Summer song

I have a new picture on my wall. With a new month, a new picture, a new kitten on my wall. This one is peeking out of a tub and has the most demanding gaze. Its now the beginning of summer, well hopefully.. and you wouldn’t want the temperatures to plummet, not for the moment at least. I hear a meek drizzle at my window, its been a dreary Sunday. Overcast, lethargic and marred by a smattering of mournful rain. Suddenly I miss the passion with which the skies burst out on you after a sweltering day this time of the year in Calcutta. This time. The crisp Spring evening and light chill slowly giving way to a scorching summer, but somewhere in between, was this time. Blazing sun, hard blue skies, wore you down and then when you were almost broken and giving up, would come a generous shower, the flying dust and grime would be laid to rest, nature would revel with the bellowing skies where sharp sinews of light were set aflame in spurts. The wind would come hollering at you and then would come the pouring rain. Sometimes they got you when you were on your way back, from school, work, sometimes worse when you were out shopping. And then you were trapped, caught in the snarls of a city struggling to find its feet against the fierce force of the ‘kalbaishakhi’ thunderstorm. You hated it then, except that it made the nights so much cooler and your bed more habitable. It was miles better to catch it at home, writing essay-questions from Hamlet, watching the umpteenth re-run of Mili, making marble-cake because you had nothing better to do with your afternoon. You attempted to keep the windows open, at least one, and let the vagrant streams from the sky get to your shirt sleeve. That and the tiny grains of dust that briskly sped on the floor gave you in. And you were made to shut the windows. It still made glorious shapes of light on the glass panes, caking it with a breath of moisture that you could pencil your name on. Sometimes it rained like forever. The power went out. Snowy was uncomfortable because his evening walk and pleasurable peeing by the lamp-post time was taken away, he would curl up in dismay at your feet, resting his belly against the cold concrete, wafting in and out of sleep, lulled by the coolness and yet very aware of the lightening breaking outside. Dinner was often almost in the dark, sometimes by a candle struggling against the wind sneaking in through the window opened to the tiniest bit. Sometimes you got the radio to play. Old songs. It is one wild night. Next morning everything is still frayed, its a hard blue sky. An impassive mask to the passion play of the night before.  But you know it would come again, in a few days. The skies would open up, the monotone would melt, with a kalbaishakhi you will find a little bit of your impetuous self and a heart that rings true with the rain.

Fear

I need to believe, that something extraordinary is possible – Alicia (A Beautiful Mind)

Fear is a huge depressant. Fear is an enormous drain. In some ways fear is even worse than failure. The past few days I have lived with a fear like one I have never known before. Or maybe it feels that way. Just till your next fear. And fear is what turns you naked. Cuts through your soul. Leads you into dark places in the mind, into a conundrum you’d possibly never really figure. And the voices in your head.

In my life I have gone from one fear to another. And many winters ago I remember telling a friend that that was perhaps why I went anywhere at all. I didn’t think then that there was a weight on my shoulders, that there was a burden in being afraid. Instead I thought that in time your fears sorted themselves, except I now know that they only slid behind the layers of your conscious self. And that they always come back. In much bigger ways than you ever imagined. But I want to keep walking, through the barriers I seem to have erected, through the black noise and the bleak winters. And if ever there is an end, it’ll be worthwhile I know. To find that at some point your faith was bigger than your fear.

A different world or a different me?

The week had zipped past. It had been the same quotidian routine of doing experiments, reading papers (research papers that is), re-doing experiments, worrying about them, being ecstatic over small successes, and mulling about every tiny failure. But then that week there also had been this teeny tiny other worry as well. My mom had discovered this painful lump in her left breast and had been advised a pre-cautionary biopsy by the doctors. I was fairly confident it was merely pre-cautionary, that my mother was fine and that this lump was just one of those freakish things that you suddenly woke up to one morning during the whole post-menstrual phase. Nevertheless I had been uneasy all week, and amidst my numerous phone calls to Calcutta, trying to calm mom’s fraying nerves, I was also trying to reign my own fears, telling myself that they were unfounded.

I don’t exactly remember the conversation I had with mom over the phone, when the reports came in,  except that I  was struggling with a dozen issues at work, and had expected the reports to be clean anyways. But then I heard of this ‘moderately differentiated ductal carcinoma’ and there was a lot of whizzing in my head.  All there was, was noise, some from the Diwali festivities running a riot outside our home in Calcutta, yes it was Diwali the next day, some from the casual bantering of lab people here, the usual Friday euphoria tipping everbody and then there was this noise in my head.

In the weeks that followed, the noise followed me. The doctors at Calcutta had recommended surgery, one had even advised mastectomy, and ofcourse the usual cock-tail of radio and chemotherapy.  I was living my worst nightmare, so far away from the people I loved, perhaps the most, too far to comfort or share, to far to protect my world back home crumbling into unrecognizable shapes. I thought all sorts of things those days, my days and nights were overcast by the black noise of my thoughts, the searing pain shooting through my mind and then there was complete numbness. Meanwhile my parents were seeking advice from doctors at the Tata Memorial Cancer Institute, Mumbai. Mom went through every conceivable type of test and scan, and oceans away, for me there was the anxiety of what the next day, and the next phone call would bring.

But strangely despite the chilling fear that enveloped my every living moment I functioned pretty normally. And a phone call later everyday I scrambled back to the peace of my humdrum research. I think I never broke down all that while except one day when I just kept welling up ceaselessly. And before that day I think I hadn’t even spoken of what had been going on with people at work, it was too painful, almost as if putting the noise into words would make everything come true and that until that, my world was secure in a shielded spot, far from the whirlpool of the noise that had gripped me and given me nightmares every waking moment.

That evening I came back from work slightly ravaged. I hated that I broke down, that I had told people about my mom, that they had sympathesized and gone back into their lives. I hated that my life was on the brink of changing forever, while people continued to live in their cosy everyday shells, that none of their lives were turned upside down and that I could do little to stem the tide threatening to change the course of my destiny. As I walked home, the scorching Fall foliage was all around me, a brilliant bonhomie of burnt red, yellow, copper and aging brown leaves cracked under my feet, there were naked branches all around, the wind hissed through them and the orphaned leaves swirled in the air and were whisked to unknown pastures. It  was a queer melee. I think I got back home and left with my camera. I walked a lot that evening, clicking pictures, of trees that were wrapped in their flaming reds but would be shoarn in the next few days, of leaves that flew about aimlessly, and of the noise that was till then just within me but now all around.  To be honest am surprised with myself, I think all of what happened was all I always imagined would be enough to break me and yet and yet..not quite. As I await the final answers on my mom’s tests I want to believe that there will be  quiet skies beyond these rough seas and that my world is now shaped stronger and more beautiful than ever before.