Repaying the Debt of Smiles Past
Some mornings feel like a quiet accounting of the life we have lived.
This morning, before the world had properly woken up, I was lying beside my son, running my fingers through his hair. The slow, careful way you touch a sleeping child when you don’t want the spell to break. He has been on medication, breathing unevenly the way children do when the weather turns against them. Another allergy. Another small battle his body is fighting.
A kilometre and a half away, in a hospital room full of loud white light, my wife is fighting pneumonia.
Life has a way of arranging these scenes without asking us first.
…
The mind, when it is worried, rarely stays in the present. It travels. Mine travelled back to the second Covid wave. Those long forty-odd days when my wife was in the hospital and I existed between phone calls, oxygen numbers, and the stubborn hope that she would come home. There were nights when I truly did not know if she would.
And yet she did.
Life returned to its ordinary rhythms. Work. School mornings. Telling each other the strange dreams we had seen the night before. The small arguments that belong only to people who share a life.
…
I turned forty-six earlier this year. Somewhere along the way I have realised something about happiness. And about sadness.
Happiness has always arrived for me slightly tinged with sadness. Even in its brightest moments there is a faint awareness that this too is passing. That the laughter, the sunlight, the quiet warmth of someone I love sitting beside me — all of it will someday dissolve.
Sadness, on the other hand, is pure. It does not pretend permanence. It simply arrives, sits beside me for a while, and slowly merges into me.
Perhaps that is why I try to hold small, insignificant moments a little longer than they deserve.
Long before social media arrived, I used to send SMS messages to friends telling them what I was doing in that moment and asking the same in return. A tiny status update on life.
Maybe that is why I was drawn to writing and image-making, to capture something that will never come back again.
The calm of dust motes floating in a stream of sunlight.
The quiet immensity of a sleeping child’s heart under my palm.
My wife’s voice on the phone saying she is feeling slightly better. Weak, but better.
…
We never really know what is around the corner.
And yet we live as if we do.
We make plans for next summer. We postpone joy for calmer days. We tell ourselves that life will eventually settle into something predictable.
There are lines from a Gulzar song I often return to:
Muskuraoon kabhi, toh lagta hai, jaise hothon pe karz rakha hai. (Whenever I smile, it feels as though a debt has been placed upon my lips.)
I thought I understood it. But some mornings are a refresher course in meaning.
Life has collected its dues before. It probably will again. That seems to be part of the arrangement.
But still, when my son sleeps beside me in the quiet morning, and my wife is fighting her way back to health in that hospital room a kilometre and a half away, I find myself doing the only thing I know how to do.
Living.
Holding the small sharp shards of joy carefully in my hands.
Smiling a little.
Even if life is keeping count.
To be at home
It is a feeling that doesn’t come easily.
I’ve changed many addresses throughout my life. Some, not how I would have liked to. Only a few have felt like home. And even in those few, this is a rare one.
I’m sitting, once again, at the dining table. Don’t know why I do most of my writing here instead of the dedicated (and expensive) study corner we got custom made! I have our main bookshelves in all their congested glory on one side, and the cabinet of curiosities i.e. dear wife’s crockery/knick knacks display on the other. Slightly further apart on the left and right are our son’s room and our bedroom respectively. And behind me is the living room. The one I’m looking at though is the guest cum study cum temple room where a pile of ‘sun dried’ clothes and books we got from the recent book fair and some winter blankets are lying on the bed in an exhibition of inter-species harmony that human beings should learn from.
It is not a pretty sight.
When I was growing up and as recently as a few years ago when we were thinking of moving into a bigger place than our previous address, I had this notion of creating a house with Scandinavian sparseness and Indian warmth. Had even thought of a term for it, ScandIndian. It was to be this large enough house with clean white walls, wooden flooring, subtle colors, Indian accents and not a thing out of its place.
This is not that house.
Not a single room here is good looking to speak of. There are crayon hieroglyphs on the wallpaper in the bedroom; the living room sofas are colonized by things that shouldn’t be on the sofas; the dining table is a visual depiction of the word chaos; the bookshelves store books and medicines; the child’s room is a museum of toys, the aangan is a gallery of dying plants, and the guest cum study cum temple room is well, the antithesis of my dreamy ScandIndian aesthetic.
And yet, this is the one that feels most like home.
This is the one where our newborn crossed the threshold from hospital to home; this is the one with all the fights and sulks and not-talking-to-you but still-caring-for-you happens; this is the one where just a few hours ago the three of us were dancing on a medley of Punjabi, Hindi pop, and Tamil songs; the one with all the yet to read books, yet to play games, and yet to dream, dreams; the one we all come back to wherever we have been.
This is home.
This is a feeling that has not come easily to me.
I’m home.
-Alok, 02/03/24
A Thanksgiving thought, thanks to my son
Yesterday, I read a book to my son. It was a beautifully illustrated ebook that we both flipped through on my tablet. The book is about a day in the life of seven different children living in seven different places around the world. Seven names, seven faces, seven countries, seven cities…told in the first person, each child introduces themselves, talks about where they live, what they eat for breakfast, where they play, what their school is like, and many other facets of their daily lives.
I think he enjoyed it, though it became a bit verbose for him from time to time. When I downloaded the book, I had imagined that he would be fascinated by the different cultures, environments, and places shown in the book. However, he wasn’t.
What he noticed most were the things in this order: the ages of different children and how they compared to his older cousins, the fact that one of the children didn’t have to wear a uniform to school, the yellow school bus a child takes (the same as the one in his favorite song), the ice skating another child does, the five cats of another child (he asked me to get a cat for him as well), and the one child whose evening activity was watching television (he made sure that I noticed that other children are also allowed to watch TV).
What he didn’t notice was: The color of the children’s skin, their gender, the fact that some children were rich, and some not so much, whether they lived in a city or a village, in an apartment complex or in a mud hut.
He’s going to be four in a couple of months, and I’m afraid of the day when these differences will start seeping into his consciousness. Perhaps we wouldn’t need our DEI conferences, mandatory corporate trainings, amendments, laws, marches, and fights if we all kept our four-year-old selves alive within us.
Thank you, dear Adwitiya, for letting me look at the world through your eyes. It definitely looks like a much ‘equal’ place.
Wishing everyone a Thanksgiving filled with warmth and reflection.