Category Archives: Happenings

March 16, 2023

Sometimes Resourced, Sometimes…

By Pavithra K. Mehta

“Where is it?” She wondered aloud. “Where is what?” He asked. “My wherewithal,” she said, “I can’t seem to find it. Instead all I’ve got, is wherewithnaught.”

Yesterday our garage door stopped working properly. Everytime we clicked the button to close it, it would swing down — slower than usual, and once it had closed, it would immediately– as if startled by contact with the ground– swing up and slowly open again. I called a Garage Door Repair company, “Pain-Free Garage Door Repairs.” A promising name. And they sent over — let’s call him, Dostoevsky– to assess the situation. Dostoevsky is possessed of a clearcut profile, a Russian accent and an air of disdain. “Your door, it’s too heavy,” he told me, “Not good. Must replace it.” And he sent us a proposal for a several thousand dollar replacement. At which point I began to think his company was poorly named. So I turned to our local neighborhood social media platform, that offers a panoramic view into the marvelously mixed bag of humanity that resides in one’s own neck of the woods, and that also offers tried and tested recommendations on everything from where to find the best gingerbread, to whom to call if your water heater goes bust. There I discovered an array of rave reviews for, let’s call him, Terrence of Paradise Garage Door Repair — and something about the spirit of the recommendations made me trust this man, sight unseen. And so I called him, and we set up an appointment for 8AM this morning. He pulled into our driveway right on schedule, and when he climbed out of his truck, I couldn’t help but sigh a little. He looked fresh out of college, still wet behind the ears. I’d been hoping for someone reliably weathered. 

Terrence made his way into the garage and began fiddling with the motor, the switch, the sensors. I began to run through a list of possible backup options. And that’s when my husband stuck his head out the window and asked me to ask Terrence if he wanted some chai. So I did and he did.  I went upstairs, leaving Terrence to potter about. My husband in the midst of making chai, says to me, “I think Terrence is going to fix it.” His optimism wasn’t founded on much — just a general sense of confidence in the man so many neighbors had vouched for [he hadn’t even read the reviews, he was going off of the little I’d told him.] I refrained (admirably) from saying anything dismissive. And when the chai, steaming and cardamom-and-saffron scented, was ready, I carried it down, and found Terrence had indeed fixed our problem, with no more than a Phillips screwdriver and the adjustment of a loose piece on the overhead track. 

The garage door, like a well-behaved and docile house pet, now stayed down when it was supposed to stay down. Terrence began to explain why the problem had occurred, and what he had done to remedy it. He was so clear, so eloquent and engaging that I found myself growing unexpectedly interested in the inner workings of garage doors, and newly grateful for their wordless diligence, their heavy lifting. Terrence sipped his chai, and flashed an appreciative grin — “This is really good!” And it really was. My husband has a way with caffeinated beverages. Terrence then proceeded to educate me briefly on the mismatched springs that were holding up our very heavy garage door.  “You might want to switch them out at some point, if the slowness of the opening and closing is ever an issue. Not urgent, not necessary, but a possible enhancement.” He could send us a proposal if we ever wanted to do that. Yes, that would be great, do send that over– we may consider that down the line, and then I ask — And for your troubles this morning? Oh –I didn’t do anything . But we’d like to offer you something! The chai is great, he says. Holding up his cup like he’s proposing a toast. “I don’t like to charge for doing nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. And there are plenty of people who will charge just for setting foot on your driveway. But he’s already back in his truck. “Call if you ever need anything.” And then he’s off and on his way. Leaving me with a little unidentified melody playing in my heart. 

It has been a full week — another transfusion for my husband, with the usual flurry of attendant uncertainties. New details to be coordinated with his hematologist, the Ayurvedic specialist and a specialized health coach we have just engaged. Rainstorms barreling through the Bay Area — felling trees, flooding roads, closing highways. Dance classes every evening. A gas furnace that is being replaced with a heat pump, work trucks in and out of the driveway each day. Enormous camellias impossibly red and frilly bursting into bloom in the backyard. The maple trees are leafing. Wildflowers are preparing to take over the garden stairs. Interviews and workshops being planned for and run, alongside a series of circle-dialogs — the latest one focused on a lighthouse of a couple. Navigating a complex form of cancer with breathtaking grace and an astonishing willingness to investigate life for what truly matters. For how to make good on the moments, regardless of however many there are of them left. The days have been so full and so heightened, I didn’t realize I was teetering on a brink until that garage door refused to close. A mechanical failure that in an alternate universe would have been just that. In this universe it felt more personal somehow — yet another unnecessary and ill-timed reminder– that things fall apart. 

Most days I can live with the inevitable truth of that, even smile at it peaceably. At other times it feels utterly untenable. A wretched arrangement– a contract that should have been shredded on sight, instead of signed and notarized by whoever was in charge of Reality when this whole parade began. At such times the tiniest crack can turn into an abyss, wide enough to swallow me whole. And the wonder of it is, in such times the slenderest thread of human goodness can turn into a cable, resilient enough to pull me out, and set my feet gently back on the plank. That’s what Rose Wilder called it. “Life is,” she wrote, “a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.” 

Somedays I discover, even a plank, is wide enough to dance on. 

9 Comments | posted in Happenings, Journal Snatches

June 20, 2022

Not Shaken, Not Stirred

By Pavithra K. Mehta

A doughnut or donut is a maneuver performed while driving a vehicle. Performing this maneuver entails rotating the rear or front of the vehicle around the opposite set of wheels in a continuous motion, creating (ideally) a circular skid-mark pattern of rubber on a carriageway and possibly even causing the tires to emit smoke from friction.- Wikipedia

An important disclaimer about doing donuts

You shouldn’t. Driving in an aggressive manner in public is almost definitely illegal where you live. Doing donuts is dangerous. […] Other than it being totally rad, there’s no good reason to do donuts at all. What are you trying to prove man? What are you rebelling against anyway? – Stephen Johnson in, “How to Do a Flawless Donut,” on Lifehacker

It’s midday on a sun-licked Sunday. We’re sitting on their front porch, his parents on one end, us on the other. The car explodes out of nowhere, into our awareness. The sound it makes is part shriek, part rumble, and it does not stop. It sounds to me like the sound of impending doom. 

I’ve never seen someone doing doughnuts live before. The experience is simultaneously fascinating and vaguely terrifying. Very Second Coming. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, he comes heart-stoppingly close to hitting a parked car (ours.) This falcon and his falconer are definitely incommunicado.The center cannot hold— yet somehow it does. Such simultaneous precision, and profound carelessness on display. The tires screech, sparks fly, the air fills with the discomfiting scent of burnt rubber. A series of concentric circles streak the blacktop.

We are the only visible audience to this daredevil act of -? Audacity? Artistry? Virtuosity? Vandalism? Dexterity? Delinquency? How much of a threat is this young man? Should we stay for the whole risky show or exit the scene? Do we say something, do something? Or will any move dangerously disorient him? Where exactly is the line again, between extreme sport and hooliganism? But this is not the time for fine distinctions. Now he is spinning himself out of the intersection and down the narrowed street, swiveling so close to the curb that every cell in my body is sympathetically braced for impact. Then this tornado on tires, this cyclone of cacophony, this menacing maelstrom disappears, as abruptly as he arrived. 

A pause. Even the silence in the air is jangled. After a few beats…

“He’s driving a Mazda,” observes my father-in-law.

4 Comments | posted in Happenings

June 17, 2022

Penpa Tang-ing with Neha

By Pavithra K. Mehta

(November, 2005)

Neha is the recently-turned-eight-year-old across the street. Every encounter with her is an edifying experience. A few mornings ago she skipped over with her grandmother and our share of homemade Divali sweets. I was en route, basket in hand, to our back yard, to gather morning flowers. “Pavithrakka can I also come? I am loving flauv-ers very much,” says Neha, in her fun, formal, not always grammatically correct, but unfailing expressive English. “Of course,” I say, and we head towards the Coral Jasmine tree out back- a tall, slender trunked beauty that all year round rains fragrant white blossoms with bright coral stalks onto the grass each night. Gathering these flowers each morning is a ritual of enchantment. Magic is born in the presence of such unreasonable, unravished beauty.

I wish I could say that such a poetic start to the morning renders one invincible to all the daily demons of impatience, and indignation, of I-ness and My-ness and My-Soul-Is-A-Squashed-Tomato-ness. But apparently you can’t buy that kind of invincibility with a basketful of flowers. It takes a modicum more diligence, more vigilance than that. But what gathering a morning basketful of flowers can provide is- a sort of sacred space to set the tone of the day. There’s a Tibetan phrase for this that I learnt recently– penpa tang. And I have found that setting that sacred space does make a difference in how I live my day- or at least in my awareness of how I live my day. Or perhaps I’m just trying to dignify my self-proclaimed vocation, of, à la James Kavanugh, being born to–

“(…)catch dragons in their dens
And pick flowers
To tell tales and laugh away the morning
To drift and dream like a lazy stream
And walk barefoot across sunshine days”

Either way, I am here now with Neha, under the Coral Jasmine tree. When it rains at night, this tree pours. And it is monsoon season now, so the ground beneath the tree is carpeted in white and orange. Drifts of blossoms, so deep they can be gathered by the careful-not-to-crush fistful. I reach over with both hands, and shake the trunk gently. Neha tilts her head and looks up, watching the white sudden swirl of blossoms, blossoms falling like stars, falling like snowflakes. Her expression one of perfectly mingled awe and delight (my day is made in that moment.) We both bend in unison to the sweetly-scented task at hand. I find myself wondering, with a faint twinge of apprehension and amusement, what Neha is going to say next. I am loathe to let the lyricism of this moment veer into the prosaic. As ridiculous as it sounds, I find myself wanting to shield the sacredness of the space from small talk. This is because I have momentarily forgotten that 8-year-olds do not do small talk.

“Do you like Mother Teresa?” Neha’s question asked in the micro-interval between one handful of blossoms and the next, is matter-of-fact and sans preamble.

“Y-yes,” I answer, somewhat startled, but also intrigued by, her choice of conversation starters.

“I also am liking her very much. She is helping all the people who are suffering from This and That. Nobody else to help them otherwise. All the people in the world say she is very kind. And then she died.”

The small heap of flowers in the basket is growing. Fresh, soft white flowers today. Dried brown brittle ones tomorrow.

“What did you say?” I have to know whether I heard the last part of this little impromptu speech correctly.

“She died,” says Neha, all of eight, “End of story.”

“End of story,” I echo.

“Pavithrakka look at this,” she is pointing to a fern under the tree, a fern that is now strewn with small white flowers, “It looks like the flowers grew there, no?” A thought I’ve so often had.

“Yes it does. Neha– what do you want to be when you grow up?” And in my head I have already framed her answer– she will want to help people suffering from This and That, like Mother Teresa.

Neha looks over at me for a brief moment, then–

“I think I will also be a Flower Collector,” she says.

2 Comments | posted in Happenings, Naturesque

June 16, 2022

Grace

By Pavithra K. Mehta

One morning (this morning,) a black car runs a red. Surges into the intersection. And just like that, coming home from a lab test, we are on a collision course. There’s oatmeal waiting at home. Oatmeal with raisins, cashews, shredded coconut and a dusting of cinnamon from Ceylon. The car is moving fast, time is moving slow. I call to my husband in a voice that is urgent and soft. Not unlike the voice I use when pointing out mourning doves in the garden. He brakes, the car sails past. The driver does not see what he just missed.

Our lives.

We are almost home. The sidewalks are sunny and quiet. The leaves on the trees, so green. Nothing has changed. Everything is different.

And breakfast is a benediction.

3 Comments | posted in Happenings

June 14, 2022

Mountain of Light

By Pavithra K. Mehta

I remember learning about the Koh-i-noor diamond in history class. That fabled diamond whose name means ‘Mountain of Light’ and whose fate was mixed up in a parade of invasions and colorful dynasties. Thought to have been pried from the earth in the mines of Golconda for a forgotten raja it eventually surfaced in Babar’s kingdom, who set its worth at “the value of one day’s food for all the world,” then left it to his son Humayun, who set it bouncing between the hands of emperors and sultans, several of whom were overthrown by ambitious offspring. Like Shah Jahan, in whose hands the Ko-i-noor twinkled for a bit before tumbling to Aurangzeb, his infamous son and captor. What a fickle life it led, this glittering rock. Gifted to hospitable Shahs, hidden in harems, sewn into turbans, serially stolen, traded for thrones, signed off in treaties, routinely tangled up in palace intrigues, ritual blindings, and mightily cursed. “He who owns the diamond will own the world, but will also know all its misfortunes.” There’s a catch for you.

In 1813 after decades of fighting, the Koh-i-noor returned to India (from a country that would become the country we now know as Afghanistan,) in the hands of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh. By this time it was so much more than a ridiculously large and beautiful gemstone. It was a dramatic symbol of unassailable prestige and unstoppable power. Singh’s plan to bequeath the diamond to a sect of Hindu priests after his death, was not well-received by the British empire. An anonymous editorial of the time lamented that, “the most costly gem in the known world, has been committed to the trust of a profane, idolatrous and mercenary priesthood.” But good (or at least expensive) things come to empires that wait. England waited. Four violent years followed Singh’s death, four years in which his throne seated and unseated four different rulers of Punjab in quick succession. At the end of this gory period, the only living heirs to the throne were a boy-king and his mother. The mother was exiled, and the son persuaded to amend a treaty, effectively relinquishing his rights to his kingdom and signing the diamond into the hands of the British empire. To be fair to the Brits in charge, the young king was only ten years old at the time, and most likely supremely disinterested in diamonds and kingdoms. I wish I could tell you they gave him back his mother, and threw in a shiny blue bicycle to sweeten the deal. But that is not what happened. Not by a long shot. But let us leave that, at that.

Before sailing to England and being cut down to size and set in a late Queen’s crown, where it winks to this day, this adventurous bit of bling is recorded to have been 186 carats and the size of ‘a small hen’s egg’. I don’t know exactly what the size of a small hen or her egg is, but I recently learned that a carat is a measurement of weight equivalent to 200 milligrams. As such it is not all that interesting. But what is interesting is that the word carat comes from the Arabic quirat which refers to the carob bean that was part of the ancient Mediterannean system of weights and measurements. And I don’t quite know why, but the image of bygone traders and merchants holding up scales weighted with gold and gemstones on one side and little brown seeds from a local carob tree on the other, pleases me greatly. 
Perhaps this is where your interest in the Koh-i-noor diamond ends. But not everyone’s.

There is an attorney in Pakistan for instance, who has written more than 786 letters petitioning the Queen of England to return the Koh-i-noor diamond to his country. [“More than 786 letters” strikes me as a very specifically general number of letters to write. I wonder if the journalist who was researching the matter just got tired of counting]. Prime Ministers of India ,and MPs too, have made polite and repeated requests of their own. Not to be left out, direct descendants of the various rulers who came into possession of the diamond at different points in its tumultuous history also come forward with fierce regularity to stake their own serious claims. To no avail.

Let us now ponder on what an elusive creature fairness is. Un-summonable, capricious. Now you see it, now you don’t. As a child I believed fairness was a law unto itself, like gravity. I believed there were forces that kept it in play, that there were no loopholes, no exceptions. I believed grown-ups would always set things right, that grown-ups could always set things right. This is why as a child, it made no sense to me, that the Koh-i-noor diamond is ensconced in the Tower of London. I remember hearing from relatives that, when they visited as tourists, the guard winked at them and said, “It’s ours now. We’re not giving it back.” Telling the story, my family laughed. But my young heart was silently appalled.

I did not know then, and do not know now, what to make of it all. This is the trouble with delving into history. Told from enough points of view it’s sometimes (not always) hard to tell the right from the wronged. Acquisition and ownership are troublesome enough, even without empires. How we, with the limited powers vested in us, participate implicitly in wresting things from the depths of the Earth. How we foolishly call them our own. How we build our individual kingdoms of selfdom, and do not stop nearly often enough to wonder who we belong to, if not to this beautiful, besieged Earth, if not to each other, and to that ineffable something which lights us from within. Rendering each one of us into diamonds of note. Each one of us, into a mountain of light.

3 Comments | posted in Happenings, Thingishness

June 3, 2022

A Certain Kind of Witchery

By Pavithra K. Mehta

I never know when it will happen. It isn’t like voting day or the harvest festival or the full moon. It is unpredictable. Like poetry, or Mary Poppins, or painting with watercolors. All I know is, on certain days a certain kind of witchery is in play. Enchantment settles into the pith of the world, and everything I look at spills cause for wonder.

On such days, the purple of a purple cabbage leaf pulls me into a daze of admiration. Such bold concentration of color in a cruciferous vegetable! The garlic bulb rests on the kitchen counter, poised and shapely as the dome of the Taj. Steamed beets dye the tips of my fingers red. Flames dance on the stovetop, steam rises like a fragrant prophesy over an open pot. Preparing lunch is a festive ritual. 

Outside in the garden, a small mourning dove sits in the sleek glove of her skin, how perfect she is! The passionfruit vine is dappled with the frilly faces of its flowers, the small green plums are reddening on their branches. The brilliant blue cornflowers tumble over each other in heaps of glory, and a conspiracy of ravens takes over our cypress tree. How have I never noticed before — that their blistering voices are raked with beauty?

The hillside paths are riddled with white yarrow, wild blue flax, triplet lilies, orange monkey flowers, delicate pink fairy lanterns — on most days they are easy to miss, but today I am captured. Brought to my knees, again and again by the delicate lasso of their presence. 

On such days I discover that beauty is transgressive. It invades everything. Even telemarketers and traffic jams are purveyors of holiness. So are burnt pots, clogged drains, dark roads and discomfiting moments. On such days disorder cannot daunt me, nor uncertainty. A rigorous gladness takes me by surprise, renders me uncommonly hospitable. On such days my heart refuses nothing.

And anything is possible. 

3 Comments | posted in Happenings

May 31, 2022

Appointment

By Pavithra K. Mehta

A pale moon, full and wraithlike in the early morning sky. Like a beautiful woman who has unwittingly walked into a surprise party where she was expecting stillness and solitude. The day, with its loud colors and steadily building momentum seems suddenly rude, indelicate by comparison. I want to stop and step out of the car, sit on the pavement, lean against a tree and look into that luminous, inscrutable silver face, that seems strangely cloud-like by the light of day. The sky around her is ashes of roses and the faintest lilac. Everything in her aura speaks of serenity, is an invitation to linger. It feels faintly ridiculous to ignore the summons, to stand up the rarity of a morning-time moon for another appointment. But there you have it. I am more than faintly ridiculous many times a day, and only slightly redeemed for being well aware of the fact.

4 Comments | posted in Happenings

October 8, 2019

After the Tsunami

By Pavithra K. Mehta

From the archives: Posts written in the months after the tsunami that struck the Southern coast of India (and several other countries) on December 26th, 2004

That’s Enough.

So many stories and they pile up so fast- I have not had the chance yet between the travel and the work to spell them all into this space, but here is a small beginning…not investigative reports or detailed needs assessments, not even journalistic briefs. Just ordinary glimpses of the extra ordinary lives that survive beyond the statistics.

 A little girl with curious eyes holding a baby goat. Both kids make you smile.

What’s your name? Shweta she says. And the baby’s? Shweta she says.

Where did you get her?

When the water came we ran to our home near the lighthouse. My father brought the baby goat home in the evening. Her mother died in the water.

And now who takes care of her?

My brother and me.

Her brother a quick young fellow of eight holds out a fistful of green leaves. The baby goat lifts its head, takes a tentative bite and chews reflectively while the children look on in obvious pride and delight.

___________________________________________________

A woman with her husband, daughter and son-in-law, they come out when I pass, invite me to sit awhile on their unfinished front porch. They lost their homes to the tsunami- this house is one they had been building before the waters came. It has cost them six lakhs already. Six lakhs!

The daughter smiles, You don’t know how good the sea has been to us she says. How much she gave us. Now she’s taken it all back…we all had televisions in our houses, and fridges, radios and CD players. We weren’t poor. People don’t understand how generous the sea can be…

They are worried because they have been told that the government will take this house away from them- it is too close to the sea. They have been told it will be knocked down and that a new house will be built for them further away.

They won’t build us a house as nice as this, says the mother sadly. We’ll get one of those small huts they’re putting up for everyone.

We don’t want that.

What we really want says her husband, is to go back to sea. We are used to being out on the water every day.

When would you go out and how far I ask?

Depends on the season, and the moon. We often leave at 1.00 in the morning when it’s pitch black out. We sometimes go as far as 100 kilometres from the shore.

Don’t you get tired out there?

He laughs, if you get tired you sleep, once your nets are in the water there isn’t that much to do anyway. We’d look to the sun for directions and to tell time. We’d be back home here by 4.00 in the evening. Those were good days.

A soft sigh.

And you’re not quite sure whether it was him. Or you.

___________________________________________________

A woman with a face that seems to have fallen into habitual despair is sweeping the dark corners of her front porch. I stop to ask her how she is doing. She has had headaches ever since the tidal wave attacked. The water lifted and dragged her several hundred metres, it washed away the small grocery shop she and her husband ran across from their home.

Have you seen a doctor?

Yes she says and he’s given me some medicine but it’s not working.

Another doctor will be coming this afternoon so I am going to get checked again.

All this sea water is sitting in my head, and it stinks.

Where are your children?

The boy is out playing. My daughter is inside bathing. See this little dog?

I look down, there is a small dog of indeterminate parentage sniffing the ground around our feet. Bright eyes, dirty coat.

That’s Sneha. When the water came she dragged my daughter out of the house- the water was already pouring in- then she swam with her to safety.

This dog?

Yes. This dog.

And the woman laughs at my disbelief. Bends down to scoop Sneha up, holds her close and says, But for this dog my daughter would be dead.

Her husband, who’s lost his business, most of his possessions and all their savings is leaning over the seat of a standing bicycle. He has said nothing until now when he says quietly-

We’re all still alive. That’s enough.

It is.

***

Ultimate Sophistication.

Samiyarpettai is a coastal village in Cuddalore district. Close to three thousand people live there. To reach them we travelled about 45 kilometres along thick sugarcane fields in harvest, paddyfields running hectic green to burnished gold. The land here is uncompromisingly flat, stretches out on both sides of the road as far as the eye can see. Women bent low in the curious half-squat of the fields, their long curving blades, their heads wrapped in chequered cloth. Bright saris boldly interrupting the green. Tireless their arms move in a difficult rhythm echoing the harsh beauty of this land. After the railway crossing we turn onto a narrower side road. Eventually in the distance a small temple tower becomes visible.

Samiyarpettai.

The fields have given way to sandy, uncultivated stretches. You can smell the sea in the air, feel the salt on your skin. We drive into the village and past the little cluster of buildings where the camp is underway. Down a sloping road and then a little ways further we are on the beach. It is more deserted than not.

A row of wooden boats are lined up to one side wounded warriors watching the sea. Waiting to be well enough to return.

I climb out of the jeep and walk away from the water towards a small cluster of thatched huts under a swooping grove of coconut trees. Everywhere there are big piles of rubble. At first glance the place seems empty of human habitation, then in small clearing I see the back of a man’s head. He is sitting on the ground his back to the sea looking straight ahead. By his side staring vacantly into space is a grey-haired older man. I approach their silence and then shatter it as softly as I can with a statement voiced like a question.

You are from here.

Yes they nod.

Why aren’t you at the eye camp I ask the older man- are your eyes all right?

I need glasses he says. Will they give me glasses?

They will. Right here on the spot. All you need to do is go get your eyes checked at the camp and then place an order at the opticals desk they’ve set up. You’ll have your glasses in hand before the team leaves today.

In that case I’d better go up there.

Yes, you should.

He heaves himself up and heads towards the campsite.

The other man is still sitting on the ground. He doesn’t seem inclined to talk.

Maybe I should leave.

Are these new homes? I indicate the low thatched huts beside us. They are very makeshift with interiors that are dark, empty and surprisingly cool.

Yes. But they are just temporary. A local NGO came in and built them in that first week and set up the common kitchen here.

How many homes were lost here?

About thirty. Most of the families affected are staying with their relatives now.

The rest are using these shelters until the government can give us better ones.

Where’s your home?

He points to the hut behind him. This is where my house used to be. It got washed away.

So now you’re living here?

Yes.

Is your family alright?

Yes. My wife and two boys ran up the slope to higher ground when the water came in. I was on the boat and didn’t have any idea what was happening. When I got back there was nothing here. But we were lucky- we only lost things. The family is all safe.

You _are_ lucky.

Funny to be saying that to someone who has just lost every material thing he ever owned. I look at the thatched hut Kuppuswamy and his family are living in now and wonder what it must feel like for some of these people who had nothing to lose- and then lost it.

Our village only lost 24 lives he says. Most of the people when they saw the water coming didn’t run to their homes they ran towards the temple which is much higher up, that saved them…and then these coconut trees, they saved a lot of people too.

These trees?

Yes, when the water came it was as high as that house over there, it lifted a lot of the women clear off the ground up to the height of these trees. Many of them were able to grab on to the trunks and then held on for their lives. See, you can see a part of someone’s dress up there at the top.

I look up, and this being a coconut tree there was a ways to look. Sure enough it’s there. Fluttering evidence of someone’s desperate bid for life.

Behind me is a small cement house with an outer courtyard. A women steps into it carrying a small pot.

See that lady- she hung on to the top of the tree over there.

It seems incongruous in that moment, to think of this young woman with her girlish face and quiet concentration on her pot clinging to the top of a coconut tree with tall waters raging right where we are standing now.

Kuppuswamy is joined now by another pleasant faced man- one of those faces that have an immediate quality of friendliness that automatically makes you smile. He starts talking now.

I’d just got back from the sea and was sitting with the others on the shore picking fish out of the net. At one point the waves came in a little higher than usual, we laughed about it and kind of wondered what was going on. The next wave was still low but a little more forceful, it took the boat with it and scattered our nets and all the fish. We shouted to the women and children then to run to safety, and then we started scrambling after our boats and nets. We still didn’t know what was happening. And then the third wave came, a huge wave, lifted out of the water higher than the roofs of our homes. It hit and the next thing I knew I was holding onto the top of this tree over here. When I looked around I saw almost all the trees had a man or a woman holding onto it. The funny thing is it was all so fast. The water didn’t stay for a second. It turned around and rushed back with the same haste it came in. Our clothes were ripped from our bodies. When the water went back some of us dropped from the trees and without a thought automatically began looking for the others, helping them get down, already there were bodies on the shore.

More people have gathered around us. Kuppuswamy’s wife, a young woman with a pearl white smile in a darkglowing face, a gray-haired neighbour in a faded pink sari who points out the tree that saved her, other fisherfolk from the same community all adding their pieces to make up the fabric of their shared history. I remember a thought wandered in from nowhere in the middle of all of this, a voice saying calmly- I could live here.

It surprised me that thought. I realized then how comfortable I was with these people, how surrounded by their warmth. Granted they hadn’t lost nearly as much as other villages. Food and clothing had been taken care of they said, and most of temporary shelters were up. Their possessions hadn’t been replaced yet, and some of the children still needed textbooks, but they didn’t seem too worried about any of these things. They interrupt each other talking about the kindness of the various organizations that stepped in to help, the college youth and the NGOs…I think what touched me most about this group was their sunniness. They had all suffered. The woman with the pot had lost her mother in a village down the coast. Others had lost brothers, neighbors, friends.

Their village like the hundreds of others will never be the same.

But they are not broken, these people. The only time they let shadows creep into their voices is when they are talking about people who didn’t make it, and when they are talking about their boats…

We can’t go back to sea until the boats are repaired. This is hard for us.

We’ve been given everything we need. Food, clothing, shelter…but no matter how many things you give us it won’t be enough until we can work again.

We are not the kind of people who can eat our food unless we’ve earned it.

Their honest restlessness touches you. Makes you understand all over again how important it is for us as human beings to be engaged. To have work that occupies us, lends purpose to our time here and the shape of our days.

The government and the NGOs have promised to repair these boats and the nets. Each boat in the water employed four or five fishermen who work like field ‘coolies’. They are daily wage labourers who often have no share of ownership for the boat. The boats themselves cost upward of one lakh.

They will all be repaired and where needed replaced but in the meantime…

Ramesh is the fisherman with the eminently friendly face. He lives in the cement house behind us, the woman with the pot is his wife.

Can we see your house?

Please.

We walk towards it, I stop outside to talk to his wife. She has bruises on her forearms from the coconut palm.

Which tree?

She points it out.

You could build a temple to these trees.

Yes.

She looks up at it.

Now I can’t believe I was actually lifted all the way up there.

She shakes her head, bends to stir the pot of sliced eggplant cooking over burning wood.

We enter the house. It is painted three different colors maybe four. The walls are covered with technicoloured posters of politicians and filmstars. Rajinikanth, Trishna, Meena, Jayalalitha, MGR, Rajiv Gandhi…a surrealish sort of gathering.

There are water stains on the wall. No furniture it was all ruined- is strange that the posters survived. They had a television and a CD player, a radio. All gone. At some level I am a little surprised by this evidence of their prosperity.

Ramesh tells us that the house was built in 1993 after he’d spent two years in Singapore as a construction worker, saving money.

Most of the men in this village have been to Foreign he says.

(foreign is a legitimate noun-not-adjective in Tamil).

Even Kuppusamy has worked in the Gulf for a few years…

You gain a sense of how slowly and surely these people built up their lives. Saving a little at a time for their families, their future.

It’s all gone now says Ramesh. We have to start over.

His eyes automatically wander back to where the boats are waiting.

If only we could go back to work, that would be enough. I dropped out of school after 7th standard. I’ve been fishing since I was 12 years old. Kuppusamy never went to school, he’s been working the sea since he was a boy of 8.

We’ve know the sea so well but we’ve never known it to do anything like this before. We can tell by the wind when a storm is brewing, we can detect it way ahead of time and pull our boats to safety, but with this there was no warning, not even as much breeze in the air as there is now, and such a bright sun, like everything was normal…

There is such bewilderment in their voice but not the anger of betrayal…they still are willing and wanting to go back to her. They still trust the sea.

I get up but immediately am told to wait, to please have some tender coconut water before going. Kuppusamy is halfway up the tree before I can say No Thank You.

We watch him climbing, the ease and strength never fails to amaze me.

He brings down a bunch of the green fruit and other people gather to help split their tops open, spilling the milky nutrient-rich water into a small silver ‘sembu’ (a curvedrim pot). One of the others brings it around pouring it into the steel tumblers someone else has managed to produce. As we drink they insist on refills. The tender insides of the cut coconuts are scooped out and heaped on a plate in front of us. Eat, they urge us.

A feast I say, touched by their generosity.

Ramesh looks up smiling from where he is crouched on the ground splitting the shells, Madame right now this is all we have on hand to offer.

And they offer it, the same way they would have offered whatever they had on hand before the tsunami struck.

The children are on lunch break now and have come running home, Ramesh’s daughter is in third standard, a girl with beautiful long-lashed black eyes and long braids. His son is three, a stocky little fellow with a shy manner. He was visiting relatives at another village that Sunday. When the water came he clung to the neck of an older cousin who clung to the window sill of a house and somehow they both survived. We thought for sure we had lost him, says Ramesh, shaking his head. I still can’t believe we’re all safe.

When it is time to leave they stand up, not one of them has asked us for a single thing. I wonder what I can send back for them or for their children. We will have a follow-up camp here so it will be easy enough to do and I know there are things they need even if they’re not asking.

This was such a special village.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Da Vinci said that once, and so often in my encounters with village India the paradoxical truth of that statement rings clear. Tagore says its taken centuries of cultivation for India to reach the open-heartedness of perfect simplicity, and that today we are slipping from that state in our cities, but the spirit still lives strong in some of our villages.

‘Ultimate sophistication’… that’s what they had, these people in Samiyarpet.

Now it’s our turn to cultivate.

January 20, 2005

Island Village

The only way to get to the island village of Sodhikuppam is by boat. The long, once-brightly painted ‘thonni’ bobs gently against the jetty. A thick rope runs through its stern secured on either side of the water. The current in these parts is treacherously strong, instead of using oars an old man pulls the boat alongside the rope. The sun beats down in sheets of heat. Sitting on the wooden boat bottom I pull the end of my sari’s pallu over my head and look towards the coconutpalm shaded shore drawing close.

 

About 2000 people live in this village. 125 died in the recent tsunami. Twenty-six of them were children. There is no bridge connecting the village to the mainland, only a jetty that wanders partway into the water and stops. When some of the children saw the water rushing in they’d run to the far end of the island towards the backwaters and onto the wooden jetty in terror, hoping perhaps to make it to the safety of the other shore. When the second wave struck it took them all with it. Almost all.

Most homes in Sodhikuppam are sheltered from the beach. Around fifty huts built on the sea-facing shore were washed away by the tidal waves, but no lives were lost on that side. If the children had only stayed in their homes, they might have been alive today. Just yesterday the Collector of Cuddalore visited this village. Promised its people to sanction funds for a tardy bridge.

We step off the boat onto the jetty. As we walk towards firm ground you cannot help but notice how there is nothing- absolutely Nothing to hold onto. On either side the green waters gently lap, innocent of memory. It is a seven minute walk from the shore to where we are holding the eye camp. Along the way we meet a small group engaged in lashing poles together, topping them with rippled plastic sheets. Temporary housing sponsored by one of the many NGOs working in this district. Dominic the enthusiastic, warm hearted local District Blindness Prevention Officer insists on introducing me to everyone we meet as Madame Pavithra International FilimDirector. Initially I protest but this has no effect, so in the end I put my palms together with a shrug and a smile half-amused half-apologetic. I have not brought my camera. It is better to go emptyhanded the first time. When they see a camera people tend to think you come from the news channels, and then you start to hear only one kind of story.

The primary school where the camp is being set up is on lunch break. There is a swarm of knee-high humanity around our arrival. The girls wear indido blue skirts with white blouses, the boys are in khaki shorts and white shirts. Each of them is holding a tin plate waiting to be served their free government-sponsored midday meal. One child comes to stand directly under me. She is wearing two pigtails that stick straight out of the sides of her small head. On her face a huge smile, there is a charming gap between her two front teeth.

What’s your name I ask. Her grin widens but she says nothing. What class are you in? She hops on one foot and shoots me a mischievous look out of the corner of one eye. What, you won’t speak to me? And then without thinking- Don’t you know how to talk?

No. Jayshree’s mute. She can’t talk at all.

A chorus of little voices. Arm in arm these little girls, Jayshree’s classmates crowd around educating me out of insensitve ignorance. Jayshree takes hold of my hand. I feel at once chastened and forgiven.

Unprompted the children start to speak all at once, spilling stories from their lives since that December 26th morning. They do not seem scared or shocked or even particularly sad. They are still so young. Do you know there’s another tsunami coming on the 26th? says one child with a knowing air, So many people are packing to leave now. Are you leaving? No. My parents say we will stay. My mother is the schoolmistress here, she says this with such shining pride in her voice I am obliged to be suitably impressed. My name is Poovizhli, volunteers one little girl. I’m Kausalya says another sweetfaced child. She can’t read, chips in a classmate. Oh and you’re the Big Genius says sweetfaced Kausalya notsosweetly sticking a small tongue out at her detractor.

He fell into the water.

This nonsequiteur from the Big Genius startles me a little.

I look over at the boy in front of me. He is small and skinny and somehow tough looking. He is nine years old but looks about six. His air of lounging indifference makes me smile. There is something spectacularly nonchalant about this little fellow, evidently a hero among his peers. He is not in the least bit thrown by my scrutiny. When he speaks it is in short, clipped sentences. I am seated on the ground, he is leaning against a wall, his thin legs crossed at the ankle, his hands in his pockets.

You fell into the water?

Yes.

And then what happened?

The waves pushed me past a boat, I caught hold of a rope and hung on. Then I pulled myself up into the boat.

Then what happened?

Then I sat there for awhile, didn’t know what to do.

Then?

Then I think I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

You fell Asleep?

I fell asleep

Then?

Then after about an hour the boat was close to the shore, so I got home.

And that’s all?

That’s all.

You weren’t scared?

No.

No?

I was a little scared. So I just kept saying God’s name.

What’s your name?

Vignesh- but people don’t call me that at home.

What do they call you at home?

Pavi. Sometimes they call me Pavithra.

Really?

Yeah. Many people on this island are called Pavithra.

Why?

Just like that.

I look up at this little guy to see if he’s pulling a fast one on me. But no. He’s serious.

So what’s my name?

I don’t know.

What do you think it might be?

Aishwarya.

Now he’s really teasing me.

They try out a few more names and then I let them off the hook.

My name’s Pavithra. People call me Pavi.

Really?

Really.

Vignesh/Pavi smiles at me. A bond has been established.

It’s time to set up for the camp. I put out a hand to be helped up.

Vignesh/Pavi looks at for a second and then shakes it briskly.

Help me up you.

Oh.

He motions to a grinning sidekick to assist, together they pull me to my feet. Such strong kids.

Inside and out.

The woman in the schoolyard, Sharadha, has a sharpfeatured, sad face. Her husband is a fisherman in the Gulf. She talks to him on the island phone every week. Their home was washed away. She’s living with relatives now, her two children are on the mainland living with their grandparents. Do you have enough food?

Yes. They gave us supplies.

What about clothes?

She makes a face- They brought us such worthless clothes. We don’t wear things like that. We’re poor but even so we buy good quality clothes. The women here wear saris that cost Rs 300-400. Nylex sarees. Not cheap cotton ones. That’s the kind of people we are.

I swallow a smile. I am sitting there in a cheap cotton saree. My favorite kind. I wonder what kind of people that makes me.

***

Dominic has set up lunch for us at the house opposite the school.

The doorways are low and we stoop to enter. Inside they’ve laid out mats for us to sit on. Packets of lemon, tomato and yogurt rice with lime pickle arrive neatly packed in newsprint tied up with twine. Whose house is this I ask. No one answers. A thin woman from the small open yard in the back enters, hollows in her cheeks, her eyes very wide. Is this your house?

Yes she says. My daughter died.

She says it very fast, pointing at the same time to a framed photograph of a little girl. Nirmala it says across the bottom. Born November 14th 1993

Died December 26th 2004.

She is wearing a frock, and her face is freshly powdered. On top of her head is perched a small strand of orange flowers. She is not smiling, her small face has the serious semi-scowl of those unused to being posed for photographs.

Over lunch I learn that she was the brightest and liveliest of three children. The photograph was taken at a school dance programme that she’d participated in.

When the waters came she ran with the other children to the jetty. Her mother had been inside and before she knew what had happened her child was gone.

Nirmala has an older sister who’s 15. Seethalakshmi who cannot hear or talk. She hovers in the doorway smiling shyly at us. They have a younger brother as well who gazes briefly our way before scampering out of sight.

Let me show you the photographs says the mother eagerly.

She disappears into a small room on the side and soon comes out again with a small sheaf of photos.

I flip through them. They are all, every single one, the same as the picture on the wall.

She’s beautiful I say.

Yes, says the mother eagerly…and then in a slightly abashed tone- there’s only that one picture over and over again.

It’s a beautiful picture.

Yes.

She wants us to stay a couple of days. I wish we could but it is time to head back. I wish I knew what to say.

We will be thinking of you and your family.

Her palms fly together as she nods.

Come back someday.

I will.

We walk back to the jetty waiting for the boat to come in. I sit in the shade of a thatched roof on the sand and look out over the explanationless water.

Such quietness inside.

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July 25, 2019

Alchemy by Hawk

By Pavithra K. Mehta

There are encounters that leave you sloshing and unsettled– like a very full glass of pond water on a rickety table that has been jostled. A moment before you were self-contained, now your inner being is flustered and expressive — full of erratic movement you do not intend.

The jostler has long since vanished but you are still unquiet within. Across the stadium of your stomach a loosed stampede of bat wings, bull horns and hapless ballerinas. The sensation is not painful–nor is it pleasant. In such times it can be useful to recognize that you are a woman of independent means — financing this residual tempest with the hard cash of memory and the loose change of muddled emotion. There are better investments to be made. By far.

It is not easily arranged, but after such encounters if one can persuade a hawk to fly low overhead as one walks a narrow residential street, one might experience what feels akin to a comprehensive internal reset. A refreshment of being the equivalent of one thousand nights of dreamless sleep. Of that instant you are no longer a container of whirling sediment and liquid agitation, but a glass filled and stilled, quietly brimming with the crystal cold headwaters of a mountain spring. It will happen with a rapidity that defies explanation.

You remember the upward glance, and the preverbal register of a remarkable wingspan, a copper colored velocity, a grace that splits the sky like day time lightning. Electric and unbound. You do not recall the perturbation being poured out of you like stale tea from a teapot. The conversion is work that locates itself outside clock time. What has transpired is not so much substitution as it is alchemy– by hawk. The transformation of a base and volatile substance (your inner landscape) to one that is– at least temporarily– golden and inert.

It helps if the hawk calls out to you repeatedly while circling high overhead. Her voice commands the sky, corrals your wayward tendencies. Her wheeling, invisible calligraphy blots out any lingering reasons for dismay, any last recollections of dissatisfaction. And you are seized by an intimation of grandeur, a power vast and sweet and gloriously indifferent to our cramped labels of good and bad, a freedom so complete it does not require approval– or even understanding, and an awareness so piercing and acute, so borderless and far-reaching it leaves you with a paradoxical sense of how small you are—and how utterly seen.

If you are in a position to pull on cosmic strings and orchestrate this process further, it would serve you well to recruit between one hundred and one hundred and fifty additional hawks. Have them soar across your line of sight in ones and twos and threes and sometimes sevens over the next week. Have them perch unusually low and in view. Have them spur you to google “Unusual number of hawks in neighborhood this summer,” and accustom you to looking up frequently (because who wants to miss sighting a hawk?) Until their presence is undeniable, their message unmistakable.

Then let the hawks fly into your dreams, and with their alternating rhythms of muscular wing flap and spiraling suspension, begin to shape a shadowy sense of what it means to house an immense perspective, what it means to travel fearlessly between this terrestrial realm and the blue beyond, what it means to combine vigilance, with elegance and self-possession, what it means to expend effort, then effortlessly release, what it means to abandon petty stories, swoop down instead on what is essential, revolutionary– grasp it talon tight. And not let go.

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July 8, 2019

Fortuities

By Pavithra K. Mehta

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders. — Milan Kundera

There are days when I look out the window without meaning to, as if my glance had been commanded by a consciousness beyond that typically called my own. And I catch, not the sight but, the sense of a bird. The briefest of blurs, a velocity of being, accompanied by a communication whose unmistakable imperative is simply: LOOK. 

I have an unaccountable conviction in these moments, unlikely as it seems to my rational mind, that I am being summoned to witness something. Someone. But I cannot will my way into such witnessing. I can only intend and then forget. So that the surface of my mind moves unselfconsciously, while the depths have been readied.

Sometimes it takes a couple of days. I feel a quiet, almost imperceptible surge, but my gaze is belated, catches its breath not on bird but on space freshly emptied of bird. Even these misses have their magic. And then comes the barefoot discovery– always barefoot– for there is never time for mind to pull on shoes, slip into slippers. 

The first time I–felt– more than saw, the somersaulting shadow of wings, and was pulled to the window by the gravitational field of an invisible presence. Three perhaps four times this happened, over one afternoon and into the next. Then there he was. A young hawk perched on the wire closest to our home and lowest. An unusual bird placed in unusually close range. Those colors, those curves and angles enclosed in and enclosing such wild grace. A sense of young majesty, a presence aware of being within the radius of another’s awareness. 

A little over a year earlier a turkey vulture had alighted, on the wire opposite our living room window. A hulking black-shouldered, red-headed bird gazing deliberately into the heart of our home, while my mother served hot dosas to a guest. No this had not happened before, and has never happened since. And yes there is a story, but for another time perhaps.

And then last week, while making breakfast (oatmeal), I turned (or was turned,) abruptly from hot stove toward kitchen window and caught a fluttering handkerchief. Small, black and flying, falling, dancing. I recognize, without knowing how, the movements of familiar birds. I do not dissect the invisible warp and weft of their intricate weaving. I could not describe it to you even if I care to, but am glad for the quiet backdrop of their daily and dynamic craft. This pattern even peripherally caught, was unfamiliar. Less subtle, more demanding of audience. Snared I walked to the window searching for the bird behind the show. At first nothing but empty driveway and branches and sky– and then he materialized. 

An immediately likable bird of an immediately likable size. Charcoal-smudged body with a roguish, tousled head and such an unafraid, arrested quickness in his being. A purposeful sense of pause. “You’ve been seen,” I told him silently. Perhaps he was unconvinced, or perhaps he was simply being sociable. Either way when I stepped outside several minutes later, he flew past me and perching on nearby branch proceeded to sing a single note. So sweetly, single-mindedly, so persistently that I could not help but think he was telling me something. I noted then, his white breast, how it peaked crisply between his dark lapel feathers. How oddly formal he appeared, how like a bird in a tuxedo. A dapper bird who had remembered to dress for the occasion–but had forgotten to comb his hair. And all the while he sang his tail pumped, keeping time. He watched and sang as I watered the plants. Unfazed by my size, my species, my lack of song. I watched him watching me and wondered where he had come from, where he was going. Wondered who and what he was.

A search for mettlesome black bird with white breast brought him up immediately on my screen. A flycatcher — a Black Phoebe. A songbird, I am informed, that does well around humans and is known to sit on low perches in backyards and keep up a running series of chirps while scanning the horizon for edible insects. The most wonderful thing I learned about this bird is that the male of the species will show his mate possible nest sites by hovering in front of them for approximately ten seconds awaiting her ay or nay. She will make the final decision on where they nest. An arrangement that strikes me as eminently sensible on all fronts.

All morning I cannot shake the sense of his presence. Finally I take out my brushes, a paint set and begin. In London and New York passersby can get their portraits painted in a matter of minutes by gifted street artists. In the backyard of our little home, certain feathered individuals, unconcerned with quality or self-image can get theirs painted by a rapturous amateur, for a song. 

***

It does not have a name, and I do not know nearly enough give it one. The birds are privy to it though. This impulse that leaps my gaze to the window, this force that draws being forth and tangles my fibers with the pulsating beauty of this world, destabilizing strictly human concerns, re-centering perception.

***

“Hope” is the thing with feathers, said Dickinson, and perched it in the soul—where it–

“sings the tune without the words–

And never stops–at all–”

If I had to wager a guess I’d say she was privy to it too.

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