Lakshamma

She would come every day with her brows furrowed deep, looking thirsty and resolute. Brown wrinkled skin that had slogged incessantly under the Indian sun for many summers, a stooping aged frame that shook to her mercurial tempers….receding white hair that she was obnoxious enough to colour an abnormally thick boot-polish black with cheap dye when she managed some extra money....that was Lakshamma for me.

She faught with my brother all the time.

It would start with a thump. Dropping the broom to the floor, she would proceed to argue in her throaty high-decibel squeak. I would leave them to it, knowing that it would conclude sooner or later. Sure enough, she would stomp out of the room irritated, her small frame shaking to her temperamental tantrums. My cheeky brother’s continuous stream of harsh criticisms were what caused this. They would constantly irk her to no end. She would show her anger on the broom, sweeping in a maniac frenzy, her ageing frame bending over.

Lakshamma was never impeccable in her chores---a fact that she wouldn't accept even if the evidence stared at her right in the face. There was coarseness to her shabby work, completed with hasty impatience. She was the busy-bee who always has too much to handle on her stooping shoulders and she never cared enough but to reply with a very blatant “no” if we occasionally complained about the quality of her work. Of course, her work wasn’t anything exciting, she never received promotions. Lakshamma was just the typical housemaid—tough, quick with a mercurial temper, shabby, hasty and gruff.

But nothing I’ve ever seen is more beautiful than the innocent heart of hers.

She was the somebody that had never grown out of childhood. Happily unaffected by the complex chaos that was the world, she had developed into a very pure-minded individual with clean hands. Her mind held the same childlike wonder towards the world…..although she never made any sincere attempt to learn. There would forever be that curious kid in her--- the one who looked at vehicles as marvels, and who didn’t know why aero planes flew or how many continents there were. For her, the world was just a very big puzzle not worth solving. She would admire from afar when god granted her the time. When he didn’t, she would get right back to work, following the bland routine. She would stare at walls and think deeply when we handed her the filter coffee in a steel tumbler. I often wondered what she thought about that much.

It was true life had been unfair to her. Her husband ran away, leaving her to face her world alone. She had seen hard days. And had survived through raw grit and endurance. Life had given her her blows very early and she had accepted the challenges. One thing that stood out about her personality was that she wasn’t the resigned, fatigued spirit who moaned about the injustice in her life. She was ignorant, that is true, but certainly not pessimistic although she had every reason to be. Every single day was survival for Lakshamma. And she knew that she had to work very hard to maintain a crumbling family. Burdened but never submissive to the ways of the world, she would slog under the sun, ignoring the weather. She was a fighter.

I shared my name with Lakshamma. My food. My dreams. I shared a lot. Although she gave me absolutely bizarre advises (like tattooing symbols on my forehead, for example), she sometimes slipped me snippets of her life. I found her a fascinating person to talk to. Her simplistic, honest-on-the-face and gruff habits pleased me in the weirdest of ways. And her antics were even more amusing. I had grown with the house, and Lakshamma has been part of the house ever since I can remember. She, in fact, has been part of my life ever since I can remember as well. She has seen me grow up, but she hasn’t for me. I might grow taller by the inches, but she’ll always look taller to my eyes. Somethings don’t change.

As I unveil my soul scrolls, I see that I have shared quite a bit with this woman---she’s integral to everything that defines home….she somehow has to be there in the background of any significant memory….because she’s always stayed there.

She was my first pillion rider, (that’s a story I would someday share in much more of a detail), and such an amazing flatterer. It was utter delight when I accidentally spotted her walking with those furrowed brows in Hawaii slippers down familiar streets. “There is somebody I know” I would say, if anybody asked. Doing that made me feel warm.

“Lakshamma!” I would scream, no matter if she could hear me or not. Acknowledging her presence in my world has always seemed important to me.

Ultimately, my brother’s criticisms weren’t unjust you know. She was inefficient. She was hasty. She was sometimes really stubborn. But she was also somebody who didn’t give up. She was my friend.

I don’t get to meet her often anymore. She doesn’t work for us from the time we moved here. But if I do get to spot her on the streets, I wouldn’t forget to frantically call to my first pillion rider and acknowledge her presence in my life and growing up.

And I know that she’ll turn right back to smile at me, unforrowing her brow with recognition and throw a friendly wave at me before her Hawaii slippers carry her stooping, aged figure into the streets, her mud-caked feet disappearing into the common masses.

Reminiscing a Rainy Day

The earth smiles as she experiences as gradual thaw. Spring is inching closer and a shy dreamer pokes her head out of the chaos of life to try and make sense of it. The open air bites at the wheels that smoothly travel on the tar, and the dreamer takes notice. Pale yellow of early blossoms, stretches of emerald, the slick black of tar, and the comely whiteness of the skies above….color is returning to the world in all vivacity. The legs push harder on the favorite machine as she continues to travel, absorbed in the awakening enigma around her.

It takes little time to get used to the faint sunlight of the early March days and the very fickle winds. But things were different in autumn before the winter had set in. Autumn’s magic had a different flavor to it. The unusual trick of the stubborn autumnal October days had been an extraordinarily inconsistency in the weather. October had pretended lovely summer with splashes of unexpected rains in between. And as I passed the same tarred parking lots that were once slippery after rainy days, I remembered a very photographic journey from 4 months ago....

It is an autumnal day that has come with the rains. I open my eyes to see the raindrops collecting on the panes, knocking invitingly. I rejoice, evasively slipping out with camera in hand. The rains persist pleasantly, and the damp earth is thriving to the rare autumnal rains—a celebration of epic proportions. A key was unlocked, and a door yanked open. A bike is pulled out enthusiastically and then the world was pulsing to my rapid rhythm. I peddle relentlessly, a lone cyclist in the deserted gloom of the wide outdoors. A panoramic view of the hills add to the experience. The same roads. The same bike. The same person. And a different world.

If there was one thing I;ll never grow tired of, it is biking in the rains. Although it is an activity I thoroughly enjoy and savor, it is like that rare treat one has to anticipate. Firstly, it doesn’t rain every day. Secondly, it is very hard to evade my very guarding parents. I have never fallen sick because of biking in the rains before, not that I am very scared of the possibility of falling ill. It is the moment that matters and to see one slip away being locked up warmly at home is absolute anguish. But today is a lucky day indeed. The knowledge smiles on my lips as I peddle away.

The maples shiver helplessly, succumbing to the mighty force of the steady rains. They litter the street side, the beautiful tawny standing out against the black of the tar. The bike skids to a halt and I crouch next to them, the rain dripping off my very long hair. Believe me, those of you who haven’t seen the beauty in the webbed vein of a maple have missed out on much. I pick a soggy one up. It clings limply to my palm. The rain is like dew, collecting in very different ways on each maple. The fearless camera finds its food. It has become a moment which has stayed picture perfect.

Further along the road, I find something curious. A rose petal is quivering tenderly as the rains splatter mercilessly. It looks like the brutal winds haven’t managed to kill the little petal yet. She is the coy pink of an early bloom, stolen by the winds and tossed unfeelingly to the ground. It is a pity she has to find an end this way. I watch her suffering, feeling delicate myself. I’m forced to leave her there, tremulous and weak under the rains. Abandoned, she cries alone under the weeping skies. I have no choice but to walk away.

The bike is wet, the hair is damp and tangled. The far side of the fence is dancing to the rain, and the heart is enthralled. The ear is enjoying a melody and the mind is awake. Wide-eyed, I gaze at the bleak horizons and the planes which are hardly visible. It feels like nature’s little secrets lie just beyond, and that I’m unable to grasp it.

As time crawls steady, the rains subside and comforting, sleepy lull descends. The thirsty ground has been fed, and is yawning loud. The dreamer in me also retires and creativity is slowing. Understanding that the euphoria is evanescing with the rains, I turn back. I return home shabby as an old dog to receive an earful for my mischief.
But the mind is elsewhere, wandering in and out of the autumnal rains, reliving.

Monsoon Memories

“Dear Journal “I had scribbled in an immature hand, “Today had been so much fun. It really was wonderful,” and had simply left it at that. For a person who is reading this one and a half years later, it is quite an arduous task to sift through her memories to remember what had been so fun, and what had made her feel so wonderful back then. Sometimes, I despise my own journal entries because they do not tell me everything. They merely reflect my mood on some particular day, or record the irrelevancies of my life which are of no significance to me now. For some vague reason, I was perturbed. I went to sleep with a question prodding my mind, like a playful cat toying with its food. “What had happened that day? Why was that day so wonderful?”

In sleep, something intruded into my dreams. It was a tenuous wisp of a memory which answered the puzzling question. I saw it clearly in my brain:

I remembered that evening. The day was done for the most part, and we watched the people worm their way homewards, through the muddy roads, dressed to evade the rains. The rains had been especially torrential, and many had grown weary of them. But we didn’t mind, my cousin and I, we loved the monsoons. That evening, a mild rain started off again, and we watched fascinated, like children. Soon, there was power-cut, mystifying the environment. We couldn’t have waited for a better invitation. That day, we called the neighbors over, and we soaked to the bones, screaming with delight as we drenched. We laughed and sang as the thunder set up a tempo. Oh yes, I remembered now, writing to my journal in semi-darkness, scribbling badly because I couldn’t see in the faint light of the lamp. “Today had been so much fun. It really was wonderful,” Nothing seemed more obvious, and my experience seemed to require no further explanation.

This was followed by one memory after another.

It was another wasted day, and I was slightly grumpy. I had finished my homework, devoured all the available novels, and wrapped up my studies. Nothing had interested me, and I felt strangely detached. I slipped outside, into the backyard, and saw no stars. I sought comfort in staring up at the skies, seeing those smiling stars winking at me. But that day, the skies were an ominous grey, and they frustrated me with their solemnity. But there was a wind, so I settled down, enjoying it. And gradually, the winds got stronger, and a rain started off, washing away my frustration gracefully. I was not cold, but I closed my eyes, and found thrill in the sensation of rain drops landing on my arm. I knew no one would think I’m crazy to be wetting myself in the rain this way, simply because no one was watching. I hummed a nice melody as I swayed with the wind. Minutes later, my frustration felt unreal, and I returned to my room, smiling without knowing why.

It was the holidays. I was relaxing in my bed, reading a somewhat boring book called “The Haunted Island,” My concentration was slipping away, and my eyes were running down the sentences without understanding them. I heard a rumble outside, and I threw the window open, and waited. The rains lashed outside, and I enjoyed listening to this. Suddenly, the book became a favorite. I stayed up, reading it until it’s finished.

I woke up with the memories still clinging onto my eyelids and squinted. The Californian sun was blazing outside, intruding into my bedroom. I stared out of my window. It looked quite sunny, but I knew I would shiver if I stepped out. The world looked a bit too bright for my liking. The autumns here will be uncertain; they always play with my senses. The weather changes rapidly as it fancies, and is very inconsistent. I scolded my inquisitive brain for making me remember the monsoons. I was missing the rains again, and sometimes, I thought, it’s better if some questions are left unanswered. The next day, I was blessed with mild rains, in the middle of autumn! I would never have expected it, that too in California....It looked like someone had suddenly decided to change the weather for me. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, this brief spell of rain, revisiting my monsoon memories again and again.

Virtual Dreams

I was once a millionaire who owned a sprawling mansion in the middle of nowhere, cared for an exotic azure cat, and constantly saw to it that fairies sprinkled pixie dust all along the way. My world was utopian, perfect, exciting. The only problem was, it was virtual.

I was introduced to a website called neopets at the age of eleven---the age when my common sense was slumbering peacefully somewhere in the back of my brain. Neopia was the promising land where all my desires could be fulfilled. There were unlimited games, virtual rewards, and an opportunity to claim a non—existent creature as my own. The internet told me an attractive lie, and I easily fell into the vicious trap. Every day, my “virtual” pets would demand some food, clothing, shelter, a companion, and it was my responsibility to satisfy their cravings. I soon developed an emotional attachment to them, even though I knew, somewhere in the depths of my heart, that they were not living things, but merely an artificially programmed images, and very immature imitation of biological beings. Another reason for my apparent addiction to the website was that the virtual me found success very easily, and was more responsible, skilled and purposeful than the real me. I saw a superior image of myself projected there, and it soon grew into an obsession. I wanted to keep on going.
I spent more of my sunny days that year, ruining the keyboard, than stepping outside to breathe in the fresh air, skip about the pavement, or feel the grass under my feet. Soon, I was not even a millionaire. I now was nearing a billion neopoints in my virtual bank, and I seized every opportunity to work on the website. One day, my father took me to the library, to browse for books, but I wasted the day using the library computer instead, playing games, earning more neopoints than ever before! It seemed like an achievement, and in that moment of blissful jubilation, I forgot to log out. I was ecstatic all the way home, I kept reciting to myself, like a familiar mantra, “Hundred more points for a billion….hundred more….”
As soon as I was home, I rushed to the computer again. My eyes were never tired of feasting on my exotic pets (I had now painted them purple), and my fingers never fatigued in the effort of dragging my virtual car (which was being bombed by the enemy) to safety, and my mind never took a break from trying to crack difficult anagrams. All these would earn me neopoints, and I logged on to the computer again. That day, my bank showed I owned no money, my deposit a horrifying single “0” where there supposed to have been 9 of them. My inventory had been robbed, my pets stripped of their luxuries. That day, I faced utter devastation.
My eleven year old brain was shattered, I sobbed into the night. My parents told me it was nothing to worry about, that my fears were imagined. Neopia was not real, so was my loss. I lived in denial of the fact for many days, finding the truth hard to ingest. Gradually, I grew out of it, started spending my summer days skipping on the pavement, rather than shopping in a virtual supermarket. It was easy for me to forget my addiction, but it is not so for millions of kids around the globe. Virtual heavens and computer games have tremendous psychological impact on a child. I know it from experience that there is no good to be gained from them. I’m not saying this because I’m not a virtual billionaire anymore, but I’m saying this with the realization of the amount of time and effort I wasted to nurture false dreams. Such things are nothing less than self-deceit. What bothers me of late is that more such websites are cropping up everywhere on the internet. Much to my disappointment, my favorite magazine, Tinkle has launched tinkleindiaonline.com, a very similar website, which rewards kids with virtual money for playing games. Although the games are considerably less violent, they can still addict kids. It’s a major issue, and I have no answers to resolve it. All that I know today, as I breathe in the fresh air, and enjoy the moist of the very dewy grass below my feet, the world is beautiful. More importantly, it is real, and very much here. I just hope that computer game addicts would sense that, instead of chasing after something which only superficially looks splendid. True splendor can be uncovered in the intricate web a spider builds, or a mountain flower in full bloom. Today, I am grateful for that helpful guy who robbed me of all my virtual money. Without him, I would never have understood the simple truth that this world is the loveliest part of my existence.

A Childhood Fantasy

It all started off when we decided to play hide and seek in the neighboring house. I remember the occupants had just left, making that house an ideal retreat for snoopy kids like us. We spent our time trampling that house, running amok in the compound and prodding every nook and corner to discover unknown secrets. It was then we came upon a very strange corner of the house, which was wilder and spookier than our vibrant imagination could ever describe. It was their little shed in the backyard—well, not a shed, actually, that would be a disgrace to that room in the back…it was a huge room, and if one peeked in through the window, one would get a clear view of the bizarre and unworldly….and I know the thrill of terror I experienced whenever I stared through the window, it felt like looking into that horrible darker realm that I believed existed. Now, if you were an adult, you would have found nothing to be scared of, but we whispered in hushed voices, and the room remained our topic of discussion for many days.

I don’t know who started the rumor. It would be better not to find out, but we firmly and secretly belived that room was haunted. It was always locked, you know, and we had our reasons to believe it was haunted. If you peeped into the room, even you would find out. It was a very dusty room, which looked like it hadn’t been opened in centuries, with an old family portrait hanging meekly from one wall—we had never seen that family inhabit this colony, we had never heard of them, we didn’t know if they still existed, which made things all the weirder, of course. Unsolved mysteries appealed to our growing minds and we were just beginning to understand the joy of discovery. And then there was this black, horribly old sofa set in one corner of the room which seemed to have been abandoned for quite a few years…the look of it, with a huge gash in the center made us reason that it was literally ripped apart by ‘the ghost.’ There was a chair too, nothing too charming about the chair, it was made of plain wood, but we were grateful it was not the rocking kind, because we were sure that we would hear it creak in the middle of the night, and crumbling, infested walls…we were scared. Well, after spending many an afternoon staring blankly into that room, imagining all sorts of horrors, nothing exciting really happened, the room remained untouched, and soon was assumed to be unworthy of attention.

Most of us gave up, but this avid ‘bird-watcher’ considered ‘room-watching’ as the most noble honour any kid could be blessed with. What more, she had a wonderful side-kick who believed in everything she did, and trusted her beyond belief. My friend Shruthi and I made this ‘room-watching’ an compulsory and routine event, as we were sure something exciting was bound to happen, and we took out time off, introducing every child in the colony to the ‘spooky house.’ We wanted more sentries, but we never got them, no one believed us, so we spun some fabulous lies, and grander tall tales which were quite convincing, but no one was brave enough to accompany us, and that is why we found ourselves so lonely on solitary afternoons.

You should have seen the ways we discussed our theories, which seemed so wonderfully probable then, and which look utterly stupid and hilarious now. My god! The detailed discussions nearly drove me mad with wild explanations, but believe it or not, after month long of waiting, our patience and hard-work did pay off, because something exciting did happen. Something which explained everything, anyway. Someone moved into the house. It looked like a disaster, but we still snooped around the house, finally, we did enough snooping to be noticed, and no one quite appreciates and welcomes the idea of a group of two girls mysteriously prowling around their house for no apparent reason. The house-owner was observing us; he even introduced his daughter Preeti to us, but we continued prowling around, hungry for some news, frenzied with curiosity, and finally, he was irritated enough to talk to us, puny little girls.
“You want to look into the back-room, is it not? Come, I’ll take you there,”
We followed hastily, it felt like dream come true. Somehow, entering into that dark hell of the room, which was always locked, blocking our entry had given in. After so many months of staring through the mesh-window, we were actually inside, right there, the only two girls in the entire world who were entitled to enter that room! It did strangle our curiosity, it dimmed our interest, after having finally understood there was nothing extraordinary about the room whatsoever. The man stood around scratching his head,
“What a mess to get rid of! People preserve all kinds of unwanted things here…it’s going to take me time to clean it all up!” The window had never given us a complete view, but now, the room looked paler than before, and most unattractive. We were enraged that our time had not payed off. He opened the wooden shelf in the corner, which too was stashed with unwanted, broken articles, he raised his eyebrows, picked up something, dusted it, and said,
“Here, you want this?”
It was some yellowed and illustrated book named The Tales of Odyssey, and we accepted the prize and looked into it, and tried reading. The pages were missing, and the story was too uninteresting and complicated with a tiny print for us to read, and we gave it up for good. But we preserved it because it was our reward for guarding that room. And we triumphantly showcased it as a souvenir of our endeavors, and most of our friends grew envious, now that I think of it, that book was even unworthy of envy! It could have been picked easily out of an old paperwaala’s cart! Finally, we ended up loosing the book, it too disappeared due to carelessness, but it spurted more of our interest, and we spent our time once again, murmuring that a ghost has returned to claim it’s book! Remembering this makes me think of how mischievous and incurably hopeful kid I was as a kid, my mischievousness has evaporated and I have grown out of that attitude faster than I can wispher ‘ghost’ in someone else’s ear.