It's 41, but feels like 52

Those were the crunch times. Crunchier than breadsticks. Harder than arecanut. The story from those days are familiar to many, having been there and borne that, like me.

The colour from the pink slip bled, stained and spread melancholy in our lives. I was already on a shrink's prescription at that time for a different reason, and the joblessness in a prolonged period of pandemic only added to the depressive disorder. It was as if the brain just needed another nudge to keel over and fall into a cesspool of dark thoughts and abysmal pessimism. Those who know it will vouch it is a battle you are fighting against an undefined enemy. It is hard to see a foe in front of you. It is nebulous like a ghost in a diaphanous dream. The enemy is sometimes you. It is sometimes the circumstances. It is sometimes the Universe, which you think is so maliciously indifferent to your fate that it will win every sadism trophy in existence.

Actually, there is a pattern to my panic and anxiety spirals. It knocks me off the kerb first, right into the middle of the road, making me imagine I will be under the next bus and become flat meat. Then when I see the buses didn’t crush me after all, I pick myself up, sit by the wayside a bit and drag myself home. The panic inspired by the initial fits of fear will eventually become the new normal, and I will learn to tolerate it like a hostile neighbour who cooks food that you abhor. I impose a sense of stability on myself.

Then suddenly, in a renewed wave of vindictive rage a dormant turmoil tosses me up again and I spin so many times mid-air that I don’t know if I will land face down, headlong or on my vertebral column. Depending on how I fall, the graph of life will go into another tailspin. I will have confusion for breakfast, chaos for lunch and concussions for dinner.

That’s how I lived those catatonic days, like how I watched Ponniyin Selvan 1, clueless and bored, struggling to connect the dots, many of which were imaginary.

“What is really bothering you?” my therapist asked over a long-distance call. She asked me to enumerate the things that scurried in the quagmire of my brain and caused a logjam there. Almost like mid-day traffic at a city intersection in Chennai. An old friend whom I knew from her Psychology days in the University, I had sought her out only to untie the knots before they became permanent in my health resume. I didn’t want my mind to be a hideout for fossilised fears and fretting.

It was the peak of summer when I first fixed a call with her, and the weather notification panel on my pc read, “43 degrees. Feels like 49 degrees” or some such feral reading that the desert air was pressing down on us. Such climes are not new to us, yet, year after year, we hyperventilate whenever the mercury soars to levels that test human endurance, and we waste no time to declare that the apocalypse is here. We look at the real temperature, 43, and then at the feels like 49, and take the latter as the real measure of tepidness outside our airconditioned cocoons.

“What it feels like is what matters to the skin. Your body perspires based on the apparent effect and not on the latent temperature. The humidity is worse than the heat. It kills.” These are myths we have woven to help us wallow in self-pity and elicit empathy from the world. There is a preposterous delight in making our miseries hyperbolic by fixing pom poms to them and attract public sympathy.

“So, of all the things you just mentioned which one bothers you the most?” the therapist friend asked. I revised the ranking a few times, like how hurricanes and cyclones are ranked based on their intensity. I was unsure. They all felt equally grave and worthy of taking the top laurels. No first among equals.

“They are all deadly and intimidating,” I declared, but my therapist friend insisted I rank them. She said I could take my time to assess each item on the list, and there was no need to hurry. She could wait for me to navigate through the maze.

As I subjected the deranged list to an MRI scan, one of the demons put its hand up and claimed primacy. “It’s me. I have been festering in you for years, gnawing at your heart, but you have brushed me aside with slight. I deserve to be addressed first,” it said, giving me a mental whiplash with its pointy tail.

It was true. I hadn’t been honest even to myself by evading the issue for decades, and I mentioned it to my therapist friend. She asked me to elaborate on it. Chunks of old, mouldering emotions tumbled out emitting a rancid smell that I had been secretly sniffing for years inside. But the past has no panacea. They are only signposts of what we are today. So, the things I spoke remained histories that I purged just to wipe the fog off my mind.

One by one, I spoke about each item on the list, enunciating them all as elaborately as I could, impressing upon her that life had become a bundle of soiled linen now and I could not bear it on my back any longer. Some old wounds were opened for examination, some new griping were dissected, some instances of deprivations and longings were given due deliberation, some passing encumbrances were glossed over. What surprised me was I did not break down even once like I had feared I would while spreading my multi-course grouse meal in front of her. It was time to harvest my griefs. But where had all the tears I had collected for my meltdown moments gone?

After each cathartic session, she would ask, in a voice that can spread a salve on any tortured heart, “How bad do you think this situation is?” and I would blink. “How bad?” It was true that I was hurting from inside for a number of reasons, sometimes to the point of foolishly contemplating self-annihilation, but were things that insanely bad?

I looked out the large French window in my room and gauged the summer blaze. It felt as if the city was caught in a firestorm. It felt as if stepping out would turn me into a barbequed piece of meat or if my body fat was to instantly melt, a shawarma on a skewer. It felt as if I would perspire blood if I walked on the road. It felt as if I would be singed like a bug-zapper singes flying termites on a sultry evening. It felt like the summer would sap the life out of me should I venture out of home. Felt. Felt. Felt.

In the distance, I saw workers laying new asphalt on an old road, their heads and faces wrapped in shawls to keep the heat from seeping in through their skin. “How bad is it out there?” I wondered. It was sweltering hot, and that was not pleasant. But it still was not bad enough for them to give up work and go home. They still endured it even though with unspoken demurs, for they can’t call it a day until the assigned job was done.

“It is bad,” I whispered to my therapist friend. “But not bad enough to call it quits and shut the business of life,” I sum up, feeling a sting in my eye for the first time.

Even now, very often, life pokes holes into the heart and causes panic, but it doesn’t stop beating. The mind goes off-kilter and spins sinister tales, but it cannot make me succumb to its diabolic intents. The summer turns up the heat and makes me sough and sigh. It’s a seasonal tyranny one cannot avoid. But I now realise, the temperature is only 41 degrees. What it feels like – 48, 50 or 55 – ­ doesn’t matter. I hype up my summers and make them insufferable. It is a lot of fiction than facts. Like the workers out there, I must carry on. There are many worn roads in my life that could do with a new layer of asphalt.

The Grand Kerala Tea Ceremony

My sister and her family, all US citizens, are currently on their first tour of Europe, walking around the streets of London, and getting the feel of a world very distinct from theirs back in Wisconsin. It is a trifle hard to imagine that someone who has been in the USA for 24 years hasn’t hopped over the Atlantic even once, but the truth is when life has a steady hand on the tiller, you blindly go the way it steers you, and at some point, after crossing many miles, you pause and ask, “Where have I arrived?” More often than not, realizing that you have been walking on a treadmill, and have reached nowhere, you step off it and take a journey in search of your soul.

It's then we take detours and go to places that offer a completely different view of not just the chromatic world, but of life itself. It is nothing short of a sacred safari in which we reset out timers and recalibrate our compasses to foray into new realms of existence.

“What’s different there?” I asked her, as my sister sent me pictures taken in various parts of London first, and then a few other European cities.

‘A lot. The royalty, the history and culture, the Victorian tradition, the unique ambience none of which we get to see back in Milwaukee,’ she tittered excitedly.

For someone who hasn’t been to the US but has heard a lot about from the time a cousin went there many decades ago and gave me a glimpse of it, her answer was a surprise. I have always thought that the US had everything from A to Z. From Apple to Zuckerberg. My naiveté, of course, to believe if it is not there in America, it is nowhere else. They have sold themselves so well to the world that we now look no further than gaining a foothold in the land of opportunity to anchor our opulent dreams.

My sister topped us up with her experiences and pictures, some of which were slightly familiar to me from my two visits to Europe. There is a quintessential character to Europe that permeates the continent, no matter which city you are in. The town squares and streets festooned with eateries and coffee shops, the cobbled paths that you wander through like gypsies, the street artists who should have been performing on stages but now subsist on the bills we drop and the strains of music that spreads on us like a soothing emollient – an accordionist here, a violinist there, a pianist in the arcade, bustling tourists collecting memories and mementoes - these are the vignettes of Europe. And to my sister, it was all new.

The Baroque and Gothic architecture and the grand sculptures strewn across are, of course, things that will make our jaws drop to the ground and under, but what probably endears us and also endures in our memory are the small moments.

“We loved walking around in the busy town squares until late night on a full moon day. We shopped for knick-knacks, indulged in small pleasures of eating from small joints that we found during our strolls,” my sister wrote. And the next day, she spoke about the English Tea Party wherein they dug into ‘multi-course cute little stuff’ along with a tea of their choice - sandwichs, pre-desserts with scones, butter and jam, and other dessert pastries.

Not having been to the regal side of the globe that boasts of inherent grace and etiquette in everything it does, the English Tea Party is not an experience that I could imagine in my head, but I am not alien to its joys entirely. I have had my own kind of tea parties with the world’s most elaborately brewed tea and ‘multi-course cute little stuff’ on the side to chomp on - Parippu vada, Pazham Pori, Bajji, Ulli Vada.

If I were to count the most memorable moments in my life, the ones I have spent with my dad in Kerala, having ‘naadan chaya’ (local tea), sarbat or juice from road side stalls, along with a snack or two dunked in spicy red chutney that can launch a rocket into space will top the list. It was a ritual for us, a given when we stepped out of home when I visited them annually.

Appa made sure that he accompanied me on my outings even after I had been married for several years and could make town trips on my own. An inexplicable camaraderie, which was missing in the first 30 odd years of my life, but became the cornerstone of our relationship in the later period, made us the revel in the short indulgences.

“Appa, what do you want? Juice, nannari sarbat or chaya?” I would ask, playing the parent, and lifting my brows in a quick query.

“Anything,’ he would say, being a man with no pickiness or preferences. For him, anything goes. All he wanted were those few hours of enjoyment that came with the time he spent chatting and joking with me even as I shop-hopped to pick up sundry things, and sometimes made him participate wherever he could opine. He would patiently wait for me to finish, making me ever so guilty, but one could not exhort him to leave me and go, even if it meant having a late lunch at home.

“Appa, go home if you are bored and hungry. I will finish my stuff and come,” I would say.

“I am not hungry. You take your time. I love this loitering,” he would confirm, offering to take a bag or two from me.

Those days are etched in my memory as the most modest yet priceless occasions in my life. He had no reason to accompany me on my jaunts, but he did, for a reason. The small moments. To us both, they were super colossal.

It was in September 2016 that I had the last of such moments somewhere near a town called Malayatoor in Kerala. Not that there haven’t been other small moments after that which I could extol for their uniqueness, but if I were to index them, none would ever equal the grandeur of having a naadan chaaya with Appa. And the last one was an unparalleled, knock-out experience.

As part of my desire to write Appa’s life story, which for some reason I didn’t want to call biography, because his spartan ways and simple life didn’t warrant that weighty a moniker that people with bigger track records in life usually adopted, I undertook a journey to his native place in September 2016. He took me around his old school, almost bringing to life old images with his vivid descriptions. Teachers from the past and the stories that made them iconic tumbled out of his memory. He marveled how nothing much had changed, including the classrooms (although I was certain a lot must have, given the huge time lapse), getting animated now and then reminiscing the past.

He took me to his ancestral house, which was locked and close to collapse, and relived his childhood - an array of anecdotes that spanned the 30’s and 40’s and involved his 12 siblings. He didn’t seem particularly perturbed at its dilapidated state and took it as a natural fall out of time, and we took pictures for posterity in the courtyard. It was a pilgrimage of sorts for the dad-daughter duo.

It was also a day when I noticed that Appa had slowed down, and the deterioration in his health became apparent to me from his slow gait and faltering steps. None of it was reflected in his spirit, though. Gung ho as ever, he took me on the excursion with the enthusiasm of a school boy. But Appa now needed a helping hand now and then, and I sensed the sand in the glass slowly emptying. It was with a shudder that I realised that I had to hurry with my book. His wisdom and witticism had to be recorded, his memories had to be documented, his life had to be made a reference guide. There was a lot left to be done and perhaps, time was in short supply.

At the end of the day-long trip, on our way back, we stopped at a wayside shack, with the Periyar in the background running in full spate, for our customary Kerala Tea Ceremony, which I didn’t imagine would be our last. As the banana fritters and dal vadas sizzled in oil behind an array of glass bottles filled with jeeraka sodas and other cool drinks in a push cart, and the tea flew a mile between the hands of the tea-maker, I asked, “Appa, I had a great time. Did you?”

“It was perfect. I enjoy these small pleasures in life and I do it only when you come.” Indeed, even the small moments were few and far between in his life, for reasons only he knew the best. He had no special friends. All his acquaintances were friends to him. He didn’t go out much, but wherever he went, he made a picnic out of it.

Appa looked tired from all the walking in the day - another sign of his slow decline - but nothing could have stopped him from claiming his share of happiness that came with the tea ceremony under a thick grey sky heralding a rain.

Small pleasures. Little things. Casual joys.

Is this what we are scrambling all over for, rummaging through the big things, I wondered as I slurped the tea rich with a taste and aroma only teashops in Kerala are capable of infusing. All it took for us to relish this simple delight of having a tea by the wayside, with a ‘multi-course cute little things’ to bite into was a willingness to see life from the broadside.

As I said grace for the blessing, the monsoon clouds that had gathered above us began to fall as if to say ‘Amen’ to my prayer. The rains know when to fall and create a setting, don’t they?

This was in September 2016. The book had to be put on hold then as I needed to spend more time with Appa to gather enough content to make it an authentic manuscript. I kept it in abeyance till my next visit which I thought would happen in January 2017. But the Universe decided that I shouldn’t wait that long and came up with a reason for me to travel home again sooner. I didn’t know there was another sinister plan brewing in the chaaya kada of fate.

Barely two weeks after my return to Dubai, Appa had a heart attack, and I rushed to be by Amma’s side, who had spent the first night of his hospitalization alone, waiting outside the ICU. Loneliness can make any crisis feel like a catastrophe, but she had hung in there with only prayer and the comfort of having me with her shortly.

It wasn’t an open and shut case; Appa had three major blocks in his arteries, and he rejected a by-pass surgery outright. As an alternative option, an angioplasty, which people said was a routine procedure that didn’t warrant much worry, was scheduled for later that week. It wasn’t fool-proof, the doctor said, as the third block was inaccessible for a stent, and that could affect the quality of his life considerably.

Sometimes, life doesn’t leave us with many happy choices. We just take what comes by and give it a happy spin.

I spent the next two days giving pep talk to Appa who seemed crestfallen when he was told that life wouldn’t be the same again for him. It sapped his vital energies.

“You will be alright soon, and we will go on our jaunts again to have chaaya by the way side. We’ll make the most of life,” I said, and it livened his sagging spirits instantly and gave a smile that bordered on cautious optimism.

Despite whatever I said to him during the day, my night passed in great anxiety, alert to every move Appa made in his hospital bed, wondering why his heart never gave us any heads up before it decided to go into disrepair. On the second night after I landed, in the middle of the night when he woke up briefly and began coughing, I asked him with dread dripping from my voice, “Appa, are you OK?”

“All perfect, kondhe (a tambram term for child),” he said as if he were walking in the Garden of Eden, and went back to sleep. I lay staring into the night, trying to fight demoniac thoughts away, and making sure I heard the soft purring of his breath.

Little did I know in that fretful instant that there were only 24 hours left in his hour glass and that there will not be another Kerala Tea Ceremony for us.

On the night of 7th October, a day after he affirmed that everything was ‘perfect’ even when he was secretly fighting his fears, my naadan chaya partner, the man who taught me that true happiness was an offspring of a contented heart, moved on, leaving me with a shattered heart and an unfulfilled dream of a book based on his life.

The scattershot of death sent shards of my broken spirit deep into the space and I am still picking the pieces strewn between the stars. One day, when I will have picked them all and pieced my heart together, I will likely write the book showcasing the life lessons and tenets he lived by for 76 years. Until then, I will have naadan chaya with a kadi (traditional snack) in the Malabari restaurants dotting Karama, and every time I do it, raise a toast in his name before the first sip.

“Cheers, Appa, to our friendship and to our grand Kerala Tea Ceremonies!”

How I became a columnist - the story of my success

‘What can money do?’

At 13 years, this was the title of my first piece of original writing, if one were to mark down the horribly drafted compositions that I wrote in school. It was a rhyming verse that paraphrased the futility of wealth, which in hindsight is too heavy a theme for someone who hadn’t yet been thrust into the rabbit hole of life. Yet, I was proud of what my peanut brain could produce at the time, especially after it was featured in the school magazine and a few biased relatives hailed it as a masterpiece.

The only other accomplishments worthy of mention in the early years were winning a prize at 15 in a school versification contest and later, getting my first ‘Letters to the Editor’ published in The Hindu at 19.

The former didn’t have any perceivable impact on me, probably because writing poems was only something one did occasionally for contests and school magazines. However, getting the letter published in The Hindu, which at that time was considered the embodiment of quality journalism and impeccable writing was something that I celebrated with some fanfare. I took the paper to college, had it read in the class by my teacher, and I took in the little gasps, jaw-drops and rolling eyes with great relish.

I didn’t have any inkling of my literary propensities then nor did I think it would become my life force in the years to come. But I started writing more seriously after that letter made me some sort of celebrity in the class.

At that time, I had nothing but a pen and some long sheets (sheaves of dull, grey paper called newsprint that dad got me on the cheap for my writing) for tools, and a dictionary and a thesaurus for resources. My writing retreat was the wind-swept shade in the backyard of my house that echoed a cacophony of crows and random droppings under a mango tree. Writing was a solitary act, awfully more private than it is now; much like soliloquys that aren’t very significant in the main script of life’s drama.

I must have been in my late teens when I wrote my first article for a newspaper. It was a middle piece for the op-ed page of Deccan Herald, which had a designated space for slice of life narratives. I vividly remember the crushing pain I felt when the regret slip arrived a few weeks later, and the deep despair I sank into after many more regrets duly trooped in as if on a cue. At that point, I should have ideally switched to a more utilitarian hobby like embroidery or tailoring. Instead, I persisted like a lunatic, continuing to write and making it a habit to wait for the postman to hand me an envelope with my address neatly written in a distinguishable hand. Mine.

‘Stamped, self-addressed envelope’ became the zeitgeist of that season of unpublished jottings that traipsed around opinion and personal essays. I wonder what I wrote so feverishly in those impressionable years when my world view was constricted, and my experiences were limited.

Back then, there were no reference points nor the faintest idea of what makes for an interesting read. Heck! I didn’t even know there was a method to the madness of writing. Despite all these, I wrote, without rhyme or reason. Tagging one sentence to another, sewing up thoughts and creating tapestries that often didn’t pass muster at the editor’s desk.

It was around that time that the seed of a dream was sown in a fledgeling writer's soul, like an idea of love in the heart of a sailor lost at sea. The dream to be a columnist. I had no clue what it took to be one, nor did I have a road map to the destination. All I knew was, no matter what I became or didn’t become, I had to keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing. While reading, reading, reading.

A journalism degree that I earned midway should have spurred my dreams, but I didn’t latch on to a newsroom opportunity for some inexplicable reason, while many of my classmates took to it like duck takes to water. I took up corporate communications, instead, for a few years before life elbowed me out of that track. A relocation to Muscat post-wedding put paid to any possibility of a late detour to journalism and, in fact, to all career prospects.

The world was a different place in 1998. There wasn’t even a pc at home until 2001, which again was a second-hand piece left behind for a pittance by a migrating expat. When people spoke about Y2K, I squinted at them suspiciously, trying to determine who was the alien between us. When friends in the know discussed new versions of Windows, I looked out of the window weaving stories on the vast desert loom. There were so many out there, I realised, as I peered through the raconteur’s kaleidoscope.

Physical writing graduated from scrawls on newsprint paper to neatly stacked lines on the pc, and along with it, my desire to craft human narratives also ballooned. I wrote a few random stuffs for Gulf News as a contributor to the community page and a feature on Indian migrants for KT wknd way back in the early 2000s. I also regularly wrote articles for another publication the name of which I now forget. Vaguely around that time, the word ‘author’ appeared on the distant shore, and it became my first port of inner calling. After a long gestation, and many relocations and disruptions later, Sandstorms, Summer Rains was born. In 2009.

I was a novice and a new mother, and I struggled to nurse my baby.

Facebook was in its infancy, and I wasn’t part of it until many years later owing to its strangeness and my lack of understanding. I had to let the world know about my book and I didn’t know how. A couple of old journalist friends back home helped with some news coverage there, but the book was largely unknown to people in the UAE.

One day, I made a cold call to the newsroom at KT following some advice by a friend in Muscat.

“I am an Indian author living in Fujairah,” I introduced myself (with the greatest confidence I could exude) to a young lady called Raziqueh Hussain. “I have just published my debut novel about Indian migrants in the Gulf.”

Indian authors in the Gulf were a rare breed then. Raziqueh was keen to pick up the lead and offered to do a story in the weekend edition of the newspaper. That tryst with Khaleej Times as an author changed my fate forever.

After a few months, buoyed by the exposure I got for my novel in KT and backed by a couple of old writings I had done for wknd. in 2001, I decided to give my old ambition to write for the Op-Ed a shot and pitched an article to the then Editor, Patrick Michael. My stars were aligned and for once, my shot cleared the park. The editor took a liking to my writing, and wrote to me, ‘you have a way with words’. Truth be told, I didn’t even know I would get paid for my article and was pleasantly surprised when I was asked to go and collect my cheque.

Following that, I sent him pieces week after week, punching my thoughts and opinion in the most chaste and authentic manner, and he kept publishing them. And just like that, before I realised it, I had become an Opinion page columnist.

Apart from setting me up as a writer, the new opportunity made me believe in the remotest dreams one could entertain; and in perseverance and consistency that has no substitute. It made me believe in people and above all, in the power of words.

Since I began my journey with KT, the Opinion page has passed through many editorial hands, but I have, by Grace, survived the changes and the challenges that came with it. I deem this as the greatest accomplishment and blessing in my writing career.

My deepest gratitude to all the erudite gentlemen who found value in my writing and gave me the column space through the years. Patrick Michael, Allan Jacob and Suresh Pattali. And to Anamika Chatterjee, for giving me the privilege of writing for wknd., especially, the cover story today. It is certainly a step up in my climb to wherever my writing takes me in the future.

13 years is a long period in the life of a freelance writer with no frills; time enough to either perform or peter out, and I am thrilled to have made it this far. No marketing stunt, hype or hoopla could have helped me grow and flourish as a writer as this journey has. No synthetic endorsement would have given me a sense of success that the effort to build this edifice has. Each article I write is a brick on my wall. And each reader is the mortar.