a new path

of late, i have been going through a phase of soul searching...

soul searching on: do i have more things than i require? is it becasue of a lack of respect for what i have? do i buy stuff just because i fancy them at that point and then rethink the decision of buying and never use the stuff i have bought? have i become a hoarder?

while i could not agree with the idea that i do not have respect for what i buy, i agreed with the fact that i have done impulse buying... and also the fact that i have not used my stuff rationally... i have just stored things i know i will not use...

but i have stored them because i did not know what to do with them... clothes that i will not wear, or clothes that i have grown tired of wearing, utensils that are just lying around in dark corners of the kitchen cupboards, shoes that i do not like anymore or am uncomfortable wearing, clothes that R has grown out of, things she does not like wearing, or shoes she bought thinking that she liked them, but actually did not...

while i have told myself, "whet before you buy", i have told R, "we will buy you things only when you need them..."

because she is still young and has listened to what i told her, without questions about whether i am doing it myself, i know pretty well that i should practise what i teach her...

and i have found an answer of what to do with the stuff... GIVE THEM OUT, without remorse...

i have given out four boxes of clothes, one bag of toys and some of R's shoes... and let me tell you, I FEEL LIGHTER, I FEEL HAPPIER...

while that is true of my Doha home, in my next visit to India, i need to just give away stuff there... one cupboard of sarees, to top the list...

only then will i feel completely LIGHT. and this time, i mean business.

a little piece of history

while fishing for my certificates yesterday evening I laid my hand on this letter...
it lay on my workstation when i resumed after my maternity leave in March 1996...
Great men come out in the style in which they appreciate... this was the best appreciation i ever got in my professional life and I hold it very dear.

bringing up Mommy

in the midst of a meeting, i suddenly see my mobile ring and guess who was calling: Mom. she now has a roaming mobile and the call was to tell me that she had reached Nainital where she has gone with her friends for a vacation... she'll also be visiting Almora and Ranikheth...
i ran out of the meeting, took her call and spoke briefly...
as the call ended and i was headed back to the meeting room, my mind raced back to those days... those days of gloom... those days when suddenly i became responsible for Mom, without any warning, without any foretelling, without any sign of things to come...
and the "those" days were when Dad passed away... R was two year five months, i had a very demanding job with a 10-hour day, B was awaiting his transfer from Mumbai to Kolkata, while i had already taken the transfer...
to top it all, Mom was now alone in a two-storey house, not knowing how to fill her days and nights, not knowing where to sign on a cheque to withdraw cash, not knowing what and how much to cook for herself, not knowing why her husband had left her alone, with a busy daughter and a son who had to get back to his place of posting...

i literally stretched the days, day after day, to pack in more... my job had to be attended to with a lot of details since the financial institution i worked for was raising public money and i was looking after that in Kolkata, R needed me, Mom was helpless without me ( i called four times an hour to keep her occupied) and i was staying with B's family at that stage, which had its own set of demands, though not tall...

my day began early, at 5.30.
6-7 was driving class.
7-7.30 -- with Mom over morning tea
7.30-8 -- pack R to school
8-8.30 -- get ready for work
8.30-9.15 -- commute to work
9.15-6 -- work
6-7 -- commute back from work
7-7.30 -- with Mom over evening tea
7.30-9 -- R time
9-9.30 -- dinner with R
9.30-10 -- put R to bed and doze off

and in all the calls i kept making, i was trying to address the fact that she had to continue her life, she had to be able to manage herself, she had to make a new structure for her day, she had to stop depending on anyone (even me, though i did not have the heart to tell her that)...

it was almost like having two daughters all at once, one young in age and needing care and one older, needing compassion...

i started taking her to the banks to get her money in place, got her pension sorted and started, make an Excel sheet of her investments, got her started on a Library membership so that she could spend her time reading...

three years passed exactly in the routine above, only change, we had our first owned home and shifted in... B got an offer in Delhi and was not sure whether i could leave Mom alone and come with him. i assured him i would... i wanted Mom to grow up, be independent and live her life...

i left for Delhi, she saw me off with a blank look... but i knew in my heart of hearts that she would carry on...

and she has...

could have been better

this is Hisham Matar's first novel... written well, but could have been better, considering the fact that it had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
living in an Arab country and working with Arabs gives a distinct edge while reading Arab authors since it makes the task of understanding the way they use language and clears a lot of cloud on their thinking process... this thought stayed with me as i turned page after page of Matar's book...
the story is one of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy who, as the protagonist is trying to make sense of the adult world around him... his parents' world, where the mother gives in to secret drinking binges, when the father is away 'on business'...
this is woven in and around with Slooma (Suleiman's nick name) friends, Kareem, the son of Ustath Rashid, who is publicly executed, for opposing the regime in power in Libya in 1979. the execution forces Slooma's mother to go and beg with a neighbour to help release her husband who is also part of the same political group...
till this story segment, the narration is detailed...
when Slooma is sent off to Cairo by his parents to help him carve out a life of better possibilities, it seemed that Matar is in a hurry to end the book... the detailed narration becomes sketchy... and somehow ends, with a touching reunion between mother and son in Cairo...
the imagery if powerful, the story is good, but narration falls short at the end...

a smooth glide

one of the best contemporary Indian writers in English, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is very powerful in the images that she draws for her audience...
in this, she almost weilds a magic paintbrush and paints vividly, with a deft combination of thick and thin strokes, choosing appropriate colours as she goes on finetuning the imagery. Each of the characters, whether present in her stories or not -- Romi, for instance in the first story, from which the book derives its name, is not really present in the canvas, but is there in the readers' mind -- is most likey to remain with them for a long time.
there is a certain subtelty in Lahiri's prose, a certain hold that she establishes almost from the start over the reader which, while giving them the freedom to get inside the book and exploring the minds of each of the characters, does not let go of her/him until the book is over.
each story in this collection is on the lives of Bengali immigrants in the US. the rootlessness is stark in the second generation and is brought out by Lahiri so very clearly... here, possibly because she herself is a second generation immigrant, Lahiri can empathise so well with Kaushik and Hema (in Hema And Kaushik, a short novella, within the collection, written in a unique format) or Sudha and Rahul (the brother-sister duo in Only Goodness).
For me, the last mentioned was the best story in this collection... it brought back so many autobiographical similarities to the fore which i thought, i had simply forgotten...

Chaitra sale and a crucial decision i made early on

this month in our calendar is called Chaitra... the last month before the New Year (Nababarsha), which falls either on 14th or 15th of April each year...
and every year at this time, there is a clearance sale of garments... from shops to footpath stalls (i would not know about malls that have sprung up now), every shop that sells clothes, offers a sale...
shops are choc-a-bloc with buyers since customers suddenly become more trusting when it comes to goods offered on sale, mostly women, who buy for an entire household... there is (was, to be more apt since i am talking about 18 years back, when i left Kolkata, interspersed with two brief stays in between) a custom of gifts to youngsters and people who come helping at home on Nababarsha...
whether goods really become cheaper on sale, i have no idea... what i am convinced about is that the quality of goods genuinely suffer...
if one can go on the first few days, one lands up buying quality stuff at bargain prices, made more attractive with saree clad Bong housewives who, gloat over their bargaining skills with the shopkeepers, in mid-day scorching sun...

as i write this, i re-experience the numerous occasions when i accompanied Mom in her exploits, shopping for Nababarsha... money was limited, she made a long list, edited it to delete items which she thought would not make it through Dad who would not look at the list, but would allocate the funds for them...
if the going was good, she would be allocated all that she asked for... if not, she would have to be happy with what Dad thought was appropriate...

i vividly remember the little victory she scored when the amount was okayed... or the little hurt on her face when it was not... and it is the latter that had convinced me the need to be independent financially so that i could go impulse shopping, if i needed to...

i saw the same victory on her face when she was here with us last year and i was out with her, she next to me on my modest car, bought with my own modest means... but there again, it was laced with a thin film of tears in her large eyes (my large eyes are from her) on two counts... of joy that her daughter has done what she could not; of sorrow that her husband did not live to see what she has...

i don't know which of the emotions was primary, though...

our parenting, their parenting 2

the new academic year is about to start, so evenings are spent in covering exercise books... thankfully, books have been given with a lamination... so no sweat over them...
despite being shown how to do it, R has not yet mastered covering books... she will do a ramshackle job and stuff the books in, if pushed to do it...
while it is no rocket science and there is no genuine skill involved in covering books, we (bro and me) were thrown into doing things beyond a certain age... i cannot recollect when exactly i started doing these things on my own, but i remember vaguely that it must have been when i was in 4th/5th, not later... and R is in 8th now...
i cannot sulk at home... B does not like it...
so here i am, tapping out at the keyboard, but in my heart of hearts, i know the reason why R is not yet into things i used to... my over-protectiveness... i can see the smirk on many of your faces... and i know i need to work on this...
let's see how well i manage that...