Tungnath

Tungnath feels like a dream now. The mountain feels like a gently sloping hill, the colorful horses, the green grass and the blue skies make it seem like it could be a little place in the Nilgiris, somewhere near Ooty, perhaps.

But when I strive to remember, although I don't feel the pain, I remember thinking that I might die, or vomit endlessly, or faint, or do all at the same time. The climb up the mountain, the anxiety, my wide eyes, gasping breath, my struggle not to fall back- they could have happened to someone else.

Yet, one incident I recall clearly. I was stumbling over some rocks; RK was ahead and waiting for me; the kids on their pony were almost impossibly farther ahead, the pink and orange of their sweaters making a nice contrast against the bright blue sky. For every step of mine, the rest appeared to take ten. There was no way to catch up.
And at that moment of hopelessness against a background of stubborn will to climb that mountain to keep the kids in sight, if not reach the temple, a thought popped in my head: This is what a pilgrimage is. This is what penance is.

During a pilgrimage, there is no logic. It is a struggle and in that struggle there is only one driving motivation. Maybe it is the idea of God, maybe it is as simple as trying to keep up. But whatever it might be, it is what makes you force one step ahead of another, even if your chest hurts and you are light headed and your stomach feels like it might turn inside out.

I became one with the millions of others who must have struggled on that same mountain trying to reach that same temple over thousands of years. Just as they must have collapsed on the grass and stared sightlessly at the sky, giving their bodies a break and to gather strength for the next patch of mountain, so I did. After a point of time, there was no further reason to keep climbing other than the fact that I was on the mountain and the only way was up.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a persistent thought: maybe this struggle was a good way of apologizing to my parents, for all the wrongs, for all the times I didn't listen, for the small daily decisions of inconsiderateness, forgetfulness, callousness or willfulness.

Onwards we climbed. 2kms, 2.5kms, 3kms up. At the 3km stop, I hired a pony. I feared I would die or faint or something highly inconvenient otherwise. I would have hired the pony for the remainder of the distance, but there was some disagreement with the pony fellow and I hopped down after half a km. But the break was good and I felt comfortable being back on the ground.

I don't recall the rest of the climb. I must have climbed the remaining 1.5km and must have met up with the kids at some point of time. I only recall reaching the temple gates and removing my shoes.

The priests at Tungnath sing out their prayers, instead of reciting them. Three of them sing in harmony, in three different octaves. It is easy to close one's eyes and get absorbed in the music. The main alter is Shiva's, but it is like no Shiva linga I have ever seen. It looks a bit misshapen, a bit hump-like. Later I remembered the story of Tungnath. Shiva tried to escape the well-meaning apologies of the Pandavas after the great Kurukshetra war, turned himself into Nandi the bull and not willing to take any chances, borrowed himself under the earth. Only 5 spots of the bull are supposed to be visible. The hump of the bull is in Tungnath. The shoulders, the tail etc are elsewhere in the Himalayas. The temple was built by the Pandavas, almost 5000 years ago. It's a funny story- no doubt many of us would like to borrow under the earth while disguised as animals to escape people we have no desire to meet!

Maybe it was the exhaustion, or the air, or maybe it was just the place, but when the priests started singing the Shanti mantra (for peace) in that small, dark, ancient alter, my mind was filled with my parents and tears started rolling down my eyes. They followed it up right after with the Kshama mantra (forgiveness) and I was grateful and wonderstruck. Maybe it was a sign from God that the priests chose those exact mantras to chant?

Ultimately, it was a privilege. How many people get to see a temple built by the Pandavas?

One striking thing about this whole trip has been how my idea of our epics have changed... All my life, the Mahabharatha and Ramayana have been great stories. This trip made them so real- temples built by the Pandavas, their kingdoms (which are now suburbs of New Delhi), their battle grounds, the mountains Rama worshipped on and the peaks they stayed at... my view of India's great epics have always been extremely Western- I always felt these were wonderful fiction. Only now are my eyes slowly being to open to the fact that many of these stories might have actually happened, that the Pandavas actually did exist at one point of time. And if they did, then Krishna too would have. Which means that God suddenly no longer feels like some abstract concept. I too have walked the same mountains that all these people walked on. Suddenly, God feels a lot closer to my reality than ever before.

Escape from Bangalore 1- Travels to Delhi

Just the very act of getting away from Bangalore felt like someone had pressed a release valve in the pressure cooker of my brain.

Mundane acts of travel- packing up, waking the kids up at midnight to make in time to the airport for our 4am flight to Delhi, printing out boarding passes, going through security-  took on a sheer exuberance. We might have been the first people in the world to ever travel by air, such was the level of our excitement. 

I've never been to Delhi by flight before. The two other times in my life I've been that far up North (people like me, who feel most comfortable south of the Vindhyas and who always have to scrunch up their face to recall their primary school Hindi, always capitalize the N in North India. The geographical, linguistic and cultural differences seem so vast that North might just as well be a different country) were when I was a child- first when I was 10 or 11, and the second when I was 22 (one might think, well, not so much of a child, but for all practical purposes, in terms of total and blissful ignorance of anything of import, I was).

Outside Delhi airport are a couple of eating and tea drinking joints. Tea seems to be the favorite drink in the North... which makes me wonder why my mom, who if she could have double-capitalized the N in North would have done so while firmly proclaiming that she was fine in the South, thank you very much, was such an avid tea drinker and reluctant coffee drinker. When I was 10, my dad got transferred from Madras (which is about as South as one can get). Initially he was supposed to go to Delhi and my mom literally cried, "Oh my God, how can we possibly survive so far up North? The cold! The Mustard Oil!!" But in fact, he got transferred to Pune and my mom told me, "Oh good, it's only central India. It's quite close to Bombay and that's practically home" And that is how my parents and I became life-long addicts of poha, bakarwadi, aam burfi and zunka bhakri.

So anyway, we went to an eating joint called "Delhi Str-Eats" and guess what we saw? Idli and dosa!! So much for Delhi street eats!

We all recoiled. Give us authentic Delhi food, we cried. And so we ate parothas with big dollops of fresh butter, deep fried pooris with aloo and a gigantic oil-dripping bhatura with chole. 

My uncle had booked us a room at the IIT Delhi guest house, in the center of the campus surrounded by trees. We were greeted by a golden oriole pair, a few jungle babblers, a coppersmith barbet and a red vented bulbul as soon as we got off the cab. Very soon it became clear that while the natural beauty of the guest house was all very well, it was impossible to actually stand outside in that weather for any length of time to enjoy all this ornithological pleasantness. It was 42 degrees Celcius.... at 9 in the morning!

Our days in Delhi were spent hanging out with my uncle, aunt and cousin; visiting some friends and driving around Delhi. In my mind, Delhi was this horror city, covered in smoke and filled with rapists.Turns out, apart from the preponderance of Hindi, Delhi isn't so different from Bangalore.  Also turns out, my Hindi isn't so rusty after a few days of linguistic immersion. So, maybe I don't need to capitalize the N after all... it's just the north. It takes the same time to reach it as it does to reach Kolar by car. 

Blood

My aunt sprained her foot this evening. That left me to wipe the kitchen floor after dinner, the first time I've been alone in that kitchen since the night after my mother's death on that same floor.

If you look closely on the tile under the fixed cupboard, you can still see remnants of my mother's blood, the dried stains we were unable to reach to mop up. 

Today, while I was wiping the kitchen floor, I remembered my mother in law. She helped me clean my mother's blood after we returned from the hospital. She and I scraped the pulpy mess out, sprinkled water on the dried clots, mopped up the seeping blood and carefully poured out buckets and buckets of reddened water from the moppings into the toilet so that the bathrooms would not become stained with the discards.

No matter how much my mother in law and I might argue, I will never forget how she helped me that night, quietly, sincerely and compassionately. She wept for my mother as she cleaned and although my eyes remained dry, I took comfort in her tears. 

Many hours later, my cousin and I wiped the floor again with soap and water to remove the stickiness of the blood and the stench of it. She sprayed insect repellent by the foot of the cupboard to stop ants from eating the blood. 

Today, wiping down the floor again, I saw the stubborn stains of dried blood hiding under the immovable cupboard and I recalled my mother in law and my cousin. Somehow, I am not as worried about ants eating up mom's blood. Let them. May they gain some succor from it. 

As for my mom, she truly did give her tears, sweat and blood to that kitchen. 

Life and Death

We only ever hear of medical miracles- the time a child drowned for hours was somehow revived, the time a man had massive pulmonary embolisms that blocked off both sides of her lungs but yet survived and thrived, the time a man was revived despite his heart having stopped for a whole hour, all the "almost-died but didn't", the "lucky to be alive" stories that populate pretty much every form of modern communication known.

Death is supposed to be determined by the lack of a pulse, but somehow that didn't stop these people from not dying.

When are you supposed to stop trying to for a medical miracle and when are you supposed to keep trying? And how do you know the outcome will always be the positive one that they show you on TV? What if you do all this work, revive a once-dead person only to have a damaged person on your hands?

I wonder if I gave up too soon on my parents.

Logically, I think I took the right steps: assume we had succeeded in reviving my father.... then what? He still had the cancer, the inability to breathe by himself, the mouth ulcers that made it difficult for him to swallow and so on. Or if we had revived my mother and then she ended up like a vegetable, bedridden for life, dependent on someone else for every single action. Neither of them would have wanted that, I think.

Yet, the part of me that weaves fantasies wonders if I should have fought harder for a medical miracle.

If mom had lived

A freak accident, a fall, and a bloody death.
 I looked at her body in the ICU, words forming accusingly in my head, fighting to keep from uttering them out aloud, "What the hell mom? What the fuck were you thinking to do?"
 And i imagined my mom's words, the cadence of it, the bewilderment and shock in her voice as she might have spoken had she been able to speak.
"I thought I would quickly just do that one thing, Varsha. I never expected...I never thought that's what would happen. The last thing I ever wanted was Ani to find me like that, that poor poor child"

That godawful blood. That stench of dried metallic fluid and gunk.

My mother was with me and she wasn't with me yesterday. She kept popping into my head to tell me things, that she hasn't meant to die, only to clean up the kitchen a bit, that she didn't want any of the fuss, she called me to cover her legs after they cleaned up her bloody clothes but hadn't thought to preserve that bit of modesty. She rested in the ICU only to wake up in my head again as we went to the police station to complete the medico legal formalities, regretting the trouble her decision to climb that ladder had caused. "I'm so sorry ma" said her voice. "Who would have thought I could do this or that it would come to this?" She bemoaned the delay in getting her body out of the hospital "Yeddukki, yenna ippidieyelan paduthura?"

The post mortem. My understanding of how she might have died improves. Her voice quiets as many many pieces of information are given: supra something something fissure, midline shift, massive cerebral hemorrhage on the right side, multiple fractures on the left side.

"So, you are saying that somehow she fell off the ladder, and landed on her left side, her right side of the brain started hemorrhaging and she lost blood and she died?" I ask the forensic doctor.
"The impact was massive", says the doctor gently. Massive, massive, says my head and her voice.

I latch on to something tightly. So she may have become unconscious? She may not have even known? RK clasps my hand to him and says, yes. She was unconscious when Ani found her a few seconds after she fell. Her body probably would have shut down immediately. 

I feel a sigh going through me. I sit with her wrapped, plastic packed body in the ambulance. I make no move to touch her. I recall the feel of her soft familiar flesh and I recoil from imagining how hard it might be by now. She looks different, sort of like a nun or some saint with her head tightly wrapped. She looks molded, like a doll. When my father died, he was dressed in clothes that he liked, in a khadi kurta and loose pants. My mother got plastic and ropes. "Ayyo Varsha", says her voice, and I imagine her keeping a palm on her forehead and shaking her head at me. "What does it matter now?"

We come back home, they lift her body into an icebox and I can no longer touch her, even if I want to. Right by the icebox on a table is my father's photograph. I stare at his face wondering if there is some secret that he knows. Could my father perhaps be there with my mother? Perhaps they were right now arguing about it. My father might be saying, I thought you wanted to join me and my mother might say, yes, but not so fast and not so violently! 
Or maybe my father would say, why in the world did you come so fast? Surely you knew the kids need you. And my mother would say, yes. I know. I don't know why I came so fast either.
Or even worse... To my ever lasting shame, my father might say, I saw Varsha didn't turn up with you for my 45th day ceremony. Clearly she wasn't taking proper care of you. I didnt think you should hang around there moping about me anymore.

My eyes are sore, my head burns behind them. I have a choice- I can either continue to sit and stare ahead, and eventually collapse into sobs, tears and a migraine or I can push some food into me, get some rest and stay in control. I eat. My mother is no longer taking directly to me, but in echoes, from a not so distant past when she and I both decided to eat after my father's body was brought home from the hospital so that we could stay alert to do what had to be done.
I nap.

When I wake up, my mother's voice is silent. There is a finality in that icebox. I join my aunts in keeping the vigil through the night. Somehow I feel lighter at heart. Light enough that I'm able to greet all those who come, able to narrate her death story and talk and laugh loudly with my cousins both during the vigil and later after the cremation

Somehow it doesn't feel wrong. And right now, when my head is thick, all I can do is go by my feelings.

Touch

My father was never a touchy-feely kind of a guy. Apparently, he got this trait from his father who frowned upon any expressions of love, either verbal or physical. My paternal grandmother too is very much hands-off. She expressed her love through food, like most textbook grandmothers, cooking incessantly when she was able to and now that she can no longer leave her bed, incessantly asking people about whether they have eaten or not. Any craving for touch would make one a target for gentle mockery on my father's side of the family: "Ayyo, kozhandaikku conjanuma!" ("Oh the baby needs coddling!") my aunts would exclaim.

I recall my father carrying me around on his shoulders till I was almost 7, after which, one fine day he decided he had carried me enough and made me walk everywhere. I still remember the tantrums I threw at that time of forced transition from babyhood.

After this, any touches were either accidental, or very much with a single purpose, such as holding my upper hand to guide me through traffic, or giving me a leg up when I needed to climb a wall to retrieve a shuttlecock. In my early teens, I rebelled against this enforced no-touch policy of my father's and would find ways to hold his hand or plonk my head on his lap while we watched TV and so on. I would hold my breath and only release it if it seemed like he would allow this temporary aberration, always knowing that he would free himself in a few minutes.

As I grew into my late teens and early twenties, I grew closer to my mother. She fulfilled my need for casual touches and caresses. Many times, I used her as a mediator to communicate with my father. It wasn't until I left for the US that I realized my father and I had many things in common, not least the preference to communicate by email rather than by phone or face to face. When I type 'Sreedhar' in my Gmail inbox now, I get tens of thousands of hits over the past two decades. My dad sending me recipes, advice, scoldings, wry observations on life, and pictures- dozens and dozens of pictures of his life. By the time I returned to India, Appa and I had reached a steady state. We would communicate by email, in case anything important had to be said. He immersed himself into the lives of my kids. He played, fought, and laughed with his grand kids every day- the no touch policy didn't apply to them.

During my father's last days, he craved touch. As he gasped for breath, straining to expand his solidified lungs, nothing gave him more comfort than having someone rub his back. As his mouth filled with ulcers from the cancer treatment and oral thrush raged in his throat, he found it immensely soothing to have someone gently move their hand up and down his throat as he coughed and coughed and tried to swallow.

When we decided to move him back from the ICU to the ward so that we could spend his last hours with him, my mother and I had one single thought in our minds: that we needed to touch him, as much for our sakes as for his, so that he would know he was not alone. We wanted to hold his hand, help him with his food, put an arm around him when he coughed, wipe his chin after he had hastily gulped down food before his oxygen saturation dropped.

If there is one regret I have with the way he died, it is this: I was not holding his hand when he breathed his last. He had fallen asleep (or what seemed to be sleep) and I didn't pick up his hand again. And by the time I realized that he wasn't breathing, it was too late. I think this must be a regret for my mother too- that she spent the entire previous night and the next day morning and afternoon with him. And about an hour after I took over from her, he died. "If only I had spent just an hour more with him" is what she expressed to me after she hurried back to the hospital.

What have I learned from this? I'll never stop touching my kids, husband, mother, anybody important to me: caresses, hugs, kisses, massages- they will get it all.
I'll never again discount the power of touch - touch is as essential as life in newborn babies, toddlers and even adults. And the weaker you are, whether by age or by sickness, the more important touch is.

Camping again

After almost a year, we went camping again this weekend.

Why do we forget to go camping? I think because camping requires an innate ability to leave yourself exposed, to give up a level of control. So, when you have a few rushed days in which to grab yourself a holiday, you would much rather keep everything under tight boundaries rather than risk losing that precious time to unforeseen elements. So it's not forgetting to go camping, but it's more of a deliberate decision not to bring the possibility into any equations.

Durga will turn five soon and she wanted to go camping. I think the main reason D loves camping is because she gets to make friends with dogs and cats and any other strays that get into her path. Sometimes I wonder how much of her innate love for animals I am stifling by not allowing her pets... am I ruining some beautiful expansive thing inside her and twisting it into some future misshapen horror? Or is that just plain weird thinking?

The very thought of having to be in charge of a pet, when as a family, we are emerging from D's babyhood, is enough to stress me out. No thanks- let the kids become old enough to clean their own poop, let alone some pet's, and then we shall see.

Our camping mainstay in India so far has been Bamboo Rustles, a wonderful place near Krishnagiri. But as BR becomes more and more popular, it's difficult finding available dates to go there. Plus, it's nice to explore a new place, not the same old safe zones.

I used Camp Monk, a website that curates camping areas across the country. We stumbled across Middle of Somewhere, in the depths of that website. MoS had been featured in CM's advertising post on environmentally conscious sites near Bangalore. Loved the description, loved the pictures and went ahead and booked the place. Very reasonable rates (Rs.500/ head) if you bring your own tent, which we wanted to do. We have a stove as well, but no propane to get it going. So instead of running to Decathlon and hunting for propane, we decided to order meals there.

We left for MoS on Saturday afternoon, after spending a hot morning at IISc's Open Day (incredibly crowded. No idea what events they had there- each thing had a mile-long line). It takes about an hour to get there, assuming you don't get lost. And it really feels like the middle of nowhere- you take a mud path from a point on the main highway and drive and drive inside for about a mile and all of a sudden, just when you wonder where in the world you are, you reach it.

Kids are now old enough to help pitch the tent! Hurray!

                                                        Wait for it.... And..... all done!

After pitching the tent (during which my sole task was to take pics), I went for a spot of bird watching. I can't spot as many as RK can, let alone identify them, but I would like to think that I'm becoming better. I'm getting more patient, at any rate. Earlier I used to get a little jittery- I would think, man I can hear birds all over the place but can't see a single one, or can't see one long enough to figure out what it looks like. Nowadays, I'm getting to a more Zen-like state (!). I am not thinking (as much) of a bird count, or a list. I'm more like, let me hang out here for a while and if I see any birds, all the better.

In MoS, this attitude helped a lot because there were a TON of birds that I had either never seen or had no clue how to begin identifying.

So. Many, many birds. Amazing star-gazing areas. Wonderful Peepal tree under which we pitched our tent and which sheltered us from a blazing sun the next day. 

What I am pleased with reg bird watching:

a) I saw my first treepie!

b) I finally recognized my first Red wattled lapwing- which is a bird that RK has been pointing out to me for years, but this was the first time I saw one and figured out what it was all by myself. 

c) I finally saw the white eye of the White eye

Small steps that make me feel great.

When I closed my eyes for a nap this evening after returning home, all I could see were birds, on wires, on treetops, flitting about on the ground.