Reflections in the receding water

This is a bit of writing in the wake of the Chennai floods, a string of thoughts as and when they came to my head. The piece is written in two parts, the first after a day out in the city helping with distribution efforts and the second written today after we wrapped up relief operations.

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My Chennai flood experience started a little different. It was one of luxury, of prosperity, of excess. Two hours after young boys battled each other to grab a packet of biscuits from my hands, I ate hot food and drank hot chocolate milk at my college mess. Why me? Because I'm lucky to have access to a campus that's in the spotlight, a campus that convinced all the vendors to operate on credit, a campus where the mess workers waded through waist deep water surrounding their own homes to cook for us because, in their words, "naange illena ungalukku pasikkum." (If we don’t come, you will all be hungry.)

But my Chennai flood experience is also one of need, of desperation, of want. It's one of women as old as my grandmother begging for food from my fast depleting bag, of young boys discussing how many mouths a Rs 5 biscuit packet can feed, of the scores of eyes laying sight on food for the first time in days. It's the experience of giving and getting instructions to barricade our buses and close the windows to stop people from climbing onto the bus as they try to grab food, of people flocking the minute they see what looks like relief supplies.

My Chennai flood experience was one of gratitude and oneness. Of volunteers coming together and spending hours collecting, sorting, loading and distributing without stopping to ask for names. Of the IITM team realising we don't have a master list of everyone who worked to thank later on because no one waited to take pictures or fill a roll call. Of locals who tell us "Inge oru vellai saapadu irukku-nge, neenge aduthe edathukku ponge." (We have our next meal here, do go on to the next place.) Of citizens sharing contact details on public forums if that means access to more bread loaves or medicines. Of us thanking the stranded for magically procuring coffee while they thank us for turning up. Of running out of paracetamol in the middle of a medical camp only to have a stranger offer to go shopping and return with a box full.

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I’ve seen Bhanu Akka every day for the last five years, as she sits patiently in the lobby of our hostel, in charge of our security. Every day for the last week, she has told us stories of her house and her neighbours, as they struggle to put their lives back together after floods ravaged the city. She told us stories of another Akka whose house was washed away but who was ”lucky” enough to save her ration card, which she proceeded to dry on a dosai kallu. She told us of people whose utensils were blackened by sludge, whose choice lay between washing them thin or the unaffordable solution of replacing them all. There were stories of snakes in the stagnant water of bedrooms, people lying on the bed anyway for want of somewhere else to go. There were tales of traffic jams caused on the only half of the road that was usable because people began spilling onto the streets to escape from the cramped, unhygienic environments of shelter halls. The auto driver who dropped me home late last night thanked God for his first floor house, telling me how the people on the ground floor were flooded and those on the second were dealing with leaking roofs and walls. The beginning of every conversation in Chennai today has become ‘how is your home?’

Behind every aching muscle in my body today, there is a story. The stories from Anankaputhur and Vyasarpadi, Moggapair and Iyyapanthangal, Velachery and Taramani. The stories of people in neighbourhoods I barely knew existed till recently. The stories of the woman as old as my Paati who begged me to give her a sari she could use. Or the Anna who ran behind our bus as we pulled away after distribution. Or the Akka who bent down close to thank me for distributing sanitary pads, saying only we understood her struggles. Or even the woman who stood by me as I assisted in a medical camp, warning me when the time came to stop. “People are coming back for seconds, ma,” she told me. “Go give this to people who need it more.”

Never before have I seen this kind of longing. More often than once, I have been shaken by men and women much older than me thanking us for our work, their eyes glowing at the sight of food and medicines. Even in the ruckus of our “control room”/collection centre, as we joked of having stocks to last for years, there was a tinge of unease in our voices, speaking volumes of the roads just outside our gates. No matter how much we joked and collected and segregated, all this would disappear in minutes outside, we knew.

This last week and all the hours in it have taught all of us many things. It taught us the value of bread and water, of dry roads and cloudless skies. It taught us to save every drop, switch off every extra light, huddle in one room to optimize candle light. It taught us that good faith and trust can still drive mass movements, a lesson reinforced every time supplies traded hands with no questions asked. It taught us that our city, known for orthodoxy and conservatism often spoken of in the same breath as boredom, can rally together when the going gets tough and not give up. It taught us that in times of need, hierarchies are forgotten memories as professors checked with student coordinators to volunteer in the efforts and children lugged many kilograms of rice to unload/reload. It taught us to share information, resources and encouragement. It taught us to stick together and come out stronger.

1 week. A dozen core members. Around 25 neighbourhoods. Hundreds of volunteers. Many thousands of kilograms of supplies.

Doing our bit to reclaim home.

Learning from the Legends: includABILITY 20

There is a cream visiting card in my wallet that reads Former Chief Election Commissioner of India. Yet, if I close my eyes and think of Navin Chawla, I will see him breaking a Rs. 5 KitKat bar into three to share with the police officer accompanying us and the driver of the VIP black Merc courtesy The Park.

There is a note on my phone with an email id of India’s most famous ad man. But if I close my eyes and think of Prahlad Kakar, I will only hear uproarious laughter, spontaneity and the ability to talk of everything from a soufflé omelette to scuba diving. That, or the time he asked me for the Tamil translation of ‘fruitface’, venturing to try himself and coming up with ‘pazhimoonja’ or something like that.

There is a picture of the stage on my phone, and in centre stage wearing a pale pink bhandini sari, sits Bollywood’s mother figure. Yet, if I were to close my eyes and think of Jaya Bachchan, I would hear her voice congratulating me on feeding the teleprompter, smiling as she squeezed my arm in congratulations.

There was a moment when I went up to introduce myself to Siddharth Jayakumar, a boy who has cerebral palsy and has worked in the private banking sector for over five years now. I meant to tell him I had seen him at many events before but never had the chance to talk to him before he stopped me and asked “aren’t you the girl from TEDx?” Turns out he had told his mother the same thing.

My afternoon at includABILITY 20, Ability Foundation’s celebration of their 20^th anniversary, was a humbling evening of learning and inspiration in a room filled with such different people, each a celebrity in their own right.

There will be a bigger article that comes out in places other than my blog, but till then, here it is. The memory of greatness standing merely feet away. The experience of humility and gratitude of having the chance to be a part of that moment. The opportunity to grow.

In that room were people with disability and people supposedly without, there were celebrities and then aam junta. There was laughter and there were hugs. There was never-ebbing conversation in everything from English to sign. In those few hours, identities were put on pause – he wasn’t an ad man, she wasn’t a heroine, he wasn’t an IAS officer, she wasn’t an activist. In those few hours, everyone sat together and held hands through stories of pain and struggle, discrimination and bullying, and ultimately strength. In those few hours, we were all audience to stories of immense will power and determination.

Yesterday, I met India’s biggest ad-man and a top-ranking heroine of a generation past and the man who ran multiple elections. But I also met a blind cognitive neuroscientist who paraglides for fun, a deaf girl who struggled through insensitive mainstream schooling to become a trainer today and a quality control executive from a famous corporate who has celebral palsy and left the audience in splits with his humour, even as they stood to give him a standing ovation. Tell me, who are the celebrities? Who are the real heroes?

The idle musings of an almost adult

Think, everyone told me. Think and it will come to you. Think and it will dawn upon you. Just think and the world’s answers will appear in a heartbeat and clarity will come giftwrapped in a nice little box miraculously left behind by the Tooth Fairy one Tuesday morning. All you need to do is think.

I’ve thought on planes and trains, buses and bikes. I’ve thought while I was meant to be thinking and much more when I wasn’t. I’ve stared just to the right of my professor’s face during class and doodled pointlessly in the corner of my notebook. I’ve made more To Do lists than anything I’ve ever done and then stooped from putting ‘Figure it out’ to ‘Shower’, in an effort to check something off. You can’t say I didn’t try.

When it all fell apart all around me and all the same advice kept pouring in, I turned to clichés. I took a long, hot shower. And I thought some more. Or atleast I tried.

What do I write my paper on? And once that is done, what do I do my thesis on? And once that is done, what do I do next? Where do I work? Do I let go of a great job just to leave home? Do I accept another great job even if the cash isn’t great? What qualifies as good enough and how do you identify a challenge? When you can’t differentiate the road less travelled from the well trodden path, how do you choose to be conformist or rebellious? And how is it that the more I think, the more questions seem to need thinking about?

This thinking thing is a lie, a web designed to keep you in a never-ending loop. You think you get more questions, you kid yourself into thinking you can answer them all. For now, I’m going to take a break. The paper may happen, or not. Reading all day is fun in itself. The thesis will definitely happen. On what, well, epiphany shall strike before graduation some time. As for a job, I’m only almost adult for now. Please don’t burst my bubble?

The Dead Man's Woman

Yes, it has been a while. Ah well.

This is pretty much all the good that can come out of late night exam mugging. I was recently told that this blog is 'all serious' and in that spirit, here is a piece inspired by Albert Camus' The Stranger, fiction written from the point of view of Marie. Title credits, a play adaptation I was a part of a couple of years ago :D

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I’m tired of being the mistress of a man sentenced to death. How long am I to hold on, hang in there, not let go? To cling to a sliver of hope by the tips of my manicured fingernails? To shut out the voice in my head crying for rationality, for a better future?

I love him. Or at least, I did.

We met in strange circumstances, we did. His mother had died, my boyfriend had left me. It is unsettling, speaking of these situations in the same breadth, almost writing off the death of a progenitor as being the same as a spineless, transient relationship. Yet what can I say? That queasily unsettling feeling of the very first day set the tone for our liaison. I became the mistress. He became the stranger whose unidentifiable charm drew me in deeper than I expected.

I want to marry him. Or at least, I did.

He grew on me, that man. How and when, I do not know. He had an abrupt way about him, always answering questions off the top of that intelligent head. If one didn’t know better, one would claim there was no heart in the man, that he was merely a machine with bodily needs. God knows I knew of them. Yet, I walked up to him one sunny afternoon. And I asked him to marry me. What possessed me, I have not the slightest clue. Did I expect him to gush with emotion? No. Did the long forgotten memories of girlish romance threaten to rear their suppressed head? I think so. I should have known better. He said yes because I was the first woman to ask.

I know him. Or at least, I did.

He didn’t do it on purpose. He is not a bad man. We went swimming that morning. Out in the middle of the ocean, our legs intertwined as we floated in the calm waters, I almost felt happy, normal. His hands found their place on the small of my back and we kissed. The salt in my mouth mixing with the salt in his mouth mixing with the salt in mine. Four hours later, they found a man with five bullets in him. They said he had done it. No. I don’t want to hear more.

I believe him. Or at least, I did.

He told the world it was an accident. A series of unfortunate events. A set of bad circumstances. A mere coincidence. He didn’t speak to me at all. His lawyer said he hadn’t meant to kill that man. It was Raymond who had a bone to pick after all. Maybe it was the sun at the wrong angle or something about the sand. There was a dead man on the floor and the gun in his hand. This is all we know. But he isn’t a bad person. He isn’t.

I want to wait. Or at least, I did.

I visited him at prison. Once. I sat on the other side of the glass with a plastic smile plastered on my face. I asked him if he was fine. He said he was. I felt stupid asking. So I spoke. I spoke to fill the awkward silence. I spoke to hush the nervous beating of my heart. I spoke. I told him of work and tennis and swimming. Of Raymond and Masson. I spoke till my jaw hurt. Till the men came to take him away. I spoke and I smiled. And I never went back.

I’m tired of being the mistress of a man sentenced to death. They say he will die and I will live. But I want him to survive. At least, I did.