It was almost dark. As I entered my room to switch on the lights, there it was on my window sill...a baby pigeon lost in the dark..! I went close softly and looked at it. Where is the nest...? Did it lose its way? Was it the first day of flight through the vast blue..? Helplessly, it looked around. I drew the curtains in silence so as it to give it a secure feeling, for my eyes were undoubtedly its cage and my perception, its prison. I moved away and sat at the corner of the bed, stealing glances at that unexpected visitor. And after a while, it transformed...there I was - sitting on a narrow concrete platform at the edge of an abyss under a nameless roof. And here in the room were the eyes - unknown and curious. I could feel the eyes, but could not flap my wings. Darkness had caught me midway, and I had lost my maps. Vulnerable, exposed, apprehensive, I could scarcely move. And there were the eyes - invisible and curious. It was a lost battle, for if they came close, I had no option but to pretend alertness by staring back, and all around, there was this envelope of darkness. I had to wait, through endless hours, hoping for light gradually... I sat there stiff, turned to stone, for who knew if my quivering wings would offend the eyes..this wasn't fair. I had to complain...this precarious narrow strip of balance between the cage and the abyss.. Who was there to listen to me? Yet another pair of eyes across the patches of blue above..? And there were sounds, unfamiliar and strange..an unknown tongue of weird verbiage, which I could not fathom, but faintly sense... I've heard these eyes, more powerful than me, call some of their kind, pigeon-hearted... Swung back to the edge of the bed, I smirked - one should have lived the pigeon, to know what it means!
Monday, November 14, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Musings
Love is no love if it cannot broaden the horizons of the mind to accommodate and include. Relationship is no relationship if it cannot perceive the beauty of jointly shouldering responsibilities beyond the binaries of mine and yours. People who had once started walking together, gradually start growing tired of the routine which a social institution like marriage thrusts upon them. What changes here...the individual or the perspective..? I do not know. Perhaps, in perceiving these duties and responsibilities as a garden jointly owned by the two partners and taking care that every bud may bloom into a flower, lies the key to enjoying a journey of togetherness, with each other. When basic human understanding, cooperation and empathy comes to stand as confinement and restriction, as opposed to love, where do such individuals stand as human beings..?
Every now and then, my facebook shows me status updates - X is in a relationship with Y, X is committed, Y has gone to single from being in a relationship etc. Walking along these lanes of life, a spectator of the self and the surroundings, often do I sit back in my cozy little bed and worship its solidity for being there. I touch my table and the dusty window panes and thank them for the relief they bring from these abstractions...abstractions that I little comprehend...
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Melody
Every now and then, I am reminded of my school days - the phase when we used to meet and work and play with autistic children. This was under a work education programme conducted by our school which involved interaction with an institution for the autistic children. I remember the first day, the first sight of those who were not like us..and then the gradual process of working together to understand each other...till the moment when we actually looked forward to Thursdays to see our friends, and very special friends, in this case. If there is one thing for which I remain indebted to my school, it is this experience, which at a very young age, helped us to internalize alternative subjectivity...it taught us that expressions may vary, but the language of love is felt and shared across apparent differences; that if you cannot accommodate and cherish differences, you can never appreciate the intensity of a bond..
These children belonged to various age groups, the youngest one being around four years old. The severity of their problems varied from individual to individual, two of them being so precarious that they had to be tied to their wheelchairs, else they would fall down. One of them was Akash. We were all allotted one or two playmates with whom we were supposed to interact and initiate joint activities, such as collage making. Collage was fun beacuse as we drew the outlines, the children would tear off bits of coloured papers, dip their fingers into a large container of gum and try to fill up the outline provided. We would hold their hands and that soft touch of unadulterated human warmth and love would be transmitted magically.
Akash was a quiet little boy. With negligible spinal support and sensory integration disorder, he was always tied to a wheelchair, a handkerchief pinned to his shirt for the problem of constantly drooling. It was difficult to talk to him, for with his head bent towards a side, he would never be able to respond; neither could he partcipate in our joint activities. I would take him to the site of collage-making and he would watch-and-not-watch silently from his wheelchair. When I spoke to him of the beautiful sky or the scorching heat, he would not stir. After a few such meetings, one day on my trip out in the school field with Akash, as I took him around constantly talking about everything I could think of, something happened. I saw Akash's finger tapping on the handle of the wheelchair to which it was tied. For a moment, I felt I was simply imagining things, and continued with the walk. But then it happened again. I stopped and opened the soft knot around his arms. It was still tapping. I rose alarmed and just as I did so, something even stranger happened. I bent closer to him to confirm my perception..and there it was...he was humming a tune, very very softly. A strange sensation ran through my body. Fearing any sort of deterioration in his health, I took him back to the room where our teachers were, as quickly as possible, for in these children there is a strange capacity to fathom our minds - they can sense our tension, our not-being-alright, almost instantaneously, without a single word uttered. So, taking Akash back to the room had to be as 'normal' as possible, no matter what the circumstances were. As we reached the room, I wiped his mouth, went to his teacher and told her what had happened. She said she would come back in a while to check and asked me to continue playing with him. As we continued, the teacher came silently from behind and observed Akash. She then bent her head to confirm what I had said. She heard it. Akash was humming a very familiar tune of an old Hindi number, very very softly. The teacher hugged him, tears in her eyes and said "my Akash is happy".
More than a decade has passed. Akash still remains my refuge in moments of solitude, and his song my melody through the cacophony of an otherwise absurd jouney called Life... I do not know what became of him, but as I perceive my self today, I can feel him and his melody reverberating through my being...
These children belonged to various age groups, the youngest one being around four years old. The severity of their problems varied from individual to individual, two of them being so precarious that they had to be tied to their wheelchairs, else they would fall down. One of them was Akash. We were all allotted one or two playmates with whom we were supposed to interact and initiate joint activities, such as collage making. Collage was fun beacuse as we drew the outlines, the children would tear off bits of coloured papers, dip their fingers into a large container of gum and try to fill up the outline provided. We would hold their hands and that soft touch of unadulterated human warmth and love would be transmitted magically.
Akash was a quiet little boy. With negligible spinal support and sensory integration disorder, he was always tied to a wheelchair, a handkerchief pinned to his shirt for the problem of constantly drooling. It was difficult to talk to him, for with his head bent towards a side, he would never be able to respond; neither could he partcipate in our joint activities. I would take him to the site of collage-making and he would watch-and-not-watch silently from his wheelchair. When I spoke to him of the beautiful sky or the scorching heat, he would not stir. After a few such meetings, one day on my trip out in the school field with Akash, as I took him around constantly talking about everything I could think of, something happened. I saw Akash's finger tapping on the handle of the wheelchair to which it was tied. For a moment, I felt I was simply imagining things, and continued with the walk. But then it happened again. I stopped and opened the soft knot around his arms. It was still tapping. I rose alarmed and just as I did so, something even stranger happened. I bent closer to him to confirm my perception..and there it was...he was humming a tune, very very softly. A strange sensation ran through my body. Fearing any sort of deterioration in his health, I took him back to the room where our teachers were, as quickly as possible, for in these children there is a strange capacity to fathom our minds - they can sense our tension, our not-being-alright, almost instantaneously, without a single word uttered. So, taking Akash back to the room had to be as 'normal' as possible, no matter what the circumstances were. As we reached the room, I wiped his mouth, went to his teacher and told her what had happened. She said she would come back in a while to check and asked me to continue playing with him. As we continued, the teacher came silently from behind and observed Akash. She then bent her head to confirm what I had said. She heard it. Akash was humming a very familiar tune of an old Hindi number, very very softly. The teacher hugged him, tears in her eyes and said "my Akash is happy".
More than a decade has passed. Akash still remains my refuge in moments of solitude, and his song my melody through the cacophony of an otherwise absurd jouney called Life... I do not know what became of him, but as I perceive my self today, I can feel him and his melody reverberating through my being...
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Walking down...
Why is it so that the subject-matter for writing or thought, most of the times, is poetic or somewhat linked to it...? Why do we talk of rains and clouds and flowers and love and relationships and seasons...? Why are we so prone to not thinking about things which are ugly or nasty if they do not affect us directly...?
'twas a lovely day..the air filled with a soft drizzle and the sky embroidered with dark patches. I was walking down the slums beside the Bidhannagar station, having completed Coleridge's Kubla Khan with my students at college with reference to the Theory of Imagination and complicated things of the sort, and thereby explaining the process of creation and creativity..and there was this child, two to three years in age, seated on the footpath right in front of me. He frowned at me with angry eyes and that was when I realized that I was almost on the verge of stepping upon some invaluable pieces he had brought together, among them a torn chewing gum wrapper, a piece of cardboard, some brightcoloured strings of I-don't-know-what, a thrown out empty box of some delicacy from some city restaurant etc...I heard an irritated voice asking "why stand in the middle of the road, and that too, such a dirty one, surrounded by garbage all around." I moved aside and saw the couple behind me hurrying down the narrow lane, their faces half-covered, to keep the stink off. That was it. A narrow lane with no defined borders except garbage from the surrounding housing societies. The child didn't seem bothered. I stroked his little head apologetically. This was beyond the artist..the re-incarnation of the sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice..he who on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise..never to be included and cited in a class on Romanticism. He smiled back, his eyes sparkling with the energy to make-something-out-of-it-all...
'twas a lovely day..the air filled with a soft drizzle and the sky embroidered with dark patches. I was walking down the slums beside the Bidhannagar station, having completed Coleridge's Kubla Khan with my students at college with reference to the Theory of Imagination and complicated things of the sort, and thereby explaining the process of creation and creativity..and there was this child, two to three years in age, seated on the footpath right in front of me. He frowned at me with angry eyes and that was when I realized that I was almost on the verge of stepping upon some invaluable pieces he had brought together, among them a torn chewing gum wrapper, a piece of cardboard, some brightcoloured strings of I-don't-know-what, a thrown out empty box of some delicacy from some city restaurant etc...I heard an irritated voice asking "why stand in the middle of the road, and that too, such a dirty one, surrounded by garbage all around." I moved aside and saw the couple behind me hurrying down the narrow lane, their faces half-covered, to keep the stink off. That was it. A narrow lane with no defined borders except garbage from the surrounding housing societies. The child didn't seem bothered. I stroked his little head apologetically. This was beyond the artist..the re-incarnation of the sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice..he who on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise..never to be included and cited in a class on Romanticism. He smiled back, his eyes sparkling with the energy to make-something-out-of-it-all...
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