'By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower' –Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
There is a swirling expectation all will simply float away one day. It’s the way of close encounters, of pandemics, the rustic appeal, the nightmarish expectation, in theory, they say. They transport you back in time. Take the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, cohesion of masking, fear of death, moment of unmasking, elevated mythology you can peel gold foil off bit by bit from Arabic gum, Yet, everyone of these things left. My dual expectation at the time of ‘ours’ was make it all go away! Wipe the cartridge paper clean, the grass blade drawings, pigment from flowers. But also, how do we cope, how do we walk the pieces of this puzzle.
There I was primed to my touch screen computer, fresh out of groceries, figuring out the manoeuvres of GrubHub deliveries, full blown allergies raging, my annual bane of pollens, dander, and dandelion wisps, when I hit a gigantic pothole, the kind that develops after cyclones, like Hurricane Mable. To decide in retrospect is never easy. A lighthouse beacon could not have delivered a brighter beam. Caution from the trenches, battle flawed or otherwise ordered Do as you are told! Follow the rules! Wear a Mask! I could not breathe, masked or otherwise. My throat seized up. Breathe normal! You mean behind a cloth? I just could not! Dr. Brandon was kind. Let me give you the bare facts, stay home, protect yourself, there are killers at work, night stalkers, day stalkers. Wear a face cover if you do not want to turn into a gesso paste of your own making when you mix the residues on a Tanjore painting. Not maybe. Not frequently. Always. Oh well! All was not booming nor blooming. Not in the cruel phase of our cyclical mirage!
That was when I found her online. A friend! Distant but true! Has this ever happened to you? Destiny works in rich tribal textures between neem sticks and vegetable oils, turmeric and leaves. One moment we can't predict the future she agreed, but look outside your window. I looked. What I saw left me seriously chewing gum, not sweetened gum but vitamin C from Amazon-ordered green bottles in mega-doses of miracle platefuls to go with my mid-afternoon meals. Tea and lemon should have worked, maybe ginger water mixed with honey. The diviners of ayurvedic wisdom strongly recommend set dosages. However, superstitious principles were not the way I chose to go for great internal renovation. Mixtures didn’t cut it. I could die if I couldn’t breathe! My grandma swore by nature remedies. If it doesn’t grow on a plant, ground up, don’t trust it! She lived to be a hundred. And never went to college. I decided to invest in her tulsi herb, whose aroma is soothing.
My guiding extractions turned towards my newfound computer friend and soon this lone yoga woman ensconced in distant degree connecting nature to life and I were caught up in paper history, remote science, string poetry, through our technological lives, hammering notes to each other spasmodically, bringing us in compliance with our inner selves vibrating in dots and patterns. After that the right flow, breathing flow, what you will proceeded to an obvious comfortable coordination. My air flow improved. My chalkiness declined. I did not grow soft, but greatly relaxed. I needed that lifeline.
Over the months the fishnet border of our Covid-lives was the outer extension of our Tree of Life. We discoursed bravely about the outliers and sceptics, the virus and germ invasions, the aerial invaders largest to smallest, angular to elongated, mirage to real, Yama to Yami, that pervaded our very existence. We connected the dots with the Smithsonian, with art galleries, then with our own heavily painted fingernails, with the colorful Rajputana Havelis, concluding that flying mammals were reckless, that free floating terrestrial denizens of the earth and sky with ‘reputation’ problems were the world’s biggest puzzle. A seismic mirage! Simply put, the way my friend did, bats were rats, golden arrows were pinball machines, airborne. Well, if Dracula’s alter-ego was something to go by, and if the demon-horse Keshi’s outrageous roar was something to be recounted, anything could spring out of a hairy winged creature. Something did – Covid!
True to form I re-read Bram Stoker. I plunged into the animal fables of the Panchatantra. Crows, peacocks, tigers, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi mongoose and snake - the unforgiving and the incredulous, the gullible and the tranquil were conflict enough however anthropomorphised their outlook. The air around me spun, turned purer. The shine in my eyes grew brighter. Blank wooden traditional planks glowed more surreal yellow than gold foil gold leaf palagai padam panel paintings.
That year for Mother’s Day I received a water purifier from my children. The apparatus created water bubbles like club soda - an added feature. Lucky me, electrolyte balancing! I love soda. And I love my children. I was saved. I had no illusions left about our natural world, no graceful Shakuntala Looking For Dushyanta to scroll my random moments, except my view from my window, the one my friend had deduced was illusion. And that view was all puckered and puce, all patta (cloth) and chitra (picture), turning into a struggle, turning into a flaky green. Of course, times were going to get harder. I wish I had more plant sap and bamboo shoot in my veins. We did not need world experts to grill the drill. New warnings were mostly block print swastika symbols, hers! So, we re-visited ‘Six Feet Under’, her choice of sitcom on Netflix, not so much for its Yamaloka Hades darkness as much as to re-emphasise John Donne, our own little islands, so relatable, and ‘every man’ our joined humanity together yet isolated.
With so much heartiness, heartlessness, heartfulness on the line, no pulse oximeter antidote to monitor heart rhythms, the boom and beat of our vital organs, I ordered one online. Not a single device on Amazon, none at all available. How would our lives ever normalise? given the monstrous way the world was doing business. ‘We’re all going six feet under, to our graves,’ I cried to her one day when the dispensation of our craftsmanship no longer mattered. The glorification of the afterlife could not have been more masterfully manifested or delivered.
Let's not think about it. What did she mean by that? Was it her yoga? Records will show my family are thorough traditionalists for every heart ailment you could name or blame. ‘Ask Aunt Milna,’ I could hear my grandma say over lucrative clock-devouring debates across two sides of the Atlantic, even though my remote second cousin on the partial side was known to have drowned in a small rain puddle meant for a fish pond despite and in spite of his ailing heart.
I googled like crazy. To do the job right. Here's how hearts work said my friend to emphasise two sides of the same annihilation. Love! Love? I squeaked. It’s too broad! You mean Affairs of the heart?! Who, Me?! When life turns to questions of the living some people build up defensive nerve digging into little things! Never! Never? I have three grown-up children to think about and dalliance with my late husband drifting the terrestrial ether. I did not sleep for two whole nights battered into a mud slide, my heart racing gallops. She was leading me into a resounding quagmire of delusional mirages.
You're in bad shape my friend, she said tut-tutting at me with claps and oil lamps in typical signature Kaikottikali rhythm on FaceTime. You’re lost! I let her speak. Dance! Sing! Turns out her ex- who lived in one of those 'burbs where six feet from someone's front door WAS the front door to two other front doors, and the street in front was overflowing with joggers and dog-walkers, masked and unmasked, circled and squared, had snagged himself this lovely young thing. No question about it. He had online dated. He then live streamed the entire joining ceremony in a quaint chapel on Zoom. No one in attendance except parents on both sides and a domestic cat invited to a vast empty car lot.
This actually happened. Basically there was no human encounter except by the bride and groom, and the officiant. The simplicity lays the foundation. Human invention depicts fertility symbols as simple harmonious geometric designs like Phad folk painting on the one hand depicting romance and high adventure as brightly emboldened and intricate although the handmade Madhubani art incorporated both. Vows fulfilled both emerged, groom in black, bride in white, presiding clergy in combination of black and white or some such hue. Got reported in The Daily Chronicle 'Union Solemnized'!
Success, they were wed! That's LOVE, she said, holding a tissue to her face. Reduced me to tears. The average number of teardrops shed at weddings can fill an entire ladies’ handkerchief she says. The average miniatures in modern times, sun and moon, flowers and leaves, Radha and Krishna, birds and animals, deities and myths can fill the entire rock art of Ajanta. The two mothers cried buckets, triple crowding the cat. I did too, like a rheumy baby. I could not imagine not witnessing my own daughter's wedding, not hugging my own child on the day of her marriage. That's what the pandemic viral desperados did to us, a chance to cry like never before longer besides sending us six feet under. It emptied our shared vanity, singling our lachrymose ducts, victims in our own ceremonies, and uncompromisingly masked for keeps. Bonafide mirage!
Tagore’s Stray Birds aphorisms are fleeting and sweet, gathered like jasmine in a flower basket for the moment. The awe remains a collective memory, plucked. I don't exactly recall when I stopped sobbing nor when I gave up babbling to myself or to the computer screen, but it must have been when she whooped at me like a Richard Parker, all 450-pound Royal Bengal striped apex predator tiger adrift on a boat in the depths of Life of Pi.. It was a stinker. No time to adapt anew. And then it was time to make my own reality and she was gone.
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