My Sister and I

September 25, 2024

            I know I am procrastinating. I know I am supposed to be doing other work but what with travel coming up on Saturday and a zillion things to do zipping through my head, too many even to make lists of, I feel helpless and unable to focus on work. 

            I have been dreading this trip and today I’m thinking of my sister because we have been fighting a lot on every call over the last weeks. Her ideas about taking care of my mum, during this time when she is in pain and has lost muscle tone, are completely different from mine. Her idea and mine of why it came to this are also so divergent. Sometimes I am forceful with her and she closes up, but one day I flared up badly when she did that and now she tells me to shut up and listen. 

            These conversations over the last weeks made me see that though we went through the same experiences of losing a father at a young age, and we had the same mother, our time and upbringing after our father’s death diverged drastically. I will write about that another time, but I realized that I don’t know my sister and perhaps will never really know her. I feel further away from her than I felt since that day in 2015 when we had a massive fight in a Kyoto hotel which ended up in us understanding each other better. From that time on we got along better, at least until my January Bombay trip.

            Things broke down completely because I refused to play by our previous patterns. One of which is midway through every trip she gets grumpy and I try hard to get her to talk. She doesn’t, I push harder, she cries, and things ease up. Last time I simply told her I was there to listen when she wanted to talk, but I didn’t daily ask her what was wrong, and put up with the unpleasantness of a grumpy co-resident by doing the things we were supposed to do together in silence and then retreating into my room. I think she was shocked, and it took her longer to bounce into an easy relating space. It was not a nice trip for us.

            In that trip, I had a goal of improving the relationship with my mom and maybe I didn’t, but I did end up knowing her better — from both the things she talked about and the things she clamped up on. I got into her skin at many moments and felt deep compassion for her, and I felt that though we have dealt with life challenges differently, that our core personalities could be similar. 

At least more similar than my sister’s and mine. I don’t even know if I can set a goal of getting to know or understand her better. But I do want to get her into a creative space. She is a painter who has stopped painting since covid. She makes excuses and every attempt of me to get her to try to pencil sketch, or do an ink sketch, or a brush pen one, for just 15 mins daily have failed. She doesn’t really do black and white and her main reason for not doing her fabric painting is that setting up and getting her colours right take a long time, and she is too often interrupted. Then the colour dries up and changes and the work is messed up. 

She has an affinity for colour and is more comfortable handling coloured media so this time I am going to take a small water colour palette and water brush with me and see if I can get her to do a 15 min sketch every day. I want to start using water colour and I am going to say that I want her to teach me. 

Not sure if it will work but I need to keep trying. I realized I had given up with her to an extent after the January trip, but it bothered me enough that some unconscious part of me still sought a way to shift that while consciously I was just going through the motions. 

How peculiar this is, isn’t it? Siblings are complicated but I wish I had a closer relationship to her like I see many other siblings have. 

I know this is a procrastination post, but it is also an advance post for next week when I may or may not have time to do one. 

Oh, and the idea for this post came from an email a friend sent me after reading the previous post and also reading a story I wrote, a while back, about conflicting sisters. You know who you are and if you read this, huge thanks. Your making that connection might improve that story but more so it sparked this thought about painting with my sister, and I hope it improves my relationship with her. 

Family is important to me though I also see that due to loss of my father at a young age, and a brother who left suddenly and didn’t get in touch after, there are interior barriers to family. But that too is another story. 

Delayed, Displaced, Reaction.

September 25, 2024

The rain has scuttled my plans for the day. I was supposed to be out doing errands, going from one location to another, but it’s a bit icky to walk around in wet streets with rain dropping down from above. The insides of buildings feel colder, especially if I get wet in the rain. Much nicer working at my desk while it patters outside, and the green trees look lush and happy. 

I am home this week. I returned Saturday and though settling in took a while I felt lighter that one of the two back-to-back stays away from home were done. But Sunday night my peace was shattered.

After we returned home from Sunday dinner with our cat and human family, I lazed a bit on the sofa, watching some sketching videos. My current sketchbook is boring and I wanted ideas to do different and more striking things. Instead, I found a video encouraging me to draw ugly birds and embrace the ‘ugliness’ of my art, because without doing the ugly stuff we couldn’t create the beauty. It was fun but neither the video-makers nor my birds looked ugly to me and I suppose that exactly was her point. 

I switched to another video, and I heard a huge thud from the study. ‘What fell?’ I said, wondering what Deepak was doing in the study at that time at night, almost midnight. 

‘That wooden box on the bookshelf, with the headphones in it. I wanted to update them,’ he said, and went back and sat on the bed after re-arranging the box. 

I had forgotten what other things were in the box and I continued watching another video, but suddenly asked, ‘What else was in the box?’ 

‘Erm those ninja keychains, and some pens.’

I jumped up. I remembered the pens. After nine months living here I still don’t immediately remember what it where. They were my least expensive pens, ones I had removed from the trays in my desk drawer as my collection grew, but which nevertheless included some of my favourites. Had any bounced out, did any crack, had they opened up, were the nibs damaged. I went into panic mode, and I felt an anger that was disproportionate to what had happened, and then I went numb. 

I wrote a message to my fountain pen group asking for advice. Almost immediately people started posting suggestions. One person also added walk away from the horror for now and deal with it after the panic has subsided. I liked that and after checking the nine pen’s outer bodies for cracks, I got into my pj’s, slipped into bed, and picked up a book to read.

But it was as if something more precious, not necessarily materially precious, but something like trust, or a belief system had crashed, and not a box with the least expensive of my pens, and I couldn’t sleep, and when I woke my body felt shaken as if it had undergone a huge trauma. 

I love my pens, from the cheapest to the most expensive, but I don’t believe that I would be in the kind of shock I felt if one or a few were broken. I’d be sad, I’d wonder if I could fix them, or if I should replace them and how fast. I might feel like the best thing to do was to let go.

But there were layers here. Why did Deepak not mention that my pens had fallen, but instead, just go back to the bedroom? He said he had panicked and felt paralyzed, which makes sense as I also have done the same. I also could have been the one who dropped that box and maybe I just need to find a safer place for my pens. 

A flood of memories of other things broken, of people not owning up, of people just running away without saying anything, and maybe even denying it later when confronted. The sense of life’s forward flow being obstacle-ed and stuck in eddies that swirl and circle, that reverse the flow and change everything, overwhelmed me. Even though what had happened was not that big a deal. 

I couldn’t touch the pens until Tuesday morning. Monday, I continued as if the box and pens didn’t exist, made plans for the short few days here in this home before I went away again. I got on with life. I haven’t understood the enormity of my reaction, my overwhelm and anger, yet. I don’t know what delayed shock I was responding to in this possibly echoed experience to one from my past. But unidentifiable fears, the worst kind, overtook me. 

Delayed response. I often get into that mode. It’s as if the body-and-mind need a less heightened state to process whatever is happening. Does that sound familiar?

Meanwhile the escalation of the war situation in the middle east terrifies me and yet I go on with life trying to not think too much about it. Even if it bothers me what can I possibly do about it and the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness is too much. All I can do maybe is include it in a meditation, but I suddenly stop in whatever I am doing, I just pause, my hand in mid-air, my thought flow arrested and wonder what people on both sides — the Lebanese, the Palestinians, and the Israelis — are feeling. Are they wondering when it might stop? Are they in the place where they had to numb out a bit or a lot? How do they cope emotionally. The ordinary people I mean, not the ones perpetuating the violence.

I wonder if we, all of us in this world, are numb and what our delayed, displaced, reaction might be. 

Collateral Damage

September 18, 2024

            I woke to news of Hezbollah pagers exploding simultaneously. I don’t know why it shocked me so much—I don’t have any sympathy for them. But perhaps because it felt like a scene from a future with never ending violence, what with all the new technology being developed on ways to spy on and to kill.

            I read a Washington Post article about it that made a coherent argument about the IDF being behind it—though IDF had not confirmed this. It made me think of Pegasus and how Israel never confirmed or denied selling the spying system to the Indian government. It made me think of how the story has died down in India and nobody knows what if anything the probe into it is doing. 

            So, my mind split. 

Part of it thinking of the scary cyberespionage-ware being developed. Thinking of this attack that seems to me to violate some basic ethics. The entire war on Hamas where ‘collateral damage’, non-combatant casualty, has crossed every boundary of humanity should be uniquivocally condemned. I read recently—“Israel has dropped almost 80,000 tons of explosives - this means that Israel has dropped ~36 kilograms of explosives on Gaza for every man, woman, and child.”
            This is astounding. Unthinkable.

            What does it mean for humanity, the human race’s future as an ethical one, that such things can happen. That groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, that don’t care that private citizens are ‘collateral damage’ in their war for power, can flourish. And a state like Israel, that does the same, thrive. I also wonder what it means for humanity to not realise yet, that violence can never lead to peace and co-existence, that it fosters cycles of revenge not just amongst those that believe in the ideology of exterminating the other, but also amongst groups who have suffered from the ‘collateral damage’. It is rare to see forgiveness bloom in such circumstances, though not completely unseen. 

            As I keep saying and feel deeply—what if the world spent as much on peace technology that it spends on war? What would our world look like? Maybe it is age, living so much life and not seeing things change—but I don’t feel much hope. 

            The other part of my mind went to all the things, huge unforgivable things, that have been glossed over in India. Pegasus, electoral bonds, crony capitalism, rising inequality in wealth distribution, bias and corrupt regulators—and the list goes on. Though despite all this it warms my heart when I think that the people of India did were not won over by religious sloganeering and voted from on basis of their needs, in the last election. Hope they do the same in the next, though which party/government actually cares about us/them is a mystery. 

            Just observing the weird ways in which the mind moves—starts somewhere and other things get thrown up. 

            I am still here at the cat’s home. Will be back at my home for a week and then have to make a trip to Bombay to see my mother who is unwell. The time here is tiring—possibly because sleep is reduced, and I am missing being around my things, and missing my life as it was finally beginning to emerge. I feel isolated here and stressed by even the thought of trying to keep my activities going while juggling cat meals and things. 

            The stress did exacerbate my gastric issues which anyway had flared up recently. This though had an interesting insight—that when I have gastric flareups not only does my brain fog up, but I become self-absorbed and would like to be in an almost comatose state. I did a chakra meditation and felt a relief or clearing in the abdomen area the first time I did it, similar to what I had felt after my first acupuncture session last year. 

My mind is still rebelling against the knowledge that eating anything I have allergies to causes massive flareups and sometimes I reach for that bottle of chill sauce or the dairy product—read ice-cream—that I know makes life miserable. I’d like to work on this body symptom and this dysfunctional behaviour but haven’t had time yet.

            The meditation also left me with a feeling that what would help me heal is being in one place for long enough that I could focus on developing structures and diets that promote the healing. But this year has constantly thrown up movement and scattered attention and I’m not yet sure how it will end. 

            Still, I hope I can end the year in stillness and maybe even some solitude and healing. 

Favorite Book of 2024

September 9, 2024

         I’m writing from my daughter’s home. This is our second time living here and this time we both, my spouse and I, feel scattered and sluggish. Last time my spouse did better. Last time I didn’t even try to do better. We had moved homes, after which I had gone to Bombay almost immediately for five weeks, and barely had I returned and lived in my new home for two weeks when we had moved here to cat sit. I spent most of my time ‘being under’ and wishing I were home — the new not yet lived in one. My spouse held the space and the time here so we/I were/was able to survive it. I had also bumped my head on the third or fourth day here, had a vertigo attack mid-stay, and severe allergic reaction to cat fur and odours in this neighbourhood throughout the two weeks.

Luckily the sofa in their living room has a view — of short trees just outside, a patch of grass with taller ones across the street, and the top of the ARC and much taller trees in the distance. I spent most of my time on their sofa making sketches of the trees and the sky, and of people waiting at the bus stop across the street.

This time I am trying to get more done, including exercise. I am finishing up reading what for me is the best book of 2024. Hisham Matar — My Friends. 

The book is about many things but a few of the themes it delves into include friendship, what keeps us close, or apart, even in what feels like the strongest of bonds. It also talks about home, being away from home, and about whether one ever can really go back. Some can be pulled by an inexplicable desire — sometimes familial, sometimes political, and most often a primal, preverbal longing — back to home which is still home. While others return for a particular relationship and still others fear returning at all. 

Why does the same friendship contain both powerful connections and an unbridgeable silence? Why and how, do some intense friendships change when we live apart longer than we live close by, and the time spent together becomes about just catching each other up to the happenings in our lives. I had felt this the last time I was in Bombay in January, when I had met some of my friends. I missed the being in ‘the moment that existed’ feeling that used to be there. Conversations this time around were about the broader sweeps of happenings in our lives, and only momentarily dove deeper into something that the psyche was grappling with in that moment or in that week or in that month, and the processes that it had already been through. And other friendships, just as strong but built perhaps not around an intimate emotional connection but around an external activity that felt constant whether all were doing that activity or not in the present — friendships that may have felt less deep than the other ones, somehow seemed better at being in that moment than the deeper ones that earlier were the perfect ones to contain the moment. 

And what of friendships where the people involved who had the same strong feelings about something suddenly are on diverging paths. As the path diverges does the connection get looser, weaker, less important even? 

And leaving home and returning is completely different for everyone. Making a home in a new place is harder for some than others. And then having learnt how to do it in one place doesn’t necessarily free one of the fear of uprooting and trying to root elsewhere. Some need this rooting to do anything meaningful and others wander gathering or trying to at least gather meaning. And return is something some slip into, but others never can as they always feel alienated by the fact that they were away and changed in a myriad of ways that they sometimes cannot dare share with those who never left. 

Moving here has changed me in places I thought were unchangeable. And I am pondering that. I think the need to write memoir is less about sharing parts of my life with others and only about trying to make sense of who I was, I am, and want to be. 

This book, My Friends, is fiction though reads like life. It took me to many places and there is an urge to finish and start again at the beginning at once. Do read it if you get a chance. And do share with me what you thought about it.

Lack of Compassion or Connection

September 3, 2024

Today I am thinking about a change in my ability to relate with a friend I have always been able to connect easily with. It happened yesterday while we were chatting that I found I couldn’t connect. It upset me enough for it to stay with me and I reflected on its genesis as I felt it had been coming on for a while. 

When I read back through my journal — we chat very regularly — I found that I had felt this for the first time in July. I had wondered then if it was simply our paths diverging after they had been running parallel for a while. 

It’s not the first time this has happened in a friendship. It does disturb me. It makes me wonder if there is indeed something within me that is broken when it comes to relating long term. I have sudden occurrences of a need to withdraw, and I have noticed this more in Singapore than before.

As a child growing up in a joint family I didn’t fit into, I spent a lot of time alone. I had so many cousins that our socializing was mostly with family. And since I didn’t fit in, I was on the edge always. As I grew, around grade 10, I began expanding my circle of socialising, but I think I remained on the edges always then, and even through University, and the early years after — until perhaps the 1990’s when I began to know myself and the things that drew me and began to seek those things and find more people who I felt were part of my 'tribe'. It was a time of picky expansion. Picky because slowly, besides knowing the activities I wanted to be involved with,  I began to understand the kind of relating I wanted and waited to find friends who could be authentic in relationship, willing to deepen it with vulnerability, especially in times of conflict. I was/am lucky to have several such friendships now in Bombay and in other parts of the world. 

In Singapore I have fewer such friends. But I felt my relating with this friend was one such in that there was search for authenticity and for understanding our core essence — if there is such a thing. But since July I found an inability to be present authentically when we talked. A, always was a good listener, someone who I turned to when I had a dilemma as I could rely on him to help me think it through. There were some issues that A had fixed views on and could not listen openly to, but those were few. But in July I found the quality of listening shifted. A listened with the intent of finding something similar in his life and relating it back to me, I guess thinking that the way he dealt with it would help me or something — not really sure what but I began to see in it a certain need to talk about his own self and life journey that stopped him from listening. 

He was going through some heavy issues so I decided then to spend the time we talked listening more to him, and trying to understand what might be behind this shift in his quality of listening. I felt it would move as his energies moved within him, but the months rolled by, and it just stayed the way it was.

            And yesterday I switched off. I had arrived to the conversation with a ton of anxiety about my mom who has been ill for a month. Something I realised I hadn't told him about, despite talking at least twice since she fell ill.  I never seemed to find the right moment to talk about it or anything. I found his lack of interest in my life, and my hopes and fears, turned me off so much yesterday that after a making a few attempts to bring those into the conversation I withdrew from the authentic connection and listened politely. Of course A noticed and felt sad. And I felt sad too because I just could not connect. 

            But I also go through periods of compassion fatigue. I feel unable to muster it up for individual person, or for a situation in the world that I have previously felt it for. I notice, withdraw, and replenish during those times and I wondered if this was one of those, or if something was wrong in the friendship, or it was just me operating from my childhood dynamics that fostered an inability to relate. 

            No answers — just sharing my process and questions. Bit sad.