Monday, October 27, 2008

diwali

So this is what the first major festival without looks like.

No waking up at the crack of dawn, none of the usual frenzy before sunrise, no somnolent mid-mornings, no phone calls, no home-made sweets.

It should be - in an appalling way, it is - a relief. We have a ready-made excuse to not celebrate a very exhausting festival.

It is also useless to ask why it makes me feel so terrible when the day has gone exactly like I've wished a thousand times it would be. As if I didn't know why. Instead, I think of how my mother, every year, warned my father a month in advance that she would not be making stuff at home; how, two weeks before he would persuade her to at least make a payasam or therati paal ('for the kid. Paavam, he likes therati paal'). How it would start with that one concession and end with two namkeens, three sweets and a jar of leghiyam that would last a whole year.

It's not that we aren't celebrating stuff because we're not supposed to. We just don't want to. I can see this lack of enthusiasm extending well into the future - I've personally never been a big one for festivals. But my parents had always wanted to do things so that my son at least knew what it was all about. I used to think it was for him; that it would be my son's absence that would take away the enthusiasm. Now I'm wondering if it wasn't my father's craving for the festival specials that made my mother do everything with such dedication year after year; whether, with him gone, she could ever find it in her again to celebrate something like that.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Moth

In the early days, we kept a light on in the bedroom downstairs. It was a zero watt bulb we had originally put in for my grandfather when he used to visit because he needed it to see by when he went to the bathroom. We never took it out, though we never used it again until that time.

I have been first down in the morning for some time now, to make the coffee and school lunch. For as long as that zero watt light was on, my eye was drawn to that room first thing in the morning. That was when I would really wake up: with the shock of knowing that the light signified an absence the room didn't yet feel.

On one of those mornings I noticed a moth on the wall just below the light. It was a huge moth, with a large wingspan and touches of purple in the grey-brown. I went to get a broom in which to catch it and let it out.

The broom was a new one, soft and sizeable. I parted it in the middle and reached for the moth. Holding it close, I thought, 'that was easy!' Near the door, I turned to check that I had indeed caught the moth. I hadn't; it was on another wall, half-hidden by the still-drawn curtains. I shook the broom loose of I don't know what and went back. I drew back all the curtains.

If I gave the moth a light whack, it would fall down stunned and I could pick it up gently, I thought. I swiped; the moth fluttered away. I whacked at it; it flew higher. I climbed on the empty bed and hit the wall where the moth was...had been. Its flight grew more frantic and irregular: it smashed itself against the light, the window; it came at me, swerved away. It looked like a small bat in that half-light.

While it was somewhere in the air, I hit at it repeatedly, blindly, hitting myself in the forearm from time to time with the broom's handle. The moth disintegrated. Moth dust flew in the air and I breathed it in because I was breathing hard now and almost sobbing. I no longer wanted only to gather the moth and deliver it to the morning air. I wanted to destroy it.

The moth was nowhere. For something that large, that dark that visible against the walls, it had completely disappeared. I turned all the lights on in the bedroom, the dining room and the kitchen. Even in the bathroom. I looked behind every curtain, shook each one. I checked each wall carefully, section by section, as I would look for a pen in the clutter on my desk, certain it was there but I was just not seeing it. Finally, I started to pull chairs away from the wall to check behind them. I knelt to check under the bed.

There it was. At the very centre under the double bed, the moth lay, smaller than it had been. I lay on the cool floor, warm with exertion and watched it as it made a half-circle and lay still. Then I heard it.

I never knew until that moment that moths make sounds. It was a high squeak, but not like that of bandicoots heard in the dark; not like other night sounds. But it was a sound all the same and it came from under that bed.

I swiped under with the broom but it was just out of reach. I shifted the broom so I was holding only the very edge of it and tried again but only managed to push the moth further away from me. I got up and went to the other side. This time I swept it out. It lay on the floor, tattered but still recognisably a moth. Like the very first time, I parted the broom to scoop it up. The moth heaved itself off the floor and flew with heavy wings - isn't that strange? It had lost so much of its wing, but the flapping was slow and weary, as if the weight of wings was too much for it to bear.

It flew past. I was slow also, and I watched it go. I was ready to just let it be, just die in peace in some corner of the room. It wasn't going to chew the curtains through in its current state. What did I want to kill it for, anyway? Against the growing light outside the window, the room became a little smaller, the lights a little more unnecessary. I turned them off. Room by room, I turned off every light and came back to lie down on the bed. Standing at the foot of the bed, though, I saw, backlit by the window, small bits of moth-wing, still drifting down. I couldn't see it, but the bed must already have been layered with flakes that were no longer brown or purple or any colour at all. I felt the breath rattle in my throat. There were other things to do.

Later, we found the moth under the fridge, still alive. We took it out and left it on the steps. It still made half-hearted half-circles. I could not watch any more. Still later, in my room, I took out Primo Levi's Other People's Trades and read his essay on the butterfly.

What I feel today is still a burden of guilt. In my mind, the moth and the light we kept on to illuminate someone's death are inextricably linked. Why did we do it? Why did I do it?

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

all this long silence...

...only means that I am carefully avoiding picking at scabs.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Much too late for a ban

From today on, cigarette smoking is banned in public places. This includes roads, railways stations, airports, restaurants (that seat less than 30 guests) and pubs.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

My father worked for a cigarette company for 14 years. He moved to Hyderabad in 1970 to take up the job and he stepped across some line then. Suddenly, his life was something he could never have imagined; it must have a been a culture shock but he took it well. He started smoking because cigarettes were, naturally, freely available. When he returned home from work and I buried my head in his neck, it was the cigarette smell that signalled appa.

People like us - the families of those who worked in cigarette companies - were the last to know about the health risks. Perhaps we were just the last to heed it. It was only because my mother and I stood so often on that line that divided us from the rest of the family and wathced life from both sides that we didn't start smoking; so many women in our circle did.

So my father smoked a few then a pack and then two packs a day. There were always ashtrays. I broke one when I was little and its pair is a reminder of the other one. I think the one I broke was a peachy-pink. It was solid glass, oval but pinched in the middle for cigarettes to rest in.

It wasn't until the late '80s that we began to see changes in my father that were definitely linked to smoking. The cough, for one. Mornings would begin with that. During vacations, I would wake up with that hacking cough that came from deep inside, as if his insides were trying to turn themselves out. I would lie rigid in bed, waiting for the fit to pass. (These days, I lie in bed rigid and waiting for a cough that we will never again hear.)

Once, mymother wrote me a letter in college. She began by talking about regular things. I turned a page and she said, "Don't be alarmed but - " Whatever she said to me, it was clear she was not just alarmed, she was very worried. It appeared that my father had, a couple of time, had such bad coughing fits that he couldn't breathe and had fainted. I was frantic with worry. I called my father andhe reassured me, listen to me ranting and promised to quit.

It was a promise he was to make several times in the years that followed. It was from him that I learnt all the vain braggadacio of smokers: I can quit whenever I want. I am not really addicted; I smoke because I enjoy it. I'm smoking much less than I used to. I swear. I smoke only four or five cigarettes a day.

Then the sincere attempt, the withdrawal symptoms, that irritability, the lighters discarded, the ashtrays put away, and inevitably the slide back.

I can't remember when my father stopped smoking in the house. He took his lighter to the terrace/balcony and kept a lighter somewhere where we couldn't see it. It looked as if no one in the house smoked. On rainy days, though, he would stand at the window with his mouth at the grill and blow the smoke out. My mother would fume and fine some excuse to pick a fight with him about something else.

Even after his major illness was diagnosed, he continued to smoke. It wasn't until he was rushed to hospital with internal bleeding caused by excessive coughing a couple of years ago that my father finally stopped smoking. This time it was really permanent. He never smoked another cigarette again. Ironically, it was only after this that his lungs began to get worse and then collapsed.

A few days ago, my mother said she dreamt of appa for the first time since he died. She dreamt he was in hospital, irritable the way he was when he really was there. And he was smoking. Lying in bed in his pink hospital robes, with his thin shoulders on the pillow and his arms attached to tubes and the oxygen tube in his nostrils, he was smoking.

I feel capable of great violence when I think of it.