Chhath

It's the festival of Chhath. I will miss it of course, for the nth year in a row. I don't even have a count. The festival is now nothing but a tradition of nostalgia that surprisingly doesn't fade but grows stronger with time.

Chhath. A personal festival. Celebrated only in some parts of the country. And yet, it was as if the world celebrated it when we were younger, when we didn't know there was anything different that existed, that there were other cultures, other rights and wrongs, other shades of skin, of light and dark. As I type this, I realize that more often than not, I write nostalgia. And I wonder if this is who I am, if I am really trapped somewhere in the bygone, and then I realize that the present doesn't make me pick up the pen any more. Happiness doesn't make me pick up the pen. Fear and anxiety do. Loss does. Regret does.

Today, families that still manage to be families and get together on Chhath as an annual tradition would have come together. The late arrivers would have arrived today, and would have been teased as work-shirkers who arrived after all the pedakias and the thekuas are made and all the daliyas are prepared. Tomorrow, the day would be spent catching up, playing antakshari, dancing, and fake palm-readings; the children would disappear into their separate worlds with cousins, and wouldn't be found when looked for. Bedsheet tents would be made, ghost stories would be told, crackers would be burnt, fights would be resolved, tears would be wiped, while the fasting members of the family would stand in the river/ pond/ pool and play homage to the setting sun - all in the backdrop of the most melodious Chhath songs streaming from loudspeakers. 

Tomorrow night would be a night of anticipations. The kids would hardly sleep for fear of oversleeping and missing the time before dawn. Showers will be taken with cold water in the freezing hours of pre-dawn and the music and the crackers would begin anew. The earthen elephant lamps would be lit to light the darkness and the sun will be awaited. Millions would pray to the rising sun that morning and then would begin the raiding of the dagras with all the food that was not to be touched till now. Children would be warned against having too many Gagar nimbus for the fear of falling sick, so there would be elaborate planning for stealing them, probably involving holding an open bedsheet on the lower floor to catch treats being stolen and dropped from an upper floor. Everyone would chew sugarcane, peeling it with their bare teeth, and the antaksharis and leg pullings would resume.

I would like to believe that this still happens in families. That the large three storeyed houses do not echo with the sound of emptiness. That some of the generations have not disappeared entirely, that people are not so disconnected that they aren't even expected to be part of this tradition anymore.

14/06/2012

I miss home today. I have never had a 'home' home owing to the transferable nature of Dad's postings. I never had a place where I 'grew up'. So I guess I grew up with just that familiar protective nest of family, no aangans, no summer gardens, no permanent neighbourhood chachas and gubbare wallahs, no ageless neem trees. I have always felt the absence of these things, and the helplessness of a life being shut and reopened every three years, change of schools, change of friends, till the point that I began to suspect that it didn't affect me any more. But I have never missed an anchor in life. They have always been there; the two firm pillars of my existence who hand-made a picture perfect family with love, sweat and immense patience. I didn't know strife in a family. I never heard a raised adult voice directed at another. I want to go back to that. That innocence and that complete devotion to the idea of a family. We were family, and we didn't know any other way to be.
I miss them. I want to be with them and show them the beauty that I see, because they raised me to appreciate it. Because they smiled at my first ever ridiculous poem and said it was brilliant. Because they encouraged me to re-draw a sketch that I had unfairly traced, and made me believe that the honest one was the more beautiful one. 
I miss nana nani and dadi. I miss those houses where time never advances. Just that the number of people in them reduces significantly over the years. I miss that tradition of calling out people's names from the third floor to the ground floor, and that running around on those endless stairs. I miss Dadi's prayers and her intoxicating voice and devotion. I am not doing justice here, because these are not things you write about. They are not relevant. In fact, when is perfection ever relevant? This was not supposed to be about nostalgia though. This was supposed to be about now. About wanting to go back and be with them. All of us fragments at one place, on one large bed under one razaai on a winter night playing antaakshari. 
I am very tired. Dadi's bhajan is playing, not in my head, but somewhere deep, really deep inside my chest.

Us

For my brother :)


I don't know if you remember, you talked of silly things. You told me once that the universe records every sound that is ever made, and that some day, it will play it all, at once. I took note and decided to watch what I speak, so when the playback happens, I am not ashamed. That theory seemed so believable, I would keep wondering how all these different sounds from different places in different languages would be distinguishable when they are played together, and I would end up explaining to myself that the universe would not make an effort so futile and that it would make sure to make us hear only what made sense to us.


I believed you, because for a long part of my childhood, I did not know where I ended and you started. You said silly things that always made so much sense. Why, for example, would I doubt that pencil shavings kept in milk and frozen would turn into rubber? It was all so clever, freezing would solidify the milk, and the milk would obviously explain the white colour of the erasers we used. So, when Shilpi's mom found out about that experiment I did with her and laughed, I still explained to her that we probably added too much milk, or didn't allow the freezing to happen long enough. 


You talked of the universe one moment, and pencil shavings the next. But you always tried to explain. To ask questions and have answers. Sometimes, I wonder, what you did in those evenings when I sewed garlands with those wild yellow and pink flowers in the garden, because you were never around. Perhaps that is when you observed the earthworms, and took my curiosity to the highest peaks later when you spoke about the cycle of the universe, about how, there is a bit of the earthworm in us, and a bit of us in the earthworm. 


I remember watching the ants with you in the verandah; we would try to distrupt their line, and observe how they struggled to find their way. Sometimes, we would blow an ant off its path, and that would sadden me, because I thought it impossible that the ant would find its way back to its family, considering its size, and considering that the displacement would probably be like another end of the city for it.


We cared about ants then. And about pencil shavings and the one-ness of the universe. Together, we had deciphered everything they tried to teach us in textbooks all our lives. 

Guava Tree

A fragment of her, perhaps, never made it to adulthood. It got stuck somewhere on a branch of a black&white guava tree. "It brings bad luck", someone had whispered about the tree, when tragedy had struck the family. And they had brought it down. She had picked up a leaf and smelled it, torn it, scratched it, and rubbed it on her palm, to have the scent long enough. A fragment of the guava tree too, had survived in her nail beds.