Health and Wealth

Search for the right doctor, series of appointments and follow ups, lengthy stay in the waiting room for the appointments (5 hours), expensive, painful and scary tests, frenzied driving from hospitals and clinics back to home, frantic trips to the pharmacy and laboratories, frenzied meals hastily prepared and served, and squeezing in office work and conference preparations in bw, the partial prognosis is here. The doctor has ruled out an initial possibility of cancer or tumor; however, the final verdict would be handed in after biopsy (the result of which we are waiting). This entire time period and the waiting for the dr to give his verdict, while sitting besides my comatose mother in the recovery room were intense. I did not know what he were to say. His expressions were grave but I guess that’s the way he is, a mechanical robot with only instructions to dictate, and next appointment to worry about. This time period also brought back memories of my dad’s long bout of illness many years back as a result of an accident induced injury and our subsequent helplessness– a difficult time, but we pulled through somehow. I recall how that was the life-altering moment for me. I grew up that day, in a matter of moments only. Looking back only makes me wonder if I now know or like the person I was before that at all. But I lament nothing…hard lessons taught by life have always come in handy……

 Thank you so much for the well wishes and prayers for my mom and for my flu. Somehow the online friends managed to ‘be there’ despite the limitations the medium put forth. Emails, sms, good wishes, calls poured through from ex-coworkers, present room mates, my blogger friends of course….whereas the offline, real life friends weren’t there. When the friendships you invest in emotionally over the years begin to suck, you question and wonder, and when they cease, you simply feel disgusted. If I were to dictate my life with such a degree of self-centeredness, then maybe it would have been ok. In a way, this has made my life easier, now I don’t have to care or keep asking about their family, their ailments, their inclinations. I can focus on those people who have been there for me or would matter down the road. I Remember this quote by Abraham Lincoln:I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end . . . I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

Real friends, real life….Mundane and the Abstract

“Real friends don’t judge each other but try and offer solutions and a shoulder to lean on when you might need it most without the lectures……” ….these words of a familiar stranger from a far away land gave me some assurance at a time when I was questioning myself, what I have to offer others and what they are offering me…..needless to say adjustments have to made yet again in attitudes, work styles, liaisons, interactions, expectations…it’s amusing how friends take all the space they want in life, claim and hog your space as well, and yet they deny you your space….Life is a tapestry of changing colors….. If they like to see life through the specs of their abstract theories, then it should suit them…. 

Talking about the mundane things dictating the mechanics of life, flu has taking a particular liking to me. It’s been 10 days or so, I have been taking medication for body and muscular ache, skipping work alternatively, drinking a concoction with real dried exotic herbs……my pledge to live green…..eid was spent like that, with a torturous family get together, where they devised a different route this time to irritate me….instead of asking me when I was getting married, they asked me when I was getting pregnant….you gotta hand it to them…  my mom is ill yet again, we are trying to seek appointment from a specialist this time, bcz she has agreed to see a doctor. I am trying to make myself ready for anything and everything….

Chop Chop

And I had a hair cut too. Lots of chop chops and the tresses were gone, a sort of purgatory exercise, of shedding some emotional baggage. This was because, the hair loss was seasonal, and yet monumental and worrisome. Every year I go through the same cycle, every time, I worry that they wont come back, or come back with greys and whites. The last year, it went beserk, as it shed the entire 3 months of the engagement; the day his mom walked in our home and our life, till the day we called it off. He used to lament how its black magic that’s turning him against me, and when my hair begin to fall, I started believing him, instead of taking side with reasoning and common sense that is, I was under lots of stress due to the his psycho antics and the in laws’ manipulation, and so hair loss was eminent. That’s what happens when u r in bad company, the spouse try to drag you into whatever shitty place he or she is in.  Back to me, I had to get a hair cut, but I got over my hang ups, kissed my long hair good bye and parted with inches and inches……Since I was tired of hearing how lush my hair “used” to look and how they aren’t any more. Hey, I used to be many things I am not. Life happened! Some used to say I had the ability to tie down a man with my hair and keep him enchanted. I learnt better. A man cannot be tied down with anything…..even with promises, even with commitment, even with unconditional care and support. So hair were nothing really, mean nothing….when ties are to be broken, promises are to be revoked, dreams are to be shattered……and every time u are required to emerge from the shadows and move on…..

Every soul has a dark winter before spring…..

 I would try not to be philosophical, I would try not to brood. Its hard for me to decide right now  if my mind hurts more or my body. Fasting becomes troublesome for my body every year, and yet I carry on with it. It has been habit transformed into faith. But now it’s something else, I am not sure….I have transformed into someone else, something else ….. Not a non believer, but someone who has questioned, wondered, raged, gone weary if not strayed…..And questioning isn’t allowed in religion, and yet I don’t have unconditional faith and belief. Sorry…all the believers can throw stones at me and condemn me for that…but that’s the way it is. Every soul has a dark winter before spring….. I stuck to the basics initially, then by the last ashra, somehow worked up the nerve to say my nightly vigils, the nawafils. And yet every dua was a personal rant, an anguished outcry: “why have u forsaken me?” And sometimes just outstretched palms…no words……emotions so overpowering that they negated the need for words…. Sleep was distant, dreams and nightmares where aplenty. Work, coupled with backache and body ache, was killersome. When I ran out of physical energy, relied on mental one; when I ran out of that, I fell back upon my physical energy. It was push push push. There were sessions to conduct, papers to check. Things to edit, all done thankfully….no slacking…..The whole month round, I carried myself in the auto-pilot mode. I programmed myself to wake up, pray, walk, sleep, lie down, read and speak in a pre-conditioned mode, a state of zombiness. There just wasn’t any time or any energy to think of anything else. Parents didn’t fall ill alhamdullillh, I have, towards the end…..but the rest was fine, despite bouts of melancholia. News of no marriage, no engagement was broken to a few more relatives……so now there are a few lesser people to tell, lesser people to answer….so the last eid with parents wasn’t last ….and thankfully so…. after all despite his psycho crystal ball rants last year. The future is something that just doesn’t exist. And yet it is scary….

  In darkness and solitude I rise.
I cannot see the sun and worry
That it has abandoned me,
Never to return, Like so many others
Whose light once promised And failed to shine,
Whose warmth, once caressing My flesh now chilled and pallored,
Gives cheer to all corners of the earth Save this prison where hope Is all but lost.
 
 I search, and try to remember That place where faith,
The mightiest servant of the creator, Does dwell, in whose flame Each new day is born,
And slowly warm my soul by his fire,
Remembering That in the east
Love and light await
Always.
 c 1988 Ed Talbot http://sonxpro.multiply.com/

Traveling Light ~*

Things don’t hold value, people do, occasions do! Two days back, I went on a purging journey – I took out all the eidi stuff I received from my sadistic sh*t head in-laws last year, on the engagement, on the 2nd eid. It was stuffed in the nooks and crannies of my closet by my mother as neither of us wanted to have a look at any of it. I decided to give it away to someone, someone who could see stuff as stuff and not associate any bitter memories with it. A colleague’s maid’s daughter was getting married and she asked for some material assistance. I wanted to give some out from my zakat money but then was told that I can’t give it to a non-muslim, and right now it’s ahrd for me to take out some sadqa because of the heavy amount of zakat I am paying (gee I dunnow, I dont feel that rich). Anyhow, I took them all out, the jewelry, the flashy clothes, the hair pins, the makeup kit, perfume, etc. The sweet kiddo not-meant-to-be sister-in-law hand-painted a card and attached it to a pair or dangly earrings with my name on it. I ripped it off and tossed it on my dresser. The rest I bundled off to the office and handed over to my coworker under everybody else’s suspicious eyes. “U could v used some of it,” she said wistfully on seeing the earrings. “No thank you, my heart cringes and recoils every time I lay eyes on it.” I don’t know, I never am comfortable with using stuff given by someone I am not on good terms with anymore, or anything that has any association with an unsavory event or memory. Because for me gifts are special, an extension of feeling that you have for another person, that’s why I take time in picking gifts out. Similarly, I rarely shop, but when I do, I pick things on the basis of utility but more so on the basis of memory and feeling they evoke, the occasions they mark. The stuff given by the only person who used to matter to me in another life time was duly packed up and sent off at his address with a note about how the trinkets should be given to his would-be-wife (if she prefers hand-me-downs). For instance, the stuff my parents haphazardly bought for my equally haphazardly planned marriage many years ago used to cause me serious discomfort every time I used to enter that room. I could throw it all out, give it away, hide it away…..wipe out the reminder of a very dark and difficult phase of life. Thankgod there was nothing to exchange with that set of in laws (they were cheap skates, though not ghatya as the current ones and ya I have one-too-many) at that point in time. There is some sort of shagun ka silverware in the bedsheet closet, with which my fingers brush by every time I search for clean sheets. I tried my best for so many years to have them move away to some place, but I couldn’t due to lack of space, and may be for the sake of not stirring the ghosts in our family’s collective closet. This time, I didn’t let my mother know what I was upto, I just took it up, dumped it in a shopper and gave it to my coworker. I exhumed the ghosts and I tried to expunge some of em. The inbox is clean of emails, the in box of photos of families, mobile shots and ecards. The messenger is purged clean of useless contacts. Yet eid is just round the corner, another solitary one, another reminder of the things, of the relationships that weren’t meant to be, one of the many . I feel lighter, yet I feel hollow, but at least there is one bride out there, who would be quiet happy with the stuff she received from an anonymous baji. That should matter alone na? ha….ya sometimes it does; many times it doesn’t. So, do me a favor, if u r trying to comment on this with a “it would all get better”; save it for someone else.

Obituary

“Who knows maybe life wouldn’t afford us another chance to meet that person,” I said this yesterday to my neighbor and former university mate for my critically ill teacher, and today, just now I heard about her death. Within a matter of hours…..sigh……she was in a lot of pain due to her cancer being in the last stage…yet she looked healthy when I met her this june…….a senior told me that she worked very hard and sacrificed a lot for her siblings…never got married….was looking after an ailing mother right now….and now she is gone….but atleast she isn’t in pain anymore…… 

Edit: today i attended a condolence meeting for her at my alma mater, i am glad i went. The teachers appreciated how the almuni took time out of their professional lives and schedules for her. Her younger brother told the audience how she started teaching in the same school in the evening shift in which she used to study in the morning to support not only her own family but that of her step mother. She was 13 back then, a career span of above 25 years, and while she was bed-ridden she still was marking the answer scripts of her students, so the result wouldnt get delayed. The University and  our department was the axis of her life…a life no more…..