Quiet Despair

 May 27, 2021

 

It’s my estranged brother’s birthday. I have seen him once since he left the family home, without a forwarding address, in 1999 or 2000. I don’t recall when and I’ve destroyed the journals from that difficult time so cannot check. I burnt them to let go of those energies. Not a wise thing but I wasn’t wise in those years of extreme duress. 

 

But besides the date and year I remember the day well. He and his wife walked right past me as I sat in the corridor near the front door. I remember what both wore. No goodbye, not even a wave. But having grown up with him, something in the way he walked, the way he looked at me and looked away, clued me in that something was off. Impulsively I ran and hugged him near the elevator. Then went into my bedroom, lay down on the carpet and sobbed. I saw him one last time in 2010.

 

Today’s morning was slow and sad. Memories, good and bad, drifted through as I washed out the tea pot. I have no way of wishing him and wondered if I would even if I did have a way to contact him. It is so complicated and a story for another time. But perhaps I have told it before. 

 

Later, after chomping through a cheesy piece of leftover quesadilla, I thought about the word languishing. Somebody sent me an article last evening that named the state that many of us find ourselves in often during the last year, as languishing — feeling blah, stagnant, empty, and muddling through days. The article said it wasn’t  depression but one didn’t feel good either. It wasn’t burnout but one didn’t feel energised either. It was a fog with fragmented attention and lack of focus. One of the consequences could be staying up late – to reclaim the something that you missed out during the day, ‘a search for bliss, connection, or purpose in this perpetual pandemic.’

 

One way it suggested one could escape it is by getting into flow, by immersing in a project. But it also acknowledged that it was hard to find flow when one couldn’t focus. It felt good to read this, to hear the state I find myself constantly in described so clearly. I also realised that I was lucky to have karate — in the worst of times I can absorb myself completely in it. I only have to push through the languid lack of energy and motivation, move, and bang there is that mysterious flow.

 

I started this blog thinking I’d write about the forgotten—not forgotten but not reported on anymore—Farmer’s Protests in India. Yesterday was six months since the farmers have been camping on the borders of Delhi. Six months of braving a cold winter nights, rainy days and now intense dry heat. Six months of being ignored by the government at the centre, just a few kilometres away. All the government needed to do to halt the protests was to agree to repeal the laws and look at them afresh with better consultations with parties that they will  affect. But the Government’s strategy of waiting it out has worked. Now with the second covid wave the movement is losing sympathy and it is easy for the Government and their lapdog media to call the farmers potential super spreaders. About a month ago I had heard a BJP supporter claiming that the British variant came from the farmers at the borders — not from flights from the UK. Now these demonising lies will increase. The brave efforts of the farmers sitting there on the borders for so long will probably go to waste. 

 

This time this wily and uncaring Government seems to have won against the farmers. And that’s why I fear that despite the mishandling of covid they will somehow brazenly get through it and retain their power. But retaining power does not mean good governance. And also there is the recent hope from West Bengal.

 

Another article I was sent called the Government’s behaviour, particularly relating to the Central Vista project which is destroying heritage momuments, more akin to that of invaders than an elected Government. That struck a chord. They are tearing through more than just monuments—through the constitution, through all the progress made since independence, scientific norms, through connections between communities, harmony, institutions of higher learning, written history. Through the past and present to make a future very different from what’s gone before. Perhaps forgetting the wise adage — how much of the future can one really control?

 

It’s a day of quiet despair for me. I wish I could drill a hole through the time barrier and see into the future. But best perhaps to stay right here.

Despair, an apology, and...

 May 21, 2021

A prickly thing with small sharp teeth. That

bites daily, ripping small pieces,

of you. Exposing brittle bone beneath the protections.

Despair takes a bright sunny day and tosses up a storm.

Searing lightening bolts, thunder that rolls endlessly, dense acid rain. 

And your hair falls out.

 

I wrote this, sort of, poem two days ago. After watching people gasping for oxygen, hearing accounts of the black fungus that is attacking covid patients treated with steroids. I felt insane despair as I watched images of countless corpses floating in the Ganges, more buried on its banks — while listening to the official denial narratives about these corpses. I had grown my own fangs and had been snapping, snapping, biting at anybody who came within chomping distance. Crying at times and raging at people who couldn’t understand the fragility roiling beneath my surfaces.

 

I remembered those months in 2001. Right after the bombing of the World Trade Centre. I remembered the ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Afghanistan that the Bush administration began. I googled it and read that this kind of tactic was used earlier than 2001, but I remember this one for the daily images of destruction akin only to Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in my memory. 

 

I remember going to peace meetings, signing petitions to stop this War on Terror. It changed the world after. Made it a more dangerous place to be in. I remember wandering, trying to find a way to stop the devastation I felt within and saw outside. Trying to find a way to be ‘useful’ to the innocents killed then, to the ravaged land. I remember seeing American citizens waving posters claiming that they didn’t vote for Bush or apologising what their country was doing. I also remember many Americans feeling deeply their own wound of 9/11 — which is huge, deep and unforgivable. 

 

I want to wave those posters today. As an Indian I want to apologise to the world for the Prime Minister I didn’t vote for. I want to apologise for the hubris, the early jubilation, the ignoring and burying of scientific data, of a completely messed up vaccination policy, the taking the eye of the ball to win an election, to image build — that has made the world a more dangerous place today. 

 

I live in Singapore, which is experiencing a burst of  covid clusters and renewed restrictions. Polite Singapore calls the B.1.617.2 variant the South Asian mutation – not Indian. Yes, they are called out by the citizens for this. Yes, there are racists comments and questions why Modi won’t close his borders as well as questions about why the government here won’t close theirs. 

 

How can anyone be blamed for a natural mutation of a natural virus. But conditions in India created by policy of the ruling party provided a petri dish for it to thrive. The low amount of genome sequencing once it was detected, the early ignoring of its virulence, the lack of research into it, the absence of tracing, of sharing what little they knew with the world, allowed the mutation to travel to places, and enter the community there. With advance knowledge maybe many countries might have shaped their entry and quarantine policies differently? Just like we say that early knowledge about the virus when it was first seen in Wuhan might have helped us avoid some of the catastrophes we saw last year.

 

I feel, like many others, that Modi, along with several others, should be tried by an International Tribunal for crimes against humanity. 

 

But he won’t be. Just as Bush and others — with the policies and conditions that provided a petri dish that lead to 9/11 — never will be. Modi will probably win the next election instead. 

 

India is grappling with its bleeding wounds. The immediacy of the situation and the response to the constantly evolving events leave no time for reflection. But once we are past it, I truly hope that we can have truth commissions that accurately reflect the deaths and the ways in which they could have been prevented. A court in India has called what is happening a genocide. We have to, just have to, acknowledge the true numbers, the true harm that was done to the people of India, and to the world by the actions of the current Government. And more than anyone else his supporters need to call him out for what he didn’t do. As the world turns and more things happen we forget things in the past. This year, and the last, I hope remain in our collective memory for a while. 

 

Even as I write these words I know I have only captured a tiny bit of the churning within me. There is so much, so much more but grateful that a few words have escaped the too ‘much-ness’ and the paralysis I have been feeling. 

Taxes, shots (gin and vaccine), poxes -- more than just a rant

 May 4, 2021

I’m at that time of year when I am again doing taxes online, at a distance. Yes again. I remember being here last year too. The plan of course was to be in India, last year too, and work it through with my sis. Hers, our mums, mine and my daughters. But covid. Had other plans. And covid can you just drop me a line, or better still make an announcement on some world media forum what your future plans are for us? Please. 

 

But taxes. Stressful as it all is, it still would be ok except for—damn and darn—the government of India which makes rules, particularly for non-residents, that feel like harassment and HDFC securities which takes those rules and compounds them with inefficiency and stupidity. As I said in a WhatsApp group I am in – May a pox destroy every single body in the top cadre of that organisation. Ok I didn’t say top cadre but I should have. 

 

And I was told, I couldn’t go wrong using such a Shakespearean curse! 

 

But before I proceed I have to admit to consuming a shot of gin. It being the only alcohol I still have a stock of – Kinobi from Japan and very fine Irish gin, only one little shot left, given to me by my daughter’s Irish friend. And, then of course I had to google writers who wrote under the influence and I see I am in good company – Hemingway, Chandler, Joyce, Highsmith, Capote, King, Stevenson and lo and behold even Louisa May Alcott, double t and not double l.

 

Those  darn red tape things have been hitting me for a bit but despite that this morning I woke with conviction that I would (1) finish the blog post I had begun yesterday about loving what Bengal did (2) Train and (3) Wander and destress, maybe even buy a few, perhaps a half dozen, pens (I do need some fineliners), and notebook or two, before I went back to taxes this eve. Yes, I would devote this morning and afternoon to self-care.

 

But HDFC securities - or rather my sister calling about a problem created by this fine org -

had other plans for me. 

 

Meanwhile as I confessed on one of my WhatsApp chats that I was consuming brunch shots, well only one so far, I got a deluge of everyone’s favourite tipples. Single malts, feni, arruk and gin are the favoured ones. It seems it’s not just me who is severely stressed in this time. I am in even better company, than the writers I named above, with these soul sisters in Mumbai. Bless the Goddess that brought me to you, to them, in 1998 at the World-Work in India.

 

But seriously, yas seriously… India, dear India… We need prayers from the world… and we need more than that from the f---ing government at the centre…

Stop! Just stop now. Right now!

Stop. Trying to build image and worrying more about that, than the actual situation in the country. Everyone has seen you addressing rallies with no covid protocols when covid was rising in the country. Everyone, in the entire world, knows you chose this instead of governing. Everyone knows the path that brought us to here. The choices you made about prioritising the Ram temple (the tallest in the world) or the Central Vista, or a cricket stadium (the largest in the world) or trying to win Bengal instead of preparing for the next wave with a comprehensive vaccine policy and hospital beds and oxygen plants. It’s not people showing pics of burning dead bodies and crying about oxygen shortages that is spoiling the image of the BJP’s rule in India It is what you all did that messed up your image. 

 

And as I am typing this my sis calls. She, my mum, and her one helper, cannot get their second vaccine dose anywhere in Mumbai. Nope. None. Nowhere.

 

I know many put this failure on the state governments and also on the people who didn’t wear masks. But this is on you at the Centre – you made the vaccine policy, the decisions not to import, to control the doses sent to states and to export huge chunks while not funding the production of the next rounds. It is you, not the states, that is primarily responsible for the mess as you brought in the national disaster act, and the national epidemic act, and the f---ing kitchen sink, to centralise control. Control the thing you love most, more than the welfare of the people who voted you in.

 

So a pox on you too. And a pox on everyone who is trying to give this government a clean chit. Wake up. You who support blindly are killing the rest of us Indians too.

 

So underneath the anger, despair, frustration and helplessness I feel about my tax issue is really the angst I feel about how this country has been brought to this point by terrible governance, a compliant media and a whole bunch of blind supporters of the government who even now cannot stop defending them. 

 

Disclaimer – the opinions and emotional states shared in this blog belong not just to me, but also to a whole bunch of other Indians. 

And end note(?) or further disclaimer or confession – Hemingway, I think, said, write drunk, edit sober. I was neither drunk nor sober when I wrote and I didn’t bother with editing today.