Tuesday 1 January 2019

A Silver Thank You


Thank your parents for giving you the best of their youth. Extend their youth by taking them to meet their friends. Lighten the fears you have sensed they have by talking about them in the group.

Thank them for making it possible for you to enjoy opportunities in a smart new world. Interpret this new world for them by teaching them how to use some gadget. Surprise them by connecting with them during the day.

Only you can help them fight loneliness, for you are their umbilical cord to the energy of the wider community. Thank them for when they entertained your curiosity and share your observances from your day out in the world.

Celebrate the special moments of old age with your parents. Be grateful for every memory they share, for that new health app they learn to use, and for another birthday they live to see. Be attentive, and express your joy in these moments.

Thank them for every morning when they set you off with blessings and every evening when they wait with prayers for your safe return. Pray for them and with them.

Friday 13 October 2017

Pointless Persecution



The book I translated and edited has just been published. Pointless Persecution was written by Pastor Balabir Negi in Hindi in 2016. The English version has added stories of how he suffered persecution after coming to the Lord Jesus Christ. You can order your copy here: http://mountainpeak.biz/index.php/pointless-persecution.html

Thursday 26 March 2015

Lives, Films and Unacted Parts

You remember when Facebook put up short films reviewing the online-lives of its subscribers? Boring as the films were, I couldn’t stop thinking about the man-hours spent in watching all those films. Soon I found myself thinking of the Last Judgment. I surmised freely and may God forgive me if I am wrong in these surmises.

What I thought was that Heaven will last an eternity, because who knows, the Last Judgement will take forever to carry out. Just imagine, the lives of everyone from Adam onward being played back on a giant screen! God the Judge presiding over the public screening. One life-film at a time. Not one second of the person’s earthly life edited out. There will be context for every action and hopefully explanation for every judgment. Context and commentary… how wonderful!

And I thought in Heaven will I really understand the people who were part of my life. A gallery of faces passed before me and at the head were Papa and Mummy. The two people I’ve spent my life trying to understand.
                                                                             
***

Papa and Mummy were children in the 1940s. Growing up in Christian-dominated neighborhoods in the south, and educated in their mother tongue. In early adulthood they moved to the north where most people spoke another language and practiced another religion. Me? I was the anxious offspring of migrant parents, growing up in shape-shifting Delhi. Trying not to speak with “stammering lips and another tongue.” Unlike my parents, trying too hard to fit in. But like them, existing in a zorb ball, separate from others. Tens of other contextual factors that I know of but don’t fully understand.

Then there is the communication – the inadequacy of its quantity and quality, especially where Papa was concerned. He was a man of few words, even fewer where women were concerned. And he brooked no careless word or gaze. Expressed his disapproval with a fearsome look. I learnt early that he liked obedience and didn’t like a show of disrespect.

But that was him as a parent. What was he like as a child? As a young man. As a person.

***

You know the literary concept of “unacted parts” – the Woolfian strategy of adding detail to the personalities of characters, in one way, by breaking the unities of space, time and action. Or “bubbles” – what the editing tutor at the film school I attended, pointed to. Bubbles are moments in the film, he said, that are at once separate from the narrative and inseparably part of it. The tutor was reviewing a film I had been editing. Nothing New was inspired by a few early memories of Papa. A film that was at once fictional and intensely personal. A projection if you like of what Papa might have been like as a young man and how I would have been altogether like him if I were male.

People’s responses to the film told me where my mental picture of Papa could be correct and where it was likely to be false. The making of Nothing New gave me a handle with which to start a less passive process of trying to understand him – a process that continues today, more than 8 months after his death.

And somewhere along the way I put together a Facebook-like film in my mind. With moments of Papa’s life from years before we met and extending to his last moments if they had played out differently. Made up entirely of unacted parts… They are fodder for my introspective moods.
Here then is, not the life-film that will be played in Heaven, but my short review film for Papa.

Papa as a little kid
Papa is a chubby-faced little boy. He enters the schoolyard where there are other kids his age and older. He is delighted to see them. He calls out – Hey! When did you come here? A smile in his voice. He talks as if he is sat on a throne – his mum’s lap. Factually, I know that he was given away to his childless aunt whose husband it was who got him enrolled at school. This mental picture of Papa’s first days in the schoolyard, where he is too small to be taken any notice of, formed in my mind years ago and I have revisited it often. Gradually, I realized something that was probably as true for Papa as it is for me – loneliness chased us from the start. We delight in human company.

Papa as a born-again believer
Papa is in his early 20s. He stands in the courtyard of a church. It is somewhere in the north as he is wearing a sleeveless sweater. He stands with his feet slightly apart, looking towards a group of learned pastors. He lays a newly-gleaned Biblical truth before them – trying to impress them and hoping too that they say something in response. Something that will calm his inner doubt…. An “I believe Lord, help thou my unbelief” kind of inner mood. Perhaps it is too late to know if Papa used to grapple with moments of doubt. As I do. But I daresay in his case, a journey that started with curiosity ended in stubborn faith. How will mine?

Papa as a city-returned native
Papa dressed in trousers and a white shirt. There is a smart belt around his middle. He and my mother, who as always is dressed in a saree, are going to church. They are a retired couple returning home to a small town where even the men still wear traditional clothes (the mundu.) Especially to church. In the mental picture I have of this unacted part, Papa is smug that he is standing out – at once belonging and not belonging to his surroundings. I know the feeling.

Papa bidding us goodbye
Maybe this is a corrupted memory of how we left for one of the innumerable hospital stays. There’s Papa, moments before his death. Not as it actually happened but as we might have liked it to happen. Mummy and I are with him. Mummy hugs him and I kiss his hands knowing the dreaded moment will soon be upon us. We are all crying. Papa is almost bent over with sorrow. As the last moment approaches, Papa breathes in, straightens and says slowly, “Alright.” I can’t bear to see how he actually leaves us. What was he feeling? No fear of death really, but of the wretched loneliness of the grave, the separation from love and warmth.

                                                                                ***

As it is written, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me”.

And so I wait. Holding on to my curiosity and need really to know my loved ones – Papa – better. I suppose when those life-films are played on the heavenly screen…. Then.

Monday 28 July 2014

You left too soon Papa

This post has no connection with any piece of literature, film or video. It is about mourning the death of the man who was my father. We lost Papa suddenly. It has been a fortnight.

My earliest memory of Papa is the one of him carrying me in his arms, on his side, when I was 5 or 6. I had thought he was a stern man, since I recalled an incident when he had rebuked my mother harshly. And he carried me tenderly. I was a sickly child and had been unwell again. He walked up and down the verandah, up and down... with me in his arms... deep in thought. And he was lost in thought at the end too. He was only 77. Left alone for a minute he would look at the floor thinking of something. I knew when I saw him that way that he was probably thinking of death.

Another early memory is of him standing at the window, gasping for breath. He was asthmatic... from before I was born maybe. Prone to pneumonia maybe and given to self-medicating, until (in more recent years) my mother started administering his medicines. He needed to be hospitalised many, many times. And on several of those occasions it was touch and go. I've lost count of the times when I waited in dread for the news that he was no more, and hoped against hope. I think my first prayer was for Papa. To the Jesus he introduced me to. And Jesus never turned my prayer down. When the end came at 5:30 in the morning, Papa was alone in the washroom. He had been getting healthier and we didn't see it coming. There was not another plea sent up, not until it was too late. Later, I kept whispering, "Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died," but it was no use. (Why 'brother? Papa will be my brother in Heaven since God has only children; no grandchildren). As people started coming in, I thought, if only there would be a little time for us to pray by the body... On many of those times in the hospital, when he had been on a ventilator, or shivering from pneumonia and septicemia, or just medicated and in deep sleep, I would call, Papa, papa papa - until he responded. He responded on each of those times, except when Mummy and I half-carried, half- dragged his body out and laid him in the corridor... that last time. The doctor who visited said the cause of death was a cardio-respiratory arrest. The last thing we expected would take him. He was diabetic, had a sodium count of 134, and yes was hypertensive too, but we never thought a heart attack would be what we would lose him to.

My younger sister and I (before things turned acrimonious... about that in another post) discussed how he would have loosened his grip on life in those final moments. He wanted to live, I know that. I believe if he had realised it was the end he would have shouted out - Hallelujah! Not in joy, not even in fear quite, but in hope and prayer to the Lord he loved so deeply.

I found myself lost in thought again and again this afternoon. And I thought I knew what had been on his mind the last eighteen months, when it was touch and go every few days. (He was not hospitalised but was under medical supervision at home.) I thought I understood how he must have felt time closing in... you really ARE speechless and numb when reminded of your own sure mortality. Now that he is gone, I'm scattered and shorn ... Since I am single, I fear for my own end, which will come someday. Unless the Rapture happens first.

Another childhood memory is of a train-ride from Delhi to Kerala. I was about 10. Papa had gotten off at Nagpur I think it was, to get some water for the family to drink, and almost missed the train. The TC blew the whistle and I looked through the bars of the train window scanning the length of the station, but there was no sign of him. I waited in dread for a few minutes, and then came the tears and prayers. Of course he appeared a little later, smiling widely. He'd re-boarded at the last minute and had walked the length of the train appearing, minus the water I think. You'll not miss the train to Heaven, Papa.

As the people leave, and as the phone stops ringing, I pick up the thread of my loss again. So Papa, until the Lord Himself comes down from Heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God... when we shall meet again.

Tuesday 10 June 2014

Twenty/Twenty

I've been reading Shakespeare's King Lear since the weekend. This evening, I reached Act 2 Scene 4 where Lear confronts Regan and Cornwall and says: "Beloved Regan, Thy sister's naught. O Regan, she hath tied Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here." (Stage directions: He indicates his heart.)  

Prometheus did not immediately come to mind. Something about the powerful physical gesture Lear makes at this point set me thinking. From 'passion' my mind jumped to how this passionate play was loved by the English, of whose coldness some people have commented upon. From that to my own countrymen, Indians, of whose passion some people have also commented upon... And so on I went thinking of this, leading to that, ending at how when I was younger I was more clear-sighted about myself. Some predictions I jotted down about my future in my journal did come to pass (to my surprise). 

Anyhow, this is what my thoughts were and what I posted on a social networking site, before I resumed reading:

You know how vision worsens with age? I was thinking earlier of how metaphorical vision too worsens with age. It has in my case. Hindsight may be 20/20 ... But the road ahead, the present moment... all too difficult to read correctly. Is it to do with the fact that when one is young one can project, say the situation that one is in, on the "backdrop" of other people (in the classroom or the shop-floor)? Whereas when one is older, the people around you are fewer in number (there are fewer people at the top, where you may be placed at work and loneliness does exist in families....) Also, when one is younger, life stretches out before one, like a seemingly endless road. And that somehow helps you put things in some sort of perspective. This valuable element - space - shrinks with passing years. At any rate, it is the young who can, prophet-like, see the future (at least) in a cold clear light. It's all blurred after that.

Drop me a line if you care to share your thoughts.

Monday 4 November 2013

Dandelions

I'm fascinated by the dandelion as a literary symbol. 

Brief research on google shows that the weed could represent something stubborn - something/someone which/who won't go away. But I've seen writers and illustrators use it to represent memory... especially one from very long ago and very nearly forgotten... the import of which eludes the mind... the deeper meaning of which, when grasped (in the fullness of time) has power to transform the individual. 

Saturday 26 October 2013

Flawed Me!

These days while I'm writing I'm also looking at myself. I see two things. The first is that I'm almost never shocked by man's transgressions against God's laws. But I AM shocked by man transgressing lines that another man has drawn - even if the act itself is not strictly immoral but only insulting. 

The second thing I've realized about myself is that my heart has never missed a beat or beat faster except in fear. Never in joy, or excitement, or even love. 

I feel very flawed right now.