A liminal state of mind

She mooned about the house listlessly. She had lain awake most of the previous night, shifting on the sheets, unable to sleep. A snatch of a memory and a few oh-so-perfect phrases lit up her mind and led her to smile inwardly. Then she would feel the anticipation that she had felt every day of the past week, of what was to play out the following day. And then with a finality as irrevocable as the banging of a gavel or a shutting of a door, she would remember that it was... finally... over. Those times of bonding and eager anticipation of what was to come, how it was to all turn out... were over.

Her flatmate looked at her keenly, noting all the tell-tale signs. No words exchanged, she  understood the situation. That faraway look, the reliving, the state of being in a liminal- it was all too easy to guess.

"The next one is just round the corner, chin up!" she beamed encouragingly.

After all, she had seen it play out so many times:

The heaviness that sets in when a book is closed down on its rear cover, the reader still under its thrall. That awkward stage after a memorable read when one is still living in its world.

Feeling too vulnerable, too fragile to break out of its hold and face the strange world outside of its familiar scent, its characters who have become one's closest friends, and the comforting rustle of its pages.

Dreading talking to people who seem alien because they do not belong to or understand the world she had been inhabiting these past days.

She was between books. Awaiting a new love, a new delight to hold and read and cherish. 

 

Love in the time of sanitizers

 

It was a bright and warm day in April and the clocks were striking twenty-one. Days of lockdown that is. Who has the ability to keep time by the hour when the seconds and minutes have congealed into a gloopy mess of hours, she mused.

It was a momentous day, and she got up with not a little trepidation. The previous

day, worn down by her incessant proselytizing, the home sanitization protocol was adopted in the household, with unanimous approval. The usually unwilling member immediately accepted his duties (which not too long ago had been relegated to the one-person clean-freak of the abode).
This, then, was the first day of the new protocol and she was anxious to see what the day would bring.

Wake up and smell the roses, the poets used to sing in another era. But here she was waking up to the most reassuring smell in the world: heady fragrance of protection-granting, life-affirming sanitizer. With which the aforementioned member had swabbed the surfaces of the house, in accordance with his allocated duties. She felt woozy in delight, or it may just have been the effect of all the alcohol (strictly not less than 60%) in the air.

Even as she was revelling in the headiness of it all, she overhears snatches of father-toddler conversation from the other room.  “Clol Ekideen” she thinks she hears the toddler lisp.“  The beaming spouse looks up as she walks in, and says brightly, waving the spray bottle of sanitizer. “I just taught her the word of the day. It’s Chlorhexidine.”

And just like that, she fell in love all over again.

Maslow's chillies

Dabbling in the kitchen for needs arising from the lowest level of Maslow’s needs hierarchy, I discovered over the course of this lockdown, is a far cry from going occasionally into the kitchen to self-actualize by rustling together fancy ingredients into a photo-worthy salad.

This turned into a particularly searing lesson for me today. I mean, literally. Like actually literally. Not ‘literally’ like when people use the word literally to metaphorically mean something patently non-literal. Involving mindful cooking and green chillies, and hours of running laps from the living room to the kitchen madly flapping my palms*.

I have barely ever used green chillies in food prior to this. However, the latest fortnightly survival kit from one of the blessed e-commerce vendors who deigns to deliver to my building included a very, very generous package of green chillies. As my mantra during lockdown is “Waste Not, Want Not”, I resolved to use this entire lot. So it was that I surveyed three of the chosen ones from the pile. Two of them were curved in a particularly, warningly, sinister fashion. Alas, I failed to heed the warning of the fates and proceeded to gut them of their seeds and throw in the angry green skins into my waiting skillet. Within minutes, the cooking for the day was abandoned and the activity marked above with * commenced.

The spouse, patiently awaiting his victuals, was startled by this rather unusual sight. The lingua franca of my movement is invariably limited to plodding, ambling and slouching. Therefore, this sudden interest in indoor sprinting could scarcely go unnoticed. I breathlessly screamed, “Burning hands. Do something, do something.” My movements were so floppy and my manner so panic-inducing that he initially assumed that my hands were on fire. Like, you know, really, literally on fire. Like with flames. Not the metaphorical way people use the word ‘literally’ when you know, they’ve got chilli burn. But dash it, it really did feel as if my hands were spouting molten lava.

Once he got wise to the situation, he broke into paroxysms of laughter. I made incoherent threats (including but not restricted to using the vegetable in question as a weapon) to shake him out of his laughing stupor and google for remedies.

After a few rounds of hits and misses, and after slathering my palms variously with dishwash liquid, coconut oil, baking soda paste, hand sanitiser and aloe vera gel, we recovered some semblance of sanity in the household. Now I know not to take capsaicin lightly. Along with various other snippets, such as its official name: 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide.

The sole achievement of the day is that the placating party in this story now knows to never, ever offer such helpful trivia as IUPAC names of active spice ingredients while the suffering party is in the throes of chilli burn.

--Please feel free not to commiserate with me on the chilli burn. This is a work of somewhat pure fiction--

Don’t get mad, get even!

Or how to robot-proof your career

There used to be a time when the rich world was complaining of jobs being Shanghai-ed or Bangalore-d away. It appears now that humans, all and sundry, are at the risk of being robot-ed away.

Trending on my news feeds over the past few months are articles from a set of highbrow publications that pronounced that the liberal arts were the only resort for future humans. Trounced by AI in traditional fields of inquiry that are vulnerable to robotisation, jobs in STEM, Finance and the like were most at risk, they warned. This being so, it was argued, humans could make use of their skills in the humanities that require fuzzier forms of expertise that cannot be usurped by the coming machine onslaught. Fields such as art, poetry and music.

Fresh from reading this, and spouting my newfound anti-STEM wisdom to anyone within earshot, imagine my consternation when I discovered that the latest field to be invaded by the bots was (gasp!) poetry.  

Can there be such a thing as artificial poetry? Apparently, yes- the one in question has been written by a chatbot who has been 'learning' through interactions with people!   Naturally, this development sparked a generous amount of outrage across literary circles, apart from chilling my poetic aspirations to the bone.

A friend took one look at one of the creations of Xiaoice, a chatbot on Weibo, and reassured me that I have nothing to worry about. The offending sample reads thus:

The rain is blowing through the sea/ A bird in the sky/ A night of light and calm/ Sunlight/ Now in the sky/ Cool heart/ The savage north wind/ When I found a new world.

Not so fast. I decided to ambush my Modern poetry discussion group with this piece, passing it off as a poem by a contemporary American author who chose to remain anonymous. For a few minutes after I read it out, there was silence as the group digested the piece. Soon after, a storm of observations broke out.

"The savage north wind- what a refreshingly original thought. Surely, an oblique reference to the more traditional east wind."

"Oh, pure genius. The north wind that blows a new life, so unlike the east wind.”

"The sharp shift from the calm night to sunlight- a volte-face that brought about the discovery of the new world?"

"What an interesting thought!"

By now, I had slipped away, new hope nestling in my heart. If Xiaoice, an infant in chatbot years, could pique such ardent poetic discussions, maybe I could spin out a few quick quatrains too. Maybe I would just let the universe suggest words to me and arrange it into lines. After all, those who are keen to find meaning in lines will do so, regardless of how subtly (or grossly) it is hidden!

The house that waits

The streets are quiet, unusually bereft of the chatter of people. It is a Sunday morning and nothing stirs inside the rows of apartments. Save the giant banyan tree whose leaves sway gently in the sea breeze, even as its rope-like aerial roots swing to and fro invitingly. And the fine grains of sand that rise in the billowing clouds of dust. Something seems to be moving inside the cloud - some living, breathing being in this still, sleeping morning. It is the sweeper of the streets, engulfed in a halo of dust, emerging from the sand clouds like an ancient deity emerging from the mists. Daylight has begun to filter through the canopy of the banyan tree, lending a soft glow to the pink bougainvilleas, and rousing the hibiscuses from their slumber. A swaying prop root of the banyan brushes past my face in its pendulum-like motion. I catch it in my palm, and trace it with my eyes back to its high branch, the branch to immense trunk and the trunk to its base where it was growing around, and through the walls of the compound.

Incongrous in this street of high-rise apartments in the middle of a metropolis.  As strange as me and the street-sweeper, awake in this sleepy morning.

A survivor in this busy, ruthless city.

An unfinished building, covered in an unseemly green drape stands next to the banyan. It used to be an old, old house with a swing in the balcony and yellow windows with wooden bars. Now it's a monstrosity of concrete and green draping and a hoarding promising views of the sea. An erased relic of the past.

I avert my eyes and walk down the street, now warm with the late April sun. I am playing make-believe hopscotch on the mottled patterns of light and shade on the road.

I look up as one of patterns resolves itself into the shape of a sitting person. Somebody's grandfather. He is sitting on a chair in front of his house staring into the distance, his expression expectant- as if waiting for something.

Another being from the past- the house. With a swing and wooden bars on the windows. The thought was strangely startling. The house is empty- the diaspora children scattered across the world, leaving grandpa alone to his ruminations. Waiting. For what?

The windows are all open, the bars like teeth on a grinning face. A crack on the wall of the upper floor like a frown on its brow. Anticipation mingled with uncertainty. The mood of the house seems to mirror that of  the old man. Waiting. To join the future? A future, perhaps as a highrise with unkept promises of views of the Arabian sea.

Bookrack memories**

She hefted four Forsyths in one hand, rearranging an untidy assortment of Austen, Maugham and Dickens with the other. Her face arranged itself into a frown, bent from the weight of deciding whether to place Brian Weiss in her Self-help rack or in the Spirituality one. Or maybe it was because she was balancing an abridged Time Machine between her chin and neck. That was when something caught her eye. 

She pushed aside a rather formidable War and Peace to uncover a small pile of slim books. An exclamation escaped her lips, and simultaneously, the Time Machine, from the precarious grasp of her chin.

Bite-sized books in a series called Great Scientists: those were the cause of her happy surprise. Yellowing, but in excellent reading condition, still arranged in her favoured alphabetical order. Albert Einstein. Alfred Nobel. Archimedes. And so on. She pulled out Marie Curie from somewhere in the middle of the lot, idly flipping the pages of child-friendly, large print, as childhood daydreams replayed themselves, unbidden, in her mind. A jumble of conical flasks and beakers and test tubes, one of them hissing with the nascent fumes of an element just discovered. Presiding over it all, a girl in an immaculate lab coat. Herself, of course- not Madame Curie.

Smiling indulgently, she reached far into the recesses of the next rack, and felt a large volume.  The peeling hard-bound cover declared proudly in fading text on a green background- "Complete works of Shakespeare". An inscription in the inner flap revealed a relative's name, and the year, 1968. Memories tripped over one another in their race to the top of her mind- seeing this tome in an old bookshelf in a faraway attic at a grandfather's rural homestead. Slow summer afternoons with chattering cousins making up games, and watching with excitement as tender coconuts were gathered from the palms in the garden by a local expert. Mangoes from the backyard cooled inside a bucket dunked in the well. 

The pages were still intact. She put them carefully aside and continued to wind her way through the shelves, browsing through books of all kinds: Small and concise. Unwieldy and hard to place. In need of mending, but fondly familiar. Large and inscrutable. 

And she struck gold. Again and again.

Out toppled an afternoon hidden away in a corner of a cousin's room. The spoils from a bargain-hunting rampage at a used-books store. An elocution contest in primary school. Playing truant in a Maths class. A fascination with a historical figure. A friend who shared her love for a certain author's murder mysteries. Lectures drowned out by noise from the Electrical Laboratory. Visits to a much-loved bookshop. Birthdays celebrated. Train journeys.

To be opened, relived and carefully rearranged. All the memories. And the books, of course.

When the last of them was filed away, she stepped back, to look at it all in one glance.
Bookrack, perhaps. Pensieve, undoubtedly.

** with due apologies to George Orwell

Empowered

She steps out of her house, even as her mother  shoots meaning glances at the clock. It's 11 pm. She glowers, sallying out of the front door, even atom of her eighteen-year old self spelling rebellion. Her mother sighs, and gets back to the TV. It's futile to talk to her. Her daughter has a predictable counter to anything-  "Empowerment" She hoped her husband would not turn up early- that would mean another argument,  a bitter quarrel.

In the wee hours of the morning, in another part of town, he walks briskly towards his tenement. He finds his sister sprawled over her books, breathing evenly. As he enters, she wakes with a start, an expression of panic writ over her face. It’s just me- he calls out. She recovers, and looking around, goes into a fresh bout of panic as she realizes that she's lost precious hours of study. He raises an eyebrow. Exam. Tomorrow. I have another chapter to go- she frets. He shrugs.

I couldn't leave early today- she volunteers.  From the gym nearby where she cleans. It's not a great place to work in, but it pays for her evening college. And the hours are decent. What happened to you? 

A scene at the bar. Where he helps in the kitchen. A daughter-father duo. Father insists on her leaving. Daughter refuses. Angry words. A fight. Broken glass. Took him all night to help clean up the mess.

He hesitates, then asks- What's 'empowered'? The girl at the bar repeated it several times : 'I'm empowered, I'm empowered',  while refusing to leave with her father.

Her eyes brighten. Oh yes, I know.  It means strong, having power to do what you like. He frowns, confused. You mean like the trainer at your gym?

She laughs- No, not at all. Not physical power- it means ability to make your own decisions, develop your skills and be independent.

His face clears. Isn't that what you are going to college for?  To get a good job and run your life? She smiles- Yes.

He returns- That girl certainly looked like she was 'empowered' then.  I still don't see why she had to break furniture at my bar to prove that.

She shrugs, returning to her books. 

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