Alone, Happy

I walked through the walk-way of the path. It was my fifth round. Each round took around twelve minutes to complete. I would start with walking. Once the body had heated up enough, and I could feel the blood flowing a bit more through my capillaries, I would slowly start a jog. It was Delhi. It was winter. And, I was alone. I had decided to take up a permanent job when it was finally offered to me - after I turned forty, i.e. It was a "low level" position compared to my age and my experience. But, a position, neverthless. I had a chequered career graph. And, it was a story of career mixing up with intimacies gone awry, of broken dreams and hearts - and, it was a particular story women giving up careers to be tethered to men they loved (or, thought they did, at least). After so many years, I had almost nothing - my relationship was shaky, my career had just restarted. But, that day, in the park, on a Delhi winter afternoon, I had my own steps and my breath to count. After the fifth round, I would sit on the benches strewn around in the park, sweating. It would already be sunny because in winter, you use the afternoons to jog. The small knot of old women friends, many of them migrants from UP and Haryana villages nearby, would all be scattered around in small circles. The golden-winter sunlight bathing all of us in an extra-beauty. I remember I was happy. I had just found out I can be happy, alone.

Green and Peacock Blue Days

That was our last trip together. We both knew that. She had decided to get married. I knew she would be lost to me forever after that. Marriages, even good ones, tend to do something like that. Bad ones surely had a way of totally gobbling up the woman. It would eat at our core, tell us we are door mats, a cog in the system of endless family dinners, full-time servants, who should ideally, never be heard, seen, or felt. We were taught the fine art of being invisible from our childhoods. That, we realized later, was the training to be daughters-in-laws and wives. 

    I failed spectacularly at it. She was, unfortunately for her, a roaring successful. 

     She was never invisible. But, her deep empathy for others worked against her. She knew (magically, I would say) who needed what, the moment she entered a room. Physical comfort, emotional succour, even intellectual stimulation… she gave everything selflessly. In fact, she reveled in it. 

     But, I knew she would be destroyed by her decision. It hardly came from self-love. It came from self-hatred. I strangely felt sorry for the young man who had haplessly got trapped in her very own elaborate schemes of hating herself. I knew he would see through her one day. I knew he would be destroyed in her flame of cynical anger directed against her own beautiful self. He was, just collateral damage, nothing more. But, before he destroyed himself, I knew he would try everything in his power to destroy her. All for nothing- that was the tragedy of it which I knew, I saw and I resented. 

     Yet, that day was magical. We went to an old fort in the northern tip of the state. We were totally alone in that vastness. She wore a green and peacock blue dress. The dupatta flying in the light breeze. It became a combination of colors, I always associated with her later in life. The grass in the fort was parrot green. She emerged from the undulations of the hills, like a goddess, a part of it. Young, beautiful and liltingly earthy. 

     I snapped a mental picture that day. For I knew, this moment is passing. And, I knew then, we are alive now… But soon, we won’t be!

Naked to the Elements

Two days ago, Vinaya called me over the phone. I was glad to hear his voice. I told him: "Vinaya, you have entered my university's syllabus. My collegue Krishna and me, we have designed a course on Bhakti women saints, and your translation of Akka figures in the reading list." Vinaya sounded upbeat and the conversation took us to the topic of "nakedness." Akka, a 12th century Bhakti saint, had famously abandoned her cloths. She is depicted as covering her body with her long hair in popular visual representations. But, I always felt that "covering" is our ugly minds looking at her and foolishly trying to "cover" her up in the false modesty of our hypocritic gaze on a naked female body. I picture her in all her abandonment - flowling hair, her nipples exposed to the elements, pubic hair visible..and her, singing the praises of her very own god of her universe - "her lord, white as jasmine" (coming to me in the English poetry of A.K. Ramanujan). Vinaya translated it as "Channamallikarjuna, Jasmine tender" - I love it also, it signifies the tenderness of her intimacy with the lord, and also reflects the local god she made universal with her devotion. I then spoke to Vinaya about this experience that I had long ago. I was travelling in a friend's car in the coldness of a North Indian winter. The car passed by a street - one of those Delhi streets that have these huge trees in the sidewalk - comparatively clean and peaceful, but also dotted with some walkers. I suddenly felt in my subconcious mind, I had a vision of something I normally don't expect in a public street anywhere. I thought I had a glimpse of a male genitalia for a second and then the car had passed that scene and therefore, probably, I wasn't sure I had seen it at all. I turned back. And, there there were. Not one, not two, but three naked bums. One was slightly old and wrinkled. The others were fairly young, maybe middle aged. They were all crossing the street in the cold January of a New Delhi winter. The bodies didnt give out the meaning of "mad" (the only other naked body that you might come across in a public street like that). They seemed calm. I was surprised by my own reaction to the sudden glimpse of human nakedness, when you least expect it. I didn't feel "strange." I didn't feel "disgust." I didn't feel, they didn't "belong." It was so mundane, so ordinary and precisely because of it, so extra-ordinary. I did ask my friend whowas driving whether he noticed them. He hadn't. That he missed them clearly showed me how these bodies were just part of of the landscapte. And, I suspected, it might also be because of the aura they were sending out. They were not drawing attention to themselves. Nor were they covering their selves and hiding either. They were just "being..." My friend said, maybe they belonged to a sect of digambaras (has a beautiful translation possible - the one who has chosen the four directions as her raiment) with their ashram nearby. That made practical sense. They entered my bucket list of things to do in my life. I had to reach there somehow, one day. I had to give up my self. I had to become comfortable with my beautiful/ugly human body and present myself to my self and the worl - with no claims, no thing to hide!