ready for this day. I would like nothing better than to sleep. Or better still, I will watch a film. That will be two birds with one stone, the heart's bird and the mind's. Better to get high on movies than books, I think, because a book always seems to want you to do something.

I don't want days to brighten, where is the rain and dark dark skies? Let there be dark!

2006-04-03T06:41:00.000+05:30

So here I am, the sun's up and waiting to turn it on strong, in the meantime, the glow is fiery orange. Once it begins to burn, as it will, I will have to pull the curtain across its fire. It's already looking like its holding its breath and working up the fire. Do they too have bad mornings, I wonder?

Ha, there, I can see from the corner of my eye, its hotting up.

I will now go down and make tea. And then I will ''get ready'' and go to class. Is one ever really ready for students, I wonder? But it's the most fantastic feeling in the world, to stand before a class and receive return messages for what you say to them. I get a great high. Nothing I can think of, not even writing gives that kind of shot in the spirit.

And in every class there some kids who are special, whose mere presence is enough to give the entire class a warm expectancy. And then there are the other kind of special kids, who colleagues have warned you about already, the rough waves, the unpredictable swirls in which you can feel like there's nothing to hold onto.

I believe that the act of making meaning with words is a magical transformative process, and only the really unimaginative child will not, by the end of some learning adventures, not be touched by that magic to want to participate. I can see it in my class. And it makes me high. Hmm, everybody must get stoned, right?

Off to daily routine this morning. And then I have some knots to iron out. I take on this day with the feeling that I can.

2006-03-28T02:48:00.000+05:30

Another day.
I came back up to my room on the roof, after a scare with some "intruder" running up onto the terrace and a policeman chasing him, and waking up the family downstairs, and my mother calling frantically to say don't open the door someone 's run up onto the terrace, and being exiled to the hall downstairs so full of mosquitoes that I could sleep only in snatches, interspersed with scratching . Then I moved into my daughters' room, where they played music till I started to protest and every night I would feel like an intruder, though they were accommodating, but I could not sleep.
Finally yesterday I moved back up and the ease of it all.

Its nice to be awake when everything else is asleep. Haven't done this in a long while;woke up with bright ideas and had to do something about it. Then before shutting off, decided to blog a bit, I think I'm getting bloggier.

Been watching all the Oscar films. Right now have A History of Violence, supposed to be very good.

2006-03-02T08:36:00.000+05:30

Triumphant, celebratory, like the zen flag. Is how I feel. Purposeful.

This morning's darkness was epiphanic, waking alone in a bed looking out over the tops of the dark silhouettes of trees, hearing the birds stir, and now, to finish a poem started a month ago.

This morning I am emptied by actually feeling the thought of how being alive too is a shifting thing - if you are alive, you are simply alive and what is right now just is right now, its not the 'before' of an 'and then'. Nothing needs to lead to anything else, just the thought that waking to the promise of silence and meaning doesn't have to yield up something appears to have freed the words I tried to shackle to my lines. And my poem finished.

If I could not make things with words, or music myself into friends' hearts with words, if my business were with other than words, if in seasons of sorrow, there were no words to bridge into the world, or when done, the deeds that have passed, if they could not be buried into a waiting field of words, I would be like blind people, whose faces never fully develop because they can't see other people looking at them.
Anyway, here's my poem.

Nothing prepares us for what we become.
Today's page
shows the skill of yesterday's making.
I put them there,
The lines, columns,
This city peopled with my words.

Now I must separate
text from annotation
to know what it was I said.

In my doings's bowl,
the Rorschach of give- and-take
maps the rounds and sharps
of time's rush,
I need only separate shape from chimerical other shape.

Was it only yesterday, at turn of evening
I said, " I will",
and leaning into the horizon, read its signs?

Today's auguries are laid out:
if I were still a poet, would my
fingers have known its pulse? (I was a poet, you know;
no, poetry is not like cycling, once mastered never lost.
a poet corrals herself out of poetry's stretch
should she ever forget the lyric of herself )

In the cave of that tree's dark branchings -
just a name's distance away -
sunflame and birdstir;
across the sky's blue, cloudloops.

Can I not tell its meaning?
If I stretch a little
just a little more out of this ailment of
inwarding,
perhaps.

March 2, 2006.
8.43

2006-02-03T21:38:00.000+05:30

For some reason I've been thinking of Osho. Osho Rajneesh. And the way he died. And the way, before that, he was thrown, unceremoniously, out of the Land of Opportunity, like a beggar, like one who had gone there a begging opportunity,when he was distributing opportunity to many hundreds of thousands of yearning seekers.

Only Pritish Nandy wrote condemning the US's treatment of Rajneesh, a moving piece in The Illustrated Weekly pointing out that he was a guru, not a criminal and saying the US routinely accorded criminals much more respect.

What we respect says a lot about us.

Evening in my room

2006-01-26T18:11:00.000+05:30

It's evening in my room
too
the light is of evening, and evening's lingering tale
of things unsaid, people unmet....

This room up on the roof, where the sky comes in at the door's magic rectangle,
where I wake to the keening of birds and the bursts of trees in bloom, where at each window, there beckon tantalizing lights and shades, this room that you cannot see is where I sit and correct all your papers and plan your lessons, and sometimes dread the next class approaching all too soon.

This afternoon I went to visit my husband's teacher, who, four days ago, had his brain visited briefly, oh so fleetingly, by a stroke...For three days he staggered a bit when he stood up and walked, he forgot words and the connections made with memories, but then the touch passed and he's not slurring anymore, he's not staggering. He even made coffee for me, filling - while my heart felt as if I were watching leaves falling in clouds from humbled trees - a heavy pan with water, the filter with coffee powder, waiting beside the water till it boiled, pouring it into the filter, then into the shiny new flask( he never needed one till now) then waiting till the coffee sank a bit then refilling it then watching the milk till it boiled, then mixing the coffee in a glass and passing me biscuits.

Some things we forget how much they can mean. I came out to a bright hot evening, a blue sky without promises, roads screeching with traffic. In my heart the leaves are carpet thick, and I am too busy to linger there.