The truth about Sunita

The other day I found some of my old Malayalam short stories and poems, backed up in 2006 in one of the hard disks. I went through them to have a good laugh and to rejoice in my new found spiritual enlightenment. I did laugh, but I was surprised to find her in a lot of my works, the fact is even I was not aware of it back then. She is not always only 'her', she is often combined with someone else I could have saved, or some others who made lasting impressions. Sometimes she is my sister, sometimes she is my best friend, sometimes she is the school bully and sometimes she is just 'the girl'. But she is there, haunting my writings in different names and channeling the direction towards her.

Sunita was not really my best friend and I don't have sisters. For the little while I had known her, she terrorized the daylights out of me. But if she hadn't, perhaps I could have helped her.

I attended the local Govt school when I was staying at my mother's ancestral home in Calicut. The school was at  about 10 minutes walk from home by the road, but I had the habit of taking a more scenic byway and my poor valyamma was not comfortable with the idea of 'little absent minded me' walking alone. She entrusted me with older children from time to time. Around the time I was 8, Sunita became my walking partner. She was about 12 at the time and was surprisingly still in 4th standard. She smiled and chatted casually with my valyamma, and my poor valyamma had no idea that she was a bully. She would raid my school bag for money and other things of interest, and would  literally black mail me into secrecy. I was really scared of her threats, biggest one was that she would make stories about me and give me a bad reputation. I was probably the only 8 year old, who was scared of a 'bad reputation'. Anyway I did not utter a word to anyone about her. What really disturbed me was her stories, I did not really understand them and actually, I did not want to hear them as well. But she obsessively gave me the details of her life, of her disturbing relationship with her step-father. I used to toss and turn in my bed all night, but I did not dare to talk to anybody.

Then one day Sunita tried to run away from home but she came back in a week. She stopped attending school and started hanging out with the boys of the local workshop. In a way I was relieved that she was not walking with me to school. After I went to Trivandrum , I got to know that she and her family moved to some other place. I have no idea what happened of her.

I believe that more than 80% of the girls in the country are abused in someway or other. I do not mean rape or molestation, but a 'bad touch' is a bad touch. It stains the child's memory for ever. Even things like getting poked in a public place has a very disturbing effect in a 13 year old's mind. Its different at 17 or 18 when you know how to react. But at 13 most girls still dream of barbie dolls. You simply do not know how to react when someone is being extra friendly or a stranger is trying to lean on you unnecessarily. And after a couple of years when you do understand, you cannot go back and react. You cannot go back and kill that pervert. That bad memory will haunt you for ever.(Of course that's personal)

We are living in a hypocritical society. Not every stranger is a monster, but how do we tell them apart?
How do we teach the children to protect themselves? How do we teach them the difference between good touch and bad touch? How do we teach them to react?

Of course little boys are almost as vulnerable as little girls. How do we save our children? How do we save Sunita?

Woods are lovely, dark and deep

I am taking a stroll through the woods. Alone!

Well, it is not so much of a realm of wilderness or anything, there is a railway line right through it, but I let my over imaginative mind take me away. And suddenly it is a deep dark forest.

There are trees everywhere. Trees .. Trees.. Trees
They are still bare, but spring is making its promised entry, there are tiny buds in some of them.
And there are birds, chirping in an incoherent harmony. These birds, why are they so chatty?
I can listen to my own footstep, as my feet mercilessly crush the remains of fallen leaves on the almost invisible, beaten-down path.

Suddenly I am aware that I am alone. There is not a soul in sight!
I am afraid, but I am excited as well. What is it about fear that we sometimes almost love it?

Then I remember, that I also have promises to keep, or a dinner to cook at the least.

Identity and Identity crisis

This post doesn't come from my soul, it probably comes from vanity (whatever left of it).

I am from Kerala, before the age of weather anomalies and drought it was the land of greenery and rivers. The state is blessed with 44 rivers, and as far as I know, water scarcity had never been a matter of contention. This probably is the reason for our obsession with personal hygiene. It is probably the only place in the world where women obsessively wash their hair once or twice a day. And may be there is magic in the water, it doesn't harm the hair at all.

This is how the heroine is presented in many Malayalam films; a beautiful young woman in traditional clothes , her very long hair still damp from bath, her forehead adorned by sandalwood paste and her eyes lined with kohl. She radiates freshness. Every Malayali girl must have been told that this is her identity and that freshness compensates for lack of beauty. And we believed it one hundred percent.

There is one small problem with that conviction and that image of freshness, it has to be followed only in Kerala. If you try to pull the Goddess act in most other places, by washing your hair every day and leaving it damp, pretty soon you will not have enough hair on your head or you will die of pneumonia. One of the two is certain.

When we discuss moving back to Kerala, a number of things come into my mind.

1, I want us to be there for parents
2, I want to be there for this little boy who is in a difficult state of life.
3, I don't want to alienate my son from his roots
4, I want to volunteer for an orphanage a little bit (I know I know, I am much too spoiled to be a handy-woman of any kind, but I can be a tutor :-) )
5, I want to have some sort of a career, if that's an option.

I do mean all of these, one hundred per cent, but there is one more thing which I don't actually voice out, but is of equal importance (at least to me).
Save my hair! at least what ever is left of it!

Really shallow? I know :-)

I do love this song of Kavya Madhavan, look how beautifully fresh or freshly beautiful she looks!

An old picture of S.K Pottakkatt. Thats my Valyachan behind him with big smile.

Its not really about the chicken biriyani

Have you ever smirked at a woman who praises her own culinary/ house keeping skills? If you have, please make it a point not to do it the next time you hear some one say, how her biriyani made raves at the previous dinner party. Its not really about what you think it is.

I grew up seeing the sighs and sorrows of a highly talented woman. She cooked divinely, ran the the house efficiently, stitched beautifully, smiled deliberately and suffered silently. I don't remember anybody complimenting her for anything; not even for her skill of turning water into wine, meeting the demands with limited resources and bearing with the greatness of an idealistic man. Sometimes in the afternoon, if she was not tired, she would recite poetry, I still cherish the memory of her sweet voice. She did have quite a taste for sad, emotionally haunting poems, Vennikkulam's Ganga was her favourite.

A few years after I left for Trivandrum, she decided to burn her emptiness,tears and sorrows. Along with those, her voice, her smile and her much neglected sweet self were also reduced to ashes. Every body blamed her, for putting all of us in grief and disgrace. Sometimes in the silence of sleepless nights, I blamed her too for losing faith.

Over the years it became an obsession with me to interpret silences, to guess what people really try to say with sighs. I wish I was old enough to understand my valyamma's silences. But nobody can turn back time.

Then after I got married, I met this other highly talented woman who was caught in the clutches of domesticity. Strange if you think about it, I had met my husband in college and neither of our families were thrilled about it. We belonged to different castes and our horoscopes were not an exact match,sadly the two primarily important things you need, to get your parents' consent on your choice of partner in India.

My mother in law had looked at me suspiciously in the beginning, lets face it I don't cut a good first impression, I was just a shy, slightly spoiled, average looking girl whom her son seemed to like for incomprehensible reasons. She would tell me at length, about her sacrifices for her children. She was a topper during her under graduate studies, but never got an opportunity to work as she had to be there for her children; how each one of their accomplishments would track back to her years of devotion and care (and  delicious home made meals). If I say that I did not find it overbearing, that has to be a lie. But, life.... the magic of each passing year ....

I formed a very strong kinship with my mother in law over the years. In many ways she reminds me of the one I lost, the one I could not help. My mother in law is a purist who fights somebody else's battle and gets hurt sometimes, who deliberately stays righteous and who is often taken for granted. Sometimes when people seem to forget her sacrifices she is lost and indulge in self-praising. Everybody has the need to feel good about themselves. But she then goes out of her way to help others and takes their burden on her shoulders.

She is often scorned by the world, and once during a deeply upsetting turn of events, she asked me in tears why she is that way, why being real and good had not rewarded her in life, why some unconscientious people still manage to hurt her. I told her it would take 9 lives for others to learn what she knows about life and she just has to forgive the lesser souls. I don't know what made me say that, but that made sense to her.

Sometimes I think if I hadn't loved and understood my valyamma I would not have been able to appreciate my mother in law. And strangely now I understand my mother too..

In this surprisingly long detour of my life, I find myself seeking for approval on simple things. I ask my husband at least 5 times during a meal if everything tastes good. I apologize to him when I miss the weekly cleaning schedule even if he doesn't notice. Its tough as I was not groomed to be a good house keeper.
Somehow this feeling that you are being defined by what you do takes hold of you.

So if you know a woman who keeps praising herself, please bear with her and turn a sympathetic ear. Its just that her creativity is crying for expression and her need for appreciation is getting the best of her.

This is why this blog is not shared on FB. I don't want to lose the liberty to write about family :-)

Life and Bollywood - 5

This unfathomable power of destiny to make and break lives! And sometimes at the same time! Isn't it cruel that life can make a person so successful and still take all the happiness away from them?

My salute to the memory of Meena Kumari, one of the most talented actresses of Hindi cinema, whose brilliant portrayal of many grief-stricken, tragic women gave her the name 'The Tragedy Queen'. 

Strangely tragedy and drama ruled her personal life as well. It even began with drama, if you ask me. Born as Mehjabeen to struggling stage actors Ali Baksh and Iqbal Begum in 1932, Meena Kumari was left in a Muslim orphanage as her parents could not even pay the doctor's fee. But after a few hours her father came and claimed her back.

Little Mehjabeen wanted to go to school and have a normal life, but she was forced into acting from the age of 7. She made her debut as Baby Meena in Farzand-e-Watan 1939. In the fourties she became the sole bread-winner of her family. 

Meena Kumari gained fame and recognition with the success of Baiju Bawra 1952. Her performance was critically acclaimed and she won the first filmfare award for an actress in 1953 for her portrayal of the self sacrificing tragedienne heroine.

There was a huge development in her personal life as well around this time. She fell in love with director Kamal Amrohi. Amrohi was already married and was 15 years older to her. Before we start raising fingers, lets just reflect over the facts. She was hardly even 20; life is nothing but an array of beautiful possibilities at that age and love is divine. She soon became his second wife and the 'choti Ammi' to his children.

The domestic responsibilities did not slow down her career. She was able to repeat her tremendous success in the movies like Parineeta, Ek hi raasta, Dil Apna aur Preet Parai  to name a few. In 1956 she started working on Pakeezah with her husband. Though the fate of this movie was often indefinite through the ups and downs of their marriage, it would ultimately become her role of a lifetime.

She has made me cry in almost all the movies I have watched of her. My favourite is Guru Dutt's Saheb, Bibi aur Ghulam 1962. Her portrayal of 'choti Bahu', the orthodox Brahmin woman, who chained down her philandering husband, by turning herself into his personal drunken singing girl, is simply phenomenal. Here is a song from this movie. Just look at those eyes.

In the movie choti Bahu becomes an alcoholic and meets with a very tragic end. Ironically Meena Kumari's own life was also heading for the same direction.

Due to their personal as well as professional differences, she had separated from her husband and was turning to alcohol for solace. Her affair with actor Dharmendra, who was many years younger to her , and the subsequent break up also became a reason for her deterioration. She was rejected by both men she loved.

May be this is the right place to mention her accomplishments as a poetess. Poetry had always been natural to her, but the heart ache was adding fuel to the fire. I have been trying to get hold of the translations of some of her poetry, my Hindi is not all that good, but I have to say, the haunting quality of her poetry literally rendered me speechless. The expressions like 'Yaad ke Jugnu' ! well what can I say...

Meena Kumari was later diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, though she sought treatment in London, her condition continuously deteriorated. Irrespective of her disagreement with her estranged  husband and her failing health she continued to work on Pakeezah. The film released in 1972 to lukewarm response, but the audience flocked in to the theaters in a month; it's heroine had the left the world of tragedy and drama and had succumbed to the ultimate salvation. Thus Pakeezah became a major block buster success, after Meena Kumari's death. 

She still continues to haunt us with her brilliant portrayal of many lonely, suppressed women. And we are still mesmerized by that, unblemished beauty and that anguish-laden voice!

What is there in life after all, if there are no fireflies of memories!

I love this song of her :-) 

Just this song

I don't know how long I've been searching for this one.

Sighs in the moonlight

I walk to your door
Drenched in moonbeams and guilt,
You don't hear my footsteps,
They're lost in the wind.

You think it's wind chimes
When I knock on your door
For I am nothing but moonlight
In the darkness of night.

I enter your chamber
With the lightness of a soul
And stand near your bedstead
When you toss in your sleep.

You dream of moonbeams
You dream of me
When I hover over you
As the shadow of past.

When I touch you with fingers
You feel the chill
Your eyes seem to moist
With your tears and mine.

Your eyes ache to see me
With the first ray of sun
But I am nothing but dewdrops
On your window at dawn.