In love with love

It never ceases to amaze me that English, which is one of the richest and oldest languages, certainly older than Bengali my mother tongue, and richer with a vocabulary of more than a million words compared to Bengali's 100,000; but English has just one word for love, okay two if you count affection. Neither of them are nuanced, neither of them indicate the nature of the emotion, the object to which it is directed. Clipped and curt and businesslike, it gives you the state of the one who feels it but no further details. In the Indian languages I speak/know, and in Arabic which I try to speak and know a little, there are several words for love. In Bengali, there is general love, there is romantic/sexual love, there is the affection felt towards someone younger, there is the love of a mother towards a child, there is spiritual love directed at a divine being. And portmanteau words, which are an integral part of the normal language, no neologisms there, yield unending variants: mother-love, brother-love, son/daughter-love, friend-love. Does this say anything about the speakers of the languages?  I mean, apart from the fact that Bengalis are dreamy navel-gazing idealists in love with love?

Last couple of months have just zipped by - the child went on his first independent, international trip with his class to France, and all my energies in the days of his journey and leading upto it were taken up with not unravelling with worry and spoiling it for him. He managed fine though he did not wear as many layers as I had required and entreated and begged him to.  Once he reached, there was no way to communicate directly with him, but I survived somehow.  Glued to the updates that his teachers provided.  

Also the alternative medicine didn't work, not an iota of improvement after 6 weeks of relentless and fussy doses of pills and restrictions, so went back to the regular ENT and got regular allergy medicine, which seems to be working fine so far.  Breathing in, breathing out.  What more does one need? Keeps it simple, the priorities, love it simple. Wonder if there is a word for that in Bengali?

Tomorrow, or rather in a few hours, the A-Z Challenge starts, and this time I am better organised about both the reading, writing and visiting.  I am not sure whether I should sign up with this blog too, I had originally thought I would, because then I could plan the ones on M-i-V and this could be completely spontaneous, I am a pantzer by inclination! But then again it might be better to wait for the third year to do that.  

Minor epiphanies

Is it enough time now? To look back on the year 2014 with some perspective, I mean.  It's been a very mixed year for me personally. Joyous family occasions and visits in the first half of the year made it go down sweet and smooth in one long, breathless swig.  But then a whole lot of things happened in the second half, some mere irritants and some rather awful. They steadily drip-dripped all through, eroding morale and mood. So I kept putting off the stock taking, the mental toting up of pluses and minuses. Meanwhile we are already halfway through January and the first few global disasters have already muddied the waters - Charlie and Boko Haram. And while je ne suis pas Charlie, je suis Ahmed more likely, and je ai eu some sort of epiphany definitely. There is never going to be a better time, for anything. This is the way it is, warts and all, and if I want to sum up, it will have to be done with them included. I can't slice into time, hold up a skein to the light, turn it this way and that, to make the past look or feel better than it was.

The worst of course was death, and last year it happened to come in threes. First a friend, then an aunt, then a friend's mother who I called aunt, and who had once done up my hair as a child, which incidentally my real blood-aunt had never done. That's how my life has been, strangers and friends have done for me what relatives normally do, and I see this repeated in my son's life as well, the perk-pitfall of expathood. But I digress. In between the deaths, there were the usual annoyances of relocation - the shipment took ages to arrive, a couple of books were slit into halves by the customs while checking for contraband, a few possessions of no particular value but prized nevertheless, got lost or broken.  

Somewhere along the line, my connect with Bahrain snapped, a place where I was happy to be previously, now feels vaguely strange, strangely claustrophobic. On the other hand, my connect with Egypt, which seemed to have snapped clean as I had got ready to move and pack over the long summer, I now find hasn't really, ragged threads here and there persist and surprise me still. Even the usual remedy of going away on a holiday and then the return, that coming back to own spaces and the aha moment which usually drives the nail home as to where home really is, failed to work this time.  The son was supposed to go on a school trip, a strategy I had thought would settle him in, but backfired big time as the visa didn't come through in time.  At the very start of our holiday in mid-December, he had a nasty fall and hurt his ankle, and we ended up going to the airport via the orthopaedic surgeon's clinic. Fortunately it wasn't a fracture, but a ligament injury can be almost as serious.  He is a total trooper and happily trudged on with an ankle brace for the holiday, but our enjoyment was rimmed with concern and initial panic.  A mixed holiday to round off a mixed year.

But it's not all bad.  It never is.  There have been highs as well.  Writing-wise, and family moments; spikes of enjoyment and laughter with friends. I have finally taken control of my health, and have resolved to sort myself out in 2015 once and for all. Trying some alternative medicine right now, which admittedly isn't working, but we'll see.  A time frame of three months, and then I dive into more intrusive treatments, which I have been avoiding for the past five years because I am a bit scared of it. Wealthier and wiser seem elusive, but healthier is an objective I can do something about! And I'm going to get a grip on the anxiety and the needless panic.  

I know I feel this every January, I felt this way about 2014 as well, and boy, was I right! This year too feels important somehow, meaningful in some obscure way, as if I am just months or weeks away from something greatly significant.  As if the changes haven't finished with us yet. I don't know whether that change is going to be for the better or worse, I hope it is for the better, but I know as long as we hang in together, we will manage to cope if, by chance, it is not.  

Unfinished and unbalanced

This year, as in all years, I try to tote up balance sheets, the profits and losses, the learning and the opportunities lost, and it seems overall like a hard year to sum.  It has been a hard year, harder than usual, difficult in complicated ways.

I have travelled back and forth, I have moved home, I have battled with my usual, baffling, allergy-related illness and ye olde spirit is finally flagging, I am more uncomfortable in this body and its odd “disability” at this moment than I have ever been in the last five years.  I started learning Arabic and then stopped, I am not sure whether this is going to be a permanent break or if I will be able to pick it up again next year.  I blogged and wrote much, but still couldn’t complete the edits to the novella, and now that I think about it, maybe I should rewrite the whole thing, keep the kernel and scrap the rest.  A bit disappointing either way.  On the other hand, I also wrote a whole bunch of flashes and short stories and poems, some of them felt real good too, I started a new blog where I am less poetry and more me, all me in fact.  A blogpost here won an award. But right now all that doesn’t feel as important, as monumental as the things that didn’t get done. 

When I had come to Bahrain more than eighteen years ago, that was a huge change, from a working woman to a trailing spouse, from a big city, dwarfed in an even vaster country, to an island nation where one fell off the farthest edge after an hour’s drive.    Claustrophobia would have been justified then, but I am feeling it now with a lag of eighteen years.  As it was, I had got on with the job at hand and settled down and made the most of, even revelled at the staying-at-home part then.  I learned to cook and bake, found flexi-time jobs, wrested new computer skills, started a family, learned knitting from scratch, read a lot, made up stories and poems for my infant son, and left myself no time for disgruntlement.   Moving back here from Cairo seems minor in comparison, I already know the territory, both physical and psychological. So it feels a bit weird now, to be hit with this irritable restlessness, this chafing at a way of life that has been long familiar, in fact enriching even, truth be told.  

It is patently obvious that the further I have journeyed from my place of birth, the more time and resources I have had to look at my paths mindfully and critically, to regulate the pace of the travel; to glean, at leisure and unstressed, whatever insights that might have been granted me. I have been lucky in more ways than one, so it feels petty and above all quite baffling to give way to an attack of negativity.  To lose my perspective and let it be coloured by the temporary heartaches of the last half of the year.  Maybe I should revisit all this later this month, leave this blog post unfinished as of now.  The year is not yet over.  I think that is just what I will do.

Forever Indian II

Banners in front of the Tata office, Mokattam, Cairo

What, Indianisation?  Again? Well, yes.  In a previous post, I have put forward a historical perspective on the multifarious ways the world has been Indianised, past and present.  I have dutifully looked at facts and blathered on about figures - populations and diaspora, trade and FDI.  I don’t say facts and numbers are not important, they are. Extremely important. But they are kind of dry.  Lack the thrill sometimes, that sense of amazement on unearthing some tiny miracle tucked into the mundane somewhere, wholly unexpected.  Nope, numbers can never tell the entire story.  For that one has to look beyond them.  

Forever Indian

India has captivated the imagination of the world since ancient times.  Her list of contributions to our collective knowledge base and cultural heritage is formidable.  From small things like buttons (Indus Valley Civilisation, 2800 BCE) to sophisticated concepts like the zero and ahimsa, Indian ideas and discoveries have diffused across the world for millennia and still impact lives today.  A paisley patterned scarf, a dish of kedgeree, a game of Ludo, a peaceful protest rally – these are all more Indian than you think! 

It wasn't just charity that began at home

Over at the other blog, the "flogged" blog, which incidentally has just celebrated its third anniversary, did you even think we'd survive this long? I know! I even surprise myself sometimes. Anyways, getting back to the point, over at that very respectably-aged blog we have been talking about identity, straddling cultures and alienation and frustration resulting from the diaspora experience. With a British-Nigerian poet who knows a thing or two about straddling.  And identity and alienation. And of course, poetry.

I found that post extremely interesting.  Partly because she happens to be a native of the country where I was a foreigner once, the bakuwa, often called bature, the skinless one, the distinctions between my lighter Asian skin merrily conflated with that of Europeans, to my discomfiture, resentment as well as astonishment.  But as I reflected on my diaspora experience, it kind of appeared that my entire trajectory has been a little different, drawn awry by its own momentum.  

The first cut is the deepest

But first, a couple of actual experiences where I felt unfairly treated because I was a minority, a foreigner/stranger or some way related to my identity.

Toppish and Tennish : A Choice of Short Fiction

Did you see that books-that-stayed-with-me challenge recently making the rounds everywhere?  A couple of friends tagged me, and then I tagged a couple, and before I knew it, my tbr list, which is always a mile or two longer than I like, was raging totally out of control.  

I had at least two books of short stories on my list.  So the other fall out was that I couldn't get rid of the idea of putting together a list of memorable short stories.  Here are some wonderfully rich tales, sad, happy, comic, horrifically thrilling, and deeply satisfying.  No particular order, and many more stashed away in the memory bank, restricting myself to the ones that were TOM when I sat down to write the post.  Except for a couple, most are available online so links included.  And no, none here from Chekhov, don't kill me!  I  do not really like his stories, the fault is entirely of my own taste and character, nothing to do with his brilliance.

The End of the Party  - Graham Greene



Silver Water -  Amy Bloom




The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Ernest Hemingway




Lamb to the Slaughter - Roald Dahl




The Necklace - Guy de Maupassant




My Beloved Charioteer - Shashi Deshpande (No links that I could find, part of an anthology called The Inner Courtyard)




The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield




The Ant and the Grasshopper - W. Somerset Maugham




The Gift of the Magi - O' Henry



Sredni Vastar - Saki

I am actually rubbish at picking favourites.  The minute I put down Sredni Vastar say, I feel conflicted, what about the Reticence of Lady Anne?  And The Last Leaf is surely just as sentimental and satisfying as The Gift of the Magi, isn't it?  What about Alice Munro, she is a favourite contemporary short story writer, where do I fit her in?  Margaret Atwood?  Kazuo  Ishiguro?Salinger? Twain?

And how can I not even mention the richness of Bengali short fiction?  Samapti by Tagore still gives me goosebumps, Banaphool's works, Satyajit Ray's Fritz... And what about the novellas?  Mice and Men, and The Snow Goose and The Small Miracle.  The names come tumbling one after the other and there's no stopping. The nicest thing is of course that  in real life, there is no need to stop at ten or twelve, no need to pick favourites at all. 

Do you like reading short fiction? And if you do, which are the ones that you have liked?