Apr 8, 2016 Friday Fictioneers, Original Short Story

PHOTO PROMPT © J Hardy Carroll

Word Count:  100 words of text, exactly
Genre:  Realistic Fiction

Reminiscence
©April 8th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

“Do you remember, love?  Do you remember how you and I built our house?  How we lived, loved, fought, and laughed together?  Do you remember the flowers we planted, the vegetables, the trees, our pup in the garden?”

I don’t show her pictures of the place from recent times, just the ones from long ago.

Her left hand caresses the photo-album.  Looking at the pictures, then, up at me, lips trembling, she whispers, “Who are you?”

She reaches for my arm with her right hand, and her grip tightens.

A tear falls on a photograph.  Whose?

We grow quiet together.

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Thanks, as always, to our dear Fairy Blog-Mother, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields, for hosting Friday Fictioneers, and to J Hardy Carroll for the haunting photo-prompt.

Tags: #100-wordFlashFiction, #Alzheimers, #MemoryLoss, #Nostalgia

Mar 15, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings

Today in Five Senses
©March 15th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

Today, there’s rain and damp earth, and my bulbs have begun to bloom – bright yellow flowers pushing out from the ground on rich, green stems, and shy, purple flowers just beginning to make their appearance.  And my new-growing bulbs drink long, cool draughts of air and water, and soak in sunlight, while the moisture makes all the red-brown-breasted robins come out in droves, and thirstily sip the rain drops on the leaves and on tree-bark.  They look fat and happy, ready to populate the world with more robins.  And the rich, fat, wriggly worms poke their heads out, diving into earth and making more rich, brown earth, themselves, and the robins love them for it, so much that they snack busily on them, and it’s all part of the sun-bright, rain-dimmed days that make the Spring both joyous and gray.

And I look out and am glad.

The day wears on, as days have done since I left teaching, with things to do at home, and also time to write in between.

A friend visits – he’s teaching my daughter the drums.  (She got a four-piece drum-set, to which our friend added a proper bass-drum and a tom-tom) .  It thrills me to hear her play – this is just her fourth lesson, but her six years of dancing kathak (a North-Indian classical dance form), and her innate musicality and rhythmic intelligence are a great asset, so she’s learning fast.

Last week, I sneaked into her room and played, and found to my delight, that I was able to sing and play simple drum beats, with high-hat, tom, and the bass drum, while singing my favorite Beatles songs.  Yes, I, am fortunate to have been a musician for as long as I’ve been aware that I was one, which was when I began to sing in tune at age two and a half.  I cannot wait until we can play songs together – she, and my husband and  I taking turns on guitar, bass and drums.

I listen, and hear the familiar patterns of a twelve-eight feel, ta-ki-ta, ta-ki-ta, ta-ki-ta,  ta-ki-ta.  I later learn they were practising a song that she and I know and love, the Smokey Robinson song, “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” which was later sung by The Beatles.  There’s a comforting, nostalgic feeling that sweeps over me when I hear it.  Reminds me of when I was young and full of happiness, because life was opening up for me in my twenties, and I remember listening to a cassette-tape that my future husband had sent me of The Bobs singing their brilliant a cappella version of it.  I remember, looking back, that my eyes felt like they held the sun, and my skin felt like silk, and fit me well, my blood felt right, and flowed laughingly in my veins, and my heart beat faster because I was in love, and was loved back.

Now, here I am, years later, having gone through ups and downs, but what I remember are mostly the ups, which feel so fragrant and linger so long in my mind that they feel as if they happened only yesterday.  I remember the downs, but only as if they had happened to someone else in a dream who resembled me, and whose chaotic heart I could not harness during times of turbulence.

So, it’s time to make Indian masala chai for the four of us.

I chop fresh strips of ginger and dice them, and pop them in two cups of boiling water, adding cloves and cardamom pods, and crushed black pepper.  The air is fragrant and thrills my senses.  What I need now is a stick of cinnamon, or better still, crushed cinnamon.  And lo!  Here it is, right under my nose.  Inhale that, but do it gently, and from afar – you can damage your nose and lungs seriously if you do anything more than just take a whiff of its happy-making smell.  Toss that in the ebullient water, and add some black tea leaves — enough for four people (four teaspoons will do).  Let that come to a boil.  Now add six teaspoons of brown sugar, and then two cups of milk, stirring the whole time, turning down the blue-white flame.

Oops!  I turned it off by mistake.  I try turning it on again, and I get that horrid smell, stinky as hell, that tells me the gas hasn’t been lit, though it’s on.  Quick, fix that!  Good!

Open the door to the backyard, and let the stinky smell, and our dog, out.  Holly’s both happy that the air smells good, and irked that it’s rainy.  Ah well.  All that lovely, curly, Standard-Poodle hair will get messed up.  Got to brush her tonight into a nice cloud of soft poodley fur.

Back to the tea.  Yup.  it’s done!  Let me waft the scent your way.  Can you smell it?  Now, strain the tea into four cups with a tea-strainer.  Serve it steaming hot to your family and visiting drum-teacher friend.  Set out plantain chips, and sweet-peanut crunchies.  Heat up a spinach triangle for your husband, who needs something more sustaining after a long day.

Inhale the tea, then sip.  Ahhh!

Feel that steaming liquid heal something within you – dismissing the malaise that might have crept up unawares, and looked over your shoulder.

Get back to other work, now!

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Tags: #Being in love, #Brewing spiced chai on a rainy day, #Bulbs in Spring, #Drumming in twelve-eight time, #Family and Friends, #GardeninginSpringtime, #HowtomakeMasalaChaiIndianStyle, #Journal Entry, #Life in Springtime, #Nostalgia, #RobinsLoveWorms, #Snack-time!, #Writing for the Five Senses

Mar 9, 2016 Uncategorized

Shine On!  (Sonnet for Childhood)
©March 9th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

See yon diamond kite, sweet child of the sky?
Come watch it trail its skeins of sun, and smile.
And see the air move round it in a dance –
You’ll soon, like me, fall straight into a trance.

The world moves fast around, and so do we,
Not knowing if we’re trapped, or if we’re free.
No matter what, if we but laugh in play,
All traps, and chains, and bars will fade away.

If I could find the golden key for you
And carve a doorway to a world that’s new
I’d make it full of light, and play and song
I’d walk in there; but you can fly along!

It’s in your eyes that I see childhood shine
And wish for you that it will not decline.

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Tags: #Childhood's Universe, #Nostalgia, #Original Poetry, #sonnet, Kite and sun

Mar 15, 2015 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

What I shared a minute ago on FB today:

Nostalgia of an Ex-Pat Indian

By Vijaya Sundaram

©March 15th, 2015

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Tags: #Nostalgia, Ex-pat Indian, festivals, India, Missing home, Reminiscences

Jan 29, 2014 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

Forgetting

©By Vijaya Sundaram

(Begun on January 28^th, and continued on January 29, 2014)

 My entire life has been a long process of forgetting.

This is not to say that I forget all who have done me a kindness, or been good to me, or have helped me, or have influenced me profoundly.  I remember them and bless them, and thank them in my mind every day.

This is not to say that I deny people from the past, or slight them in memory. 

It’s just that I cannot handle too much memory.  I feel weighted down with it.  Something gives.  The names or faces of people sometimes get buried deep.   Yes, I know it happens to all of us to a greater or lesser degree, but every forgetting by me seems both a blessing and a betrayal on my part.

And then, I berate myself.  Who are you?  Are you so important that you cannot remember someone who remembers you vividly?  Do you think you’re greater than they are?

I know it’s not that, though.  It’s just that everything is too much for me to bear.  Remembering is too much for me to bear.  Any memory, whether it be sharply defined, or nebulous and hazy, brings me to a deep place of introspection or sadness.  I don’t like it.

I don’t wish to live in the past.  I like sloughing it off.  Perhaps my forgetting is consciously unconscious.  I will never really know, for sure.

I was remembering my father yesterday (as I do, every day). I remembered what memory means, meant, to him.

My father had the memory of an elephant.  He always recalled people, events from his past, and historical events – history mattered to him.  He was often shocked when he’d mention a name of a relative or a friend of his, or someone we’d all known from my childhood, and I wouldn’t remember.  He was genuinely startled and (I suspect, upset) by this.  Somewhere within him, I think that he might have feared that I might forget him.  I haven’t, of course — how could I?  I still see him vividly, both as he was at the end, with tubes and medical apparatus attached to him in a hospital, as he lay dying of liver cancer, and as the young man he was, when he took us on his motorbike in the city of Pune, India.  I remember him as the middle-aged man with jaundice, to whom I read P.G. Wodehouse, making him chuckle in the summer afternoons in Madras, India.  I cannot forget how everyone adored him.  I also remembered that if they were upset with him, they somehow couldn’t hold on to it in his presence.  I can summon up in my mind’s eye, the breadth of his expansiveness when we were in a room filled with people.  Some of that expansiveness, that Jovian capacity of his rubbed off on me, I think.  I expand, too, in a room of people, but, like my mother, I also know how to shrink back into myself.

(There will be more about my mother later, and not in this piece.  This piece is about memory.)

So, my father remembered everything, and was great at telling anecdotes.  He would fill my eyes with scenes from his childhood.  He would, later in life, talk about his travels to places around the world.  He was a restless person, I think, trapped in conventional marriage and fatherhood.  While he was great at being a kind and loving dad (and I know he adored my mother), I think he probably wished to escape, sometimes.  Those travels he did (from business circumstances over which he had no control, and which came at great cost to my family) would be the stuff of his tales.  He always came off sounding great in those stories.  He remembered things beautifully.

And yet, he did this thing that disquieted me – he’d adjust his memories, repaint them, re-upholster them to suit his liking.  It was almost as if any painful moments of the past had no right to be, and only pleasant things remained.  He never, ever recollected painful things in our presence – not when we were young, not when we were old.  Any of his remembrances of difficult times would paint him in a good light, but never others in a bad light, and although he did belittle others, sometimes, to make himself look good, he was never malicious. 

This lack of balance that he exhibited towards his past, in terms of softening it, creates a curious imbalance in me.  While I don’t try and soften it, per se, I remember only the better bits.

I don’t like to dwell on painful things.  What point is there in doing that?

I dislike talking about embarrassing things.  I find no pleasure in turning them into charming stories.  Some people do that beautifully, and I love hearing them, but I’m no good at them.

I prefer not to hold grudges.  I want to forgive, always.  It hurts me to not forgive.  When someone who has harmed me is nice, I act like a puppy and melt towards them.  I don’t forget, though.  A part of me is still wary.  However, I always forgive.

However, I don’t forgive myself, ever, for hurting anyone.

I dislike re-hashing the past (and yet, I do rehash it with my siblings, something that I would suppose many siblings do).

I vow not to repaint the past to suit my liking.  In my mind, when I realize that I did wrong, hurt people’s feelings, didn’t speak up when I should have, spoke up too harshly, when I could have been kinder, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about that.  Wrong is wrong.  There are no excuses.

However, I will not talk about that to all and sundry.  Why should I?  It’s none of anybody’s business, except mine, my husband’s (because he should know), and the person I wronged or hurt in any way.  The problem with people (that includes me), is that once we have a picture in our heads about how someone was, or how someone behaves, we find it hard to dislodge that memory of that person.  It occludes our vision of the person who is currently before us.

I may not repaint the past to make myself look too good when I wasn’t, but like my father, I tend to dwell on pleasant things.  In that instance, I am like him.

The past has no meaning for me, except that I have to admit that it has taught me things.  Sometimes, although I dismiss nostalgia as indulgence, the past wafts over me like a perfume-laden breeze, or a magic carpet.  And then, I let it bear me away, and I ache with longing for when I was little, and played in the dirt, or when I ate gulkhand made from sweet roses in the garden of a neighborhood acquaintance in Poona (now Pune), India. 

I remember missing the school bus one day, because I was too intent, in my kindergarten innocence, on picking fresh, ripe fruit from the tamarind trees in my school grounds.  I managed to get home, by flagging down a rickshaw, and taking the driver through the tortuous bus-route to get me home (I didn’t know my address, you see, but I knew the way home — I have always known the way home in every sense of the phrase).  The amazing thing is that he got me home safely.  My parents were so grateful — that rickshaw driver was a good man, who must have chuckled at my innocent brashness.  I remember expecting to be driven home, and I was!  Only as a grown-up did I fully realize how dangerous the situation could have been.

I remember many things, but they are like things which happened in a dream, to somebody else, and yet, I know that somebody very well, as well as I do myself.  Oh, it’s confusing!

I am amazed that the creature that I was is the same entity as the creature that I am now.  And yet, so much has been sloughed off.  So much has been rebuilt.  So much is about new memories overlaying old ones. 

I feel like an archaeological dig sometimes.  When I try and remember things, re-member, as in re-attaching all the parts of myself that seem to have floated off into the deep space of the deep past, surprising things surface.  It is not that I dislike my past – it is that for some reason, it seems irrelevant to my conscious mind.  And yet …

My cells remember.  My blood, constantly renewed, remembers.  My eyes remember.  My nose and ears remember.  My skin remembers.  My feet remember. 

Songs come floating back on a stray breeze into my mind.  I stumble upon a line from a book or a movie, and a whole chunk of my childhood, or young adulthood breaks off and floats towards me.  I take care to avoid a collision, but as it floats by me, I admire the crystalline beauty of an encapsulated past.  Frozen in its depths are images, faces, songs, people in mid-action, reflections in pools, sensations, tastes, colors.  Some of them lack context.  They come and go, little bubbles of memory, untethered to other memories.  Some, however, are linked, like creatures in a dream move about in that frozen landscape, holding hands.

(Mixed metaphors, anyone?)

How can we ever get old, when we remember on that level? 

And yet, I forget so many of the specifics – names of people who drifted in and out on the tide, names of places I’ve been and bus numbers of buses I rode for years.  I forget what it was that made me drift away from certain people.  I forget why I couldn’t bear the smell of someone or something.  I forget why I was completely unaware of things when I was a certain age, and painfully aware of every slight, every injury at a much later age.  I cannot seem to understand why other people’s lies or disingenuous behaviors made me so angry and so upset that I lost my capacity for compassion, or for distance. 

I spend much of my life forgetting things.  Was this the result of conscious choice, or is it rationalization after the fact?  Is all this “forgetting” a measure of protection?  (For, I feel that my capacity for memory is finite, and I cannot overload this particular camel with the last straw that will break its back.) 

The fact is I’ll never know. 

What I do know is that I have met a whole lot of people in my life, from years of teaching, performing, living.  I wish I could recall all of them.  Every one of them gave me something, and I’m grateful to all of them.  Because of all of those who gave me perspective, criticism, love, support, respect and kindness, I think I’ve become better at being a person, at being a friend, at being fully aware of my actions.  Isn’t that what the past is supposed to do for us, not load us down with pointless facts, but amorphous experience?

I guess my past has taught me, after all. 

I hope so.

_____________________________ The End ______________________________

Tags: #Forgiveness, #Nostalgia, Forgetting, Growing up ïn India, Memory, Remembering the past

Jan 4, 2014 Reading, Writing, Thinking

I like typing, because I type fast, a few notches below the speed of thought, but several notches faster than the slow movement of a pen across a sheet of paper.

Yet, there was something missing.

Then, I saw Neil Gaiman on December 29th at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, and when I finally got to shake hands with him and get his autograph, I saw that he used a fountain pen.

And a familiar fondness for the days when I used one washed over me.

I found myself missing the slow allure of fountain pens, which we used so casually, back when I was young.  I said so on FB, and some of my friends and former students talked about how they loved using fountain pens still.

It was sweet to read.

And I remembered how my father loved Parker Pens and Sheaffer Pens, and I remember the ritual of filling my more ordinary fountain pens with turquoise ink from Quink (Quill Ink, if I recollect) in India.  Wistfulness, memory, nostalgia, and a need to go back to writing in the slow lane all blended into this strange need.  I went online and ordered a Sheaffer fountain pen, which hasn’t arrived yet.

Later in the week, I was rummaging through a drawer which had lain forgotten for a few years, and found a Sheaffer Calligraphy Fountain Pen set, which I had ordered in a fit of nostalgia five or so years ago.  I kicked myself for forgetting I had it, but decided that it wasn’t too late.

So, I took it out, put it together and wrote.

And lo, if my handwriting didn’t come out all stylish and calligraphic!  (I have terrible handwriting when I write with a ball-point pen, and it must be because it’s so terribly utilitarian and boring to write with!)

And I wrote in rhyme!

In the next two posts are (virtually unedited) two verses I wrote, both not related to each other or anything else.  Please check the next two posts for each poem I wrote in pen, then typed into WordPress  Just a start.

Thanks for reading!

Love,

Dreamer of Dreams

Tags: #Nostalgia, Calligraphic Pens, Creative writing in the slow lane, Fountain Pens, Writing by hand