Ramble on..But Why!!??

ok it's not 55 words...

2012-01-17T00:49:00.001-08:00

The mirror glowed, the mirror gleamed. The queen looked at her face and screamed. Wrinkles fine ran up and down, the smiling face now a frown. ‘I need blood’, she said, to put back that glow. ‘Find some silly maiden who spins, lock her in your room, and do what you do best; and please, not the skin white as snow type, you know what happened the last time’.

Bluebeard sighed. Maybe one day his story would be told.

2011-12-04T20:56:00.000-08:00

You never asked
her
if she wanted to come
back
to walk again behind you,
following
like a faithful pup
the footfalls
up and down
rugged mountains
so that
your feet could crack and hands grow rough
and people could say:
‘Look it’s ORPHEUS,
who brought her back from the dead;
praise his love.
We saw his grief
tear at the earth
till it opened, bleeding'.

The other king,
and his dark kingdom,
lay wounded,
defenseless
so that, to heal,
he yielded.

but
you never did ask
her.

2011-10-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

55 word story challenge: re-write a fairy tale or use fairytale elements to write a story in not more than 55 words:

Crunch crunch crunch. Baba Yaga was gnawing on a bone. ‘The problem with maidens is that they ask for too much’. ‘This one, for instance, asked me for a mirror’. ‘Now another one is asking me for a glass slipper’. Rumplestiltskin, her son, nodded wisely. He knew maidens and their demands only too well.

2011-09-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

It does not seem fair
that the morning should come
with a yawning sun
shivering in the mist,
and everything is the same way as yesterday.

Yesterday when you ran up to me,
there was summer in every leap;
I burdened by woes, imagined and real,
could forget
and see just you, so happy, so alive.

Oh I know,
the flowers over your grave will burst one day
with blossoms;
each will be like a message from you,
telling me that this,
this is life; just one; just once.

And the sunshine on the petals will
touch me too,
and for just that one moment,
you will be here again
prancing, dancing, loving life
as I never can.

But right now,
it is not fair.
The sunshine and the birdsong
go on,
and I wait my dear cat
for you.

Eurydice to Orpheus

2011-03-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

Eurydice does not speak to me easily. This is a work in progress.

I want to be here
The other life has blurred;
and though I can feel
the sting that runs like fire
through your fingers
burnt by stringed flames,
its winter here
and slowly, I am forgetting.
Sometimes when my
feet stir a memory
of blazing winter suns
deliciously burning my soles,
I remember
us
as I walk precipices
on midnight days.

Orpheus to Eurydice

2011-02-25T06:25:00.000-08:00

On some days it's easier
When the winter sun
Allows for glimpses
Between the mists.
I wait,
And remember
Us,
Walking through these grasslands
You, me,
Dancing in the mist,
Seeking each other by touch.
Your fingers make
Music more haunting than
My calloused fingers have ever brought forth.
We would wait for the sun,
To break, to stumble through the mist,
Till it fell on our faces.
And when in the haze,
Your eyes, delighted,
Saw mine,
You would laugh,
And hide.
So I wait
Outside this cave, for you are hiding again,
I hear the echo of your footsteps,
Fading further and further away
To a place I cannot reach.
So I sing, I strum
Come now, they are gathering around,
Your birds and beasts.
Together, they and I,
Are waiting.

The Human Child.

2011-02-17T22:20:00.000-08:00

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
W.B Yeats.

They took the human child far, far away. He had followed them because they had baskets of berries with them; berries, red like the counting beads in his nursery; red like the rubies his mother wore; red like the apples he bit into as he watched autumn sunsets. They told him that he could have the berries if he came with them. They knew a place where there were thousands of berries. So he followed them.

Now he began to cry. Salty drops ran down his face. Laughing, they said that his tears would make a pearl necklace for their queen.

In the moonlight a mother looked for her child. Every rock took on the shape of the child and she would run towards it sometimes in fear, sometimes in joy, sometimes in tears. The white moon shone down on her, quietly, unfeelingly.

The wind rustled, someone giggled. Pale whispery hands gagged the human child. The mother turned. She knew her child was near. But all around her was barren, open rocky land. Hopelessness filled her and she fell.

The human child was taken deep into the earth. “Here he is”, they said. “We have brought you a human child”.

She was looking into a mirror. A barren world showed itself to her. She could see the mother standing against the hot uncaring wind and the blazing sun that had little else but her to burn. Her eyes looked straight out firm and determined. A shiver ran through the other world. She turned her eyes away from the mirror and held herself for warmth. For the first time she felt fear. ‘Cover the mirror’, she said and walked out.

'My son, have you seen my son?' the woman asked the boys who were playing near her house

'Have you seen my son?' she asked the boy who was chopping firewood.

'Have you seen my son' she asked the washer-man by the river.

'Have you seen my son?' she asked the three women who sat begging at the boundary of the village.

' Your son?' asked the oldest woman. 'She wants her son, did you hear that sisters?' she shrieked

'Have you seen my son, please, kind ladies?' said the mother.
to be continued.

2011-02-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

‘Wrrroom wrrooom, rrrrooom, rroomm, and now ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts, we will be landing shortly, this is your pilot Ajay speaking’.

I was in my car, parked outside a house in one of the crosses of Bharatnagar. It was a hot afternoon, and I kept the door open for the small, occasional bits of breeze. A friend was in the parlour next door getting her hair straightened. Miscalculating the time it would take, I had reached an hour earlier. Not wanting to be subject to it’s smells; the outdated women’s magazines; the chemically altered, Photoshop perfected pictures of models and the ever critical assessment of perceived physical shortcomings by the receptionist, I opted to stay in the car to wait for my friend.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you can now unfasten your seatbelts, thank you for travelling Ajay air, this is your captain Ajay signing off’.

The voice was coming from the upper floor of the house. I guessed the boy’s age to be about ten or eleven.

‘ Wrrroom!!!’

Ajay, perhaps, was ready to fly another plane. His attempts, however were cut short by another voice. It was an elderly man’s voce.

‘Please stop now Ajay, sit down’ he said. ‘No…wroom, wroom, there are too many passengers, Tatha’. Ajay was obviously in no mood to listen.

Ajay had begun to run now, from what I could gather. The annoyed mumble of the grandfather was getting drowned by the sounds of Ajay’s running and incessant, repetitive imitation of an aero plane. The afternoon wore on. A dog came up to the car and wagged his tail. I petted him and wished that a petty shop was nearby so that I could get him a bun. Hardly anyone was about. The silence and emptiness had a strange, unnatural quality to it. It was the silence and eerie feeling you expect to have at 2am if you are walking down an empty street. Everything seemed so still, the air was heavy; I could almost smell the heat, taste it almost. Trees, I thought. Why can people not plant more trees? All these houses; surely I reasoned, there is enough room in the compounds to plant at least one.

‘Tatha, when will they come? ’ Ajay’s voice was high, complaining, irritated. ‘They will Ajay, wait’. ‘But they have gone so long’. ‘Keep quiet, Ajay, please’. His grandfather sounded angry and Ajay said nothing more.

The house had seemed particularly empty as compared to the others in the lane. That was one of the reasons I choose to park the car there aside from it being next to the beauty parlour. I looked at it carefully now. There were no plants. That was what had struck me. That is what I had unconsciously registered while parking the car. The windows were empty too. There were no curtains. I peered into the driveway. No car, no scooter. In fact it was an upswept driveway, dead leaves from roadside trees and debris lay scattered all around. Glancing at the compound wall, I could see layers of mud on the wrought iron lattice work that once must have had creepers growing through it.

'Honk, honk’ said Ajay. ‘I think the car has come. Mommm Daaad, is that you?’ ‘Ajay, please’ said his grandfather. ‘Sit down, I said, They will come, just wait’.

I looked into the window of the ground floor. The room was empty. There was nothing in it. No furniture, pictures, nothing. I looked up, at the window from where I could hear the voices of Ajay and his grandfather. From what I could see, it was empty. I walked up to the gate. It was locked. Locked!. Why had I not seen that before?

Wroom…wroom…continued Ajay.

The heat was beginning to get to me and the sudden ringing of the mobile made me jump. It was my friend. She was done and was wondering if I had reached. Lunch, she said, was something she could have three servings of. I told her that I waiting outside.
She came out, hair shiny and pin straight. ‘Wow, amazing, it really suits you’ I said, insincerely. I took one last look at the house as I backed the car. It was silent now.

(I did hear a conversation like this. We were waiting in the car while our dog was being groomed. The house outside which we had parked looked empty. At least the ground floor rooms were empty. From the upper floor we heard a boy pretending to be an aero plane and an elderly man's voice could be heard too. When i looked up, the upper rooms also looked empty. So my husband and I, as we often do, made up a story to explain this apparently strange situation)

for Desmond, Socks, Kajal Clone, Casper, Calliope,Charles Bucket, Kalahari and so many more.

2011-01-25T00:08:00.000-08:00

'No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two'
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot.

I am no poet, but this is for you.

where have you gone my little cats?
Each day I call your names, and hope,
In vain perhaps, that you will return, if only just
To run away again.

Where have you gone my little cats?
Your food is kept each day, in the spot where
Just you liked to eat. And it stays there,
Till another, delighted at a second round,
Crunches it up.

Where have you gone my little cats?
Far away from my lap, the tickles and cuddles,
The slaps and fights with the others,
To a place I cannot reach,
To a wonder only you see.

Where have you gone my little cats?
Can you not hear me? Are you so far away?
I wait each day; attend to each sound,
Hope and perhaps pray,
That you come back today.

Stray dogs, poverty, instinct and madness

2011-01-12T20:45:00.001-08:00

The mauling to death of Prashanto, the one year old son of a labourer couple by a stray dog was tragic and reminded us of a fact that is undeniable; that dogs have a pack instinct. They hunt what they perceive as easy prey though the motive may not be to eat it. To my knowledge no stray dog has eaten human flesh.

Prashanto was the seventh child of this couple. They have six daughters and he was the seventh child, the youngest. This couple had come from Orissa, are below the poverty line and were living is shanties constructed by a building contractor. It is reported that there were no doors or windows in any of these shanties.

Imagine everyday life for this couple. The daily wage for a labourer is meager. It is certainly not enough to feed a family of nine people. Their house has no door and therefore no protection, against dogs or anything and anyone else. It is probably not even enough to comfortably house nine people. Obviously the daughters do not go to school. Being migrant labourers, education, especially of daughters is out of the question. Warm meals, warm clothes, steady income and other basics are things they have no conception of. Theirs is a day to day existence.

So, what was Prashanto’s death really a failure of? The contractor who failed to provide them with a secure house? The parents who had seven children despite knowing the abject poverty they were living in? The Government who could not provide for families like them? The government again who has consistently failed to provide a humane Animal Birth Control Program and humane euthanasia of rabid, aggressive and diseased animals? The apathy of all of us who do not care for either families like Prashanto’s or the many animals who live, suffer and die on our roads?

We are so quick to react and mass kill stray dogs when incidents like this happen. A few years ago when a similar incident occurred, professional dog killers from Malabar were called in and they killed hundreds of dogs in the most inhumane manner imaginable. Did that make any difference to the dog population? When hundreds of dogs were poisoned to death all over the city, did that help? What good did it do to beat a stray dog to death and drag his body in triumph? None of these methods have worked to reduce the stray dog population.

Yet the government will not allocate adequate funds to sterilize and vaccinate stray dogs. It will not co-operate with Animal welfare Organisations to work with them to humanely reduce the stray dog population. This same government will not work towards the welfare of its poor either. It will instead arrest innocent people like Mr.Yadav who allegedly looked after the dog who killed Prashanto. How is that an answer?

Let us not become irrational and cry out for another bloodbath where hundreds and thousands of dogs are needlessly killed. We are, I hope far too civilized for that. Let us instead look at solutions that work and benefit all.

The Rejection...

2010-11-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

So this got rejected for the sixth issue of an online magazine called The New Fairy Tales.

Moral of the story: don't think you or your story is so great!

The Wicker Basket.

The basket floated down the weed green marshy stream, got caught among the gently fermenting reeds near the woodcutter’s hut and lay there quite still, a wicker basket among brown, green and cloud grey water.

The woodcutter, his wood chopped for the day, went to the stream to wash his splinter bruised hands. On seeing the basket, he waded in to have a closer look.

Inside lay a baby, perhaps a few months old. Black, curly ringlets spilled over her eyes and ears, little drops of water clinging to them like fairy lights. Her eyes were green, a dark mossy wood green. Around her neck was a thick chain of gold with a pendant of green stone. In the twilight it lay on her tiny throat like a leaf with the first hints of autumn on it.

He quickly took the pendant and its ropelike chain and waded out of the marshes.

The baby began to cry as night slowly filled the spaces between the trees.

The woodcutter sat by the fireside and smiled as the stone glowed green and gold. He knew this stumbled-upon stolen treasure would fetch a high price in the market.

The next morning he did not take any of the bundles of neatly chopped and bundled wood to the market. Instead, he took with him a small bundle and on reaching the market, sat at his usual place, opened the bundle and spread out its contents.

'Oh, what a beautiful pendant!' exclaimed the woman. 'My lady', said he sadly. 'My lady, it was my mother’s, she took it off the day my father died and could never look at it again. Now that she too is gone, I cannot bear to look at it', he added.

'What is your price?' she asked.
'For you, dear lady, so lovely, so fair, it is only five pieces of gold. If you take it with the chain, it will befive more gold pieces'.

She smiled and gave him a bag of coins. He took out the gold, bit a coin and satisfied, put it back in. She laughed and clasped the pendant around her neck and walked away.

That evening, the curiosity of the guilty made him wade into the marshes to have a look at the basket again. The baby was there still, alive, perhaps sustained by tiny droplets of water that fell from the reeds that surrounded her.

Something in the basket caught the last rays of the sleeping sun and glimmered. Feeling around in the basket he found a mirror. A tiny mirror, just the size of his palm. Framed in gold and blood red stones it glowed, setting the last rays of the sun on fire.

The baby let out another wail and he waded back to the shore,

'And for this, oh lovely one, I ask you for fifteen pieces of gold.' he said the next day, back in his stall in the market place. The lady, too, was back.

She took the mirror and looked at her reflection and smiled, her lips as red as the red stones of the mirror. 'Oh your price is so high!' she said sadly.

'My lady, it pains me to see you so sad, so I will ask for only twelve. This mirror was my sister’s. She died you know, dragged down by water sprites when she went bathing in the river'.

She gave him a bag and laughed gaily at her reflection.

When he looked at the basket later that day, the baby was still, either sleeping or dead. He unwrapped the white embroidered stole that someone had lovingly, perhaps sadly wrapped around the baby to keep her warm.

The stole was made of fine soft silk. It was hand embroidered with beautiful flowers and fairies. Each delicate wing was in shadow stitch and each pink, yellow and red rose so real, he tried to smell them as he allowed the cloth to brush against his cheeks.

'And, my lady, this is for your fair shoulders. A gift to me from my grandmother, should I find a lovely maiden to marry. Alas! that is not to be, and so I must part with it.'

'What will you take for this?' said she. Green eyes and blood red lips tantalized him.

'For you my lady, just 20 pieces of gold'

'You ask for too much.'

'Fifteen then,' he sighed.

That evening he took all the three bags of coins out of his box to look at them again, to count the coins, again, and to lick his gold.

He opened the first one and screamed. It was filled with dust. He emptied it and the weightless dust spilled all over the table. In a terrible rage he tore open the other two and shook them. Dust.

Screaming he ran out and waded into the stream. The basket was there but there was no baby. He picked up the basket and crushed it.

Nearby he heard laughter. Lying stretched out teasingly with green eyes reflecting the green stone around her neck, the silk stole carelessly thrown over her naked body she lay looking at the red stone encrusted mirror, seductively biting her blood red lips. Her hair, wild and curly fell over her breasts, her hips and teasingly touched her navel.

He felt himself sink, as the reeds choked him. He did not fight, there was no struggle. He sank, slowly, looking at her all the time and she looked at him, laughing.

a haunting?

2010-09-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

In a way you could have called it a haunting.Whenever I would walk down the corridors of my childhood house, I would feel as if I was being enveloped by a dampness that made me shiver even in the warmest of summer days.I would also feel a black shadow that seemed to walk behind me, constantly.
In those childhood days I had no name to give it. I would turn around several times in an attempt to catch whoever it was that walked so quietly behind me.

Of those years I remember no winter, no summer and no spring; just occasional days. Days when I crawled into the canopy of the lemon bush to lie down and read (Now, so many years later, I am surprised to find that lemon bushes have thorns, for I never remember having been scratched or having to avoid any when I hid inside the bush), days when I sat by the pond with my feet in the water, days when I made mud pies and decorated them with flowers torn off bushes ( I regret tearing those flowers now), but mostly I remember the days as days spent with myself, endlessly weaving stories to keep myself amused. I do not remember telling my parents about the other girl. Many years later they asked me about her, because they said, I would tell them about her and the games we would play, the adventures I would have with her. Amused though they were, they would tell me that I had a lively imagination but I must not let it carry me away. I would insist she was there, they said, waiting for me, and she that would play with me every day as surely as I spoke to them.

But what of this black shadow that would walk with me wherever I went, once I was inside the house? Oppressive, heavy, cold, once frightening, once thrill inducing, yet never harmful. Just walking, walking, walking ceaselessly behind me, making me want to run, making me want to stop and turn abruptly, making me wrap my arms around myself for warmth.

Two men wait for me in the kitchen, dressed in carnival costume; Punchinello, except there are two of him, tall, very tall, lanky with arms and legs that seem wobbly at the joints. They walk towards me, jerkily, grinning and I cannot escape. One of them, pushes me, hand on my face ‘Beauty Queen’ he says and laughs.

I wake up in a panic. I never ever want to enter the kitchen again. Never alone anyway.

I smell blood. The cold wind blows in and brings with a blackness that can be felt, can be tasted, and it wraps itself around me, chokes me and a knife plunges into my bed, stabbing it and then there is blood everywhere.

I wake up knowing this was real. This happened. Now I never want to enter that bedroom again. Thankfully it was never mine. Just one of the many spare ones I had wandered into one afternoon and fallen asleep.

And still, this house haunts me, so many years later. In my dreams I walk, relentlessly walk up and down those corridors, feeling the same black shade. I search for the lemon bush, the pine tree, the mango trees, I roll in the grass and let the hot sun burn red and brown blisters into my skin. This too is a haunting.
In my teen years, my mother once showed me a poem she wrote and I loved it so much, I made it my own. Now only bits of the poem come back to me

The fragrance of roses,
My garden pervades,
And the moonlight shines,
In silver cascades,
…a sudden movement,
A creaking of the gate,
Is it you that comes,
At this hour so late
Memories food,
as I rush out to see,
Ah! but it’s just a shadow,
Your spirit is visiting me.

Who then did my childhood self see? Who walked behind her? Who was the other girl? Who haunts that house? Is it me? Is it the other girl? And what of the black presence? Of Punchinello? Of the knife and the blood? I don’t know. I don’t know.

2010-09-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

She had been left in the animal shelter because she was old, incontinent, had bladder cancer and cataract. For someone, she had become too much of a bother to look after. I saw her in the distance, tied to a pole. She looked at me with an intense expression that I tried to ignore. I was not intending to take her home. I had just lost my German shepherd and looking at another one was too much to bear.
As is often the case with me in animal shelters, I walked up to her anyway. ‘Do not touch her’, said the shelter manager, ‘She has already tried to bite three people who have wanted to walk her or adopt her’. I looked at her. She was a huge black and tan German shepherd, with large wolf like eyes and enormous ears. She was really staring at me; I had not imagined it when I first saw her. Her tail did not wag, and in her eyes I thought I could read a deep sorrow. I went home and told my mother about her. The next day both of us went to the shelter and were told again that she was a biter and it was best not to go near her. When she saw my mother, she wagged her tail and jumped up and down. So, despite my protests, my mother walked up to her, with biscuits and to the astonishment to all those around, this dog ate out of her hand. I was asked by my mother to unchain her which I did with my eyes closed in fear, expecting a bite right on my face any minute. Nothing happened, she was unchained and I began to walk her outside the shelter. She saw our car, ran up to it, dragging me behind her, climbed in and sat down and looked at me with her tail wagging.
We took her home, I sat next to her and she licking my hands and face throughout.
Whether she would she adjust to the cats was my next fear and I told her that if she did not, she would have to go back. Once home, she settled in with cats like it was the most normal thing for a dog her size to do.
Three months later, my mother took ill and passed away. I, overcome with grief, became withdrawn and began to live a reclusive life, my only outings being the daily trip to work and back. Leela, as we named her, insisted in moving into my bedroom and she would cuddle with me through those pain filled nights. I would spread a rubber sheet on the bed because of her incontinence and feel grateful for her warmth and love.

Slowly Leela began to look after me. She would go to the kitchen and wag her tail, so I had to go there too, to give her a snack, and so would eat as well. She would flop down next to me when despair would fill me. Few things can equal the peace and joy that comes when you hug a dog, especially one her size. She began to screen everyone who came home. Some of my friends were fine according to her and she liked them, others she hated and as the years showed me, were well worth her displeasure. She would not leave my side when I had repairmen at home and they could hardly talk to me because she would bark continuously not letting them come anywhere near me. She bit one or two people who tried to come too close to me when I walked her and soon had the reputation of a ferocious dog. An excellent reputation that she worked hard to build I am sure, to protect someone who was living alone.
Three years passed and she grew weaker and more incontinent. Her kidneys failed and she was dying. I begged the vets to save her. I just could not lose her. I could not. After fifteen days of dialysis, her creatinine count came down to a near normal level and she came home. Once home, she resumed looking after me, protecting me and bossing over me.

More than a year passed and then she began vomiting blood and I knew that she would not live much longer. Around that time someone called me and inquired if I had a kitten that he could adopt. I said I did and he said he would come over in the evening to have a look at her. I warned him about Leela when he rang the doorbell and waited to se Leela’s reaction. She walked up to him, sniffed him, wagged her tail and walked away. I was relieved. Usually anyone new would be barked at for at least fifteen minutes, more, if she disliked the person. ‘She likes you’, I told him. He took the kitten home and Leela died a week later. Once again I was devastated. My lifeline had been cut again.
But Leela knew something I did not know. It was as if she had been waiting, just as she had been waiting all those years ago to be taken home. She was waiting for this man who came to take the kitten. It sounds rather dramatic, but I married the man who adopted the kitten from me. We have adopted many dogs and cats since but I will always remember my special friend who looked after me like a parent does and even made sure that I got ‘settled’ in life.

2010-06-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

Peggy the pigeon was found on M.G road outside the Deccan Herald Office almost two years ago. An employee of Deccan Herald found her and went to my husband who was having breakfast in Coffee House next door, to ask for help. We were looking after the coffee house cats at that time and the regulars there knew that we help out animals in distress. So my husband packed up the pigeon and took her home. Now came the problem of putting her in a safe place in a house full of cats.

We put her in the dressing room, called the vet, described her condition and asked what she could be given to eat. It turned out that she had a B-complex deficiency and all we needed to do was add B-Complex tablets to her food.

Because the dressing room was between the bathroom and bedroom, Peggy, as we named her, had to put up with us going back and forth through her room several times a day. She would flap her wings indignantly, fly up and perch on the curtain rod and look down at us, annoyed.’ You smell of cats' she would say.

It did not take long for the cat network to get to know that their humans had brought home something different for dinner. They ran into the bedroom and sat outside the closed door of the dressing room in anticipation of being let in to the feast inside. Some tried to break the door down when they found that we were of no help. Others, in rotation, kept a constant watch at the door. Inside Peggy would flap her wings furiously each time a cat mewed. This only frustrated the cats more.

One day they got in, five of them, Peggy flew up to the ceiling and flew from one end to another. Poor thing, she must have been terrified. The cats were trying all they could to get at her, but there was no way they could. They were shooed out and the door was shut. We realized that it was time Peggy was released. It had been close to three months, she was getting very fat and she seemed fine.

I did not want to part with her despite the permanent bird poop stains on the floor, despite the difficulty of preventing cats from running in, despite her not making friends with us. But she had to go, there were pigeons in the area and she would surely find friends and live happily.

So we opened the window and hoped she would get the idea. Promptly a cat walked in from the open window. I had forgotten that they could climb from the parapet below the window. Peggy flapped angrily till we locked all the cats away and waited. By the evening, she had flown away. I looked out for her for many days after that, hoping to see her on some tree, somewhere nearby. I scattered grains into any likely area where pigeons might roost but I never saw her again.

I won’t forget her, little Peggy, the pigeon among the cats.

2010-06-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

The graveyard of the ants.

I will never know why there were squares cut into one of the compound walls of my childhood home in Lucknow. The squares were small and ran along the length of the wall, right in the middle. Perhaps they were meant for lamps. One day I discovered ants in one of the squares, hundreds of them and they were all dead. As I watched, I saw a procession of ants bring a dead one into the square. It was carried across the other dead ones and left in a corner and then the others went away. I had found an ant graveyard!.

From that day on, I would go there everyday to observe and check if I had indeed found an ant graveyard. On most days it lay there silent. The dead lying there naked, exposed, vulnerable. What if the gardener decided to clean up the squares? All of them were becoming collection points for dead leaves and mud and would soon become too obvious even for him to ignore. What if he decided to clean everything up? Where would the ants put their dead? I kept a vigil from that day on. I made myself the protector of the ants and their graveyard.

I even kept flowers there. Purple bougainvilleas, tiny wildflowers whose names I did not know and covered their bodies with leaves. At least twice more, as far as I can remember, I saw a procession of ants carrying a dead one and depositing it in the graveyard.

Ant graveyards do exist. Most of what I have found is anecdotal evidence. Ants graveyards in kitchens, in the bathroom of a hilltop home, in some shed and other such places. The people who have discovered them have been as surprised and fascinated as me. I would love to have a scientific explanation for ant graveyards but I have not been able to get much.

2009-05-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

Little Red Riding Hood loved the forest. Spring or winter, autumn or summer, she would take her picnic basket and spend many hours there pretending that she was a woodland creature . Her grandmother who lived on the other side of the forest would often tell her stories of her own childhood, when the forest was thicker and a person would have to be very brave indeed to go into it at all.

'If you go into the very heart of the forest', she told her granddaughter, 'You will find the cottage of the lady of the forest'. 'She is very old and her hair is silver like the stars and her eyes are as green as leaves. 'We never dared to go anywhere near her cottage, for we were very afraid of her.' said the grandmother to Little Red Riding Hood, who listened with terrified fascination. 'Did she turn people into toads?' asked LRRH?

'Maybe she did' replied her Grandmother,'Who knows?'.

'Was she a wicked witch?' asked LRRH

'Witches are not wicked, my dear' said her Grandmother. ' Not always, anyway, only if they have to be' she said and smiled.

One day LRRH was in the forest pretending to be a witch. She had a pile of berries in a little pot of water and was very seriously repeating a spell over and over again.

Red, blue, green and gold,
Cherries, berries, leaves and mold,
Cook, bubble, steam and stew,
Make me a delicious magical brew.

'May I have some of your magical brew?' said a voice. LRRH looked up and saw a tall handsome huntsman. 'Why?' she asked. 'So that I can become the best hunter in the entire world' he said and smiled. 'The forest is dangerous you know. A little girl like you could get eaten up by a wolf'. 'If I get magical powers, I can protect you, I can kill the wolf and any other animal that tries to harm you'.

'My grandmother told me that the animals in the forest are not harmful', said LRRH indignantly. 'She has a wolf that comes every evening to be fed'.

'Your grandmother tells fascinating stories , it seem to me' he said and smiled. 'Now, may I have some of your brew?' he said and moved closer to her.

LRRH shrugged and gestured towards the berries.

'What lovely green eyes you have, little girl' said the huntsman and he picked a handful of berries and inched nearer to her.

LRRH shrugged and said nothing.

'What a lovely tiny nose you have, little girl' said the huntsman and he bit into the berries in one big mouthful and moved closer to her.

'And what lovely little ears you have' he said and he tucked a dark curl behind her ear.

'What soft hands you have' he said as he took them into his rough scarred hands.

LRRH tried to pull away but he held her firmly. Smiling. Chewing the berries, lips staining red with their juice.

'What lovely......

Before he could finish, a look of terror came into his face. He seemed to be looking at something beyond them and his face twisted into a plea of forgiveness, of anguish, of immense pain. He his mouth frothed and his hand loosened the grip he had on her.

As she ran towards her grandmother's house, she could hear him screaming in pain, in fury, like a dying beast. She ran till she could hear him no more.

She pushed open her grandmothers door and found her knitting, her silver hair had just been brushed and she looked up and her green eyes were twinkling.

'Did you have a nice day in the woods, my dear?' she asked. 'I have made you some cherry pies and a mug of chocolate.Wash your hands and dig in'

and this is with JP's input

2009-02-13T01:18:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, in the dark woods, there lived an old lady.

She lived in a ramshackle log cabin deep in the woods, far beyond the last clearing and far from any water-hole. She grew toadstools and nightshade in her small garden patch. Perhaps these were her only diet. Every woodland creature gave her cabin a wide berth. When she went for a rare stroll through the woods, deer ran trembling from her path, birds flew away crying wildly, hares rabbited off down their burrows, foxes fled in fear and even the bears and wolves stayed well away from her. In the late afternoons, when she sat in what passed for the porch of her cabin, weaving cobwebs, sometimes a horned toad would come and sit beside her in silence.

Every morning and evening she would comb her long slivery hair till it shone like a glittering galaxy of stars. After that she would sit on her rocking chair and look out of the window. Many hours would pass this way. Sometimes a tear would roll slowly down her cheek and sometimes she would smile. No one knows what thoughts filled her days. No one visited her, for no one dared to go so deep into the dark woods.

Until, one day, a knight came knocking on her door. The regular sort of knight, in mail and armour, with sword and shield and helmet, riding a great warhorse, bravely caparisoned.

The old lady was frightened. It had been too long since she had seen another human being. She didn't trust them and shining armour didn't impress her. If she thought hard, she felt she could almost remember a time when there had been many knights around her, and ladies-in-waiting, and…but the memories were dim, and she had no use for them anymore. She did remember that fair words and finery were things that had turned bitter for, that she had resolved to turn her back on them.

So she did not open the door. The knight rode up to her door and reined his mount to a halt. He waited silently until it was dark and then left. The old lady went back to her rocking chair and her dreams.

He came again the next day, and the next and the next after that. Knights are persistent, if nothing else. Finally the day came when annoyance overcame fear and she opened the door.

'Go away', she said. 'You can want nothing from me, for I have nothing
to give you, go away'.

The knight bowed. 'I want nothing from you my lady', he said. 'I have come to return something that once was yours'. He placed a carefully wrapped package before her and stood aside. She picked it up and opened it, untying knots and pulling away sheets of cloth and paper. Inside, was something longer than her forearm and a little wider than her face, gleaming softly, like the memories that began to stir unbidden within the old lady's mind.

It was a mirror. A beautiful mirror with a richly worked silver frame and a flawless glass. She saw in the reflection of a terrible, powerful lady of great beauty. A smile from yesterday, beautiful,
proud and just a little terrible came back to her face.

'Yes, this was mine,' she said to the knight. 'And it still is. You may thank that slip of a girl you call your queen for returning what is rightfully mine. And tell her never to bother me again.' The knight bowed, mounted his horse and rode away.

The old lady went inside and hung the mirror on the wall. So you've come back to me, she thought to herself. You are fairer than ever, my lady, came the reply.

Somewhere in the forest, a horned toad darted out its tongue to catch an errant fly.

2009-02-09T20:58:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time in the dark woods there lived an old lady. Every morning and evening she would comb her long slivery hair till it shone like a glittering galaxy of stars. After that she would sit on her rocking chair and look out of the window. Many hours would pass this way. Sometimes a tear would move slowly down her cheek and sometimes she would smile. Who knows what thoughts filled her days.
No one visited her, for no one dared to go so deep into the dark woods.

One day a knight came knocking on her door. She was frightened. It had been too long since she had seen another human being. She did not open the door. The knight waited a while and then left. The old lady went back to her rocking chair and her dreams.

He came again the next day, and the next and then he came again. Finally she opened the door. ‘Go away’, she said. ‘You want nothing from me, I have nothing to give you, go away’.

The knight bowed. ‘I want nothing from you my lady’, he said. ‘I have come to return something that once belonged to you’. He placed the carefully wrapped package before her and stood aside. She picked it up and opened it. It was a mirror. A beautiful mirror with an ornate silver frame and flawless glass. She saw in its reflection a lady of great beauty. Smiles from yesterday came to fill her face. She went inside and hung the mirror on the wall.

for a 55 word story challenge.

2009-02-06T00:44:00.000-08:00

Little Red Riding Hood goes deep into the dark woods where the trees are thick and the sun never shines. She leaves a trail of cake crumbs and laughs. They will be eaten. Then she will truly be lost. She throws off the hood, lies down in the silence and waits. The wolf will come.

2009-01-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

I walk in the graveyard in the evenings, hoping to spot a ghost. I must admit that it is difficult to picture ghosts sitting on those gravestones, cracked and broken though some of them are. Why they would show themselves, anyway, I reason. Would they not rather be back in their homes trying to make themselves visible to their families?

Many of the graves are very well maintained. Shiny granite surrounded by flower beds. Most are cracked though,faded and forgotten, surrounded by dry mud that was once a bower.

My mind, gleefully morbid, estimates the various stages of decay the bodies must be in. The boy who was buried last month must have begun to lose his youthful suppleness by now. Perhaps the old lady buried in the far end of the graveyard, five years ago, is a heap of bones. And what of the graves that are a hundred years old?Are their occupants truly dust to dust returned?

Why do people visit the graves of their dead after the burial? Why heap candles, flowers and so much more,decorating them as if for some festival?.Perhaps the physical proximity is comforting. Perhaps it is to show the dead that they are still loved and remembered. Or perhaps it is so that the living heal themselves.Then one day the grave is forgotten and it begins to die.

I look at the seemingly endless graveyard and i think to myself,the only thing haunting it is the silence.I no longer remember if I am dead or alive. There is a well aged and forgotten grave that has on it my name. I feel absolutely alive though. I am the ghost hunter. Sometimes when I wave at visitors they, hesitatingly wave back, sometimes they don’t. Most of the time no one notices me, not even the caretaker. I wait, perched on the grave that is supposed to be mine. The ghosts will come.

2009-01-03T08:27:00.001-08:00

I am walking on a beach. I walk slowly, my toes play with the sand. I let my feet sink in this soft, relenting, glistening mica. It is a lovely warm feeling. Like snuggling into a blanket with hot chocolate, buttery toast and a favourite book. The sea is rhythmic, sleep inducing. It is a very hot day. Blue sky, brown beach, blue-green water, a school child’s drawing.

In the distance I see a rock formation where the sea forms a small shallow pool. It is brilliant blue, still, calm. Two children are playing in the pool. They see me and ask me to come over. One of them throws water on me. It is cold as ice. I shiver. They ask me to play with them and I, shy, sit among the rocks and dip my feet into the pool.

They are wearing school uniforms. White with a grey and white striped belt. They point out to a building not very far away from the pool. ‘That is our school, the SEA SCHOOL’, says the girl. I see that the school has two buildings that are connected by a glass fronted passage on one of the top floors. There is, I think, a tower that is a part of the building on the right. I cannot be sure.

The bell rings. Not a school bell, more a maniacal tolling. ‘What is that?’ I ask. ‘Oh, that is the drill bell”, says the boy. ‘Practice drill for us in case of tidal waves’, says the girl. ‘We have to run into the building on the right and run all the way to the highest floor, can you see that floor that has a lot of glass windows?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ I said, I could. ‘We have to reach there, hurry’ she said.

They took my hands, one on each side and ran. All around me the sky and the sea was changing. Clouds; black, gray, angry, hungry, filled the sky. I shivered. The sea ran after us, full of fury. Big arms of water broke away chunks of beach. The pool was gone.

‘Run, run’, they said. I ran with them towards the building. All the while the sea ran behind us. I felt a spray of water. Then the rain came down, the sun died, the world went black. Up, up up the stairs we ran. The waves rammed against the glass. The rain and the wind tried to shatter it. Then the wave came. First there was a sky, an angry black sky, there was rain, and then there was no difference between the two. Then the wave that ate the sky drank the rain and swallowed the building.

When I opened my eyes, I saw a room full of school children in white uniform. Some were crying, some sleeping, some playing some and singing songs. It was a gray dull room so full of sorrow I wanted to cry.

I saw my two friends from the beach sitting quietly. They looked very peaceful. ‘Aren’t you sacred?’ I asked. ‘Oh no’, said the girl. ‘This wave came one day, long ago, when we were playing, and took us all away, we had no time to reach the building, we are happy we saved you, we are already dead, nothing can happen to us’.

This was a dream I had many years ago, in 2004 perhaps.

2008-11-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

I narrated the following ghost story to JP’s school going cousins, Madhavi and Ram, during a recent visit to Chennai.

(It is to be noted that I always tell this ghost story in the first person and always request my audience not to interrupt me with questions. I tell them that the events as they happened in the story are true and are a part of who I am, and if some facts of my life seem contradictory to what I narrate, I am not to be stopped and questioned about it, no matter how strange)

My father was a priest in a temple in the Himalayas. It was a Shiva temple. We lived next to the temple. As a small child, I remember never being allowed to go out of the house on my own. I could only accompany my father to the market to buy the weekly provisions. I had no friends, I never played with other children. I never knew why. I had to satisfy myself by sitting near the window and watch the hundreds of people who would come to the temple to pray. Between the house and the temple there was an ancient Peepul tree. A woman would always sit there, alone. She would wear a white saree and leave her long, very curly hair open. Her head would be bent and she would drape the saree around her head. I never saw her face. I could sense that she was very sad. In a strange way, I was drawn to her. I could feel her loneliness.

My father would stop and talk to her both on the way to the temple and on the way home. Each time she spoke to him, she would cry. Curious, I would ask him who she was. I never got an answer. However, I persisted. My fathers routine had gone on for many years and I wanted to know who this mysterious woman was.

One day my father told me. She is a Yakshini, he said. A kind of she-demon. She lives in the tree. He told me that the way a Yakshini could be distinguished from a human was by her feet. Yakshinis feet do not touch the ground.

All of a sudden everything about my life made sense. The isolation, the unanswered questions, not being allowed to play with anyone, the lonely childhood. You see, I always thought that it was out of respect for my father that each time we went to the market, people would clear the path. Long queues would move away so that we could be first. Shopkeepers seldom took money and they averted their gaze when I or my father would speak. Out of respect, I thought. I never knew it was because my feet do not touch the ground.

Whenever I tell this story, several different reactions follow. (and mostly from adults)
1. A blank ‘I did not get you’ look.
2. A ‘ok’…duh ‘What happened next?’ look
3. A stony silence.
4. A stony silence followed by a scream.

Madhavi and Ram had reaction number 4. This was followed by them insisting that they have a look at my feet. I told them that since I was wearing sandals, my feet were off the ground anyway, so they would never know. I had to take my sandals off after that to show beyond doubt that my feet did indeed touch the ground.

They were not convinced. They are not the only ones. After telling this story so many times, I have seen that I am looked at suspiciously, from a few hours to several days after.

Really, I tell you!

Should I celebrate my success as a story teller or accept Ram’s verdict; ‘She is scary, I did not notice it before, but now I do!’

I had to spend the rest of the evening convincing them that their cousin had not married a Yakshini. I told them ways in which they could tell the story and frighten their friends. The success lies in speaking softly, sadly, giving a feeling of doom. A very good actor might even manage a tear.

Though I assure you I am no Yakshini though I do have very curly hair and can trace my ancestry to the Himalayas.

2008-11-13T00:59:00.000-08:00

The first few lines of a deeply moving short story, The Ballad of the Sad Café, by Carson McCullers make me think what an empty house must feel like, if it could. Hence this...

The ballad of an empty house

Boarded up and forgotten,
I live another life.
I trap memories in cobwebs
And breathe into them
A life I wanted.

For everyone else to see,
There are layers of dust,
And the whispered footprints
Of people of the dark
Who crawl over me.

People pass by and say,
Oh look, remember that place?
With its pink roses and lilies
And its garden parties,
And its many romances?

Look at it now, its crumbling,
I would not dare to walk up its path,
Who knows what ghosts live
Behind its brown mould walls,
And its ivy eaten windows.

I smile, I sigh, what would you know
Of my sunshine and starlight,
And the lilies in bloom,
Of the endless dances,
And of my many romances.

2008-11-10T22:07:00.000-08:00

Ghosts must have had a special fondness for my family. My mother told me about an experience her father had on his grandfather’s farm. He had gone to the farm for the winter and was staying in the outhouse.

It was a black, freezing, and windy winter. A Swedish winter, bitter cold. A winter that I can only imagine.

Sometime around midnight he heard a knock at the door. It must have taken him some time to wake up because when he did the knocking was impatient and persistent. Not wanting to climb out of bed he asked the person to come in. No one did. The knocking stopped. As he was falling asleep, the knocking started again. Once more he asked the person to come in. Nothing happened. When this repeated itself the third time he got extremely angry and told whoever was knocking to jolly well open the door and come in if he wanted to. The door blew open with a tremendous force. No one was there. Just the wind blowing ceaselessly.

The next morning he told his grandfather about the incident. It came as no surprise to his grandfather. He looked upset and muttered about something starting again. He refused to give any explanation to my grandfather. He just told him not to sleep in the outhouse again.

2008-11-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

For some reason the ghosts spared me. Or perhaps I was protected by the Baba, who knows. Of course when I was about two or three, I would tell my mother about the Doosri Larki. This other girl and I would play endlessly in the garden, near the pond, in the Doll House that was made for me. I would tell my mother endless stories about what she told me, what she showed me, what we did.

I remember nothing, sadly. The other girl went away by the time I turned five.

2008-11-07T05:51:00.000-08:00

The corridor leading from the entrance of the house in Lucknow ended at the kitchen. It took a long L shaped turn before it reached the kitchen and it had along its length bedrooms and a living room. Its walls had old lithographs on them and from the ceiling hung green handis.

It was a dark corridor, even during the day. I would feel cold walking through it and would look behind me to see if I was being followed. The short arm of the L especially was very dark, being a dead end with no ventilation. In the kitchen, where it ended things were different though. My mother’s cakes and cookies or aromas of curries would send out warmth. Being there was like stepping in from the rain and getting a hot cup of coffee to drink and a fireplace to warm icy toes to toast.

One afternoon my mother heard footsteps. Someone was walking through the corridor. That was strange because the cook would leave by 12 noon and come back only in the evening after 5. My mother looked out of her bedroom and saw a veiled woman wearing a traditional Sharara walk towards the kitchen. When the woman passed her bedroom, my mother meant to call out to her but she told me that at that moment her throat constricted and she could not speak. Once the woman passed her my mother went to the kitchen. Whoever it was could not go out of the kitchen without first backtracking and passing her or opening the back door into the orchard. When my mother reached the kitchen there was no one there. The door was bolted from the inside. The kitchen was empty. Then my mother checked the entrance door but that too was bolted from the inside. No one could have got in. My father , who has a thief fixation, had put three bolts on every door and all three were bolted, from the inside.

My mother had first thought that it was the cook who had decided to come earlier and not wanting to disturb us, had gone straight to cook the evening meal. After finding no one in the kitchen, she thought that she had dreamed it. She later asked the cook if she had indeed somehow come. The cook looked terrified when my mother told her what had happened and was convinced that this was a omen and she was going to die. Thankfully that did not happen but my mother always wondered about what she saw. Never one to be scared of the paranormal she told the mysterious woman that she was welcome to walk the corridor anytime she pleased.

2008-08-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

We had several antique kerosene lamps in our Lucknow house. They were obtained from the palaces of the Nawabs where they were not meant for décor but for every day use. In our house their function was purely decorative. When my parents had parties, the lamps were lit and the muted glow of the flame through the ancient frosted glass was the only lighting in the house. I remember being awed by the beauty of the house on these occasions. It was a rich, warm beauty and I would wrap myself up in it while I sat alone and bored with endless adult conversation and seemingly useless laughter. I never could understand why the grown ups would carry on a deep, profound conversation and then burst into loud helpless laughter. What was the joke?!

On the eve of one such party, my mother discovered that we had run out of kerosene. She was wondering how she could procure some when the doorbell rang. It was our antique dealer. He told my mother that had a very strong feeling that we might need kerosene. He was carrying a can of kerosene to give us. He did not actually sell kerosene, so this was not part of his stock nor did he make any money from the kerosene.

My mother was taken aback and she told him that she did actually need the kerosene.
Many years later when my mother was recollecting this strange event, she said the fakir must have been behind it. She was only half joking.

2008-08-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

My father was obsessed with collecting and making furniture. Very often I would see carpenters working endlessly on a sofa set, a cupboard or some other heavy and extremely ugly furniture. They were made to work in an open shed that faced the front garden. My father took great pride in being a slave driver. The carpenters had to work relentlessly and must have been poorly paid, I am sure.

One October a carpenter who had been working on restoring a bed that had been brought down from Mussorie walked up to my mother and said that he had enough and he was leaving that evening even if he did not get paid and the work was incomplete. My mother’s first thought was that my father was the reason he wanted to quit.It was not unusual. It was well known that no one could work for my father for very long. His temper was famous. He was well known all over Lucknow for his rage and people were terrified of him.

On being questioned he said that he was very afraid to work in our house because of the Baba who lived in the compound. He claimed that every evening he would see an old man in long white robes walking in the orchard. The carpenter said that he looked life a fakir. This fakir appeared to do nothing in particular but the carpenter was very intimidated by the way the he would look at him. This fakir never spoke and behaved as if people around him did not exist.

My mother who was used to the strangest reasons for staff leaving the job laughed this one off and told the carpenter that she would speak to ‘saheb’ to increase his pay, if that is why he wanted to leave. The carpenter refused and insisted that he was very afraid that the Baba would cast a spell on him and he felt that even another day in the house would doom him.

Naturally it was of no use telling him that there was no Baba. My mother suspected that he might have been on some kind of drug and the Baba was a hallucination. To convince the carpenter that there was no Baba my mother called the gardener and told him to talk to the carpenter.

“But Memsahib, there is a Baba in the orchard. He is a very nice Baba and I do puja to him every day. He is very kind and his blessings are with me always”.

The carpenter never came back and my mother’s interrogation of the gardener resulted in nothing but a repeated insistence of the existence of the Baba.

This was the beginning of a series of very strange events that my mother experienced first hand.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My mother had given Badi Bi the cook a week long holiday. A few days later my father announced that he was calling his politician friends over for lunch and he expected a good North Indian spread. Imagine trying to feed and please pot bellied self obsessed old men! My mother could make the most wonderful cakes and bakes but she struggled to make Indian food those days. Now she was in a real fix. It was no use reminding my father that Badi Bi was on leave and preparing the kind of food he was expecting was impossible. He simply did not care. It had to be done. This was the order he gave in the morning and the spread had to be ready by noon.

My mother despaired and wished that Badi Bi would somehow come back. A hopeless wish for Badi Bi was several hours away from Lucknow.It was only the third day of her leave. I cannot imagine what my mother must have gone through. My father’s temper spared no one. Not even her.

At ten that morning the door bell rang and my mother opened the door to a breathless Badi Bi. Very agitated she puffed and panted as she asked my mother if everything was all right. The moment she was told Memsahib wanted her back immediately, she came rushing. Why had Memsahib sent for her? My mother was very surprised and told her about the lunch. “But Badi Bi, how did you know I needed you, I just wished that you were here, I did not send for you”, she said.

“But Memsahib, a fakir came to my house and told me to go back immediately because you needed me and you had sent him to call me. He told me that it was very urgent and I must leave right away.” she said.

My mother had no explanation for what happened. My father got his spread and was well pleased and none the wiser.

The mysterious fakir became a fairy godmother as my mother found out fulfilling even the most fleeting wish she had.

2008-08-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

The house I grew up in was haunted, that’s what all the servants would say. They would tell me that long ago, before any house was built, that area was a village and before that it was a forest through which the British troops would pass.

I would always be awed by the fact that the house and the land around it was large enough to fit a village and before that a forest. The loss of both would make me feel sad. Who had destroyed the forest to make way for the village and who had destroyed the village to make way for the house and its unending grounds?

I would often dig about in the garden hoping to find some treasure left behind by a soldier or a villager. The gardener told me that if I dug deep enough, I would probably find the skeleton of a British soldier and I would know it for sure because he would still have his helmet on.

Although we had a fairly large house keeping staff, none of them would take up the offer to stay in the quarters provided for them. The servant quarters were on one side of an orchard and to me they seemed very tempting. I would spend many hours there with my books, dogs and imaginary friends. I had the pick of fruits to eat and rooms to invade and laze in.

No servant would stay there because they said that in the evenings you could see lamps burning outside the doors and windows of the quarters. This story had been handed down generations of servants and nobody ventured there after dark, except my mother who would take that path for her evening walks. She never saw any lamps but the gardener told her it was because she was a “devi” and the spirits would not harm her.

However, when I was perhaps 6 years old, a cook and his wife came to stay there. Knowing nothing about the lamps and not really caring when they were told, they settled in happily. I was delighted because I always got a snack or a very spicy curry to eat when I went to play there. I was given this secretly because it was always between meals and always loaded with so many green chilies that had my mother known she would have disapproved.

Nearly three years later something happened. The cook, Duli Chand, told my parents that it was his duty to report what had happened the night before.

It was a moonless night, Duli Chand and his wife were sleeping outside, in the portico of their quarters. After midnight Duli chand thought he heard his name being called. He woke up and far down the orchard he saw a man who was wearing white kurta- payjama calling out his name. The voice was deep and menacing. He repeatedly asked Duli Chand to come towards him. When Duli Chand got up to go him, he apparently disappeared.

Duli chand was very shaken by this incident but he assured my parents that he was not the kind to get scared and that if he had God to protect him, he would fear no one human or non human.

Two months after this incident Duli Chand died. He did not have any medical problems. He developed a cough a fortnight before and that turned into a lung infection which he did not survive.

2008-08-06T02:26:00.000-07:00

School stories……

My boarding school would take in students throughout the year. One day an Italian boy joined school. He was blond with curly ringlets falling into his eyes. His smile held a thousand promises of mischief and mayhem. He spoke only in Italian and this made all the girls want to teach him English. He was chased by us through the school corridors, accosted in the dining hall and smuggled into classrooms during free periods. A smile from him or a word spoken by him, especially if it was a recently taught English word was all that was needed to make our day.

He was only three when he joined school. His parents wanted him to get used to India, especially Indian food. In the first year he did not need to attend any formal classes. The headmistress would make him sit in her office for an hour and teach him English. For the rest of the day he was free to do whatever he liked. A lot of his time was spent in the dining hall and rice and rasam soon became a favourite with him.

When he was not eating, he would go from class to class, peep in and smile. Then he would stand and wait for us to squeal in delight and call out to him. Sometimes he was met with absolute silence and no amount of waving and smiling would help. He would then step in and in a flash disappear when he saw who the teacher in class was. Most of the time it was the math teacher. Even he knew that math teachers are a terrifying species that all children should keep well away from.

One February when we were studying for the tenth grade preliminary exams he ran past our class. We had a free period then and he was immediately caught and dragged into class. He was delighted to discover that this was the class of his friend who had an endless supply of scented colourful erasers. She sat down on the floor with him and spread out her treasure. Soon we all were pretending we were in a forest and on a mission to ambush and kill enemy soldiers. Compasses made deadly weapons and the dismembered bits of eraser flesh made a little blond general very proud.

We lost track of time. Suddenly a classmate ran up to us breathless. The bell had rung, did we not hear it? Now the Sanskrit teacher was on her way to class and it was too late to send him out. He was trapped. Quickly through frenzied gestures and broken English we told him that he had to hide and wait till he was told to come out. The enemy had got powerful and he could get killed. We more or less threw him into a gigantic carton box and threw in bits of paper and anything else that we thought would serve as a camouflage.

Within seconds we were back in our places and the classroom was completely silent. The teacher, as she entered must have felt proud. Here was a class that was serious about doing well.

Minutes ticked by. Someone coughed. Then someone else. Soon coughs were answered by many other coughs. Someone sneezed. Two girls hid under their bench, buried their heads into their skirts and laughed.

The teacher looked up and a subtle change in her expression that we all knew so well made us quiet for a while. Then the coughing began again. One brave girl asked to be allowed to go to the restroom. She barely made it outside class before she fell down laughing.

The teacher was very annoyed now but there was nothing she could do. It was winter, coughs and sniffles were normal. A weak attempt at asking what was going on was answered with a wide eyed innocent “Nothing Miss!” But she knew something was wrong. It frustrated her. Her hands itched to punish. It was torture not to be able to do anything. There right under her nose we were clearly laughing at her and she could do nothing. Nothing until…..

Out he popped, the little Jack in the Box. “I’m hungry!” he wailed, the only fluent sentence he knew in English, with perfect pronunciation.

For a few moments nothing happened. The teacher had frozen. Her mouth was open and a hundred expressions all competing to get out had frozen with her. Even he remained in the box, eyes wide, and his body ready to bolt on cue. We waited. Still. We were seconds away. Then it came. A torrent of fury.

She had never seen such a shameless class she said. Hiding boys in class, whatever would we do next? It is not good for girls to talk to boys, did we not know that? So shameless she said, she would tell the headmistress. This was what we were doing when the exams were so near. Did we want to bring disgrace to our families? How could we do this being students of such an institution? We were just like the girls from the bad “outside” world. Here our parents had sent us to learn good values and this is how we were letting them down.

Meanwhile he continued standing in the box with his eyes growing wider and wider. He was very scared. Finally she turned to him and told him to get out. He did not need to know English for that, he ran out but not before yelling rudely at her.

For about a month we were the talk of the staff room and the teachers made it a point to tell the other classes not to follow our bad example. The headmistress threatened with expulsion any girl who was caught talking or even looking at the little three year old charmer.

2008-07-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

In grade 8 a friendship had developed between one of the most attractive and intelligent girls in class and another girl, who was quite introverted and thus selective about her friends. I remember her as an ever smiling and unassumingly intelligent girl. This friendship was a very close and loving one. They would do everything together and most of us were indifferent to it, We hardly gave it a thought, initially.

The fact of their friendship must have festered in AN’s mind for a long time.She had always nursed a feeling of awe mixed with jealousy for this intelligent and attractive girl. One day, she could take it no longer. Gathering her group around her she said that there was something very abnormal about their friendship. It was just not right. She then spoke about homosexuality, a word that only a few knew the meaning of in that conservative school. Those who knew the meaning gasped as if a new understanding of this friendship had come to light. Those who were told the meaning(also the very orthodox girls) labeled these girls with the one word that was the ultimate in our lingo to describe a fallen person “Sooo shameless!!!!”, saying it out aloud, after making a dramatic gasping sound and covering their mouths.

AN succeeded in making the others alienate these girls. They would get strange looks, no one would talk to them after school or before. They were spoken about in barely concealed whispers. Many dirty, holier than thou looks were shot at them.

The effect was tragic. These two girls, with no one else to talk to, remained even closer together. They rejected and attempt made to talk to them by the few who would ignore AN’s dictates. This made them lose out on possible allies as well. They became like Siamese twins. On many occasions we would see them crying together and none of us dared to approach them. It was as if they had created a protective psychic shield around them that no one could penetrate. They ate little, sometimes not eating at all or eating just one meal in a day. We saw them get thinner. We saw them put on a brave front but break emotionally. No one , none of us did anything to help them.

Thankfully summer holidays are the best drug of forgetfulness and in the new term the friendhsip had ended and they related to each other as they would to anyone else.No one brought up the incidents of the previous academic year. Maybe, because of us a friendhsip had ended but I think, in the circumstances, it was better it did.

2008-07-21T01:04:00.000-07:00

Rachel Simmion's Odd Girl Out made me think back to my school days. Was I a mean girl in then? Memories of my life in a boarding school are becoming vague and distant and all I get are a few glimpses. Things that stood out, the things we did so that we would fit into the Enid Blyton ideal of boarding school life are clearly remembered. They still feel like triumphs against authority. Things like smuggling tuck in on parent meeting day (Sunday), keeping awake till late telling each other stories, making elaborate escape plans, daring to raid the school fridge and then snigger when another grade was blamed and endless such things that to us were a very big deal.

But was I a mean girl? Did I target and victimise the more quiet and demure girls? Did I laugh at someone’s clothes? Did I move in a clique?
Did I join in the general bitch sessions when groups of girls would identify and wholeheartedly make life miserable for some girl for the rest of the academic year?

One memory regretfully stands out. I was sitting under a tree with another girl and we were taking about goodness knows what. I must have been in grade 7. We had just finished a match of throw ball and were resting. Another classmate came in and wanted to be a part of the conversation.
So she asked us what we were taking about and for no reason whatsoever I said that we were speaking in code and only smart people could understand the code.(We had just been introduced to chemical symbols and for some reason i said CuSO4 was code for common sense). Then just for the kicks I got I rattled off code that was meaningless even for me. She looked at us sadly, angrily and she walked away. As I watched her, I felt very bad about what I had done but was too proud to apologise. My compensation for what I did was never to bring up the code again.

However, meanness was very much a part of school life. When you are in a boarding school, you are with your peer group all the time. Before, during and after school. If someone decides to make you their target for harassment, there is nothing much to look forward to except to accept being emotionally battered all day long and then find it being repeated in the evening and at night.

Right from the time I joined this school in grade 5, I found that there were many girls, who individually or as a group would target one or two girls every term, every year.

What these girls did to others is difficult to define. The cruelty was often very subtle and smiled at its victims through a sisterhood of love and friendship that girls in boarding schools seek.

AN had in grade 5 declared herself the boss of the class and had around her a group of girls who could either be slaves of who looked good to have around her. Among the latter were the well read ones, the smart ones, the pretty ones, she had an eye for the pretty ones. Thrown in among the slaves and the decorations were the executors of her endless schemes. Girls who could say mean things to the targeted girl. Girls who could mobilise support to isolate someone, Though two other girls competed for Boss status in grades 6 and 7, it was AN's constant presence that worked with, played with and snuffed out the socio-emotional lives of may girls right till grade 12.

AN made HD into her personal servant. HD had to wash her clothes, make her shelf ( a space we got to store our things, we had no lockers or cupboards), comb her hair and many other such things. In exchange HD got to be AN's pet. HD would make her sit next to her and then very affectionately begin to peel away her self esteem bit by slow bit. “Oh, HD is so good at cleaning, she will grow up to be an excellent servant!" She would say, and then smile at HD, eyes brimful with simulated love. AN decided that she was the charismatic mentor to HD and would tell her, train her to think the way she herself thought and became her knight and protector against real and imagined bitching from other girls. Naturally, mot of the bitching could be traced back to AN herself.

In the school where I teach, I know of a case where a girl had to leave school because of the kind of torment and isolation she experienced because the ‘it gang’ in her class succeeded in turning the entire class against her. My students told me that if they were seen talking to her, they would also be ostracized.

The emotional damage of this kind of female aggression is more or less permanent. In any case the experiences are not forgotten. I remember perfectly well many instances where I, my friends and other girls in my peer group were targets. The harassment often subtle though many times direct lasts months, even years. Once a target, it becomes almost a game. The victim expects to be harassed because at least then she can exist on the fringes of the all important sisterhood.

2007-11-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

Mr. T of the science dept wanders around our campus like an ant that has somehow fallen out of the neat organized line of fellow ants and is now moving about quite aimlessly, not quite knowing where to go.

Of course this happens only when he ventures out of his lab. Which is rare. So when he came into the exam dept in a state of agitation, we knew something was wrong. “Someone has to help me”, he said desperately. “Please give me five minutes of your time”.

Sonya, with her infinite patience asked him how she could help.

“I cannot do invigilation on the 3rd and 4th of December. There are presentations by the 12th grade that I have to record and evaluate. I have also asked the other subject teachers to excuse the grade 12 from their classes so that I can finish the recording of their oral presentations. I simply will not be able to any invigilation on those days. Please put me for another day, I am really sorry, but I cannot help it.” He was very worried and looked at Sonya hopelessly.

(Grade 12 is not having any exam this month)

Sonya told him not to worry and asked him to take out his invigilation schedule so that she could see what she could do. He said that he had forgotten to bring it. So Sonya got out one.

She studied it carefully and a small frown came on her face and she double checked. “But, Mr.R, you have no invigilation scheduled for the 3rd and 4th of December!” she said.

“I don’t? Oh! Thanks, sorry to take up your time” he said as he drifted out of the exam dept.

2007-11-29T02:14:00.001-08:00

As a teacher and lifelong student of psychology, three things at my workplace gave me very entertaining insights into the human personality: My work in the exam department, the game black magic and Secret Santa.

The exam department is headed by my friend and super efficient colleague-Sonya and I was both nervous and honored to be asked by her to be a part of the exam department this year. The exam department does a thankless job: Organize and conduct exams for all grades in school. It is thankless because no one who is not part of the exam department knows the hard work that goes into ensuring that exams are conducted smoothly. It involves asking for the syllabus from each teacher a month in advance of the exams, making the timetable( something that is beyond my skills),teacher invigilation schedule, assigning roll numbers to students, photocopying thousands of question papers, locking them away safely among endless other things. Once begun, it never seems to end.
The first thing I was told by another friend who has been with the department for two years was that I could get all my case studies if I just spent a day in the exam dept.

In keeping with the ethics of discussing human case studies and minimizing the risk of being fired, names have been withheld or changed.

Yesterday we had the first paper of one of the science subjects (grade-11). There was a problem in the paper. One of the questions was just a statement with no accompanying question and another question was repeated twice. Since the subject teacher sets the paper and is responsible for its content, we called the subject teacher who came to the exam block looking irritated.

“Yes, what is the problem?” (Cant you two sort it out among yourselves? Must I be bothered by such small things, look how out of breath you have made me! The gall to make me run and come from two blocks away. There had better be a very good reason)

The ‘problem’ is explained

“See, these things will happen. (I never make mistakes.) Even in the final IB exam when this happens, nothing clarified to the students. They are told to just go on answering. It is sorted out at the board level.( and anyway since I am Zeus, even though I look like Adonis, surely I should not be troubled, I still cannot believe I was made to come all the way here). And the subject teacher never enters the exam hall”. (But what would you know)”

At this point he marched into the exam hall even as we were all set to go into the hall ourselves.

“This time I will go”. (After all, since you have ruined things enough, this is the least I can do. Anyway I am always a sight for sore eyes, besides who knows what you will say once you are inside)

Next day the exam dept gets a call from him.

“Yasmine, I am looking at the original paper. There is no mistake here (I told you so! Now how may I grill you, how may I kill you?)”

“………., we have the original papers, it was only after looking at them and finding the same error there, we called you.” I said.

“No no I have the original, who has given you that original? (Cheating me eh?)”

“Um you?!” I reply. (As per exam rules, all original papers are given to the exam dept for photocopying).”

“No I am looking at the softcopy (and since technology has not yet reached you, what would you know?!)”

“Anyway, mistakes happen, let it be (tsk tsk poor child, you made a big big mistake by making me come all the way there for no fault of mine. But since I am the all forgiving Buddha, I will let it go)”

………that was my first day………….

2007-11-26T01:59:00.000-08:00

There are seven kittens at home five grey one greyish brown one grey and white they sleep in a heap that can look like a pyramid a circle a rectangle and can go pop and disappear when you enter the room the grey and white kitten swam and nearly died in the loo they eat chicken legs twice their size to the bone they have driven their adoptive mother cat to frustration that is taken out on me they hiss when picked up and have ruined a woven bedspread with little kitten droppings they are not getting adopted no one seems to want greys and I do not want to think about what that means………….

whatwillhappensevenmonthsoniftheyarestillwithus!?

Students know best!

2007-10-17T20:58:00.000-07:00

Exams and assignments tell us that...

Mammals are the only animals that lay eggs. the cuckoo bird is a mammalian bird who lays eggs. (opening lines in a grade-12 student's research essay.)

Insects take the anther of a flower with it's beak and put it in the anther of another flower.(grade-10 biology student)

Organisms that have both male and female parts are gay. (grade-10)

The flower has hooks in order to get carried away by insects.(grade-10)

20,000-2000=19666.66666 (grade 12 business studies)

Kajal.

2007-09-06T02:30:00.000-07:00

Kajal was thrown out of her home and into a dustbin on my road when she was two months old. Not knowing much about the world anyway, she played among the garbage until she became hungry and screamed for her mother.

The afternoon heat and the realization that she was in unfamiliar surroundings made her desperate. Someone came and set fire to the garbage and her mews were lost among the smoke as the garbage slowly caught fire.

That afternoon I was walking down my road and slowed down near the garbage heap because I thought I heard a cat. Looking at the garbage, lit and smoking, I almost walked on, telling myself that no cat could possibly be there. Then came the cries again almost hoarse now. Risking being thought of as queer, I bent down and began to rummage among the garbage that had not yet caught fire and there she was, a shivering tortoise shell kitten shivering with fright. She was lifted out and put into my bag and taken home.

“Look what I found in the dustbin” I announced to my mother as I held up a purring very contented kitten to her. “In the dustbin?” she said with disbelief, “How could someone be so cruel?” I later found out that a family nearby kept a cat for catching rats and regularly threw out the kittens.

With milk, rice and some of my dog Tara’s lunch in her tummy ,Kajal curled up and fell asleep behind the fridge. Life after that consisted mainly of food, exploring and sleeping on my mother’s lap. When she was a year old, she decided that the best place in the house was the garden and began to spend all of her time there. She would come running up to us for her cuddles and would purr and remind us that she had not forgotten us but her wild independent side won over and we would catch her looking placidly at us from among the bushes, content and at peace. She never formed any particular attachments with any of the other cats but never fought with them either.

The years passed and much changed. My mother passed away and the pain and sorrow of her death was felt very much by all the animals at home. I fell into an abyss of despair and three slow years dragged themselves like tired feet deep in inches of snow.

Last year I met the man who would become my husband. He wanted a kitten and someone just a week ago had left with me a scrawny necked ginger kitten with a raggedy red ribbon around her neck “Polly”, he said when I asked him what he would name her. Polly and books and many things made us decide to get married . Kajal and all the other cats, fascinated by him, show a marked preference for him. That is one change of loyalty I cannot say I mind.

Three weeks ago Kajal and Freddie fought and both fell off the roof. Freddie broke his already crippled hind legs and Kajal broke her back. Freddie has made a complete recovery but Kajal is paralysed. I had hope when the vet told me that she had sensation in her hind legs, but it turns out that it is only a reflex that means nothing. Despite fighting against bed sores, she has got them and she is not eating at all. She is growing weaker and seems happy only when she is put in the garden she loves so much.

Right now I do not know what is right and what is wrong. We want to give her a fighting chance but seeing her, shrunken, listless fills me with despair. Yesterday she was infested with maggots. She was in a lying in a pool of urine, helpless.

We wont give up hope but if she is suffering, how are we to know? How are we to know if she will ever walk again? All we want is that she does what she loves doing, playing in the garden, hiding in the bushes or rolling in the grass, getting cooked by the afternoon sun.

I wish I knew, I wish I was braver, I wish I could make her happy again.

....................

Kajal died half an hour after I wrote this post. We were not home, the vet, who had gone to treat a wound called me and told me that she died a few minutes after he arrived. She had complications because of the maggots.

We buried her in her garden, both of us taking turns to dig her grave.

She will be missed in the mornings when she demands her plate of food, she will be missed when we go to the garden and don't see her dart out just to acknowledge our presence. Her beautiful gold on fire eyes will be missed peeping from among the bushes.

She will be happy though. She can run again, sprawl in the grass, let the sun warm her and she can do those many mysterious cat things that humans will never know and never understand.

2007-06-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

aha!

and ahem.

2007-06-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

Cookai, Mohini, Custard and Popsicle and all the cats with Tigger and his gang of dogs would like to tell everyone that their Mama is getting married!

She is getting married to JP ( WE ALL LOVE JP!)

JP is very cool and very smart and he knows exactly what we like and exactly what we don't. He never scolds us, he lets us do whatever we like and we think that he is so much fun. We run the JP fan club. Membership open. We already have millions of feline fans and many many canine fans and yes you may join. ( Popsicle takes a small break and Yasmine walks in!)

ahem! so that is what you have been up to! well well well...fan club eh?! for JP??!?! what about me???????

ok ok...yes people it is true...I am getting married.

to JP!

Super intelligent and totally charming. Ask my cats, they have changed loyalties. They are totally and completely his.

JP writes wonderful stories, plays beautiful music knows a lot about everything you know, did not know and will never know( no one can possibly have read as much or as diversely as him).

as my students say he's the bestest!

2007-03-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

My doll house was green and white. Large green windows and door with picket fence white walls. There was a pink bed in it and a tiny shelf that was my larder. There I kept everything that the famous five ate while they , spread out on heather, planned breathlessly exciting ways to catch smugglers and the many others who were no match for four kids and a waggy tail dog. If the Famous Five had their sea ,island and castle, I had my own pond and secret shed. Ponds have their adventure stories too!

So I had lemonade and ice, my mothers lemon tarts, cookies of ginger, oats, jam, scones with huge chunks of disappearing butter, plenty of plum jam and as many Enid Blyton books as I could fit into the space between the bed and the window.

In that tiny house, sunlight and candle flame and the endless thrill of possibility, of adventure, of magic lit up my childhood.

..............( to be contd.)

2007-03-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

“The first is the worst,
Second is the best,
Third is the one with the treasure chest!”

As the buses enter the school gates, I silently join in the chant with the children as they look out to see how many buses have come before ours. It is un-teacher like to sing along!. Today we are the treasure chest.

Sometimes when we are first, the chant is edited to make the first the best.

Hurried attempts are made to invent something cool when we come in fourth. Buses after that do not even deserve to qualify. They are simply not good enough.

The ride in the bus is perhaps the most exciting part of my school day. Yesterday a first grade student showed me his treasure. Shining crystals hidden in a black stone. He had two small pieces to show his friends in school and many more at home. “Look” he said , “it has a million crystals.”

I looked at a gravel pebble shining in his hands. “Put it in your hand and let the sun shine on it. Look how is glitters.” He said. I had to agree. It did have millions of crystals peeping out of grey-black stone.

I told him I loved them and that he was so lucky to have them. He smiled and spent the next few minutes in silence after which he told me that, after a lot of thinking, he had decided to give me a bit of his treasure. I would have to wait though, he would have to go home and find something that was nice enough to give me.

In my secret life, I also collect pebbles and imagine them to be precious stones. The flower beds in the garden are tropical paradises and I, shrunk a million sizes smaller, am an explorer.

I will take any chance I can to take off my shoes and allow my feet to burn deliciously on the stone footpaths in school. The grass that big boards tell us to keep off, plump themselves up in mossy clusters, daring us to roll on them. I walk till the edge and pretending to be in some deep thought, let a toe touch the edge of the grass.

There is also an attic in my secret life. In that attic there are old wooden chests. One of them is full of old forgotten books. Books that I can draw patterns on with the dust they have collected. They are hardcover and have beautiful illustrations in them. Someone who owned them has written a note for anyone who might read them. The note is in code. It is my job to decipher it and try to figure if I am being guided to a treasure or being told some terrifying secret. Right at the bottom of the box there are comics. All kinds of comics. Hundreds of comics. I will spend long summer afternoons with the sun coating my feet, my back and my hair, next to me will be ice lemonade and chips. A pile of comics will lie next to me. Enough to last me a few hours. The sun and shadows will bind me with invisible threads to the ground and so I had better stock up on supplies till the threads wear thin with the setting sun.

The other chest will be full of all kinds of odds and ends. Mismatched china plates, blue and white, each whispering a story. An old old clock that goes CLANG in an rusty 80 year old voice, raggedy dolls with many dresses to spare, doll tea sets, coins from all over that I will allow to sing merrily in my hands, shells, tiny ones, colourful ones, too wee to hold to the ear and allow the sea in.

I do not know what the other chests hold. The key is lost and I want to allow them to keep their secrets for now. Who knows, I may find emeralds and rubies. Sapphires and opals.

…………………sigh…………….when the school bell brings me back to my dull desk…I must , forcibly pick up the text book and become a dull boring teacher and keep ready a yelling, just in case the work I asked them to do is not done………

……….will ramble on though…later..

2007-03-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

JP told me once, "at the end of it, no seems to want the stray dogs, whether it is those of us who love them and want to bring their population down by ABC or those who want them dead." What he said is true and it made me very sad.

I look at the dogs on my road. The world for them is one happy place. They sleep, legs in the air, rolling in the pavement sand, their hearts and minds free of worry. Do they know the battle we are fighting for them? They are licensed, collared and I want to imagine that they are safe. I cannot. Even those with collars are being picked up because for their death, someone gets Rs.50.

Can you put a price on chocolate eyes full of life?

Three legged Jack, who runs faster than his able bodied gang of browns, hangs his pink dotted with purple tongue out in the noonday sun. A watchman gives him water. Some years ago, another watchman had almost scolded me for not providing him with an artificial leg. He had heard that Jack had lost his leg after an auto drove over it. It was something he constantly worried about. How will Jack manage, he asked me angrily.
His three legs melt everyone’s hearts and he takes full advantage of the extra treats and cuddles he gets because of it. For now, he is safe. But who knows, with the way the media is feeding this raging fire against dogs.

Is loss of a human life justification enough to carry out this massacre? Is it enough to condone it? Dogs injected with cyanide and thrown in landfills by a bulldozer? Dogs hung with their necks between trees and left to die? Dogs beaten on the ground like clothes against a stone till they die? How different is this from the many torture camps we read about. Saddam Hussain’s men would pull out the nails of the POW’s and use many such horrific torture methods. We shudder at the very thought. Yet, somehow torture of animals is shrugged off by most people and those who fight against it are dismissed as eccentric and interfering.

Any torture, any cruelty any willful act of harm is wrong. Animal or human. We are cognitively more developed than animals, true but animals share the same emotions as we do. They as capable of love, fear, anger joy, sorrow as we are. What gives us the right then to inflict suffering on them? They were not made for our enjoyment and use as some religious texts choose to put it. We share the planet with them and all we seem to be doing is behaving like a very psychopathic school bully with them.

People should think. Those dogs catchers and killers who have so easily and seemingly pleasurably killed dogs in the last one month in Bangalore, will not think twice, given the chance to do the same to a human being. This is because the manner and method they are using show classic text book psychopathy. Here they have the license to kill by a corrupt and bloodthirsty BBMP, steady practice on these animals will perfect their skills to eventually replicate the crime on other easy targets. Children perhaps?

2007-01-16T20:35:00.000-08:00

She must be in heaven now,
With an angel duly assigned,
Eyes closed and purring,
Basking in eternal sunshine.

I hope the angel makes very sure,
That she gets her fish and rice,
She ain’t the kind of cat,
Who will go chasing mice.

In winter ,she likes cuddling up,
Sinking in tummies soft and deep,
So they had better puff those clouds,
And give her a snug, cozy sleep.

She doesn’t mind other cats,
But she is very refined,
So hope those scallywags up there,
Don’t trouble her philosophical mind,

She has the sweetest mew,
The loveliest you will hear,
No winged harpist halo and all,
Can come anywhere near.

She doesn’t like it when you feel sad,
Remember that, all you up above,
All of heaven put together,
Cannot equal her love.

Look after her all of you,
Make sure she is fine.
Or there will be no anger worse
To deal with, than mine.

When her eyes grow distant,
And her thoughts are far away,
Tell her that I wish too,
She would come back and stay.

2007-01-11T23:43:00.000-08:00

The attitude of the anti stray dog group in Bangalore is simply this-Anti Life.
Their paranoia is equaled by their lack of rational thought . Their methods to spread false propaganda against stray dogs would have been brushed off as a jealous cheap school child trick, had it not such alarming consequences.

Most of the reports they give are fabricated. The rag and tag group spend most of their spare time thinking about what to invent next to spread hysteria in the city about stray dogs. The rest of their time is spent in thinking how they can make the best of the situation- dog leather trade by the old Diana de Vile, who exports leather. So unless she has dead dogs, she will not have her handbags.

As for the toothless old veterinarian, he fled when he thought black magic was being done on him…..very brave for someone who is responsible for the killing of all the dogs in Brunei , a culling that he wears as a badge of honour. A veterinary Dr. Death.

As for the Popinjays , they are far too pathetic to get word space on this blog. Mrs. Popinjay claims that garbage is no issue, it cannot kill anyone. Mr. Popinjay is phobic towards all animals and would ideally like all of them dead.

Phew! Never in my life have I spewed such venom. Sometimes I think that this miserable group is to be pitied. The only ray of happiness in their life is when they can take another. Being the cowards they are, they take that of an animal.

2007-01-07T22:33:00.000-08:00

The tragic death of a five year old girl because of being attacked by a pack of stray dogs once again brings up the debate of the stray dog issue.

I would like to point out what the stray dog issue is about and what it is not.

1.This is not animal welfare activists vs the rest of the public.
It is so easy to point fingers at people who work for animals and blame them for incidents like this one. Officials have pointed out that if they kill stray dogs animal activists will be up in arms. The fact is that animal welfare NGO’s who are doing the ABC program sterilize healthy dogs as well as euthanize dogs who are unfit. These include rabid, old, aggressive and otherwise infirm dogs. Needless killing of healthy animals is unethical by any standards, not just an animal lovers.

2.This is not about mass killing of all dogs.
Mass killing is not one of the standards by which we define a civilized society. As a society that is getting increasingly scientific and developed in its outlook, this form of culling is from the dark ages. Also as humans, where the is our humanity? Eliminating a species is unscientific and barbaric.

3.This is about a scientific method to tackle the dog population.

When the BMP electrocuted and killed the dogs, the population did not decrease because a vacuum in nature will be filled up as long as there is a food source to sustain a life form. These dogs who are called strays are in fact indigenous Indian dogs. They are part of the balance of nature. They have a role to play, that of the scavenger. Thus, by sterilizing them and vaccinating them along with euthanizing unfit dogs, the best possible balance is being struck. The population has come down after the ABC program as been implemented.
4. This is not about Bangalore becoming the USA or Singapore.

Media reports say that the stray dog problem does not exist in the USA and Singapore. Neither do street children, beggars, garbage, illegal pavement structures, traffic problems, pollution caused by humans etc.

5.This is about systematically clearing garbage.

A comment by Ms Vatsala Dhananjay said that garbage is not the problem as it cannot kill anyone. Infact garbage is the problem. It is a health and hygiene problem. It is a breeding ground for disease. It points fingers at a city that totally lacks civic sense. The lesser the garbage, the lesser the chances of incidents like these occurring.

6. This is about educating the public.
It is all too easy to create mass hysteria. This hysteria clouds rational thinking and actions based on such reactions will always be a cause for regret. Schools, residents associations, and the public must be educated on the ABC program, rabies, stray dogs, do’s and don’ts.

7.This is about regulating breeding.

Breeders indiscriminately allow dogs to have litters and abandon those who they find unfit as well as abandon the male and female dogs once they are too old or unhealthy to breed. These dogs are left to fend for themselves on roads, adding to the population.

8. This is about a need to develop vaccinations to counter rabies.

Just as we will not kill every human being for being potential HIV, hepatitis, TB and polio carriers, but rather work towards a vaccination to eliminate the virus, so too should we work towards eradicating the rabies virus just as we eradicated the smallpox virus. All warm blooded species can carry the rabies virus, if we begin to kill one species, where will we end? Mass vaccination drives, cheap rabies vaccinations easily available is the solution.

We speak so much of Gandhigiri, we want to believe in non violence and we as people who practice it. Where is our Gandhigiri if we react with violence? We co exist with the animals around us. Trying to eliminate a species is never a solution not by any measure scientific or compassionate. We consider ourselves a superior species. We wont prove it by being the school bully. Let is show it by doing what is best for both-humans and animals.

2006-12-18T23:26:00.000-08:00

The hollow and hungry media has ripped apart the dignity of Santhi Soundarajan. She won a silver medal for the 800m run at the Doha Asian games. Soon after headlines ran screaming that she had failed the gender test, hyping and sensationalizing the fact that she lacks female sexual characteristics.

Why does this make front page headline news? Because she is of ambiguous gender? Because she cheated (if she did)? Because the Indian sports council or whatever it is that decides which athletes represent India deliberately hid facts? ……the only thing that seems to be highlighted is that she has failed a gender test ,leaving the rest to everyone’s imagination.

It appears that she studied in a girls school and college. She has lived all her life as a woman. This is possible in certain genetic disorders where the sex gene combinations go haywire eg xxy ,xxyy, x0 etc. Such people may be intersexuals.

I do not dismiss that Santhi knew she was not a woman, she preferred to be a woman due to a combination of genetics, hormones and perhaps some external attributes. If that is so, then we need to rethink our outlook to people with gender ambiguity and find a way in which they can be equal participants in events such as this. Unless it is a clear cut case of cheating, I think no one has the right to strip her of her medal. More importantly no one had any right to strip her of her dignity.

2006-12-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

My determination to gym can qualify as the newest DSM entry. Gymming can be great fun on some days and a complete torture on others. The weighing scales in the gym are rigged..always!!!.....the gym instructor has a new challenge for you everyday…but at the end of that hour I feel great.

Recently I have tried out running sideways on the treadmill. When I first tried it, I was sure that I would get hurled out of the window and land on the branch of the tree outside. With practice, it has become my favourite form of treadmill exercise.

Does anyone have challenging exercises to do on the treadmill? If you do…do post them!

Exams!

2006-12-11T21:44:00.000-08:00

So the exam corrections have begun…..

Some answers….

Science grade-8

1.Define population:

• A place where there are people or cars.
• A non renewable resource

2. Business Studies grade-9

What is a franchise?
When KFC opens many branches or chains.

………………..more to come…………….

Animal cells dont have animal cells (bio answer grade-11)

an answer to "Explain how HIV-AIDS can affect the economy if the government does not take measures to prevent it"

HIV-AIDS is a commodity. It is good for health. (grade-12)

2006-11-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

If the legal system in India flushed itself down the loo, everyone will clap their hands and be happy.

A recent verdict spared a rapist from the death sentence by saying that he had a momentary lapse seeing a girl alone in a field. The girl was eight and she bled to death.

A senile lawyer, rotting in the body and brain now tries to bring Jessica Laal’s character into question by saying that she refused a sexual favour because she preferred someone else.

Justice for Hetal Parekh, raped and murdered, came after 14 years.

The parents of Priyadarshini Matoo still wait………

And along with the judiciary the media and human rights activists can become a part of the sewage.

The media simply loves to give long sleazy insights into “a day in the life of the rape victim”……………………mostly she is a woman of loose morals………so , that being the case, implies our puritan media, she asked for it……..

Poor guy…all he had was a momentary lapse…..

The human rights activists meanwhile hold candlelight vigils to prevent the hanging of rapist-murderers. While the victims families suffer through agony the HRA holiday in Hawaii…………when Dhananjoy Chatterjee was sentenced to death, the media and the HRA’s went to every extent possible to make him out to be a poor bloke who was wronged……….

We can protest, cry, scream, blog, get violent…..but it is that minority that wins…Vox Populi??!!………….as if!

2006-10-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

Reading blogs here and there, about this thing and that, annoys me even as it amuses. But I must not rush to type out hard hitting adjectives and nasty things that my brain is throwing up at a speed that frustrates my fingers. They are being held down, each on some letter on the keyboard, while a diplomatic discussion via my nerve impulses goes on between them and my brain. The brain trying to work out the best way possible to communicate its (imagined) excellent analysis, and if I may add ,superior view of the
mangled and confused (though excellently worded) , highly opinionated and sting ray venom loaded rambling on these blogs. The fingers tap their impatience. Diplomatic dialogue is the same everywhere.!

Ah! But I ramble myself…….

Clothes, jewels, houses, cars and gadgets…….the labels of snobbery for the intellectual's poor country cousin……… and identity, political alliances, religion and such stuff, the shredding and salad making of which, the status symbols of the imagined intellectual elite.

As far as I can see, their arguments stand only on the debris of those they have verbally destroyed. Certainly not on their own merit. What good an argument is that? The school bully is happily fed with the snack time munchies of other children, is he not?

With so many examples that I want to give to substantiate my haphazard thoughts, I feel limited by saying “Now take for example what the rag and tag girl said about designer jeans”………….so…….I will allow my thoughts to jumble and tumble and occasionally my fingers may outsmart my brain and quietly push in some evil refreshing thought, well camouflaged .

And….may I add…kind of you dear reader for still reading on……

So why must the priestly caste be shredded in order to make the non temple inheriting, non thread wearing but otherwise perfectly normal multicellulars feel good about themselves as they sit shaking their heads over cups coffee and deep fried things?

……………if you stand tall on debris, you will crash right through and the splinters will cut you and the ash will blacken the many parts of the anatomy that hit it……………….

Besides all that is achieved is another layer of cement to strengthen the granite stone strong dividing wall…………

Actions, I was taught in my Human Values class, a century ago in school, speak louder than words. So list 5 people ( non kudumbi) whose standard of living , education, health and general well being has improved thanks to consistent hands on effort and struggle by the eminent authors of such blogs………………..um….list 1.

………………and now as my lunch bell rings……I must go…..more later…..

2006-10-13T01:52:00.000-07:00

Yes! Pamuk wins the Nobel Prize...

and please do not miss the white fluff on his worktable!

2006-09-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

Crikey!

2006-09-04T02:11:00.000-07:00

Living in the eternal hope that there might be some truth…...just some in the Bermuda triangle mystery.....as well as so many others ......Easter Island, Atlantis, the Aztecs, the Myans….. I wonder with cat like curiosity about the things people believe in totally or at least secretly hope might be true………aliens….yeti…..vampires……timetravel……..

Do write in……..

2006-08-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

2006-08-24T00:19:00.000-07:00

2006-08-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

2006-08-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

My cousin Lars and his wife Anna...more pics later!

Flower Fairies

2006-08-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

2006-08-14T00:48:00.000-07:00

Fear freezes us into inaction. As a defense mechanism, inaction works quite well. What fear also does is fills the silences that it creates with despair. Despair fills everything with everything unsaid. Words, chiseled and polished in the mind, in the hope of the sentence being perfect, come out instead haphazardly and strew themselves around, so that all one ends up doing is hurriedly gathering them up and trying to string them together again.
Fear. That is what it does to us.

And so it is the fear of loss that causes the loss. We go back to our fetal self . Close our eyes, curl ourselves into that state of being which was the safest. We weld slowly and surely each link of the chain that we allow to rest on ourselves, cold. What is that strange comfort that we find in allowing ourselves to be so bound?

Inaction the conjoined twin of Fear freezes us.

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

………………………..

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
………………

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all
already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

Extracts from the love song of J Alfred Prufrock-TS Eliot.

And so fear prevents us from feeling, from believing, from accepting want.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Extracts from the love song of Alfred J Prufrock-TS Eliot.

Bleak?....defeatist?....yes…but also true?.....

I am not talking here about having the will to conquer fear, nor about being able to pull together and all the talk that accompanies such thoughts. I am limiting myself to understanding Fear and its possibilities……and I am still groping….

CUPA-Large animal urban camp

2006-08-09T01:34:00.000-07:00

Last month I helped out in an large animal camp near mysore road. CUPA holds these camps every month. One camp is held in a village and the other in the city. All kinds of animals are treated free of cost here. Horses, bullocks and cows form the majority of the animals who are treated.You can sponsor a camp..Rs 5000/- for a ruralcamp and a little less for an urban camp!....do help.

2006-08-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

Cat went hop hop hop….flew up the curtain, hid behind it…and no..she does not care if you don’t come to look for her. An occasional paw , a careless tail , grins and says she is still there incase you forgot……

Soon enough she gets bored…hops out…strolls…no…blinks past….gives a quick lick to an already gleaming coat….(ye she says, I know I am beautiful)…….lands on the bed…and purrs…talk of seduction! Learn it from a cat!

Naturally when you pick her up and cuddle her, she, queen like, tolerates it…and when she can take it no more flies off…leaving you with shredded hands and a bleeding heart…

2006-08-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

The not so pretty always have it hard. Try as we may, it is difficult very often to shake away the sheer physicality of a person. More so if that person is us. Superficial? No.
Even our folklore tells us that it was the beautiful one who got it all. The ugly step sister always lost everything. Besides being ugly, she was a wicked conniving vengeful creature, as opposed to the simple lovely well meaning beauty. Thus pairing up beauty with virtue and ugliness with all that is bad.

I wonder if we have the courage to look within and honestly say that physical attractiveness or the lack of us does not affect our relationships with people. In a group of people with everything else constant except that one is a stunner and the other has some form of physical drawback, a person is very unlikely to get attracted to the ugly twin. True?......

So then what happens to the ugly twin? With society reinforcing constantly her limitations, she withdraws. What is the use anyway?.....

What stuff are we made of?

2006-08-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Alice Sebold’s Lucky made me sad, angry and strangely happy. Rape is a difficult word. Difficult to say, difficult to discuss and indecently invading to read about.

Alice, who was raped when she was 18 tells her story in a language that is simple, straightforward and uncomfortably honest. The world for her is divided between those who have been raped and those who have not. She speaks of her anguish at being treated like something no one knew what to with, of her humorous tolerance towards those who tried to be nice to her, of her having to become her family’s emotional crutch post her rape and her relentless battle to get her rapist convicted .

Makes me question empathy. To what extent can we truly claim reach out and feel another’s pain as our own? A pain that we may never have experienced? “Oh I know how exactly how you feel!”……empty even if well meaning.

The fumble, stumble of words. “Just give me a call if you need me”….., the discomfort of hanging around the person, not knowing what to say. The intellectualization, or worse, the “it could have been worse” cliché….(someone had told Alice she was lucky that she had not been killed), the pity, the deep sighs and the whispering of “poor thing” compound an already terrible situation.

Perhaps sexual abuse is the worst of traumas that a person can experience. Even as I type this, I am already dividing and distancing myself from those who have experienced such abuse. I wonder how I would feel if I were to read this if I had been abused. Would my mind replay the trauma each time? I do not know.

And what about life? Is it ever the same again?.....relationships? will they ever be the same? The way a person is perceived?...what changes?....

We are a cowardly lot, we humans. We cannot deal with our own discomfort. And don’t we feel a guilty relief at not being the person we cannot suddenly deal with?

Disillusionment….that’s what I feel…with myself and with the way we have turned out to be.

2006-08-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

One essay I was reading says “Our Sun is one star in a Galaxy of a hundred thousand million (100,000,000,000). That is 20 stars for each person on the Earth.”

I am disappointed! I get to have only 20 stars?!

School School!!!

2006-07-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

One week of school ….almost done…..mostly a good week. Loaded with extra work this year…hmmm…

An interesting bunch of new colleagues…..one of who promptly came up to me , struck up a 2&1/2 minute conversation, mostly hers, and told me that I seemed to be the kind who will not settle for just anybody….whatever that meant!.....further to that she said she could just see it……right away…the moment she saw me….and went on to add something that was supposed to be a compliment about the way I was dressed…..did not quite come out that way…..hmmm…

And…..yesterday I had a chaat orgy at school……lunch had chaat added to it…so yum yum yum!

Meanwhile our school….getting their documentation perfect …are making us do the following….

1. Curriculum overview- something that spells out all we will do this year….
2.Scheme of work.. something that spells out all we will do this year..
3.Lesson plans…. something that spells out all we will do this year
5.Level-1 Planning.. something that spells out all we will do this year
6,Level-2 Planning… something that spells out all we will do this year
7.Level-3 planning… something that spells out all we will do this year
8.PBL-Problem based learning.. something that spells out all we will do this year

Apart from lots more….join to find out.

……and…..when we get out teacher hand books….this is hand written once again in the form of Daily Planning….

Now beat that!
……………….
And we get chocolate chip cookies everyday….

I miss the kids….badly!
I want Brandon George!
I do not want to get back to regular classes…..
…………

I am currently bunking the IT workshop……never thought that the staff room, that I avoid totally, fully and completely will be my refuge!

My colleagues look at me with holy horror ( how can she dare to bunk?!)

Ah! Dear ol Meenakshi joins me!

Bunkers love company!

The world of the Dream

2006-07-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

"-People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."

- John Dee, in Preludes & Nocturnes

So I am all excited once again about interpreting dreams. Just for the fun of it. I am re reading Ego and Archetype as well as a few other books on Jungian Psychology and find that even commonplace dreams can be great fun to interpret once I have got all the symbols in order.

Some are as simple as reminding me that I have a dental job to be done to far more complex ones. The unconscious can be quite funny and often gives you a comical angle to an otherwise annoying situation and even offers solutions.

We are the best interpreters of our own dreams. Symbols are not standard and any dream dictionary that tells you otherwise is not near the truth. Basic archetypal symbols are universal however, but will vary in each culture in the way they manifest themselves.

Once the dream is written out, the associations made with each symbol in the dream and applied to the waking life of the dreamer, the interpretation is absurdly simple. I would recommend the website-mythsdreamssymbols.com for a basic guide.

Currently I am having tons of fun noting down the archetypes in the Sandman comic books and applying Jungian interpretations to them….verryyyy nicee!! Neil Gaiman has consciously or who knows unconsciously used superb archetypes in his books.

Also, it is very interesting to note that people who may not necessarily have had an exposure to a particular archetype specific to their culture, still have that as a symbol in their dreams. Collective unconscious at work!

Of course all our myths, legends, fairy tales etc are excellent studies in human behavior and human interaction. Read the interpretation of Snow White to know how a woman can consciously ruin herself because of allowing herself to think about herself in a particular way. ….yep….the step mother and snow white is the same person!

And…meanwhile…tell me your dreams!

hmmmm

2006-07-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

Jecic has achieved the impossible…taken pics that I actually approve of…

Ye ye I am a narcissistic brat

2006-07-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

Shiva…God with the dancing locks….wild Lord….wanderer in the cremation grounds, Bhairava, … the greatest lover, the most innocent, bindingly blindingly powerful, fascinatingly dark……

Some of the Shiva Chants I love…..

Sri Lingashtakam

Brahma Muraari Suraarchita Lingam
Nirmala Bhashita Shobhita Lingam
Janmaja Dukha Vinaashaka Lingam
Tat Pranamaami Sadaa Shiva Lingam

Aatmashatakam

Chidananda rupas Shivoham Shivoham
Manobudhhi ahankar Chitta ninaham
Nacha Shotra jive nacha ghrana Netre
Nacha Vyoma Bhoomir na tejo na vayu
Chidananda rupas Shivoham Shivoham –1

Bilvaashtakam

Tridalam Trigunaakaaram Trinetram Cha Triyaayudham
Trijanma Paapa Samhaaram Ekabilvam Shivaarpanam.

2006-07-17T00:07:00.000-07:00

nainam chindanti shastrani nainam dahati pavakah
na cainam kledayanty apo na sosayati marutah

"-You are mortal: it is the mortal way. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell.
You grieve. Then you continue with your life.
And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on.
She is dead.
You are alive.
So live."
Dream to his son Orpheus, in Brief Lives

Still.......I miss you.

Any Takers!!!?????

2006-07-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

I have always wanted to write something that combines myth, fantasy, history, altered states of perception, altered, not necessarily by the use of drugs, but perhaps on the strength of will, the concept of parallel dimensions layered indefinitely within our world as well as infinitely in the universe, stringing in the unsolved mysteries of our world-the Stonehenge, Easter Island, Bermuda Triangle, the myan temples, the Incas, Atlantis, Egypt, …….all into one huge or maybe many bits of story……….illustrated or otherwise…though I think illustrated will be great…..

Jellic keeps telling me to do at least some, any writing once a week. I must.

Anyone who thinks the story idea is exciting enough…please do write stories that include all or most of the concepts mentioned above and perhaps then we could just have fun exchanging them……

so??....

Beginnings

2006-07-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

Then winter gave way to spring......

summer laze

2006-06-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

So it a nice long summer holiday…….
Will do…
Renew the house
Gym myself silly
Walk around the lake at sunrise
Try to be social and politically correct
Give Freddie a haircut.
Get more books.
Bookshelf.
Music. (non funeral!)
Write.
Work in the garden.
Cook! Yes Cook….eeep..cook.
Eat loads of calcium for broken bones and nails.
Watch some real nice movies at home!
Get off my teacher mode with my friends.
Try to live down to my image of a snob.
Scowl less.
Drink more water….
Sleep even if it is after 5:30 in the morn….
Hmm…enough….

VERSE?????

2006-06-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

On one windy mournful October forenoon, while the kids sweated away carving answers in unending white sheets, we decided to throw 5 minute poetry challenges at each other.
1.On the husband we would meet….our message to him.
2.Based on a pic of a woman looking at a couple…….speaking of sadness..
So…well…very mediocre….not meant to be a poet…5 minutes or otherwise….

poem to an unknown husband.

I am the person I warned you about my dear,
Crazy, quirky, moody ,sulky, distant, bossy,
My list is quite endless I fear,
Passionate too,and very blue,
With a cherry merry smile.
I’m Hamlet, Eliot, Plath and Keats,
I dance with Cummings dine with Yeats,
With my 11 jumpy dogs and 10 haughty cats,
All that is missing are black pointy hats.
Yet, while I dance a jig , shout and scream,
I’ll hold your hand, I'll build your dreams.
Each morn I’ll look at you and smile,
I’ll be with you every rough mile.
Though life it’s seasons will bring,
I’ll make yours an eternal spring.
All then that I ask of you,
Is love me as I love you.

Chocolate Eyes

Because of you someone smiles,
Remembering chocolate brown eyes,
Eyes that looked into my soul,
And tossed me into the wind.

And spring sings as she dances,
Dazed mesmerized by those glances,
Glances that chilled me,thrilled me,
On hot summer days,

She must live a hundred lives,
Lost on those smiles,
Smiles that fell on me,
Like Aprils hasty rain.

I must walk away,
From a world that is not mine.
A world of chocolate brown eyes,
And summer rain smiles.

Ah Friends!

2006-06-18T03:28:00.000-07:00

Being asocial, as I am well known for, comes with the tag of being an ultra snob. As far as I can remember, to those who do not know me well, I am a snooty, spoilt show off. Great. A colleague recently commented that the reason why I was hesitating to come to the ‘bonding’ exercise organized in a resort, for the teachers of my school as that I was way beyond their league and how can someone like me mingle with pool ol’ people like him and others.Well.

And anyway all I did when I went there was sit on a beach chair next to the wave pool and read…..something that has been recorded for all time to come by my well meaning colleagues. Will post the pic.
But my point is not to highlight how asocial I can get. I want to try and articulate how grateful I am to have my small group of very dear friends. Since I can get horribly and repulsively mushy…forgive…

Order random….not alphabetical…

Anushya a has known me from my college days….seen me through CUPA volunteering on Sundays, mended my broken heart over not worth breaking heart guys, my mom’s passing, my pets passing, my annoying girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead who can be horrible days, everything. Huge hugs to her …….. she never gives up on me.

Amruta…who knows me inside out in a way that is frightening. Who has been for me a sister…who, without needing words, has comforted me. ,who has done her best to make me a social creature.With whom I can spend hours just being myself and loving every moment of it….who, I know, will be by my side anytime I need her, no matter how far away she maybe.

Agnes…..who I worked with in my first job and who has steadfastly kept in touch with me, always been optimistic when she has called me out, even though I am sure she knew that my answer 11/10 times would be no. Whose idea it was to begin the cat blog. Who has been so loving , understanding and patient with me. We have had many laughs over many things. A brilliant writer and so well read, I love talking to her and can do so endlessly.

Pummy…friend, philosopher and guide…. She has held my hand literally and metaphorically. Advised me like a mother would. Helped me with my gang, supported me and Leela through Leela’s darkest days. Helped me heal over a terrible heartbreak. Nurtures me, encourages me, wants me to conquer the world and will make sure I find someone who loves cats and other animlas the way I do.

Lalitha…clear minded, level headed, intelligent, beautiful. First time I meet her I faint, fall and hit my head bang on the road. She was with me through all the tests, scans and results which made me think I would die in the next few months. Passionate about cat welfare, she has some of the best ideas for our cat brats welfare. A friend, she has seen through my thick brick wall and has pointedly given me some matter of fact practical talking to. She is dear to me and I value everything she has been for me.

Shibani…. a wonderful support system who is there in any time of need and even when there is no need. Silent and subtle, she has helped me in more ways than I can recollect.

Mimi…. who just order me about and makes sure I do what she wants me to do. I have no choice. So whether it is a toned body by killing myself in the gym and living on air…I have to do it. She will continue calling me to her lovely get togethers in the hope that I take a fancy for one of the array of men she has on display. Will always scowl at me when I combine a classy wrap around with gym shoes in school..never mind the huge distances in school that a dainty sandal wont take….her ultimate agenda….a makeover for me…!

Sonya…my HOD, sister figure, long sufferer of my total lack of adherence to deadlines, completely believes I can handle pretty terrible cases and has the confidence in me that I sometimes don’t.

Pamela….ah Pam!….she spreads joy just by being there, makes me laugh, and is very dear to me. Fav, bus conversations…her massacre of the ex-men in our lives.

Jyothi….patient long suffering friend….who loves me.

Misch..who though we have met only a few times..i know will be a great friend….

Anirudh who loves Leela and has always been there to help.

Mrs. Benjamin, colleague Ex-principal of Indus, the closest to having a grandmother. We have spent hours in her office talking about everything…..who worries herself sick about me. Who dotes over me. Believes in me. Wants me married. Thinks I am wonderful. Who thinks I am mad as a hatter but tolerable nonetheless.

And of late my wonderful cat blog people…..
JP…who is talented, intelligent and funny…!
George who is funny, intelligent and talented..!…
I enjoy talking to both of them…..and think that they are lovely gentle souls with soft as butter hearts, no matter what they may think they are projecting otherwise.
Ok now I am going to cry….
Sigh!

Give me my dream....

2006-06-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

Someday I will run away, far into the hills. Sit by the window sill in a cottage where fiery yellow flower creepers have mingled with calm watery blue ones. There my cats will purr by an old fireplace. There will be books, maybe somewhere a guitar will play, and I , I will watch the rain make the landscape into an impressionist painting. The kettle will bubble merrily, tea will linger. ……and then………. of what would I lack…..?!

Hmm...

2006-06-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Sun ripples on blue........I must begin my walks again....to ramble...to drift away....

Wish List-2

2006-06-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

Give me

Evenings with sunsets on fire…
Hot (chocolate crumbled) coffee with garlic infused cheese toast…
An old yellowing book with old forgotten tales….
Turquoise wrapped in silver….
A water chiseled river pebble…
A song that rips my veins apart…
Old creaking guitar melodies…
The stillness of 3am in a musical box……
The tickling tingling chill of stream water….

Dearest Leela

2006-06-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

She is in doggie heaven now and I know that even from there she is keeping her bossy eyes on me. Perhaps there is even a Kookai or a Lea there for her to tease. Maybe someone groggily wakes up and stumbles down the stairs in unearthly hours of the morning( it would be unearthly, wouldn't it?) to make her her favourite breakfast while she snores, snug in her bad. Who is she giving a telling off to now in her loud firm voice?

My Leela fought death with her spirit and will for a year after the doctors had struggled twenty days to save her life. She came back home with twice the energy she had before she was admitted into hospital. She bossed over me, my friends, the house helps, the gardener, everyone. People she did not like were not allowed in the home I shared with her. She took on the role of guardian of the cats and me , who she viewed as a human who had no idea of how to look after herself , and therefore, she had to do the looking after.

Five times after that she had to go into hospital for various medical problems, and each time she returned, bursting with energy. I had to stop going to visit her in hospital because she would rip apart her drip and begin yelling at me, demanding to be taken home. She would bark orders to the CUPA doctors, cleaners , visitors, everyone. Everyone in CUPA knew her. She was notorious and loved.

The one year that the doctors had given her ended this May, and I thought she had beat all odds. However, I had to be realistic. With cancer, kidney failure and cataract, I was being absurdly optimistic be thinking she had many years ahead. She went down suddenly over the weekend and died on the 7th of June. The pain of not being with her at the moment of death will remain.

I am grateful to have been loved so deeply and unconditionally. I have been looked after and protected. My need for her exceeded her need for me.

Death is just a new beginning and the spirit that is Leela is forever young, happy and full of life. Our sorrow over death is for our suffering thereafter. It is our loneliness we mourn, it’s the blanking out of our life that we fear.

Leela will always be the happy bossy girl she was in my memories and I know that she will always keep her eye out for me from way up. It is only the physical Leela who has gone. My Leela never really left me.

-----------------------------

Kipiling.....on his Dog.

Four-Feet

I have done mostly what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can't forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.
Day after day, the whole day through
Wherever my road inclined --
Four-feet said, "I am coming with you!"
And trotted along behind.
Now I must go by some other round,
Which I shall never find
Somewhere that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.

Rudyard Kipling

My Leela

2006-06-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Eyes…..she did not need anything else to call me to her…the eyes were enough. 8 am on a Sunday morning in May, three years ago, I went to adopt a dog. We had lost Tipu, a mad black GSD, a month ago in a most terrible way and mom and I were missing having him tear down the house every 45 seconds. The cats were missing having dogs around too.

At 8 am the dogs in CUPA were still in their kennels and as I went from one to another, there she was , sitting quietly, staring fixedly at me. I asked Sudha, the trustee of CUPA if I could adopt her. Sudha was uncertain because no one knew her history, there was no record of who had left her and why, besides, she bit anyone who tried to be friendly with her.

I kept going to CUPA for a few Sundays after that, and no matter where she was tied during the day, and no matter where I was, she would fix me with her stare. I told my mother about her and about why no one was adopting her.

Animals have always loved and trusted my mother. I have grown up with her looking after birds who were injured, cats, dogs, even a blind elephant from a circus loved her and went trumpeting towards her in the ring when he was supposed to be ‘performing’.
She wanted to see this dog who stared at you unblinking and bit anyone who wanted to take her.

She, as always when she went to CUPA, took along bags of food. I did not need to point out the dog to her because my mother had been fixed with the stare. We went down to feed the dog and I went up to her but dared not pet her. Mr. Lingrarj , the shelter manager, also told me to be careful. Just the other day a couple tried to take her and she snapped at them , he told us. My mother took a fistful of food she had brought, and put her palm to a big black mouth. I froze. Next thing I saw was a wagging tail and an empty palm. My mother told me to untie her and take her to the car. I shook and trembled as I untied her,expecting any moment to be bitten. Nothing happened. She walked with me to the car park, went to the correct car, jumped in and sat down to wait until we finished all the adoption formalities.

So that was that. Mom named her Leela , and Leela settled in with us and the cats like it was the most natural thing to do.

Two months later my mother passed away and my life as I knew it ended. I have never been the same person again. I aged years both emotionally and physically and shut out the world and have lived in a dark limbo since then. Only recently have I tried to pull myself together. Leela took on the role of protector, friend, family, everything. Thanks to her, I had something to look forward to in an otherwise huge empty house, full of memories that gave me nothing but anguish.

Leela fell very ill a year later and was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder along with kidney and liver failure. She had always been incontinent and now I knew why. She was not expected to survive the night and I sat inside her ICU cage in CUPA till the wee hours of the morning. I had never seen her so limp and unresponsive. The CUPA doctors worked a miracle and she lived and lives to her fullest. She was notorious in the shelter. She would bark orders to everyone. Sudha told me she had never seen a dog more expressive with her eyes. Whenever I go to CUPA, the animal care people ask me “ What madam..how is Leela….still shouting at everyone?”……..

An excellent judge of the character of people, she is never wrong. Friends of mine who she has loved, have turned out to be wonderful people who I treasure, 'friends' who she hated, over time proved that they were only out to take advatage of me. If Leela does not bark at people who come home, I know they are great human beings, having passed the 'Leela test'. If she barks the first time and welcomes you the next, she was just teasing the first time!

She was given a year more to live
by the doctors, given her medical status. It is one year now. Saturday night she was vomiting the whole night. She could not retain anything I gave her, medicines, soft boiled egg, nothing. I called CUPA immediately.

She is in CUPA now. A blood test will give her status. I am frightened. Frightened in a selfish way as well, not being able to think of my life without her. Yesterday I was in and out of tears, missing her presence in the house. Habitually calling out to her and getting no response.

My Leela is a fighter. One day , I know I will have to face up to not having her, however, today I want her…jut for a little more time…….

I am the cat who walks alone!

2006-06-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.exn.ca/cats/kipling.cfm

War Poems

2006-05-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

I love war poetry.....and here is one of my fav by Wilfred Owen

Strange Meeting.

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
By his dead smile I knew I stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "save the undone years,
The Hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world ...
I mean the truth untold:
The pity of war, the pity war distilledd
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not at the cost of war.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this death; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now ...."

Dreams and ESP

2006-05-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

Dreams are the theater of the unconscious mind. They constantly tell us who we are, show us the situation we are in, give solutions , add comic relief to the heaviness in our life besides being so much more. Sometimes they are pre-cognitive and show what is to come in terribly frightening detail.

I have had pre-cognitive dreams more often than I can count. And each insignificant detail, right to the colour of the clothes worn has eventually happened in reality. Not all of my Pre-C dreams were of bad things to come, some have been pretty routine, such as what a friend would say to me the next say, the clothes worn etc..some have been terrible….and I wish I had never had them.

Years ago, I dreamt that I was by the seashore. The sea was beautiful , calm and somewhere between the rocks a small pool had formed in which school children were playing. They wore white uniforms with dark blue and while striped ties. I went up to them and sat down in the sand, to watch them play. They invited me join in the splashing and sea shell collecting. In the distance was the school. Two huge white buildings that seemed to be joint together in the upper floor by some kind of corridor. It was called the Sea School.

The school children came up to me and invited me to play with them and soon I began to have a lot of fun in that little sea and rock created pool. Suddenly the bell rang and they told me to run into the building as fast as I could as this was a tide drill. A tide drill was done every day to teach the children to keep themselves safe from the tide.

As I ran with them I could feel the sea closing on us and the bright sunny day seemed to have gone overcast. Lead on by the children I ran into the school building and up the stairs. I had the feeling that I was running up a narrow staircase and then we were finally in a huge hall with very big glass windows. The whole school was there. Children sitting around , some sleeping, some talking, some looking out of the window. Looking outside I froze. Never have I seen a sea so angry. The waves were huge. They were a wall of angry blue and green. The sky was dark grey and black. The waves seemed to touch those clouds and as they ran towards the shore I screamed. I could only see water. Walls of water and angry rain. The children told me not to be scared and that I was safe , so high up. I asked them how it was that they were not sacred. “Oh”, said a girl “That’s is because we are already dead, a huge wave came one day ad killed all of us”……

I woke up after that with every detail of the dream etched into my dreamscape.

A year later the Tsunami came. Watching a program on TV on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, I saw a school girl narrating how she had been afloat at sea and had lost her family. Her school was near the sea and most of her friends had died.

The pictures of the Tsunami, of which I had no conception of and the girl in her uniform tallied exactly to my dream and the sheer terror I felt then was replayed.

Has anyone had pre-cognitive dreams?..Want to share?

......I like.......

2006-05-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

some poems of ee cummings....

I CARRY YOUR HEART

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

BUFFALO BILL

BUFFALO Bill 's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

WHO KNOWS OF THE MOON'S A BALOON
who knows if the moon’s
a baloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should
get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their baloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited,where
always
it’s
Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves

Travel Times

2006-05-26T00:19:00.000-07:00

Travel to and from my school can be quite a torture. For one thing, Sarjapur road does not exist. Some tar is thrown in here and there and is generally accepted as a road. Over the last two months however, some attempts are being made to tar the road so we go through a storm of dust and breathe in tar. Also, we take one and a half hours each way so that at 5.30 I look like something my cats would not bring in.

What makes it bearable are the kids and what they have to say. I sit next to a gang of five primary kids(four girls and Brandon) and sometimes their games can be a source of continuous mirth. Not always though, especially when, hard as it is for me to confess, they begin their girlie games like Doctor doctor, or Barbie (ugh!)…..

One day they were playing “doctor-patient”

Drisya: Iee will be nrse, you be docter .

Mayura: But I want to be doctor.

Sarah: Ok.ok..now don’t fight, I am patient.

Drisya: Nooh…you ar mama with a baby.

Maryra: Then I will cut open the tummy.

The operation begins..

Brandon George is silent….(suffering this silly girlie talk?)

Suddenly!

Brandon: I am the shelf!!!!

Hands outstretched he tries to push himself between the operating team.

Amruta and I look a each other, sure we have heard wrong.

Brandon: I am the shelf!!!!

No one pays attention….

“Cut no..”

“Cutting”

“Now the baby is to be born”

Brandon: I am the shelf!!!!

Amruta: Brandon, what are you?.....

Barndon: (indignant) I am the shelf…the shelf where they put all the surgical instruments. (cannot replicate the perfect pronunciation) I am the shelf, he wails.

No one listens….

Only Brandon can think of something so totally different.

2006-05-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

The daughter of the associate principal of a very well known school killed herself. Since she had got only 85% , according to the standards of that school, she must have been a

dull student. Not at all in the league of the 99% kids they breed there.

The head of t he institutions actually conducts a cleansing out of students he considers dull. Dull perhaps being below 80%. Naturally then, how could the daughter of the associate principal bring such shame to the institution and her family. I have visited that chain of schools when I was with my pervious job. The students move silently in the corridors like robots, hands behind their backs, looking straight ahead, unseeing. Part of the discipline he says.

He does not believe in helping average and below average students, filth in his hands according to him. No time to deal with the likes. Students with special needs, learning disability, dyslexia etc have no place in his hallowed institutions. They are kicked out, dumped like trash. He does not believe in progressive educational methods, learning labs, resource rooms etc that cater to the different educational needs of students.

Disgusting and horribly ironic that this girl, the principal's daughter paid a price for the pathetic philosophy of this school.

Exam laughs

2006-05-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

So it is revision time in school and tests and pre-exams are doing the rounds....some interesting answers..

Biology

Implantation takes place in girls, not in boys.
The girls have the uterus, not the boys.

History.

The Battle of Buxar

They fought a mini series because the British wanted money and the Indians did not want to give it.

And then something and all happened and Mir Jafar beacme king because he was a puppet.

Hindi oral exam

Mera Naam Rohan Desai Hai

Main paagal nahi hun

Mujhe garam kutta pasand nahi (I do not like hot dogs)

If wednesday comes....can the weekend be far behind?!

2006-05-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

We had a talk yesterday, while going back in the school bus….about Wednesdays. Till then I had kept hidden in me, my crazy logic on why I love Wednesdays….

So…when Wednesday comes….it is not counted coz well, it has already come…then we only have to wait for Thursday….and then Friday is not counted coz it is already the weekend…so, for me, the weekend kind of begins on Wednesday….

Shibani said we were cukoo and nearly fell off her seat laughing…Pam totally agrees with her.

Mohua and I heartily agree on the Wednesday theory having discovered that we both have kept this hidden from the world.

Aditi loves Wednesdays for the same reason…..

Everyone else thinks we belong in the madhouse.

2006-05-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

Ok..so I am really tired of being told that I am a psychologist and so I should not

Cry
Get angry
Get ‘emotional’

And being a psychologist I must

Have answers to everything
Read peoples minds
Be constantly analyzing people

………..huh……….

pah………………

………………piff……

I want rum truffles.....

Mystical Paintings

2006-05-22T01:22:00.000-07:00

Some wonderful paintings by Rassouli (http://www.rassouli.com)

Mystical Paintings of Freydoon Rassouli

2006-05-22T01:19:00.000-07:00

2006-05-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

2006-05-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

2006-05-22T01:09:00.000-07:00

Mystical Paintings

2006-05-22T01:03:00.000-07:00

Fredyoon Rassouli's mystical paintings.......

man!

Entering the Circle

2006-05-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Entering the Circle by Olga Kharitidi, M.D. is an absorbing account of a psychiatrist’s introduction to Shamanism.

The Shaman is there in all the cultures of the world. The witch doctor, the wise man etc are all different names for him. Jung would call him the personification of the Self. He is indeed the archetypal Self , the higher spiritual aspect of our personality.

I am just one chapter into it and already I feel like I am part of this strange journey Olga is making.

Also fascinating is The Sorcerer’s Crossing : A woman’s journey by Taisha Abelar speaks of a woman’s initiation into the powerful and bizarre world of the Yaqui Indian philosophy and practices. Of course Carlos Castaneda’s books give us the best insight into that world that I would so want to be a part of and yet be so frightened of becoming a part of.

Humph!

2006-05-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

Today I am
Angry
Irritated
Sad
Snappy
Jumpy
Teary
Unhappy
Tired
Sleepy
I want to scream
I want to cry
I want to yell
I want to howl

Arghhh!!!

No it is not lunar!

Jung

2006-05-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

Jung’s analytical psychology is what appeals to me the most. His theory of archetypes and dream interpretation is completely fascinating and I have to a large extent used them to interpret dreams with a modest amount of success.

Read "Man and His Symbols" and ALL the books by Marie Louise Von Franz. Best reads-Feminine in Fairy Tales, Interpretation of Fairy tales as well as books by another analytical psychologist whose name I forget- Ego and Archetype.

Jung interpreting art, culture and myths is also awesome…someday…someday…someday…I want to write a story on that…..pref. a graphic one…but sigh!!! Thatz just a dream!

The barn

2006-05-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

Here is the story to the pic JP posted... 15 minutes...not exactly but somewhat.

“Oh ,once you get used to it, its not so bad” she said sipping chamomile tea, “Makes the neighbourhood more interesting you know.”

“So like him, anyway, to leave a thing like that. Deliberate, wanting to shock, wanting to set tongues moving , I can almost see his smirk, the gleeful rubbing of his hands , his sure confidence in making people squirm in disgust as they pass by. Must be stemming from his childhood dear…these kind of things stick on. Fixation, Freud called it. Some unfulfilled desire from childhood.”

“Speaking of which” she continued , “How is that mother fixation of his. Still tells you that you cannot make beds as nicely as mommy dear?”

“If it was just that”, she sighed deeply, “ It is always my mother said this , she made Sunday lunches like that, you do not seem to care for her feelings, the last time you spoke to her you hurt her, but even she, it seems cannot make him get rid of this horrible fixture”.

“Wont he even paint it? I mean a lot can be done with a splotch of paint. At least it wont look so terrible. You poor dear…having to look at that each time you sit down for tea” And she took a long sip from her hand painted china teacup.

The half demolished barn stood defiantly surrounded by the villas of the rich. Mocking them it seemed, by the sheer challenge it gave them by just being there.

Every thing has its story and the barn had one too. Not that anyone believes in these stories these days, much easier to think that such things are the indulgence of eccentrics.

Long before the villas came up, he had visited this site. Once long ago it was a 100 acre farm with a rambling house, outhouses, barns, animals, songs of farm workers, mooing of cows, snoozing of cats, bleating of sheep, barking of dogs, the smell of fresh baked bread and all that is farm.

When he saw it, it was overrun with creepers that had claimed all of the buildings; angry undergrowth tripped him as he walked, no matter how careful he was. Sunlight dared not creep thorough the broken tiles in the barns and the windows in the house were boarded up.

This is it, he thought happily. My dream. I will build at least 50 villas here. Develop the area and then retire. She always wanted a Villa, tired of city life she says. Well here she has her desire. Make a good bargain with the estate agent and get going, he thought as he kicked at the dust in the moss and creeper caked barn he had just entered.

What he thought was probably an animal turned out to be a man sleeping on a pile of discarded wood, rubble and other odds and ends. Some drunk he thought and began to walk out of the barn. “Oh you must be the one who has come to buy the farm” said a voice. Startled he looked to see the man awake. “Well, yes” he said. “It is a good farm, this one”, continued the man. “Has all a man can want. Once you see it, you want it”. “My feelings exactly,” he replied.

“Been empty a while I am told, nearly 20 years? Owner made a bad investment and lost all? Had to leave? Could not afford to run the place? No buyers at his price?”.

“He did not leave.” said the man. “He stayed right on. Oh yes they did not allow him to stay, family begged him to come along. Then they left him. Mad the called him. Mad. Is a man who wants to save his home mad? Is a man who does not want to leave what he created mad? But he stayed on. Taken over by the bank they told him. They could not get him out could they? Oh no they could not. Oh no no they could not.”.

“Why here I am. Twenty years on am I not? Old farmer Briganza. Mad farmer Briganza.
The mad old man of Goa. Why here I am fresh as I was always. I have lived in this barn twenty years because they locked the house. Could not lock a broken wall could they? Am I mad? Do I look mad? Tell me tell me.”

He stumbled out into the daylight leaving the ranting man to his sorrow.

‘Touch of the Goa sun and Bibinca sir, Maybe you are not well, old farmer Briganza has been dead 30 years.” Said the estate agent. “Don’t believe what those village folk tell you. No ghosts, sir, he committed suicide, yes, he will answer his God, but you don’t lose such a good deal.”

“No, that barn will not be taken down” he told his architect. “It lends a certain old charm and anyway these outlandish things always attract buyers.”

Freddie

2006-05-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

Posting an article I wrote in 2004.

Fearless Freddie!

Ebony licked her little kittens proudly. “What a fine lot I have!” she said as she purred with delight. Cuddled around her were 5 kittens, four of them a beautiful ebony black just like her and one tortoise shelled one called Buttons. She looked at Freddie, feeling a little worried. “Why are his hind legs bent that way?”, she wondered. “Well. I love him just the same and he will be fine” she purred, as she licked him.

Pammi, Ebony’s human mom was also concerned when Freddie was born. She realized that Freddie was born with deformed bent hind legs and she would sit every day for hours giving him physiotherapy hoping that his legs would become normal. As the days passed both Ebony and Pammi realized that Freddie would always have deformed hind legs. Pammi felt very sad and wondered what the future would hold for her little Freddie.

Well, Freddie did not know what all this fuss was all about. Yes it was great that his mommy and human grand mommy were giving him much more attention than his brothers and sisters! He could hardly wait till he was grown and strong enough to begin venturing out of the cozy room that he lived in. How exciting the world beyond his bed looked all waiting to be explored.

So one morning to the great surprise of Pammi and Ebony,Freddie raced out of the room. Ebony gave a surprised mew and ran after him.. “Freddie! come back, come back…Oh dear!” she said, “he will fall!…he cannot walk!…Oh Pammi mom please help” she mewed. Pammi was looking at Freddie with amazement. “Look Ebony,” she said, “How cleverly he is using his bent hind legs and is hobbling along. Don’t worry Ebony dear, your son will be just fine.”

The days passed and Freddie soon outraced all his friends, brothers and sisters. It was a delight to see him fly up and down the stairs with no problem at all. Freddie of course had no idea that he had a deformity. As far as he was concerned, his legs were just fine. He was very clean and tidy as all cats are but what is so noteworthy is that all during his toilet training he never dirtied his bottom though it was very difficult for him to climb into the litter box. All his brothers and sisters had dirty bottoms. “Can’t you be like Freddie?” purred Ebony to her other kittens as she cleaned smelly dirty bottoms “Have you ever seen him dirty like all of you?”

It was on one such day that I visited Pammi because I am quite cat crazy and Pammi being as cat mad as me has lovely Persians Ebony and Freddie included. “Look at Freddie.” Pammi said…..and I saw a little black fur ball fly by. “Oh he is so adorable!.” I said. “How fast he is”. “Yes,” Pammi agreed ,“but look his legs”. It was only then that I saw that Freddie had bent hind legs. “Oh poor thing!” I said… “No No” Pammi said. . “he is just fine”…, “look” she said. “He has no idea he is disabled, and he is doing fine, so don’t worry about him”.

I asked Pammi if I could adopt Freddie and she gave it a thought and agreed. I was so delighted. I took Freddie home and introduced him to the cats at home. Krishna and Khushi were nearly the same age as him and they became pals instantly. Leela my dog was completely bowled over by him and would take any chance she got to nibble and clean him up.

Today Freddie is 6 months old and he is a very handsome cat. He is on the run all day .He races with the other cats and can give Formula-1 a lot of competition. He also loves to cuddle up and purr on the lap, but will be gone in a flash if something more interesting than your lap catches his eye. Leela whines and drools over him and is the happiest when he after a long day at play, goes to sleep next to her. He is totally fearless and is ready for any adventure and has been the cause of my heart stopping because of fear several times. All my fears being unfounded of course because Freddie knows what he is doing, no matter how dangerous it looks to me.

Animals like Freddie teach us that a disability only exists if we look on something as a disability. All of us, Pammi, Ebony and me were worried how Freddie would live in this big dangerous world but Freddie has no fear. His super confidence in himself makes me believe in him totally and I know he can look after himself. If Freddie says he is not disabled, I agree with him.

Sigh!!

2006-05-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

I found this poem one day while I was drifting randomly on the net...

Sigh!!....do they really make men like this one these days?

The Bee Box

In this small box, my love
you'll not find a ring,
but instead, a brave little bee.
He'll be dead by morn, having given his life
defending his flowers against me.
I felt his sting
while picking the small, purple pansies
growing wild along the roadside,
in hopes of an afternoon bouquet for you.
And I grieved the sting,
more for him than me,
knowing full well the price he paid
for my small pain.
And I allowed him his victory,
leaving his flowers as a memory,
and brought you instead
this brave little bee,
who proves there is love
even in the smallest
of things.

Lowell Parker