The Last Monday…

April 25, 2022

I’ve been itching to write another blog post. Even though I wasn't sure what I would say I had started one on Friday. This is as far as I got…

 

…Each day is hotter than the day before it. A drier heat than Singy though Bombay is a coastal city. Today I am sitting in a large blue chair in what used to be my daughter’s bedroom. The chair is rickety as the legs need tightening, and nobody else but me uses it anymore — though it is big and holds one comfortably and we all used to fight to occupy it before.

 

My days suddenly have space. We rushed through a lot of the tasks over the first ten days and now the empty time feels a bit odd. Never has a Bombay trip after 2016 has had this kind of slowness. Yesterday it felt like a huge treacherous void that had me taking deep breaths to stabilize myself.  I want to explore that feeling but perhaps not yet.

 

I have been more immersed in the Indian political news since being here. It always happens this way. I used to end up writing small notes in my journal – a character sketch, a theme, or plot idea – that later, in Singy, I would turn into small fictional flashes, just for fun. But something feels different this time. I can’t write fiction, haven’t been able to for a bit. That feels a bit scary…

 

Then I got interrupted and was busy with chores till this morning. I obviously had been wrong in thinking that my days had space. They do in bits and pieces but not long stretches. Nevertheless, I started a post this morning and got one line in…

 

…I’ve reached the last Monday of my stay here…

 

…Interrupted again and now it is afternoon. I think this morning I wanted to write about a conflict I had with my sister. I normally expect one in the middle of our time together. Just like I expected a ‘separation anxiety’ one with my spouse or with my daughter, when she lived with us, each time one of us was leaving. These were and are predictable and since they are expected we name them for what they are and move through them very quickly now. 

 

So yes, I expect a fight with my sister in the middle of any trip I make. But this time she flared up on the second day of my stay and it completely boggled my mind. She and I are very different. I want to go into the core of the conflict, uncover the root of it and clear the air completely. She won’t talk about it, but mulls and broods alone. She doesn’t express her feelings like I do, but I could sense something very heavy lay behind her silence and tears this time. I tried to figure out what it was. She had been alone for two years, had taken care of my mum and managed the house without any help for the period of the first lockdown. Later, though she had help she also was still doing it all alone. It had left trauma traces within. 

 

I wasn’t surprised when another conflict erupted on Saturday. I misread her space totally, and felt that because she had been alone so long our presence now felt intrusive. But when I put forth my theory she began crying in loud, spasmodic sobs. Suddenly I knew I was wrong. Totally off in fact. I realized that the loneliness of those months lingered within creating anxieties and blank spots that she could not articulate. This time I managed to guess correctly, and we took the morning to slowly unfold some of what she had been through. Mostly in silence, just by being together, and working together — cutting fruit, collecting tax documents, clearing a cupboard.

 

I don’t know the point, if any, I was making when I decided to write about this. Perhaps I was just allowing myself to feel it without analyzing it. I felt immense guilt — of course because I hadn’t been around to help — but also because my incorrect guess had triggered such an intensity of pain for her. I couldn’t bear that, but there was not much I could do about the past or even the present and future, except be with it. Sometimes that is all that can be done in the moment, or ever. 

 

I have indeed reached the last Monday afternoon of my stay. So much seems to have happened in these days. Every moment I was free I made small journal entries. I’ve written 74 A5 size pages since I arrived. I am longing to read them and make sense of them. 

 

One of the things I did write about is writing and karate practice. Even though I have only made it to the dojo once and not trained other than that, I know that from the day after I land in Singy I will easily slip into the practice. About writing I don’t know yet. But I think the friend who commented that I am closer to establishing one than ever before is right. Maybe for now all it needs is to just write. I itch with that desire more often now than I did over the last many months. 

Bombay!

April 18, 2022

 

I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post from Bombay. 

I am sitting in the ‘swing’ balcony as we now call it, after my sister changed most of the upholstery from green to coral. My daughter and spouse sit here too, reading or working on their devices. It is our morning spot where we gather before the busy day. 

 

This is the beginning of the second week in Bombay, and last evening something painful and heavy slipped below the light, happy tones of the first week of joyous reunion, and made its presence felt strongly. It could just be that my daughter is leaving tomorrow and a feeling that the best part of the trip is over is growing in my belly, or a horrid dehydration and dizziness due to the heat, and dust, and perhaps some mold too, is making my head reel. 

 

But I think it is a lot more. 

 

Suddenly I feel aware that I am 61 and I don’t know where I will live the rest of my life. Suddenly, and this is the painful part, I don’t know where home is. It used to feel I had two homes but now I feel I have none. After two years of not visiting periodically, this here doesn’t feel home, and nor really does Singy. I was content with a sense that I would move between homes and have the best of both worlds but now, though I can’t exactly define this, I feel I am without roots. I also feel like I don’t want to live in a country other than the one my daughter lives in. 

 

There is also the dark awareness that I don’t know where my life is heading or who I am. This visit, my spouse cleared his corner cupboard — where he stores his stuff and ‘memories’ — and layers of my life emerged. Among letters and photos which we squealed over, he found an article from the Mumbai Mirror featuring me and my friend Charmayne’s dream workshops in the section on alternate healing. I realized that unlike many lives more stable, with definite paths, mine has changed constantly and I haven’t been able to predict where it was heading next since I was tiny. It feels like I had no plan ever?

 

At 15 I didn’t know I would convince my traditional and patriarchal joint family to allow me to study Physics at University in the US. At 25 I didn’t know that my life would take another sharp turn and I would drop all selves that I knew previously and be moved towards working with human rights violations. At 35 I didn’t know that in a few years I’d study psychotherapy and dream work or that I would be drawn into vipassana Buddhism, or that before 45 I’d start training in karate.

 

And this goes on and on — as every few years I seem to simply re-invent who I was. Perhaps the previous identities assimilate in some way within, but I do have trouble recognizing the selves and lives that emerged from that dusty closet. And today I don’t know where I will be in five years, or ten, or ever. Today this is unnerving me, making me shaky. 

 

This week I will find my way to the Bombay dojo and see my friends there and meet up with other friends from other stages of my life – school friends, human rights work friends, therapy days friends – and this will likely cause some of this unease to ebb. But I also think that though running about and meeting them will temporarily cover up the unstable feelings lurking deeper, I am going to have to confront these very soon.  

Cats, Anxiety, and Writing Practice

 April 8, 2022

I am still feeling the void, the post-partum blues, I felt after the test. At first it felt ok to be in this state. My Wednesday chat friend felt exhausted and ‘brainless’ weeks after he submitted his thesis. But as time, as in days, went on and I still couldn’t write, read, or do anything remotely creative I felt anxious and restless. The uneasiness grew within my chest like a bubbling pot that was always on the point of boiling but never did. 

 

Our family cats came to live with us on the 29^th of March. They come here when their human parents travel so haven’t been here for a long, long while. They took ages to settle. Neither ate in the first 24 hours. The black one slept and slept all day, she cuddled on my feet at night, but ran away from me in the day — like she used to when we first rescued her off the streets — but 48 hours later she had managed to find stability. Now during the day, she eats, she sleeps, she wakes and demands pets, then plays by herself and goes back to her window seat spot to sleep. And she only comes to wake me at 7 am. On the first night, the white one woke me up at 2 am. He sat on my stomach, purring loudly, and kept coming back every half hour or so. He settled a bit a few days later, then unsettled himself in some way again. All day his slightly open eyes watch where I go. He sleeps lightly and meows and wanders in the day, and at night he jumps on my stomach between 5:30 and 6:00 am. He has this personality where he sometimes makes himself miserable and then stews in it. No amount of comforting soothes him during these times.

 

Today, or perhaps the last three days or even the entire week, I am feeling a bit like that. I can’t seem to relax and even thinking about doing something to relax, like going to the library café and journaling, tumbles me into a deeper state of anxiety. 

 

The cats will be with us till Sunday when their human dad returns. I will help him get them and their stuff back to their home and then rush back here to pack and leave for Bombay. I haven’t been back in over two years and two months. I haven’t been anywhere and forgotten how to pack and travel. Anxious! 

 

But my current internal suffering comes from being in a complete creative void. No writing, no reading,  no drawing even. I don’t know what it is — the combination end of the test exhaustion and sleep deprivation once the cats got here, or something deeper? My mind tends to pick up the white cat’s anxiety and then we make each other more anxious. I feel sad, ashamed even, that like him I haven’t handled my disturbance at all well this time. I have been grumpy and tense.

 

It's a time when I am trying to establish a proper writing practice. I don’t think I’ve ever really had one. Despite having a serious passion for writing, it feels on and off — dependent on inspiration, task (as in deadline of some sort, that includes feedback to another writer), and time (as in when I have time constrains the first thing that gets dropped is writing). Perhaps a part of me likes this non-structuredness, and not very committed way to doing things. 

 

But every so often I seem to have the need to have a proper practice. I read how ‘real’ writers have routines and how they go ‘into the cave and sharpen their pencils’ even when not writing. I’ve tried several times to start one but never chased it seriously. Perhaps I need to process these two parts together, allow them to dialogue, but right now I just want to start one. 

 

Several writer friends, and I mean serious and published ones, have suggested that I link writing practice to my karate practice, or at least take tips from that to develop this. The two feel very far apart though I know they are not. It wasn’t always so but now it is simple to keep the karate practice. There is a simplicity in the elements involved — basics, kata, hojo-undo, gym, group practice, and teaching. A certain number of hours every week which could be a combination of those elements in any way that feels right. I never get karate ‘block’ and nor do I faff on the day and time I am supposed to practice. 

 

It wasn’t always so and perhaps reflecting on the process of how I got serious in karate might provide me more insight than looking outside to other writer’s practices. But it is fun to hear about those.  

 

It’s been a disruptive time and the next weeks in Bombay will be more so, especially since we haven’t been there in so long, but I am going to keep a bit of my mind on getting the shape and elements of a practice going. I am making a list of things that could go into a practice and I am going to keep my notebook with me and make notes whenever and wherever. 

 

Natalie Goldberg says, “One of the main aims in a writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and non-aggressive.” I think that learning to trust the body and mind was the exact process by which I came to a karate practice. May I succeed in this too despite the time of constant change.