Maargazhi thingal

Lessons were being learnt even as I lay cursing, pillow held firmly over my head, trying to blot out the vadhiyar's loud voice chanting - "MAARGAZHI THINGAL MADHINIRAINDHA NANNALLLAAAMM...". I knew he would come the next day as well...and the next....and the next. For the whole month of marghazhi the vadhiyar would come, in his moped, at the crack of dawn, to wake sleeping children up with his loud bell and staccato voice. The smell of ven pongal would permeate the house. Amma, bathed and dressed for the recital, would prod me awake with the long stick that was used to pull clothes down from the line, in order to get me to participate. This scene was repeated thousands of times over the twenty five margazhi months I spent in my parent's house. My distaste for pongal began, I am sure, from being fed the damn thing for breakfast for a whole month every year.

When I moved to America I lost the concept of the tamizh months and the festivals that came with them. Sometimes my parents or in-laws would send out a reminder email and we would make a half-hearted attempt to follow protocol. And then, the year that I was pregnant, my mother convinced me that my unborn son's spiritual life hinged on how much I exposed him, abhimanyu-style, to the secrets of vaishnavism when he was still in the womb. It worked. That whole month I tried to recite, if not all thirty, at least the song of the day. I found, to my surprise, that I knew most of them by heart.

This past month - thanks to nanowrimo - I've done a lot of reading about the temples in Mylapore, since that is the backdrop of my story. Again, I found that I knew about a lot of the rituals and that I, in fact, have fond memories of some of them. The mesmeric drumbeat to which Kabaleeshwarar is carried on the bull (adigara nandi), the pradoshams, Sreenivasa perumal taken on utsavam through the steets etc., When did I pick these things up? Since temple talk was constantly in the background when we were growing up I suppose I must have unwittingly soaked it up.

How much of what I was exposed to as a child did I want to subject S to? I can't conjure up a moped-driving vadhiyar but I suppose I could play some thiruppavai tapes in December. Would he get it? Is having a cultural context important? Is it possible to incubate a whole cultural experience in isolation?

I struggle with these questions.

I've decided, however, that this year I will take S to the early morning thiruppavai recitals at the local temple as often as possible. Don't tell my mother!

And miles to go before I'm done...

8000 words down; 42, 000 more to go. The characters are speaking to me already, whispering their secrets so only I can hear. They want to use me as a medium to tell their story and who am I to protest?

Stephen King's advice is that you write about what you know and you say it as it is - no window dressing. I realize everyday, as I write, that there is an awful lot I do not know. There are holes in the plot because of facts I do not know and reseach I do not have the time to do. And this despite the fact that my novel is set in the Mylapore of the 80's - the place and time that is in my blood. For instance, 'Murder in Mada Street' is centered around, well, Mada street, but looking at the map of Mylapore on google maps I realize that there is no Mada street. There is a N.Mada street and a S.Mada street but no Mada street. Really?

Going by King's dictum I've also given up the hope that I can ever write something that is not macabre. I have to be myself - no window dressing.

The working mother experience - part 2

I received an email from a friend complaining that the previous post was all about the trials and nothing about the triumphs. I have been remiss, I admit. The fact that the triumphs outweigh the trials, I thought, was self-evident. She says no, not if you’re not on the conveyor belt yourself. So, here goes. Here below is my exposition on why I choose to work instead of staying home with my son.

As with all things, it began many years ago, with my mother. My mother, rabidly religious and old-fashioned, was also a working woman. She belonged to the working women legion of the previous generation that did a 150% job at home (cooking, cleaning, in-laws, kids et al) while still holding down a fairly serious, well-paying job. I know very little about the nature of work she did, just that every weekday morning, for thirty five years, she demonstrated responsibility by stepping out of the house to face the world. I was never told how much money she made but I knew it wasn’t a pittance.

I’ve been to her office a few times as a little girl and vividly remember the room she worked in. The room was large with big windows and a tall ceiling from which fans hung and hummed all day long. A broad, glass-topped desk stood under one such fan, mounted by several thick ledgers. I usually took with me a book to read while she worked but most days I would just daydream that I was the person on the other side of the desk, peering into that important looking ledger. I remember being kicked that the person I called mom was someone the Reserve Bank of India considered important enough to employ, retain and promote periodically. I knew even back then that I wanted a career.

All through her working life Mom came back home with stories about class fours (clerks) who didn’t work, typists who sleep in the cloak room, her boss, who’s son or daughter was getting married and when and so on. I listened, not fully understanding, but when I went to work myself I was able to better relate to some of her stories. After work I would stop by the kitchen and relate the day’s happenings, receive advice and compare notes (our careers overlapped by a few years). The fact that I could discuss the nitty-gritty details of my job with my mother was something I was very grateful for.

One fringe benefit of mom’s job was that when mom made friends with women from different geographies she picked up their cuisines. Rajma/Chawal was introduced to our household thanks to Panjwani aunty and Karakuzhambu thanks to Ganga aunty. By the time I was in my teens her repertoire of dishes had grown to include such items as chop suey, jams, pizza, biscuits and nan breads, to name just a few. Living, as I do, in the west, I cook way less adventurously than my mother did all those years ago in remote Mylapore.

The biggest influence my mother’s job had on us was, of course, financial. She got me my first computer and my first moped. She further financed the fueling of the moped with some arcane allowance the bank accorded. My college education was funded by a scholarship from the bank. Owing to the fact that she worked in a bank she knew the basics of investing and did not have to depend on the man of the house to secure our future. As a child I used to listen to my parents discuss investments and I grew up with the knowledge that it is not necessarily something that is relegated to the men of the house. When I got my first job she appointed herself my financial planner and opened LIC accounts, fixed deposits and purchased jewelry with my savings. To this day mom manages my bank accounts in India, sending me scanned forms and balance details even without my asking her.

Mom was an ace at taking exams. To prepare for one particular exam held by the bank, I remember that she checked into a hotel room for a few days, which was an unusual thing for a woman of her generation to do. Sure enough she topped that exam but perversely declined the promotion that came with it, since it required that she relocate to a different state. Right there she was demonstrating the fine art of balancing priorities.

Being a working woman made my mother an independent entity in our eyes, not just someone who made our meals and took care of us. She never once lectured us to be independent. She did not have to. She was leading by example.

I work because my mother worked and that enriched my life. I can expect to do no less for my child.

The working mother experience

The one opportunity I had of getting published, I blew. The office was compiling a list of stories about the trials and triumphs of working mothers on their rolls and an email was sent out soliciting inputs. I was thrilled to bits. So much so that I had the email safely tucked away in my 'Follow up' folder and promptly forgot about it. The book, when it came out, was glossy and attractive with dozens of stories that pulled at my post partum, hormone surged, and sentimental heart. There were stories from people at all levels, stories of the every day kind, stories about what a struggle it is to raise a child in this shifting world of changing priorities. At the time that I browsed through the book S was seven months old and I was a tired, groggy-eyed, barely-alive human being who was just a millisecond away from a meltdown at any point of time. I was touched by several stories in the book, especially one by a manager who spoke about attending a customer call on mute while rocking her sick baby in her office chair and changing his diaper at the same time. (been there, done that). That one moved me to tears. So here is the story I would have written had I remembered to contribute:

November 17, 2008: My first day alone with my son, Sanjay. No more parents or in-laws for cushion; it’s just the three of us. I'm terrified of screwing up. I'm terrified of not being able to cope with work, chores, a manic pumping schedule and the sometimes monotonous task of caring for an infant. I have no experience to count on, only overly confusing and contradictory advice from the internet.

November 18, 2008: Two days in my administration and S is having a triple assault of fever, ear infection and a stomach bug. I am terrified that my child will die in my care. When I tell my doctor this on the telephone she does not rise to the bait. She will simply not have him brought in till he is hot enough to iron clothes with. In the middle of this blue funk I catch myself thinking about the afternoon meeting that I will have to skip. Can I catch-up on what happened tomorrow? And then comes a stab of guilt. What kind of mother thinks about work at a time like this anyway?

November 19, 2008: S is feeling better. The woman at the daycare urges me to bring him in. She assures me that playing will make him forget his discomfort. I dress S warmly - over dress him - and that makes him unhappy. He whines all the way to his daycare and then some.

November 20, 2008: I'm late. My first meeting for the day begins at 9.00 AM. It's 8.15 AM now and I can smell the diaper that is inside several layers of winter clothing. It would take five minutes to remove all those layers, two minutes to clean him up and five more to put them back on. I would never make it in time for the meeting. Should I just drop him off in his morning mess? Is it very discourteous to do so? Or should I dial in to the meeting like yesterday? I'm so sleepy and tired. I don't want to be faced with any decision at the moment.

November 21, 2008: I read the book 'The working mother experience' and realize that I’m neither a mercenary nor a freak. I am just one of several thousand working women trying to do the best she can when both time and energy are shrinking.

Flirting with writing

All over the web people point to nanowrimo as a way to kick start that novel you always wanted to write but never quite got around to. Its quite simple. In the month of November one does his darndest to write 50,000 words towards that elusive novel with little or no emphasis on quality, grammar, or even plot. It’s a simple number game or a literary enema, if you will. Once the darn thing is out -and I'm not belaboring the enema bit here- one can take as long as he wants to rework, restructure and basically beat it into shape. At the end of the month you submit your post to the website and get a pat on the back from them and from then on you're on your own. The website apparently only does a word count so you could upload your mortgage document or a legal brief and be called a novelist but why would you want to? There is an editing equivalent of nanowrimo but I’ve spent very little time on it primarily because I feel that if I’m going to write in a tearing hurry, I'd be better off editing consciously. However, since my focus is completely given to nanowrimo prep at the moment, I reserve the right to go back on my opinion on namoedmo. The website has a list of authors who went through this "novel" processing line and ended up with a published book but - this won't surprise you - none of them have gone on to win the Pulitzer yet.

When I read this I went through a cyclical round of embarassment, shame and excitement. I felt like a loser even considering the possibility of enrolling but the chance of shooting Mr that-is-such-a-stupid-idea-i-can't-believe-I-wrote-that in the head was enticing. If you'd even participated in a high school creative writing contest you'd know what I mean. The whole challenge in writing is that this busybody of an inner critic sits with you and takes over the whole process till it reaches a point where you crumple the paper, toss it in the bin, and drown yourself in back-to-back 'Sex and the City' episodes. To be part of a process that says quality is overrated and that its all about the act is liberating. For me, however badly I may write, writing really gives me a buzz. Just for that, it's worth going through this exercise, don't you agree?

I've been preparing furiously for the event, scribbling notes on paper napkins and 5-subject spiral bound note books. For a while I contemplated getting yellow legal pads to write notes on but dropped the idea because it's old (Scott Turrow wrote Presumed Innocent in this manner). I've purchased several books on the subject of writing which I've stashed in all locations where I could potentially have a free minute (in my car to read when i'm getting an oil change, in the kitchen to read while i'm waiting for the water to boil over, in the...you get the picture). These include such thrillers as Plot & Structure, Strunk & White etc., I've been reading a lot of writing blogs in my free time as well and some easier reads such as Stephen King's 'On Writing'. The only non-writing book I've read this month -Murakami's 'What I talk about when I talk about running'- ended up having considerable advice for writers.

Here is Murakami on the subject of writing:

"Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor."

And here is what Stephen King says in 'On Writing':

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."

Two experts saying more or less the same thing - that it's as much about ass-to-chair as about fickle talent and the former can sometimes compensate for the latter.

I'm willing to buy it. I have nothing to lose and 50,000 words to gain.

Poetry to beat the blues

I never thought I’d say this but my adolescent fascination with Vikram Seth’s poetry is wearing off. His prose I still love, but his poetry, when i re-read it, sounds clichéd and affectedly cute. There, I’ve said it, and now that I have I feel less of a traitor. That said, I heartily recommend chanting the following verse fifty times as an antidote to Monday morning blues. It works for me.

'Voices'
Voices in my head,
Chanting, “Kisses. Bread.
Prove yourself. Fight. Shove.
Learn. Earn. Look for love,”

Drown a lesser voice
Silent now of choice.
“Breathe in peace, and be
Still, for once, like me.”

-Vikram Seth

Once upon a time...

Time was when all the waste my family of ten generated could be contained in a broom and dustpan that one of the servants we employed would take out daily and empty into the community dustbin. The waste itself comprised mainly of vegetable matter, tightly wound balls of hair and grains of sand and dust that accumulates so easily in India. Rarely the dustpan would take out an empty rasna carton or frooti tetrapack. The presence of these blatantly commercial items usually implied that the children of the house had been indulged by a visiting relative or a family friend. For the most part we made everything in-house including ice creams, puddings, juices and jams. In that huge, rambling ancestral home there was no place for a dustbin or at least I have no recollection of one. Likewise, i don't recall vegetables being purchased in bulk and stocked in the refrigerator either. My aunt and mother took turns going to the vegetable market to bring home the vegetables in a green knit basket. I remember that green basket so well that I can almost feel it between my fingers now. The basket was placed under a brown bench alongside an aruvamanai and another basket that held onions and potatoes. As my mind roams through the rooms in that house I can recollect every item we owned back then and where they used to be placed. This is partly because we owned so little but also because we never threw anything away. When we outgrew clothes we sold them by weight to someone in exchange for pots and pans. When the pots and pans wore out we took them to someone to have it fixed. In fact some of these utensils outlived their purchasers by several decades and when they were eventually sold it felt like a girl of the family was being given away in marriage.

When my grandmother died and it was time to sell the house and move on, all the objects of our life together were apportioned among the families that lived in that house. When I go home today, I still find some of these objects from my childhood in my mother's kitchen but now they share berth with tupperware containers and ziplock bags and a profusion of other modern storage innovations. These bright and shiny items change and are often replaced but the green bag, my grandmother's dosakal, the ancient wall clock etc., are cherished possessions of the house.

A quick zap to my life in America and what have we? As a nuclear family of three we generate so much trash every day that it frequently threatens to take over the house. Huge plastic sacks stuffed with coke cans, milk, diapers, water cans, plastic bags, bills, flyers and so on. Every year it seems to me that our plastic footprint just keeps going up despite our increasing awareness and the over-priced, cloth-based grocery bags. With time being scarce the shelf life of goods becomes an important parameter and in comes the shrink wrapped carrots and tomatoes and the bread, that must be made of cotton wool, given its propensity to stay mold-free for weeks. I see that the pace of my life has brought about these aberrations but even if I wanted to live a little slowly and deliberately I would have to jump through hoops to live the lifestyle of my childhood. Where would I find a milk man who would walk around town with a cow and a tall silver container to measure out milk? I would trade my organic cartons of homogenized milk were such an option available, even if it meant I had to spend precious minutes every morning yelling at him for slipping in water into the milk. Even after the milkman was replaced by Aaavin covers it wasn't too bad. We had the convenience of pastuerized milk delivered to our doorstep (or street corner) and a safe way of disposing the covers (as we call it in India). We piled the cover up for months and then sold them by weight to a wholesale store that bought such things for money. The children of the house fought endlessly over whose turn it was to sell the covers and pocket the proceeds. Today, I throw into the dumpster, three cardboard cartons of milk every week or twelve every month. Not to mention the countless plastic spoons and forks and all manner of non-degradeable things.

A man I know once told me that he gets one of those huge dumpster pods every few months to dispose off the waste from his house. Have you seen one of those things - those mammoth boxes that a low income family in India would consider ample living quarters? What's alarming is that at the time that I heard this information I remember thinking to myself that it was a good idea. It's amazing what you can get used to. It’s certainly a long distance to travel for someone who slept on the exact same brown pillow for the first seventeen years of her life.

I make fun of my parents when they reminisce about their childhood. They talk wistfully about how things were so different back then and how people were good and kind and milk and honey flowed the streets. Although I recognize that i'm doing the same thing here in this post I also acknowledge that some things have changed for the good. My only gripe is about those instances where we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Sustainable practices seem to have become the buzzword now with the educated classes but for most of my life in India it was the only reality. It made economic sense but it was also a way of life. Were my grandmother Pushpammal alive today I suspect she would disapprove of my commuter mug and pedometer, signs that the concept of time has gone out of wack in my life. And who can blame her?

Some prose, some poetry

I love all kinds of poetry but I’m definitely partial to the smaller ones especially those that make a wry, ironic point with what is said as much as what isn't.

Case in point -

A Man Said to the Universe
A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

On the subject of prose, i'm reading Northanger Abbey right now which is one of Austen's least popular and much reviled book. Damn my literary tastes if you will but I find that I rather like it. The language is delightful and Austen oozes satire. My only complaint about the novel is that I never quite get the same feel for Henry Tillney as I did for her other heros. He is difficult to pin down or form an opinion about and not at all well characterized. He must be one of Austen's weakest heros but i'm willing to forgive her for the fact as this was her first novel (Sense and Sensibility was her first published novel).

I'm looking forward to watching the movie rendition of this book.

Here is a passage about our anti-heroine Catherine Molland -

"She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach [i.e. attract], they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance."

A modern reader will cringe at this passage if read out of context but Austen is merely being facetious.

Bittersweet

So many of the banalities that my parents had mouthed to me when I was a child have come true in my adult life. I have to give it to them - they were dead right about a lot of things. They were right about the fact that some skills, swimming and music for instance, are better learnt as a child, about the fact that adult life is more complex than a child could ever imagine, that money is the universal divider, that more pleasure can be derived from a job well done than from idle chatter - I could go on. They were speaking from experience, of course, but as is typical of parents of that generation they made no attempt to coerce me into their point of view. Instead these tidbits of wisdom were delivered as-is or in between thrashings or during the-annual-report-card-lecture. Would I have been more receptive if they had made an attempt to seduce me with reason? I don't know. I was foolish and idealistic then and only had a head for Agatha Christies and writing bad poetry (the kind that rhymes "fun" with "bun").

Yesterday I was playing ball with my toddler son and out of the blue he came over and delivered a wet kiss on my face. My heart constricted with pleasure and in the next instant there was a slight jab of something that I’ve come to identify as guilt. I think they call it survivor's guilt. If you have a loved one in pain about which you can do little or nothing or if you've ever been through an ordeal and emerged unscathed while others have succumbed, you would know what I’m talking about. Its this feeling that you don't deserve to be happy just as those others don't deserve to be unhappy. What did you do to earn you happiness? That other person was more talented, better looking and better positioned to have a fruitful life than you. What throw of dice cheated them out of their happiness and delivered it to you? And when will it be your turn to pay up? Every new experience, every one of life's pleasure will be tainted by this nagging guilt, this reality check.

This is why that sometimes, when my son lifts his curly head in the middle of watching TV and delivers an absent minded smile in my direction, I feel this compulsion to freeze him in time. Or at least tell him to enjoy his childhood as best as he can because adult life is a mixed bag. That was the stuff of my parents’ message to me but I never got it.

Semblance of normalcy

I made the time (by shooing my son away when he came with a board book with 'Poi appa kitta padikka sollu') to read two books in a month, something I haven't done in a while. I've been avoiding reading 'The White Tiger' for a year now, primarily because i'm sick to my stomach of the genre but when I did read it, I found that I rather grudgingly liked it. The second book was 'The Reader' - a book about Nazi war guilt which I found completely unbelievable and upsetting but which I finished out of sheer habit. So, there, i've squandered the time I stole from my child by reading two books that made me quite queasy in the stomach.

It can only get better from here.

Other books in line are - Buy-ology, Northhampton Abbey, Mistakes were made (but not by me).

On a different note, I hope that Sanjay discovers the joy of reading. He seems to be quite keen on knowing what happened to the hungry catterpillar but i'd be more reassured if he didn't hold the book upside down!

Missing the obvious

Have you ever felt that most of life is about realizing the obvious? Do you struggle for years with something till one day the solution comes to you in a swift a-ha moment? And do you, when you sit down to think about it come to realize that your a-ha moment is the stuff they hawk in self-help books on M.G Road for fifteen rupees? If you answered yes to the questions above let me assure you that you are not alone. It happens to me all the time too.

Taking care of an infant without familial support is an all-consuming task - an obvious fact that never registered with me although I've heard it said several times. When people spoke about parental sacrifices I did not realize that they meant basic things like not being able to read a book, soak in the tub or have an uninterrupted conversation with your mother on the telephone. It was with shock that I realized that the most basic of activities require detailed planning, something I can't say I’m very good at. I've had one real vacation since Feb of 2008 in which I spent 70% of my time in a hotel room, read two books in twelve months and probably watched the same number of movies. I was doing nothing yet time was slipping through my hands. I was beginning to feel a little bit trapped in my life.

And then R suggested that I try to attack the day 15 minutes at a time. How about I try to play the violin 15 mins a day when Sanjay is napping, get a 15 min afternoon snooze over the weekend, spend 15 mins cleaning the kitchen etc? How about I look at the day as 15 mins times 96? I began doing this in earnest and sure enough it made a difference. After a year i actually wrote a blog post. I was able to practice the violin at least 2-3 times a week. I even get to read a few pages of a book every once in a while. Minutes add up to hours, hours to days and days to months. I always knew that but it took thirty two years to internalize it.

Fourteen minutes down, one to go. Perhaps I can fill my timesheet with the spare.

The year in passing

When you meet a close friend after a long time what do you say after the pleasantries are exchanged? Where do you begin? I suppose you give them bullet points on what happened over the days, months and years you have not been in touch. And then if the momentum continues and you meet him/her regularly for a fashion, slowly a pattern emerges, the minor details are pulled out one incident at a time and the dots are slowly joined.

That is how i feel right now. More that a year has passed since I wrote anything on this blog. What do I say now? What do i write about? Does it even matter?

Still, the year that has passed has been the most significant one in my life. I had a son, battled post partum depression, juggled work and motherhood sometimes successfully, most of the times by the thread of a hair. All my life I've tended towards cynicism, towards the glass-half-empty-point-of-view. Having Sanjay put some pink fluff on my somewhat jaundiced eyes. Not that I’ve been transformed overnight to the new Miss Sunshine but I don't pass my life under the microscope every opportunity I get as I used to either.

How did what was obviously the most stressful year of my life turn out to be the most significant? I don't know. Maybe its hormonal. Maybe its that fact that I have a whole new opportunity with a whole new person who believes, at least for now, that I’m rather hunky.

Here are some other ways I’ve changed (the bullet points):

I take the color and texture of my son's poop seriously and have serious discussions with other mothers about it.

babble.com has supplanted New Yorker as my favorite reads.

I think about him several times at work.

I do not correct my mother when she suggests that he is a musical genius.

I feel tenderly towards the people who remembered his birthday.

I call strangers to discuss my concerns about my son.

I send flowers to his pediatrician.

Names like Dr Spock, Dr Sears, Gina Ford, and Richard Ferber are integral part of my vocabulary, although I follow nothing and have no method to my parenting madness.

I 've started writing mushy posts.