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.

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.

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. 

Enjoy the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ_QqtXoyQw&feature=share

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.

Biblical Narratives of Slavery and Exile... the difference?

Hi!

Early this morning I was meditating upon Jeremiah 16: 14-15 -

"Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;
But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers."

and I thought how odd it was that we, as Christians, know the narrative of the Israelites' flight from Egypt backwards... but don't know the narrative of their return from Babylonian exile quite as well. And when I thought about it, I realised one thing. The narrative of the flight from Egypt and the 40-year wandering in the wilderness was probably written down by Moses after the events had taken place. The question is, was this narrative filtered through Moses' consciousness? Did his own participation in the event - beginning to end - contribute to the narrative's structure? And thus giving the narrative a proper beginning, middle and end... making it a plain good story.

Of course, like all Christians I too believe that the Spirit of God dictated the Bible - Genesis to Revelation - and the different prophets and scribes merely wrote down what they were shown. But we know that Jeremiah, when he was called to be a prophet, was shown what was a rod of an almond tree. He was asked to describe it. When he recognised what he was shown correctly, he was commended - "Thou hast seen well". So the prophet's mind is important as a tool that receives the prophecy. I feel Moses would have been able to use what God showed him (about what happened in the Garden of Eden for instance) as also his own narrative as of someone who was in the thick of things.

The narrative for the Babylonian exile is different from the Egyptian one. The narrative of this latter event in history is scattered. The major prophets - all three of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel I think - foretold the carrying away of the Israelites as captives to Babylon. The event, when it finally happens, is recorded almost dispassionately by Jeremiah. The books of Daniel and Esther record events that took place during the exile in the courts of the foreign rulers. Scribes Ezra and Nehemiah record the rebuilding of the Temple. You'd need to be a very ardent scholar to apply your mind, place the scattered pieces together and get the complete picture of this huge event. Does it matter that, unlike in the Egyptian narrative, there is no one human who was there in the beginning, middle and end... to tell the story in one piece?

The Jews no doubt hand down complete stories of these two events to their generations.

Morrison's Sula - part 6

After Sula’s death, Nel will mourn her but even then she is mourning her own lost girlhood.



“We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

Sula, the character the book is named after, the outlaw, had served her friend and her community merely in defining themselves. For a period of time, she keeps them away from the chaos Shadrack represents. But Shadrack, the real hero of the book, is the one friend of Sula’s who never could become that. Sula, who “cuts out” whenever her path crosses Shadrack’s, is also shown to be undeserving. So do we trust the “madman” in his assessment?


"She had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend – she had the mark of the fish he loved)"


Sula, though the central character, is denied the opportunity to realize the existence of a friendship through which she could have really transcended her boundaries. On her deathbed, she says of the community in the Bottom,


"Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me…. After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim… then there’ll be a little love left over for me."


Sula then is about relationships that are frail, mortal… that don’t survive sexual politics. It is about ordinary people who experience loneliness but don’t know how to really cherish each other. Perhaps in a more ideal world it might be possible for agape friendships between people, especially women, to blossom and mature.

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Hope you enjoyed the essay. Would love to know your thoughts....

Morrison's Sula - 5

By the time Sula is on her death bed, they have gone to being foils to each other. For instance, when Sula had returned to Medallion Nel had ruminated, “… talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself… Sula never competed; she simply helped others define themselves.” And we feel that however genuine her happiness at getting her old friend back, it is about herself – Sula made her laugh, made her see old things in new ways, in whose presence she felt clever... Sure there’s gratitude but there’s also a sense of herself as defined by the other. Sula does slightly better. She, who had drifted back to Medallion partly because Nel is there, defines herself at the expense of Nel only after breaking up the latter’s marriage – “she and Nel were not one and the same thing…. Now Nel was one of them.” Sula feels that now Nel belongs to the town and “all of its ways.” For, by the time Sula is dying, Nel has become the ‘good’ woman. “Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring”, which “hid from her the true motives of her charity” in visiting her one-time friend. On the other hand, Sula is termed “devil all right” at a social meeting of the women in Medallion. The town had united as a community against the evil Sula represented. After her death, they fall apart.

Morrison asks – how easy is it to stick to the straight and narrow when there is no other who would help the self to reinforce its sense of being virtuous? How much of being good is to do with defining oneself for purposes of gaining social approbation? When one is powerless in society as Sula is, how important is it to be known to have a personality rather than as one who was merely a product of circumstances or “good”?

Morrison undermines Nel – a faithful wife, an adequate mother and a responsible member of the church – by detailing how the thing she mourns most when her husband leaves is the lost sex, how her bear love for her children almost drives them away and how quickly her benign concern for Eva Peace turns sour when the latter probes her on Chicken Little’s death. Before the book closes, Sula’s wronged grandmother asks Nel about Chicken Little’s downing, “Tell me how you killed that little boy…. You. Sula. What’s the difference? .... Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you.” Nel is not spared the exercise of probing her own conscience.

"But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped. She hadn’t wondered about that in years. “Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?”

All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment."

Morrison employs sexual imagery – Nel feels good about herself when someone else is suffering, or worse dying, and her enjoyment is sexual. This is how she assuages her own feelings of powerlessness. Sula, who could be reduced to a mess when Chicken Little drowns, grows into someone who could, despite attempts to transcend powerlessness through education and travel, not escape.

"…hers was an experimental life – ever since her mother’s remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow."

Sula, for all her outlaw status, is someone lacking in real strength and courage. Possibly driven away from the higher pursuits she sets out for (on her friend’s wedding day) by a more powerful world which she grapples with for 10 years, she destroys those in her sphere of influence. And she meets with no opposition. When Nel means to but doesn’t ask, “How come you did it Sula?” i.e. take Jude away from her, the latter “looked bored as she sucked her teeth. ‘Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.” Her head is not full of platitudes and teachings young girls’ heads usually are full of. It is easy for her to take the wide road to hell. (In fact, her grandmother had said to her, “hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you…”) She is looking for completion, but looks in all the wrong places.

"In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous."

Sula harbors some very violent thoughts for Ajax, the man for whom she discovers the meaning of possession. After Ajax leaves her, she ruminates “It’s just as well he left. Soon I would have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity.” As she is liberated from her feelings for Ajax, she sings to herself, “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are.” On her deathbed she asks a startling question in that final conversation with her friend.

“How you know?” Sula asked.

“Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her.

“About who was good. How you know it was you?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”