Ritu Lalit's Blog, page 4

Peacock tears and other meme-worthy statements

These days we have regular schools and colleges where science, history, geography and other such endangered subjects are taught.  And we have the Whatsapp University of Bigotry where rumours, mythical properties of holy animals, jingoism, bigotry and paranoia are taught.

Now I am very much of the armchair liberal school of existence and I truly don’t give a damn unless you mess with my food.  If I don’t get my protein in the form of meat/fish/fowl, I go into a sulk.  So I read all the fantastical properties of Gau Mata including the fact that she exhaled oxygen and absorbed radiation and cheered along.  I am like that.  I cheer while I watch a Quidditch match on television for the 25876th time.

When the Hon’ble judge declared that peacock’s are celibate and they cry to mate, it cracked me up.  I mean, if humans in their prime of youthful sexuality were forced into celibacy, they’d cry too.  I seriously don’t think sperms are sturdy and long lived.  They’d die in the gullet before they could  pass through the digestive system.  If, by some miracle, some of them did survive, I don’t think they could make a jump from the digestive system to  the reproductive system of the peahen to impregnate her.  I did not comment, not because of any maturity I may have acquired on this planet, but because my What-goes-of-my-father-ism kicked in.  Dealing with trolls is a full time job and requires a thick skin and lots of energy.

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I also reasoned that the animal kingdom exists and it will continue to exist without changing its laws to accommodate our theories.  In other words, animals don’t give a rat’s arse and will continue to (bless their fertile beings) copulate and procreate without shedding tears.

So why this blog post?

Because I got into an argument with someone I knew in college.  He was the son of Supreme Court lawyers who emigrated to U.S.A. and lives there.  Sadly he has become a full-on graduate of the Whatsapp College of Bigotry.  There is something about NRIs living in gora-lands.  They absorb everything that is narrow minded and ritualistic in our culture and keep it alive.  I suppose it is a reaction to living easy lives without sweating during summer-time power cuts.  Life in the developed post industrial world is free of potholes, dysentery, malaria and the sweaty grimy grind our beloved country routinely inflicts us with.

So these people worry.  They worry about Love Jihad.  They worry about mass conversions into Islam and Christianity.  And perhaps they also believe that beautiful myth about the Peahen.

I love watching Harry Potter.  Its captivating.  Flying blue cars, Dobby, Centaurs and Quidditch are beautiful but its not real.  We all know that. We also know Disney princesses aren’t real.

How hard is it for a person reading a whatsapp message to check facts on Snopes?  Not hard at all.  Unless of course, the person really wants to believe all that negative news and feed his/her own insecurities.

I could not have expressed it better than Dr. Tejal Kanitkar, Assistant Professor Tata Institute of Social Sciences did in this video, do watch

I swam against the tide

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I always swam against the flow.  I found it absolutely boring to follow the well worn path, competitive too.  So I did things differently.  And in hindsight, what followed was predictable.  I hit rock bottom.  Here I was, having a blast, scared out of my tiny mind, feeling so alive.

Kerplunk

Thud

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This is the small print no one wants us to read when we venture off the beaten path.  It’s only when we’re bitch slapped by life that we notice that not every one succeeds the first time they try.  Most achievers have had more failed ventures than they can remember.  Why most?  All of them.

They’re innovators.  They’re also the dudes who have failed marriages, gone through times when their closest friends, parents, lovers have left them.  They’ve mortgaged homes, sold their cars, traveled in trains or buses, just because they’ve had a vision or an idea that has taken hold of them. They don’t socialize because it costs money.  They live on a dream and a breakfast of chai and phan which costs a few pennies.

Do they regret listening to the urge to strike out?  Hell yeah!  I bet they often wonder why they ever took that step which broke relationships, bankrupted them and made them live in absolute penury.

Do they want to go back to when they lived a cushy life?  I bet they do, with every breath they take.  I did when I lived my version of the pursuit of a dream. 

But I could not have gone back in time.  It was too late anyway.  So I soldiered on, clinging to the carcass of my shattered dream.  And of course my poverty and loneliness.

We’re often shocked when our closest friends and family do not understand what we are trying to achieve.  Or may be they do and feel threatened by the change this step brings with it.  And of course, we are jealous.  They have it all, the job with its regular paycheck, the family which you don’t have, the social life. 

What’s the point? you may ask.  Is it worth it?  I’m not even happy!

My simple message is not my own, someone infinitely wiser said this.  Of course I am paraphrasing it, I don’t remember the actual words.  Every person is in his or her path to self development.  When you break rank, you grow to another stage and others can’t keep up.  Oh, they may keep hanging on and criticizing you, eroding your already shaky sense of self worth.  But now you know who your true friends are.

I did.  Heck I studied the Human Nature 101 and cleared the course.  There is very little that is venial and self serving I haven’t experienced.

Don’t quit.  You will loose the grounds you have gained.

You had the option to not take this path, but you did.  Now you need to move on.  You’ve filtered out the extraneous, pruned away the unnecessary bonds and ties.  What is left is you and the efforts you’ve made.  And of course the wisdom you’ve gained.  Keep at it.  Give it your all and set your sights high.

You need to succeed.  Nothing else will do for you because you’ve paid for it with tears of blood, heartbreak and sweat.

Be a Winner.

Social Media and friends lists

 

This morning FB informed me that I could not accept more friends since I’d reached the limit of 5000 friends.  I’m cool with 5000 friends virtually so long as they are not the quarrelsome right wing kinds.  Those I delete as soon as they show their true colours.

In real life, I operate best with five trusted friends, 4 of whom live in different states.  We whatsapp to keep in touch.  It keeps life simple and one does not have to buy new clothes, learn new recipes or even keep the home sparkly clean and ready to receive visitors.

A large circle of real friends is (for me mind you) a recipe for expensive therapy.  There are folks who thrive in crowds.  I tip my virtual hat to them.  I prefer to take my friends in small doses, like my alcohol.  Two small pegs, once in a week with ice and a splash of soda.

Well I decided to weed out my friends list, an exercise that I have been putting off for a while.  I confess I operate best when faced with an ultimatum.

News Flash : I am midway through my friends list but have weeded out 120 or so names.

News Flash 2 : Operation Unfriending has been suspended.

What’s with FB anyway?  Most of the names I deleted were de-activated accounts.  I think FB should send us a memo when a person is deactivating his/her account.  Deleting those names gave me the feeling of throwing the proverbial bag into the bin once the cat’s jumped out of it.  Ah well …

There were a few gems that I deleted too.  They fell in the WTF Category[image error]

The first was someone named Someday you’ll miss me.  How passive aggressive.  Well, he/she/it bit the dust.

I had a pineapple and a lemon on my friends list.  Umm, not being in a fruity mood, I deleted them too.  I do like a pina colada and I love lemonade, but in a glass, not sitting in my friends list without interacting with me.

Gems Singh and Kerala Auto Inc … Dunno what I was thinking when I added them.  In fact, I am quite sure I did not.  Then how were they in the list?

English Grammar Friend …

Well!  While I do understand that I can’t quarrel with the grammar of the language I chose to write in, I couldn’t for the life of me see how I would interact with English Grammar Friend.  So, its gone.

The creepy one was the pic of a rather cute girl with a caption underneath ‘Actress-in-Porn-film’. In your dreams, I thought and pressed delete.  I wonder which sick mind wanted to slander a perfectly happy girl with that caption?

Hey, An Kit, Sari Ta and Tan Ya, while sandhi-vicched is quite acceptable in Sanskrit and Hindi, I don’t get your names.  But whatever floats your boat folks.  Oh you still are in my friends list BTW.

nAmes WriTTen iN ThiS StyLe have been deleted.  They aggravate my OCDs.

Some profiles I haven’t interacted with still exist in my friends list like those with witty DPs or those full of attitude.  I-am-like-this-only, what to do.

Sam Underwood, I don’t know who you are but your DP is cute.  Stay please.

Standing ovation from the author who has a rather original DP.  On a red background, this is written in yellow

Ek toh hum author

Upar Se Itne Cute

Girl, thanks for the laugh.  You definitely stay.

Hopefully, now that I have 120 vacant slots, I won’t have to do this for six months or so.

The Children

The wind howled as it blew past with a ferocity which seemed almost demented at times.  It was April but it felt like the peak of summers.  The seasons had shifted.

“I sleep without the air conditioner,” he said with a firmness that had helped him discipline his five children.  They were doing well now, imparting life lessons to their own little ones.  The missus had died a long time ago.

“Its so hot, won’t you be uncomfortable?” she asked.

She was young, almost of the age of his oldest granddaughter and she had kind eyes.  Good breeding there, he thought.  Good heart too.  She always had a kind word for her patients.

“I’ll be fine.  My thermostat is messed up.  I was a fire fighter once,” he said.

Her eyes lit up expectantly.  Yes, she was the kind who would admire photographs shown by lonely patients, listen to their stories.  He had none for her.  He had never spoken about his experiences.

“Check with the matron,” he said kindly.  “She’ll tell you to let me be.”

He fell asleep only to wake up to the cry of infants.  Poor babies, he thought, dead for decades and yet still carrying on.  He listened to them until he heard the rustle of fabric.  It was she, the young nurse.  “Can you hear that?” she asked, her face pale.  “Babies.  Where are they?”

“Dead a long time back,” he said.  “In a fire.  It’s okay.”

She rushed away after checking the room.  He heard heavy footsteps, many of them.  She’d called for help.  It made him smile.  The children quietened down.  After some time, he could hear the staff searching the grounds and even the dustbins.

Dustbins?  That made him chuckle.  He drifted off to sleep.

The wails started again waking him up.  The girl came rushing into his room and looked around wildly.

“I should have killed them, let them choke to unconsciousness.  Death would have been easy for them,” he said.

She stared at him with horror.  He shrugged.  “Instead we doused them with hoses and they boiled to death.”

He considered explaining.  Telling her about how his fellow fire fighters had choked in the fumes, the racking coughs, the lung injuries that had caught up with him now.  He considered telling her how all he’d wanted was to finish the inferno before it finished him.

“I don’t get it,” she said looking at the silent air conditioning vent, as if the cries were coming from it.  The cries of sorrow reached a crescendo.  So very young, so much potential, he thought, snuffed out so early in life.

She screwed up her face in pain and stuffed her fingers in her ears.  He thought of the tiny blackened shells they’d found after the fire went out.

He’d just been a boy then, in his first week at the job.

“Who does?  That’s the hell of it,” he said.

Outside the wind howled.  Loo, it was called, the summer wind that slapped the face with heat and dried the sweat before it poured out of a body caking shirt fronts and collars with salt.

“I want to meet them, tell them I didn’t mean it.  Tell them I am sorry,” he said.

She sank into the chair and held his hand for comfort as the children cried and the wind howled, hot and laden with dust.  He thought of those blackened shells.

“You know what?” he said finally.  “Let them in.  Turn on the air conditioner.”

La Petite Mort

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Have you?

Have you ever?

Died just a bit

To live a little better?

Have you?

Have you ever?

Cried a little bit

To smile a little longer?

Have you?

Have you ever?

Screamed a little bit

To laugh a little harder

Have you?

Have you ever?

Strangled another

Just to breathe a little freer

Le Petite Morte

 

(Images sourced from Google)

He died young, we died young

He was 22 and that is how he is right now.  Eternally 22, his straight black hair flopped all over his head.  His songs, his teasing smile when he messed with me and I took his bait, his habit of eating cookies and toast on the bed leaving me to deal with the crumbs.  They all died young.  He was my brother.  He died young. So so young

And so did we.

My parents changed overnight.  My father’s hair turned a silver grey in the week that followed his death.  No parent should be alive to witness their children’s death.  It’s unnatural.  My mother never recovered.  Nothing hit her as hard as that one death did.

And I grieved internally.  I had children of my own, a husband, in laws, job.  I had a life and death seemed so … so pointless to dwell upon.  So long as I lived, his memory lived.  He was ALIVE.

But I did not know I grieved internally.  Just that when my sons did something hilariously disastrous I told them stories about their Dony Mama.  When they did something good, I did the same, tell them about Dony’s triumphs.  When they did something nasty and hurtful, I’d silently relive the nasty fights Dony and I had in our childhood.  And then it all faded, he had not lived that long you see.  There were no memories about the life stage I was going through.  So Dony lived somewhere deeper, to resurface unexpectedly in the way one son’s eyes twinkled in a smile.  Or the twist of another son’s lips as he said something particularly sarcastic.  He lived on …, but somewhere deeper down in my internal landscape, young frozen at 22.

I went through one of life’s particularly hard setbacks this year.  I did not remember my dead brother, my playmate and best friend.  He would never share this with me, thank heavens.  He was gone a long time ago and his sister had been a 23 year old nerdy know-it-all, not yet humbled by life’s setbacks.  She was not me.

And then all that internal grieving, that bubbling mass of emotions surfaced one day overwhelming me.  And I grieved afresh.  People around me coped with my emotional storm.  Some one threw statistics of two wheeler accidents at me.  Another told me it was old news.  It happened in the 1970s and I should move on.  I had.  I thought I had.  I’d done so much, experienced so much after that, hadn’t I?

And I was the tough-as-nails bad-ass woman wasn’t I?  And yet …

So please, please don’t tell me I know exactly how you feel darling.

You don’t.  Just like I don’t know how to grieve your lost loved one.  I don’t know your brother or sister.  I can’t grieve them.  I can only grieve mine.  So I won’t invalidate your grief by asking you to move on or tell you I know exactly how you feel.  I would love to, but I can’t help you grieve and move on.  I can only work with my feelings about the boy eternally frozen in his youth.

And as I have just learnt, he lives on in my memories.  In my good times.  In my bad times.  When I am at my best and when I am at my lowest.

He lives on …

 

Stages of writing my latest novel

(I’d put this up as a facebook post.  Copy pasting it here for easy access.)

Stages of writing

1. Its a brilliant idea, I bet no one has written this before

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2. I am writing (drinking coffee) I am writing (facebooking) I am writing (Watching Game of Thrones) I am writing (Surfing television) Dammit I am writing

3. Fuck, call myself a writer? This story sucks, the writing sucks, Someone please kill me

4. Revised draft, its kind of passable but I left so many loopholes. OMG, I wish I die

5. Revising draft again and plugging loopholes and deciding coffee is inefficient. Where’s the vodka

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6. The idea is lame, its not even new, my writing sucks, I hate my hair, get me some weed, I hate vodka.

7. Revising draft for the 10th time, gosh this puts me to sleep. Why did I not chose to be a caterer/dog whisperer/astrologer instead of a writer

8. Ignore impending penury and hire an editor.

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9. Smoke more weed while waiting to see the polished version of the book

10. The editor is shit, I am a shitty writer, the novel is shit

Moral of the story : Fuck it, there is no moral of the story except that weed is better than coffee for nerves

Polite disclaimer : I am not a pot head, I am an author

Shilpi and the monster

She was the apple of her parents’ eyes.  And she loved them right back.  High spirited, a wee bit pampered and completely loved, Shilpi loved her life.

One day she heard sounds and cried for her parents.  They rushed in looking sleepy and concerned.  Mama opened the cupboard.  Papa searched in the bathroom and looked under her bed.  They sat at her bedside and told her fairy stories and cuddled her until she fell asleep.

Shilpi was an intelligent girl.  She had known she was adored, but now she knew more.  She knew she was powerful.  Her parents would do anything to keep her safe.

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Like all little girls granted with this power, she began to play with it.  Whenever she could not sleep, she would cry.  Whenever she was bored she would scream.

Every time her parents would come into her room and go through the entire exercise.

Bathroom – check
Under the bed – check
Cupboard – check
Behind the window curtains – check
In the toy cabinet – check

And then they would sing lullabies and wait for their little girl to sleep. They would never get angry, no matter what time it was or how tired they were.

One day when they were checking, little Shilpi burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” her father asked.

“You, daddy.  And you too Mummy.  You believe me every time.  I was just playing.”

Her parents exchanged glances.  Then they sat down next to her.

Her mother said sadly, “Once, just once, we did not believe your brother.”

Shilpi had thought she was an only child.  She did not know she had a brother.

That night Shilpi could not sleep ….

Bed No. 5

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(An experiment at close first person stream of consciousness)

5:30 PM

They wheel me into the ICU, pale blue walls, beeping machines, thin semi transparent curtains to draw to give a semblance of privacy.  The heavy air-conditioning adds to the coldness reminding me again of the distant one.  This place looks inhospitable, like those sets from medical dramas that English TV channels are so fond of.

The grim surroundings do not seem significant; they pale in comparison to the pain I feel at the fact that the distant one did not even meet me before I was wheeled in.

“Put her in bed no. 5,” the nurse tells the orderly.  That’s it, no name, just Bed No. 5.

I try to sit up and take stock of my surroundings.

“Ey Auntie, lie down.  We have to fix your cannula,” the nurse says.

Five failed attempts.  “Your veins are so thin,” she grumbles.

“Sorry,” I mutter.  I know I am fat and have really not had a healthy lifestyle.  On the 8th attempt the cannula is in place.  I am shivering by now.  The air conditioning is killing me.  I look at the other occupants of the room, each an island of pain and suffering, indifferent to the surroundings.

Great!  I am surrounded with apathy.  I may as well be dead.

I am glad that the immediate beds next to me are empty.  And then I see a tiny figure, a boy of 7 on Bed 8.  He has one arm in a plaster and a tube stuck out of his nose.  An anomaly.  He should have been in a playground or a school, not lying on a bed in the emergency ward.  I count the beds; there are 16 in the room, each with its own machines emitting beeps.

6:30 PM

The nurse comes to me, pricks me and shakes her head.  “Sugar 387,” she says shaking her head.  “What appened a?”

She is not the nurse that punctured me 8 times to find a bloody vein.  “Why is he here?” I whisper, staring at the boy.

“Who? Bed 8?” she asks and shrugs.  “Accident.  Father is in Bed 11.”

I glance at the bed she nods towards and shudder.  The man in that bed is bandaged from head down to the torso, like a half mummified humanoid.  The emergency of a large hospital is like a war zone.

8:00 PM

“Aiyo, large size a,” the nurse says discarding the shirt she tried to put over me.  Yeah, that’s me, obese, unfit and sick.  By this age one is used to accepting harsh unpalatable truths but it does not make acceptance easier.  “Sorry,” I mutter again as she slips on a larger shirt.  “You’re putting it on wrong.”

The nurse ignores me and firmly ties the strings that should come in the front at the back.

“Eh, Auntie, sugar is higher now.  Too much internal infection,” the nurse says, but I ignore her staring at the little boy.  He has a visitor who cuddles the boy and whispers softly to him.  The boy rests his head against the chest of his visitor.  Uncle?

The boy’s face is expressionless, his eyes have a distant haunted look.  He reminds me of the distant one, willfully wrapped in his own bubble of pain and misery.  How misery makes us self absorbed and pushes us further and deeper into it.  A vicious cycle that is so hard to break.

I am distracted by an old man in bed 15.  He is throwing a tantrum because he hates the food.  The nurses laugh and cajole him into eating a few bites.  “Papaji, stop this,” the nurse says with a laugh.  “If you are good, I will get you custard tomorrow.”

Papaji grumbles a bit but eats.  I wonder about his story.  I love stories.  I write a few of them myself.

“Stop staring,” the son says tweaking my nose.  He looks tired and shaken.  I grab his hand and kiss it.  His wife comes and hugs me.  “You’ll be okay right?” she asks, her eyes wet.  She is too young and terrified.  Hospitals are scary places.

“Sorry to cause you so much trouble,” I whisper tearing up.  There I go again, apologizing all the time.  Damn! I need to be more assertive.

“Get well soon, dammit,” the girl says and moves away to question the doctor, asking about the tests and treatment.

“She’s a good girl, a keeper,” I whisper to the son.

“I know,” he says with a smug smile.  We hug, not mentioning the distant one, though his absence looms over us both like a physical presence.

9:30 PM

The nurses chatter non stop.  Their voices and the non stop beeping of machines make me feel like I am in an airport.

BEEP BEEEEEP BEEP

PING  PING.

No, its not like an airport, this place but in a games arcade, what with all those beeps and pings.  I wonder how I will ever sleep.

11:45 PM

“What the???” I mumble trying to sit up.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

BEEP BEEEEP BEEP

PING PING

It takes me a while to surface from my drug induced haze and realize that I am in an ICU and that bed 6 is occupied.  I can see the urine bag on the floor in between the yellow dustbin marked Normal Waste and the red dustbin marked Bio Waste Hazardous between my bed and Bed 6.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

The nerve wracking sound is coming from its occupant.  It’s like a saw mill is working next to me.

“Paani,” I croak.  The nurse doles out a mouthful of tepid water.  “Two wheeler accident, him and his brother in law, Bed 7,” she informs me and bustles away.

I can hear muffled sobs somewhere in the gloomy room.  Loved ones.  Hospitals are rough on them.  Somewhere outside the son and his wife are also sitting providing each other with support and encouragement as I lie here.

Bed 8 sways and the child tries to sit up.  “Go back to sleep,” the sister scolds him.  He gives her a flat stare and tries to resist as she pushes him down, but is too weak.  Another nurse fiddles with Bed 7’s machines and those beeps add up to the cacophony.

A man groans.  He asks for water but no one responds.  He keeps asking until he breaks down into gruff sobs.  The helplessness of not being in control of your body, being tied up with tubes and having to beg for water makes him break down.  A nurse gives him water which he gulps noisily and drifts off, mumbling about complaint registers.  The sobs die down and we all drift off.

I wake up with a start.  The sawing noise RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR  has died down.

4:45 AM

The curtains of bed 6 are drawn and there is frantic activity.  I keep staring at the urine bag which is now full.

I glance at the other beds thinking that no one can sleep through this commotion.  No one is.  Everyone is lying in their beds, aware of what is going on but withdrawn.

I can’t see anything but the full urine bag.  I stare at it as the activity reaches a frenzy.  Finally it stops.

The efforts of resuscitation have failed and Bed 6 is wheeled out.

Silence punctuated with beeps and pings of machines.

He’s dead!  He’s bloody dead!  It takes time to sink in.

Damn!  This is not Syria!  It’s just a man and his brother in law who went out for a ride on a two wheeler.

I sit up and stare through the parted curtain at the boy who had risen too.  Our eyes meet, his blank and apathetic.  Then I see a flash of fire in his eyes and I realize that I am mistaken.  This boy is not like the distant one.  Bed 8 is a young soldier fighting for survival, for life, for a chance to be in a playground, to go out on a date, to watch a movie.   He’s not quit living.

The moment passes.  He rolls over and falls asleep.

I have my aha moment.  Everyone here is fighting to live, even dying to live.  And life is so damn short!  I don’t have time for hospitals.  I need to stop treating food as crack.

Yup, food is my crack.

And I need to stop yearning for love and approval in places I know I won’t get it in.

So I put Bed 6 out of my mind and sleep.  I need to get out of the hospital.  So what if I am in my fifties.  I still have time to begin afresh.

 

Rezkin’s Bright Tidings

As I informed you in an earlier blog post, the first born and I do a book review show on YouTube called Book Chat

 

And as you can see in the you tube video … or not see since we did not manage to get any visual due to some back-end malfunction, Ishaan and I had conflicting views about the book. Ishaan called it The Nickleback Effect

The author Kel Kade retweeted our book review.

Thanks a lot!

While we were still patting our backs about the endorsement we got from the author, we received this letter.

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Dear Ishaan, Ritu, and Kartik,

Thank you for taking the time to read my books and review them on your

web show. I’m glad you liked them for the most part, although you

still seem stumped as to why (as evidenced by your title “Why the hell

do we like this book?”). That’s okay. I keep asking myself the same

thing. I have my own hypotheses, but I won’t bore you with them.

Although, I will say it’s probably the subliminal messages I hid

throughout. Don’t be alarmed if you feel the urge to join my cult,

leave all your worldly possessions to me in your will, or name your

children after me and/or my characters. Also, you might have cravings

for chocolate, but that has nothing to do with the books. Chocolate is

just good.

The Nickelback Book? At least it sounds kind of cool. People scoff, but

we all know it’s an overly dramatic attempt to hide the fact that they

really like Nickelback. I hope you continue to enjoy the series. I

endeavor to entertain and to never take myself too seriously. Don’t

worry, the cliches will keep coming (it’s supposed to be that way),

and you can keep pretending to like the books less than you do