Maya's First Halloween, Cute Bunny at 9 months
Maya's Second Halloween, Ferocious Lion at Age 1.75
Maya's Third Halloween, Demure Ladybug at Age 2.75
And yes, she did go trick or treating this year, with a friend, and devoured a candy.
Eyeing the Treat, Cute is the Trick
The faces in the photograph have started to fade. One by one, the faces will vanish until nothing is left except the empty benches and the memory of what was in the the picture. I am talking of a high school picture, the kind of group portrait taken in the urban schools across India during the 70s and 80s, when I attended such schools. The faded faces are those who are no longer with us. Spirits.
I was woken up on Sunday morning by a call from a high school friend who lives on the East Coast. A high school class mate of ours, living in India, had just collapsed of a massive heart attack and died before he reached the hospital. He was returning from a shopping mall with his wife. They were about to set off when he complained of feeling exhausted, too tired to even drive. He was a doctor, he knew something was wrong and asked his wife to get some help to drive him to a hospital. All this is only hearsay to me, of course. I imagine the face of his wife. Did she comprehend what was coming ? Did he know what was coming ?
He was my age or maybe a year younger. He has a son, studying in a residency school in a nearby town. His father is still alive, living in his home town. I imagine what it must be like to be his father, traveling through the night to bring back his dead son’s body. He is old, living alone, his wife deceased prematurely, just as we were at the threshold of adulthood. Leukemia had cut her stay short. In those days, in that small town, from the time they diagnosed her condition to the end was a horrifyingly short week. I think of the father, having survived all these years, to reach this point. How do you survive this, I wondered.
He was Shanthala’s class mate from kindergarten. She knew him better than I did. (Shanthala’s parents’ knew his family well, they worked together at the same hospital). She called him a sweet soul, who went out of his way to help others. He had mistaken the date of Maya’s first birthday, thus missing her birthday party in India. All we have of him maybe a picture from our wedding.
As she cried at the news, I quizzed my friend who called with the news, trying to ascertain the cause of death. Was he obese, I wanted to know. He had always been a little plump. Was he on any medication, had he run any physical recently that might’ve foretold this end ? Even as I was asking these questions, a part of my mind wondered at the questions we choose to ask at such a time. The causes may hardly stunt the grief of his loved ones. Our parents cried over the injustice of it all. How could someone good be taken by God, when so many bad people continue to live well ? How could someone so young be taken by God, when we old people, the forgotten and the lonely, still live ? It must be his karma. Ahh, the madness of causes, of our minds wanting a coherent narrative, a predictable storyline.
He is not the first amongst us to die. Another class mate died many years back. He committed suicide. He too was married, and if I remember correctly, had children. There may have been others, we don’t know where all our high school mates are.
Shanthala was upset the whole day. I wondered if some – however small – part of the sorrow is for ourselves, our own impending mortality. I had heard a poem, Gerald Manley Hopkins’ famous “Spring and Fall” and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The poem is about a young girl, grieving over the dead leaves in the fall. The poem goes:
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Fall Over Pichetti Ranch
The day before I had seen a small flock of geese in a sullen sky, honking the impending fall. They were going home, was my first thought, before I corrected myself to say they’re flying south. As our hearts grow older, should we, like the geese, turn east ? For an immigrant like us, for whom home is not a place to seek refuge from, the mind turns over these questions, time and again. Even for people like me, who feels little for a place as home. I wondered if Shanthala’s grief was also about this ? The disconnected lives and abstract deaths of loved ones back in India. I’m reminded of a David McCord poem, a poem I’ve read to Maya, called “Runover Rhyme”:
Even the leaves hang listless,
Lasting through days we lose,
Empty of what is wanted,
Haunted by what we choose.
Not all the news of the past week has been sad. I’ve reconnected with friends from my first grade, friends I had not heard from in thirty years. One of them has managed to track me down, despite my un-Facebookness. One of them is someone I still remember as my first “best friend”. We make plans to meet when we visit India. Maya has started to speak full sentences, making them up in ways that are new to her, new to our ears in her voice. Last night, unable to sleep, she turned to me and said in Kannada, “Dini, Mayange bahala hotte hasdide” (Dini, I’m so hungry). She switches (and translates) between three languages – Kannada, Spanish and English – fluently. After a long time, Maya and I spent a whole day together yesterday. As I write this, Maya is laughing a full throated laugh at something that Shanthala is doing.
As I processed the events of the past two days, my mind settled on a quote that I read in an article about the end of life in this country. Written by a neurosurgeon, the quote is from Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Approaching the end, the archbishop says to a younger priest, “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
Summer has been a relatively absent season this year, at least when it comes to temperatures. Except for less than a single handful of days when the temperature climbed up into the 90s and kept going, the temperatures have been more spring-like. The farmers’ market is however bursting with nature’s bounty, with incredibly sweet nectarines, juice-drip-down-your-chins-down-your-elbows peaches, blueberries and strawberries, soothe, cooling watermelon, cantaloupe and melons.
We went to Picchetti Open Preserve today with another family. The company:perfect, the day:gorgeous. We listened to some live music, ate good food, drank some good wine and did a hike cum meadow exploration. Maya fell into a happy sleep in the car in the early evening hours on our way back.
All this is just an excuse for me to share this exquisite poem by Billy Collins. I read this a few months back as I was perusing his Nine Horses book of poems and have been waiting to spend a day that matched the mood of the poem.
An old colleague died early Friday morning. She was my age, if not younger. A close friend, whose cousin she was married to, informed me of the news today. She had contracted H1N1, the doctors hadn’t caught it in time and when they did, she had gone straight on the ventilator. She never recovered consciousness from that time and died, nine days later.
I had known her when I had first started working. It was her first job too. We were both fresh out of college. I was hubris. She seemed quieter, less certain of things than I was. We had worked together on the same project, gone to Paris around the same time to complete the project. Once the project was over, I moved on, lost touch. I came to know of her again, a few years ago, when a new acquaintance grew to be one of our closest friends. She had married a cousin of one of these friends. My friend told me that she had enquired after me and had asked my friend to hook us up when I was in India next. She had become a VP and managed hundreds of people, I heard. I never took her up on the offer. And now I never can.
Today was the arangetram of the daughter of another friend of mine, a friend I had also met working at the same place, at my first job. His daughter is hardly eleven years old, but she danced with the poise and grace of someone much older. Maya enjoyed the dance and the music; she couldn’t take her eyes off the violin and mridangam, even when the dancer was off stage.
As I watched her dance, my thoughts drifted to the dance of life. Three people, we shared a moment in time and place. How far apart our strands have been strung now. Each has a daughter, but one is dancing, one is rejoicing and one is bereft. The grief of the unmothered, the joy of the dancer and the watcher, all mingled together to bludgeon my mind, befuddle it, in a way that I can’t seem to express.
I am fortunate to have not been touched by death until very late in my life. Death had been a guest many times before: when my grandparents died, when the daughters of colleagues of my father’s had died – one of rabies, bitten by a dog she was caring for and the other by a snake bite -, when the parents of close friends had died. But death had never done an extended stay. Never touched me, except in sharing the sorrow of a friend’s grief. Then Kitty died. And three years later, I still can’t get my head wrapped around death. I still can’t seem to comprehend how someone is alive one instant and dead the next.
Two weeks ago, Maya stubbed her big toe and cut it when she fell running around the swimming pool. One morning, a week later, I examined her toe. It was swollen and black and infected. I rushed her to the paediatrician who prescribed an antibiotic. A week later, Maya’s toe was normal. Not too long ago, people with such infections either died or had to have their legs amputated. Today morning, I had put Maya in the jog stroller – we were going for a run together after a hiatus of several months – when I realized that I had forgotten my cap. I put the brake on and walked back towards the house to pick up my cap. Something made me turn and I saw the stroller rolling backwards onto the street. I had the stroller in my hands, safe, within a second since I was just a few steps off. But, I wondered, what if I had not turned around in time ?
Everywhere I turn, it seems death stalks us and how we escape, eludes me. Of course, no one escapes forever. I read that the Episcopalians have a saying “In the midst of life we are in death”. The only solace I find is that, at the same time, “in the midst of death we are in life”.
News comes that a friend far away
is dying now
I look up and see small flowers appearing
in spring grass outside the window
and can’t remember their name – James, by W.S. Merwin
Of late, Maya has begun to insist that she wants her milk in the blue milk bottle rather than the yellow one.
“Azul”, she cries, as I reach out for the yellow milk bottle.
“But Maya, the blue bottle is dirty. It still has to be washed”, I say.
“No”, she starts to whine, “Azul”.
The process repeats for every item which we have in blue, exactly two: a blue water glass and a blue bowl. My father was thrilled with the news. Many moons ago, some fortune teller told my dad that blue was his lucky color. He immediately proceeded to paint everything he could blue, as I and my mother shuddered and thanked god that the fortune teller hadn’t picked some more easily off-putting color like pink or purple.
When Maya first began naming the world, I wondered how we would teach her the colors. Pointing at a dog or a ball or a car and naming it was easy. How could we point to the color of the thing ? Intuitively, I felt that naming colors would come after naming the things.
Scientific American carried an article last week about the acquisition of the language of color in humans. Melody Dye, the author of the article and a researcher at the Cognition, Language and Learning Lab at Stanford University, begins with an anecdote on testing a two year old for his color naming competence. She says that most two year olds have difficulty naming their colors, despite their parents’ insistence on their complete mastery (she narrates how the parents of the infants being tested had to be blindfolded because many got aggravated and started helping when their kids failed to be as stellar as they were hailed to be). Children even as old as six continue to have difficulty naming colors correctly, despite training.
Maya can confidently, almost dismissively, identify a dog or a cat or a bird, no matter what shape, color or size the animal is. She can even identify one from cartoons and caricatures. But identifying colors is a lot more difficult because identifying colors has a cultural component: not all cultures identify the colors and its hues the same way. The author quotes how in a Namibian dialect, Himba, their name for a color “zoozu” amalgamates the colors English speakers identify as black, green, blue and purple or how another name, “serandu” does the same for what we would distinguish as red, pink and purple. The linguistic erudites know well how the Russians have not a single name for the color blue but instead use two different words, one for the lighter shades of blue and one for its darker shades (but, apparently vodka is a cure for either shade).
The author of the article also points to the problem I pondered about. Children can learn the names of things quickly because they’re used within a context. Cats and dogs have usually easily distinguishable characteristics (Maya did get confused initially with some small dogs) and so can be called out easily. But colors can’t be called out that easily, at least not until the names of the objects have been mastered first.
The denouement of the article is fascinating, another insight into how language shapes thought. Here is Melody Dye:
“As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
When kids were trained using the postnominal construction, they mastered the color much more quickly.
“What color is the traffic light, Maya”, Shanthala asks.
“Red”, says Maya confidently.
“What does red mean”, I ask.
“Go, go, go!”, Maya shouts exultantly.
