Cow tails and Pigeon wings.

Once, for the thousandth time

A cow wandered into

The narrow lane leading up to

Bai’s house in our village.

In our village, most cows have their horns.

I am afraid of them.

My grandmother though,

Reads the paper slowly, and the only word she has practice writing

Is her own name-

Bai rises to the occasion,

Playfully catching the cow’s tail, merrily clucking it the way home. The cow, understanding its own steps in this dance, complying respectfully.

It is only at the end of the lane, that she lets the tail go. I sit there, amazed at this cow transforming with Bai’s touch. She tells me later that the best way to befriend a cow is to just gently but firmly hold her tail . In this lineage of women,

My grandmother is the last to live this open secret,

After her, we will touch phone screens, flight tickets, the forbidden hands of strange and restless men-

But never a cow’s tail. Never need to. This is what the education was for.

I watch Bai in her pink sari, cheerfully escorting the cow out of our lane-

The cow, understanding, complying gracefully.

This strange conversation, never to be had again by any more women in our family.

My grandmother inhabited a childhood where girls needed to know how to milk a cow, herd it home, help it birth, help it nurse. For years, when the children were young, she kept a cow at home.

My father says we are a family that does not keep pets, when I try to get him to agree to a puppy. He says they are dirty and unhygienic. He forgets the milk in his 8 year old belly came from their pet cow. Now when he thinks of cow milk, his thoughts turn to the dangers of unpasteurized milk, the possibilities of bovine tuberculosis.

---

Today, I wake up to find a pigeon scrambling against the pigeon net I had installed precisely to keep these birds out. It was the same day my ex-boyfriend had asked me to meet him again, and I had said no, as I watched the wire mesh go up in the balcony. The pigeon, like my lost beloved- is scrambling against a net when there are other ways out. His stubbornness is exasperating. Try to show him the way and he will only surge wildly against the very thing keeping him trapped. He goes into hiding, where he cannot be seen or reached. I have no option but to wait out his stupidity and wonder how anyone came up with the genius idea of using pigeons as messengers, or men as significant others. Whatever navigational wisdom his ancestors might have possessed, this bird has lost the inheritance of it. A little too close to home.

The pigeon [ I decide is a he] sits, and I get to work on my laptop. That’s when my neighbour tells me our caretaker, Kaka can handle these things, can take out a pigeon with his bare hands. It has happened many times before.

Kaka arrives and I watch him have a conversation with the pigeon, like my grandmother would. Within minutes, he has reached up, grabbed the scrambling pea-brain, held it firmly in his hands, soothed the agitation by cupping its neck- and then unfolding his hands he throws the pigeon back upwards into the sky. Gracefully throwing this offering back into the face of the blue sky. Returning a lost thing to it’s place.

I ask him where he learned this. How does he know how to handle an agitated, desperate bird?

Kaka has no answers, only a big laugh that he takes with him into the escalator. For him, this is nothing out of the blue.

For me and the pigeon though, I’m sure it is.

I think of Kaka’s and Bai’s hands. How they were the last in their generation whose hands knew how to touch and return the wild things.

How our hands are spent so far from each other, so close to the alphabet on a touchpad. The alphabet our grandparents do not know by heart. The alphabet they sent us to learn. The alphabet in whose learning, came the forgetting of so many other things. The alphabet we will pass on to our children. The alphabet in which I will store my memories of the other alphabet that has no letters. The other alphabet that I did not learn.

The season of Grief

Death.

We make a deal that we ignore when we come alive. We agreed to live, and we agreed to die.
But we live as if we have forgotten.
I hear of how two people passed away from electrocution in the past 3 days. One, whose face I knew. He was in his early twenties. His sister was to marry the next month.
Another, my friend’s sister. She died in her arms. Leaving behind three children. The youngest is in the third grade.
I notice my tears well up. I’m sorry that we die. I’m sorry that we leave such deep aches behind when we do. I’m sorry that grief exists, at all. I’m sorry at how our carefully constructed meanings of life often unravel in a heartbeat, and we spend swathes of time, years and decades even, trying to piece the puzzle of existence back together. But it will never fit the same again. Pieces are amiss. We can only look for new configurations, new permutations of insight and wisdom as we welcome in the piece we never asked for, but knew we were destined to have sooner or later. The puzzle piece of grief, the wild card entry that enters when someone leaves, and demands we reconfigure the pieces of the jigsaw so that it can exist, and the picture can be whole. In a new way. In a different way. In an ancient way.
The Buddha promised a woman who was wild with grief that he would bring her son back to life if she could find him three grains of rice from a household that had never known mortality. Desperate and tormented, she walked through each lane in her village, asking everyone she met if they had known loss. She returned empty handed. Grief is the quietest, most tender equalizer. Everybody gets a serving, and yet we forget no matter what plate we eat out of, one day we too will taste loss.
I sit near my plant as my tears come up. Glancing sideways through the leaves, I notice a golden spider weaving a web across the framed mandala on the wall.
Life goes on. We continue to build webs. Later in the week, I will speak to my friend and ask her how she really is. I will check if the children are sleeping, eating, even crying okay. I will spend some time with her and the jigsaw, just being quiet. Life goes on. My own life, rich with the comfort of family and ritual, shimmers with an afterglow that was not there before. The simple moments of my sister’s laughter as I drop her to the gym, the monsoon breeze on my skin as the sky changes color, the joke about the milkman who has his own reasons for never supplying ghee to our family, all of these glint with a preciousness that was not there before. The rain of grief leaves us dewy, if we are lucky.
I remember the one I have lost, although he is still alive. How he in all his fumbling aggressiveness, and brutal ignorance still inspired me to seize the gift that life could be, instead of living it imprisoned in ways that I assumed would bring happiness. How sometimes, in the dark left behind by grief, we see things in candlelight and suddenly, everything is so newly precious again.
The earth holds death in her lap, and life in her veins. I notice the browning leaves that I still didn’t have the heart to cut when I gave the palm a “haircut” yesterday. They were so big, and beautiful, and brown. I was hoping that some love and water would bring them back to green. Yet, everything I read today on resurrection pointed to the same economic truth. If the leaves are browning all over, it means they’re dying. Snip them. That way the palm plant can now invest its life energy in bringing the new to life, instead of trying to save the old.
What can I say, I’ve always been a hoper of a certain kind. Snow white, sleeping beauty, all those fairytales about resurrection don’t go with the simple truths of being a gardener. Let the dead, be. New life will come once you can acknowledge the realities of death. But in the in between, we can never truly prepare to be emptied carelessly by the arrival of death, and the seasons of grief. I get the scissors. I trail my fingers right down to the stems of the withering leaves, to find that they too are papery brown and ready to leave. I don’t think plants would hurt if you trim the dead parts of them. Or so I hope. My palm plant looks even more newly shorn, but still very much alive. I know it will grow.
Tonight I will light a candle and pray for the grieving, and those who aren’t. I will pray that in the rainy season of grief, with all its muck, mildew, slipperiness and tears- we will also have moments where we open our eyes, and for some time consider how in this season that arrives after death, the things that have been rained upon have such a strange way of glistening- with life.

 

Homecoming

You can’t pretend to come home to somebody.

You either do, or you don’t.

The place in the middle has a name.

No man’s land.

 

Jarabi

I wish I didn’t know yet what Jarabi meant.

It’s a day when skies feel blue again. They’ve been blue this year. I’ve been lucky so far. Someone came and swept the glass pieces. They had lain scattered all over the grass. I am still careful dancing in the meadow. It will take time.

There is no other taste like happiness, I think to myself these days. I don’t want to grow used to it. Because what use is happiness if you grow used to it.

I don’t want to grow used to the way your eyes crinkle when you smile. Or the way this song moves through me like I am a tree and also, the wind. I don’t want to grow used to the fact of this body and it’s hunger to move, dance, sway, curl, hug, jump. I don’t want to take any of my bones for granted. I don’t want to grow used to how happy the small things make me. The right flavors in a bowl of food. The coolness of morning air. The way a matka will smell exactly like rain when you swish it with water for the first time. Each glass, afterwards will have the aftertaste of earth. How simply homecoming shows up in some moments.

In between, I am witness to too many breakings, although I try to teach myself to stop keeping count. In between all of these happy things, impermanence rustles its wings. People go out like candles, and words come between love. Luck isn’t the story we would want it to be. I have watched fate become an unfair riddle for some, and it makes me wonder, hard. All month, I have watched others scramble in the aftermath of impermanence. I wonder how it will show up, this time and how I will dance with it.

Today, the afterglow of fifteen dancing bodies was the happiest memory. My heart swilled this moment around in itself, and held it closed. I still can’t find the place where this love comes from, only that it is so preciously new and so obviously old at the same time. My feet led me in. Sometimes, there is an eternity to this feeling, Jarabi.

 

The grief of leaves.

Sometimes leaves fall from trees
And all we are asked to do
Is witness them.
Sometimes a great whirlwind
Gathers all the leaves
Into its spinning arms
And chases them from your life
Now, there is only earth
Empty trees
The grief of leaves

It is a simple thing,
The grief of leaves.
Heaven knows why you
Can feel it-
As if the tree of your spine
Stands tall, and shorn
As if inside your chest
An autumn sun shines.

Love, actually.

It takes me the first three decades of my life to become the woman who can write this.

There are two kinds of love. Love. ( The tin-can heart crunching, dream sharpening variety.) And love, actually.

I want to write poetry about love, actually- but let’s face it. My knees are still too scraped, my knuckles too bruised, my eyes a little too achy.

So, I’ll just talk to you about love, actually. The most important part about love, actually- is that it is unromanticized love. It doesn’t begin with a boy meets girl story, though a few times, it has. It doesn’t belong in a meet cute, although my best friend will tell our meet-uncute story like it is one.

It is the way she calls me nearly every evening, because she senses I need it. It is the way he always buys me postcards whenever he travels, writes them, puts them in an envelope and mails me a bunch, every few months or so- just because. It is the way he does this without asking me to return the favor. It is the strings of origami stars around my house that someone else’s hands made, without wanting me to give them a sky. It is the perfect set of white curtains that my friend chose for my room when I couldn’t go shopping with her, because she knows me. It is the way someone rode a train to come and see me a day after an accident. It is unconditional cupcake supply love. It is the fact that someone will always tease me to make me laugh on days when I’m cracking grim jokes. It is my sister sending me voice notes at multiple times through the day. It is my best friend, holding my hand, telling me I’m home, she’s right here. It is Unicorn’s voice on the phone, grainy honey and kindness- telling me it is alright to be myself. It is my father calling me to check I drove home safe. It is my mother’s awkward arms around me, her insistence that breakages will always heal. It is the message my friend sends me the day I think of her, even though we haven’t spoken in months. It is another friend choosing music for a road trip, and packing me breakfast, and feeding me when I drive. It is the way our laughter spills over one of the bluest mornings together. It is the way she listens so hard to me that I stop talking about life and am able to talk about death, before I go back to talking about life. It is someone telling his sister that I’m his best friend. It is a gift, offered without thought of return, a joke that wraps its arms around me and won’t stop tickling, it is the spontaneous hug she gave me when I accidentally talked about the other love and kind of had to stop.

There’s the kind of love that shoots your heart to stars, and scorches it into fragments. There’s the kind of love that makes you feel emptied, restless, heartsick in it’s absence.

There’s the kind of love as simple as the unconditional ground beneath your feet, the infinite bounce of air in your lungs. The love that has no name, no glitter, no billboard. The love that will not simply end if you make a mistake, say the wrong set of sentences, collide too hard in misunderstanding. The love that will wait. The love which continues to walk with you no matter how confused, complicated, broken and ashamed you are. The love that continues to look at your face without judgement, only tenderness. The love that steadies your spine, tells you that no matter how lost you are- it trusts your heart is in the right place. The love that says, I see you, I only seek to love you, and I will not forsake you. The love that does not choose if you are worthy of loving or leaving, but stays just because. The love that exists because you helped bring it into existence, as well.  I asked her why she hadn’t left yet. ” Sweetheart, I learned to stay from you.” The love that we teach each other, through simply paying attention and showing up.

There is the love that turns you to ash in it’s wake.

And there is the love that refuses to judge you, walks with you, each achy step of the way, picks up your 6am phone call, books a cab and shows up because it does not exist to forsake you. It exists to love you, actually.

Cutting away

It’s been eight months.

Your hair is so pretty.

My hair keeps falling.

Long hair suits you.

Strands break when I run my fingers through

Please don’t cut your hair.

Autumn in my head.

There is a wedding in the family.

Was there a lot of hairfall? I ask the girl who washed my hair. ” There was. Still is.” she pauses, combing out my wet hair. I can feel strands breaking. Again.

So, how much shall we cut?

All the damaged parts.

But it’s grown so long! 

All the damaged parts.

It grows really quickly.

I know. It’ll be fine by the time the wedding comes around.

It’s quite heavy, your hair. Thick. Weighs it down.

I know, but I don’t want it thinned.

I don’t understand how N mixes math with intuition. We talk, and she continues to pull handfuls of hair, and snip. Over and over again. I don’t understand how my hair will end up looking symmetrical at the end, but I don’t need to, since I fundamentally trust her.

By the time my hair has been dried into falling the right way, I’m already feeling better. This is what the right length feels like. Light. My hair feels surprisingly thicker, and stronger. It isn’t straggly or brittle anymore. I run my hands through it. Nothing breaks. I exhale.

Much better, I smile. It’s all good again.

I don’t look at the parts of my chopped up hair on the floor. For now, feeling an absence is a good thing. For now, I can run my hands through my hair without being afraid. For now, in leaving parts of me behind, it feels like something has been returned.

 

 

 

A 10.30 phone call on Wednesday/ Trees in the distance.

For H.

 

You call me up. I can already hear your heart breaking in the background. We know the sound of each other’s heart breaking. It is recognizable because it is familiar. Your voice is a thread. I hold on to it. We wait. You talk. I listen. The thread runs through my hands.

We do not know how we got here. Girls in childhood frocks who only wanted to play house, and never yell across the room. Women who’ve worn boots to battlefields, and walked back barefoot. We inhabit the world like kindred spirits, careful to be kind, and secret when we are fragile. It is a fragility we recognize the other carries. It is the phantom heart that sings to us when we close our eyes.

Our dreams have been simple as sugar. Love, arriving. Love, staying. Love, never leaving.

Our lives have been salt. Love, arriving. Love, hesitating. Love, leaving. Love, returning. Love, hesitating. Love, hurting. Love, leaving. Love- Perhaps we have loved the wrong way, left the door far too wide open, waited too hard on the doorstep, given love more middle names, more sweetness, more infinity than it ever deserved. Together, we try so hard to understand why some horizons are beyond our reach. I keep telling you there is nothing wrong with your hands, or your eyes. You tell me the same thing.

Salt and sugar. We wonder.

I wish I could buy you a pearl string of YESSES, to wear around your neck, for each maybe you’ve heard and had to swallow. I wish I could grow you a jasmine creeper that no hurricane would ever touch. I wish I could make you a mirror from everything you’ve shown me about who you are. I wish I could find a spell that would take us back to childhood, sugar and then forward to a horizon where we could spend the rest of our days planting trees that stand tall. Like promises. Like affirmations. Like they were born for sunshine, and strength and flowering. Like all the happy endings we are capable of building with our bare hands. Every single last one.

Love

Crunches your heart like a tin soda can. Throws it in the trash can. Takes it out. Your heart is now a flower. Plucks the petals. Won’t stop plucking. Until the stalk remains. It falls on ground. A red shoe steps on it. The wind blows it to a crack in the sidewalk. The stalk turns into seed. Someone must have wished really hard for a tree. Maybe those very lovers who will carve  a heart with their initials into it three decades and seven years later. Maybe those people who believed they could give this love a shape, a name.

 

***

Love. Crunches your heart like a tin soda can. Kicks it off the sidewalk. The rain weeps over it. Paint melts in a hailstorm. Love sneaks up behind you. Flirts with breath, takes it away. Now, the space in your chest and the space in the crunched tin soda can is the same. You find it on the sidewalk. You pick it up, but it doesn’t feel like litter. So you walk, holding the tin can in your left hand, the same way you hold your crunched heart in your rib cage. Awkwardly. Not knowing what to do with it. Wanting to hold on, not being able to let go.

 

***

Love. Crunches your heart like a tin soda can. But uncrunches it at once, so suddenly it’s just the way it was, except for the marks. Is it empty? Who knows? But who cares, because we’re dreaming. We’re dreaming of tin soda cans that turned into themselves again, we’re dreaming that the emptiness doesn’t matter, we’re dreaming that someone cut the top off it and turned it into a candle stand or a flower vase. The candle flames will never burn out.  The flowers will never wilt.

And I will never wake you up to whisper that it was a dream.

Jump

April was a shit month,

Although, if you’re a poet,

There is no such thing.

There is still the way the sunlight fell on the branches at 2.40pm,  and the rajasthani sky turned bluer than you would believe, and an old woman held out a garland for you to take to the temple, underneath  the sanctuary of her wrinkled, familiar smile.

There was the way that anger rusted a part of you into a stone that could not be broken. And the way arms fitted around you, in those moments where gravity hurt more than usual. And the way your father continued to wake up and make you a fruit smoothie each morning.

And the way you hid things from people who loved you, because you wanted to spare them the knowing. The way that your mind played tricks on itself, just to survive- and someone said PTSD and you understood what they were getting at. And the way that after 23 days of daily poetry, something tripped you so bad, that for a while, you weren’t able to put words to paper.

April might have been a shit month, but it ended with your feet on the ground.

And now they want to jump.