Stories from the hiatus 2: What is it that brings on a smile?

May be, champagne overflowing the glasses? I guess not only that can create a happy smile.

Happiness is a heady mixture of the feeling of being in the company of people who celebrate life not only with the molecules of the chemical elements, variously christened as wine, champagne, vodka and their likes. You need someone to spill it from your glass of pleasure. You need the company of people who care to talk to you and to listen to you; the company of people who create the arbitrary molecules of experience that you can call life.

The finest experience of this Christmas eve is a rather natural phenomenon when you have all the eight people strumming guitars and singing. It was the after-dinner song carnival that filled the wooden house with a throbbing vibration of music.

After a long day of preparing for the I-lost-count-of-the-number-of-courses meal spanning a mind boggling 5 hours, the father started humming a song which soon became a full-house chorus! Just when I was thinking now people will gradually doze off on the sofas and the armchairs and on the dining table, there was a fluster of activity across the room. The uncle was busy with a group of possibly-amateur connoisseurs of vodka, the grandma was lazily reclining on the sofa with one of her grandchild and chatting like sixteen-year old friends. the youngest kid was cuddling into the sofa, while the three gorgeous sisters were, by now, singing full-throttle.

It was like being a third person narrator in a novel. I was there, mouthing the only words that I had remembered from the last night's singing ritual at Angelique and Jerome's home :  Jolie bouteille, sacrée bouteille .... And as I observed the magical vibrancy of all the voices in the chorus, I realised they are singing for the joy of it. A simple fact, but wondrous in a strange mundane way!

They have sung these songs many times and yet when they were singing these when the eve of christmas had walked into the day of christmas, waves of joy and peace filled the mind. The songs were not religious alone. They were the songs of life - ranging from the drunkard's plea to his loving bouteille  to help him quit drinking, to the song filled with painful memories of the Jewish concentration camps, to hymns. 

This Christmas dinner, could have forced me into the cliched expression of Christmas being the festival of time spent with family and all that. As I looked at the faces of the mother and the father, who brought up their six kids, not in any other excess but in the excess of life and a strange force of living life up to the potential that each of them have.

The Christmas clause is the potential to walk on. The potential to have the courage to follow your dreams, knowing well that they are not really Columbusque in scope. Our acts in our little lives do not change the worldscape of others. The single day of the Christmas celebrations do not drown our thousand conflicts. What it does is that, it  re-affirms the hope that we can walk together, in spite of our differences. That we can create music and be alive by embracing each moment. The clause of Christmas is possibly the inherent truth of life ... be here, be now. And that will make us smile.

P.S. Though the "Stories from the hiatus" series is concluded with this post, the experiences from this christmas spent with a marvellous family will keep cropping up in various posts for certain. This is a conscious decision of the blogger. The experience of having met these  special people can not solely be confined in a series on a singular event. As I realise it now, it is not only an experience of christmas, it is an experience of life.

Image: song-carnival post christmas eve dinner.

Stories from the hiatus 1

A wooden house. A family of laughter. A father with a penchant for photography. A mother with a womb of artistic creations. Six siblings, playing the guitar, singing songs learnt while camping. The walls filled with the scent of love, inviting hope, relations and creations. Walls of glass rushing in the light of life and love. Amidst this crazy dance of life, christmas presents sit with gaiety on the chairs and on the arms of the sofas ... waiting to be unwrapped, waiting to burst into a new strain of happiness in belonging.

Age is a bluffer's name. The grandmother sings along with the kids from sixteen to twenty-eight. The busyness in the kitchen gets interrupted by the 'kids' hungry for the chocolate, sticking to the spatula after it is spread on the cake. I join in unceremoniously. 

After almost-skating across the lanes to and from the church, the muse of the night starts gleaming. Tinkering glasses with miniatures hand printed by the mother, the decorative plates, the one-eyed Santa and the glittering Christmas tree invite in more life and laughter. The uncle with his first-of-its-kind beard, the adorable aunt, the gregarious cousins trickle in with more of the clause of laughter and joy.   

Images: the christmas home of Angélique's parents ... December 2010.

*******

I had thought I will pen down my thoughts of this Christmas with a parisian family in a single blog post. However, as I sit to write this post, so many impressions rush through the mind that it is becoming increasingly difficult to capture all of that (or at least some of that) in words and pictures. Hence I choose to leave this post with the TO BE CONTD.  mark :) Keep reading to know what happened as the christmas clause took us to another land... 

To be contd.

Puja Chronicles : To continue or not ...

Now that the festival is over, it seems appropriate to conclude the series 'Puja Chronicles'. That time has passed.But does any time really 'end' ?

The smell of the slightly chilly morning wind, that of the incense sticks; the sounds of the dhak and the repeated-forever selection of songs in the para (neigbourhood) pandal (the structure which houses the deities for the festival); the illegible mantras (Sanskrit slokas used in the process of praying to the deity) of the mumbling priests; the sight of the strangely blue sky of shorot (a month in the Bengali calendar in which the Durga Puja takes place) - do they not leave behind traces of life in our beings? A friend and a reader of this creative blabbering, Supratikda, commented on a previous post, asking whether the pain of an ending can be mellowed by the resurgent nature of hope. That made me think. Do we really want to mellow down an experience that is rich and trying? I, for one, wouldn't want to do so. But yes, hope is the elixir of life. It does not only signify the possibility of a better tomorrow, but, to this hopelessly optimist soul, it also keeps alive, and burning, the possibility of miracles. Or, to use a more candid expression - the possibility of the absolutely unexpected awesome happenings. This brings us to another bend in the road of thought. What defines and measures the awesomeness of a happening? Well, I am sorry to confide that I can not help in your understanding of the element of 'awesomeness' in a concrete manner. But I can, and will, share with you my experiences of the 'awesomeness' of life which happened in strange corners of the busy-dom in which we live.

P.S. I choose to continue the series 'Puja Chronicles' not because they have some connection to the event of the puja itself (well, it may, at times), but because life is possibly the greatest puja (prayer) that any being can perform. 'Puja Chronicles' henceforth will celebrate life with its resplendent awesomeness.         

resplendent in its awesomeness

Image: An Evening Sky in Lund, Sweden.

           © 2010 Susmita Paul

Puja Chronicles ...

Blaring microphones belch out songs which have the hallmark of being 'puja' specials ... 'Aamar swapno je, satti holo aj ...' (My dreams have materialised today ...) Three days before the grand event begins (the rituals of worshipping begin on the Saptami- the seventh day in the cycle of the moon which is called Debi pokkho- the fortnight of the mother goddess), the darkness of the evening melts into the lights flattering the grandeur. From slums to multiplexes, there is this unmistakable vibe of celebration. As the deity of the Mother Goddess Durga arrives with those of her supposed children - the yellow skinned Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth),the white skinned Saraswati (the goddess of learning), the elephant-faced Ganesha (the god of prosperity) and Kartik (the god of war) with his chocolate-hero looks-the pandal (the structure temporarily created to house the deities for the festival) is still incomplete. But just the next day, as the morning of Shashti (the sixth day of the cycle of the moon ) dawns, the labourers are packing their stuff. The pandal is complete with its decorations, the festivities are about to begin.        





Image: blooming flowers, Lund, Sweden

be a bag today...

When such strange status statements appeared in women-friends' profiles, I was intrigued.When that message came in, I was amused. Amused at the diverse ways we can think. Amused that after years of coyness, we are choosing to shrug it off with a pseudo-coy statement.  The message cleared the intrigue and challenged me. I remembered the last year's challenge. I failed it. Because I was thinking too much about people's reaction. I was afraid by the barge of queries that may come up. And the year passed. 

*****

Maima (approximately translated as 'aunty') has weeks when the right hand swells up like a big balloon. Not only the movement of the hand gets restricted, but also the pain etches itself out on her face as dark patches under the eyes. Once, she had curly long hair. After all the sessions, her hair is now short and thinning. Yet she smiles every time we meet, asking me if I am keeping well or not. I don't have the guts to ask her how she is.

*****

When the message settled into my inbox, I only thought about her. I thought about women like her. The only question that crossed my mind was: Could she have a better life if she was more aware? Or her family was more aware? The answer seems rhetorical. I responded to the message.

Image Courtesy: http://www.pursuegoodstuff.com/Events.htm

Survival kit



There's a point in life when you cry when your toe is hurt because it hits the pebble. There's also a point in life when you cry because a pebble hits your toe. You forget when your toe hit the pebble, but you never forget the pebble which hit your toe. Why do you think  forgetting functions in such a strange discriminatory way?Why doesn't the mind forget all the hurts and all the burns like a flash flood that leaves no trace of itself except  a vacant land? You will say, the vacant land becomes the memory of the flash flood and hence it is impossible to forget it. You are right. The flash floods leave behind a vacant land, where once there was life and laughter, poverty and pain. And yet, do you think, those who survive such flash floods will die with remembrance of things past? Survival is like betel leaves. No matter how much you wished to secretively have them, the inadvertent red colour hang onto your lips and tongue.

You can not wash off life. But you can wash off despair. You can wash off the pains of being hurt by a flood of forgetting,not by denial, but by acceptance. You need not forget that the pebble hit the toe. Just shrug off the grudge. Because, that is not the last pebble that will hit your toe if you continue walking.

Original image from Scout Notebook-2001 http://www.ukonline.net/scoutnotes/

Modified by self

Nandini ...

There are faces
that shine in the moon,
translucent in peace
with stars on their lips
and flights in their eyes

Some dreams
trickle down
the palm of the soil...
and bring the gurgles near
tumbling over
the conch shell's sphere ...

As honour sheds its darkness
and lust spreads its doom,
As hope springs in flowers
and boats in rainy streams
cross the oceans of silence:
the little beam of soul
steer us back to the moon

... the translucent robes of peace
with tenderness in eyes
a silent hymn they sing ...

can you hear the song?
can you feel it clear?

Image:
Photo of The Divine Comedy - Paradise
Canto 8 The Highest Beauty of Beatrice
by Salvador Dali
Wood-cut 1960

odd flights...

...

sometimes the old wind catches up pretty fast,
no matter if I am riding the rocking horse
that gives me visions.

On such days,
above the clouds,
the planets hang out
the sun takes a nap, and,
the holy cow flies across the moon.

And then, the pegasus of my vision
shrinks to the rocking horse,
that once gave me dreams ...

image: detail of a bird, medium: porcelain, @ Szentendre, Hungary