SECRETS OF THE SOUL -15 EXTINCTION

SECRETS OF THE SOUL -15

EXTINCTION

I seek the secrets of the soul,

Where the neon light casts its ghostly glow,

On the bundle of life that lay below,

A refuge from the surrounding shadows,

Beckoning to the darkness beyond,

To melt away to final extinction.

The light flickers as the strings snap,

And I watch as the bundle shivers,

A last gasp as stillness overtakes,

The shadows converge on their prey,

As the neon light flickers and fades away,

Somewhere in the shadows stands the ghost.

ONE PART WOMAN/ MADHUROBAGAN by PERUMAL MURUGAN BOOK REVIEW OF TRANSLATION by ANIRUDDHAN VASUDEVAN

ONE PART WOMAN/ MADHUROBAGAN by PERUMAL MURUGAN

BOOK REVIEW OF TRANSLATION by ANIRUDDHAN VASUDEVAN

‘One Part Woman’ is the English version of Perumal Murugan’s book in Tamil ‘Madhurobagan’. The translation by Aniruddhan Vasudevan absolutely brilliant and lyrical in its rendition won him the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award for the year 2016, while Perumal Murugan finds himself in the midst of a controversy and ostracism from his community for his alleged blasphemous depiction of certain rituals which were said to have been prevalent during the early part of the twentieth century. Despite the excellent translation of Aniruddhan Vasudevan which I could read, I am sure that the original flavor of the novel written in the native tongue with its peculiar nuances in the dialect of the region and the caste would have been diluted to an extent.

The English title is derived from the Tamil Madhurobagan which is a translation of the name of the deity Ardhanareeswara which means one part woman and one part man in this case Parvati and Shiva. In fact, the Ardhanareeswara is the presiding deity of the temple in Tiruchengode.   

Storyline

The story has its setting in the early part of the 20^th century in a village near Tiruchengode where Kali and Ponna belonging to a lower caste in a society ridden by stringent caste divisions, are a childless couple. The plot revolves around the rituals and practices that are said to have been prevalent during the chariot festival in the temple of Ardhanareeswara at Tiruchengode. This is elaborated in the following extract from the book -

“For the people of Tiruchengode the chariot festival was a three-month affair.

At the peak of the celebration, all rules were relaxed. The night bore witness to that. Any consenting man and woman could have sex. In the narrow lanes, on the fields around the village, in the rest stops on the hill, and on the open surfaces of the rock bodies lay casually intertwined. Darkness cast a mask on every face. It is in such revelry that the primal being in man surfaces.

No one sent unmarried women to the festival. But women over thirty were to be seen everywhere. Young men roamed all over the place. These men tried to lure as many women as they could on this one night. This was also the night when many of the young men had their first taste of sex. And women took on the role of their teachers.

This was on the night of the fourteenth day of the festival and was accepted as a means of helping a woman bear a child after having consensual sex with a faceless stranger who for all practical purposes was considered as a god. This is said to have been an accepted ritual. In the story Ponna is persuaded by her mother-in-law to go to the festival

“Ponna, please go to the fourteenth day of the festival” said her mother-in-law to her happily. 

“Your brother will take care of everything. How long can we keep looking at each other’s faces in this house? Don’t we want a child to bounce around this place?”

Her mother-in-law had told her “What is there to think about? This is God’s work. You are going to be with whoever appears as God to you. God will show you the way.”

Ponna does go the festival assuming that it has her husband’s acceptance having been tricked into believing it is so.

It is possible that in a typically caste ridden agrarian society of those times especially the lower caste smaller farmers and laborers the need for a progeny and the stigma attached to a barren woman is so great that the possibility of such rituals being prevalent during those times cannot be ruled out. It appears they did exist and have been documented.

The hue and cry raised by caste based outfits against the author for what they consider as portrayal of historical traditions of the temple rituals in a bad manner and calling for withdrawal of his books from circulation only served to fuel the controversy surrounding an author’s literary freedom. In fact, Perumal Murugan unable to withstand the onslaught against him decided to leave his native place after declaring that he was giving up writing stating that ‘Perumal Murugan the writer is dead’.

The protests have since petered out after the Madras High Court disposed of the petitions filed by protesters in favor of the author. Perumal Murugan is a Professor of Tamil and teaches at a college in Namakkal. He has won State awards for his works and three of his books have been translated into English – the other two being Seasons of the Palm and Pyre.

In a sense the controversy surrounding ‘Óne Part Woman’ has catapulted him onto the national stage. The other books are also rooted to the traditions and behavior patterns of the society in which he had grown up and touch on caste divides and depictions of real life patterns. One can say his writing is simple and truthful and since I have read only the English translations a lot of credit is due to the translator and perhaps that is why the Sahitya Akademi Award 2016 for Translation has been given to Aniruddhan Vasudevan. An Award for the Original author would have been a befitting response to his detractors.

I am only left with certain questions – 1) why rake up a controversy over a custom which no longer exists especially when the story is set in the early part of the last century? 2) though the entire story has an underlying element of sexuality at no point has the author transgressed the rules of decency, in fact at no point does one feel distasteful while reading the book. 3) our epics especially the Mahabharata is replete with examples of children born through the intervention of the Gods. Here in the book the consensual partner is referred to as a god. May be the ritual traces back its origins to the epics (or is this a controversial statement that I have made?).

In the end of the book while Ponna goes to the festival assuming that her husband is aware and his acceptance is there, the truth is far from that. This does raise the question of the morality of all such practices.

VISAKHA – A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

The pillar where my father breathed his last

VISAKHA – A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

It has taken me fifty four long years to revisit and recapture what I had left behind. I left as a thirteen year old, leaving behind a childhood and a father whose ashes I had gathered and immersed in the Bay of Bengal. The 28^th of March 1963 is forever etched in my memory, when I was rudely awakened from what now appears as a dream. This trip was in the nature of a pilgrimage primarily, something I planned two years ago when I was in Hyderabad, but was prevented from doing so as Visakhapatnam was felled by a severe cyclonic storm then. This time around it was Chennai that bore the brunt of a cyclone. 

As I alighted and stood on the railway platform, I looked around for familiar sights – the bookstall (if I remember right it was Higginbothams) from where I had procured my huge collection of Illustrated Classics books, my father making sure to get me two or three books every time we visited the station and that was pretty frequent, what with a host of relatives travelling between Madras and Calcutta. Vizag was midway and as the train from Madras would arrive around lunch time (similar being the case with the train going to Madras) it was taken for granted that home-made meals would be made available to them. My parents never failed to fulfill their expectations. I remember standing on the platform watching as the train chugged in. The steam engine has never failed to fascinate me. It looked so alive huffing and puffing as it pulled the coaches behind it and then letting of a sigh as the steam was released. Well I couldn’t find the bookstall.

The Street where we lived

The old city Main Road

I was caught in a time warp. I was still a thirteen year old who had pressed the button on the time machine taking me fifty four years into the future. Vizag was now a big city with broad roads and bustling crowds. The guest house where I stayed was in a sprawling residential colony which once upon a time was a picnic spot. I would not have been able to navigate myself to the old part of the city where we had resided if not for the landmark of the temple of what was once a village deity, now grown big, blocking the entire road where it was situated. 

The Kanak Mahalakshmi Temple

The Kanaka Mahalakshmi temple was my first destination from where I traced my way to the street where I had grown up as a small boy. The street appeared to have grown narrower with the old buildings having been replaced with two or three storied dwellings which seemed to have encroached on to portions in front of them. Anyway I was not sure for may be the street had appeared wider and now when I saw it with eyes that had grown five decades older it seemed narrow. Well there was no one who could help me trace out the inhabitants or rather the landlord’s family of my old dwelling, though I ultimately did succeed by tracing the shop on the Main Road of the old city, thanks to the alertness of my wife who had spotted it while we were driving down. The name was same though the location had changed. What now followed was an emotional reunion after fifty four years. The landlord’s son was eighty four years old now and he had last seen me as a lad of thirteen years.

The Seetha Ramaswamy Temple

For me my pilgrimage was completed when I visited the Seetha Ramaswamy Temple situated just behind the street we had stayed. This was where my father had breathed his last. As I stood in front of the pillar against which my father had sat leaning while listening to the discourse on the Ramayana the images came back vividly. I am quoting from my book ‘I am just An Ordinary Man’ –

My childhood is filled with the memories of a father, a father who fills the major portion of this period. His death at the age of fifty three due to a heart attack was the first transforming moment.

I have suppressed these memories as it brings back the last moment of my father’s life. I was sitting in the temple where a discourse on the Ramayana was in progress. I was sitting on the other side directly facing my father when it happened. It was all over in an instant. A brief contortion of the face and then he slumped down onto the floor. He was not sick and he did not suffer in death. However for us, it was so sudden. Later, others would console us saying that he was blessed as he died in a temple while listening to the holy book of God. Well how did it matter, to us he was dead and lost forever. I remember running to our family doctor’s place, all the while praying that my father was still alive. I returned as the doctor was away, but they had already shifted my father to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

That day as I stood near the funeral pyre, a boy of thirteen, to perform the last rites, since my brother elder to me by sixteen years could not reach in time, something happened. My tears dried up and as I lit the pyre the finality of it all hit me. I grew up that day. I understood what death was all about.

I stood there for some time allowing all those memories to sink in and in a manner allowed their exorcism. Later my wife told me that I appeared upset, may be yes.

St. Aloysius High School

The next stop was my school St. Aloysius High School where I had studied from the Nursery class till the first term of Ninth standard – my entire childhood. The school was as it was structurally, a magnificent medieval monument, but I was saddened by the fact that the entire sea front at the back of the school was now lost to the ore handling terminal which had also brought with it ecological inconveniences to the school. The big Banyan tree behind the sports ground, on whose branches we had spent many a time was now no more, having given way to the ore conveyor belt (though fortunately enclosed). We had time to go through the school accompanied by one of the teachers, peeping into my old classrooms and the Chapel. I met the present Principal and Rector and introduced myself as one of the favorite students of the first Indian Rector and Principal of the school – Father Cherian. It was his recommendation that got me admitted to St. Patricks High School in Madras in the middle of a term, when we shifted there after my father’s death. I was informed that the Government wanted the school to shift and declare the present building as a Heritage site. It was the concerted action taken by all the teachers and the school administration which ensured that the school remained where it was.

Though we stayed for three days covering the city’s various beaches hills and temples, the first day completed and fulfilled what I had been aching to do for many years –a trip down memory lane and a childhood recaptured.

ROSES IN THE GARDEN

ROSES IN THE GARDEN

Something irks,

Once again I feel restless,

As I see,

The roses in the garden.

It was last year,

In a similar setting,

I had written poetry.

And she was there in front of me.

We met,

Brought together by a cursory glance.

Our glances held,

Searched for deeper content,

But no word spilled,

my heart’s lament

Sometimes on that castles height,

We stood gazing,

At the orange west,

And as the sky,

Grew speckled with little lights,

She spoke to me,

Of distant domains,

The abode of Gods,

Of divine love and death.

The days passed,

I beside her, content,

In her closeness,

The sweetness of her tone.

And the fever grew,

The fire within me raged,

And in delirium,

I disclosed the scars within,

In love of her my heart had burnt.

She had blushed;

A mist covered her sparkling eyes,

As she stared at the setting sun,

A silence reigned supreme.

In this stillness, I chose

To pursue, remain close,

To my fixation,

She receded slowly from the scene.

An year has passed,

Now alone,

I sit in the garden,

In wonderment,

In solitude,

I speak to the roses,

And they gaze at me.

A similar tenderness,

A significant silence pervades.

Something irks,

It was last year,

In a similar setting,

I had written poetry.

And she was there in front of me.

YET ANOTHER YEAR DAWNS and An Ode to the Year gone by

YET ANOTHER YEAR DAWNS

An Ode to the Year gone by

Shakespeare wrote in ‘Macbeth’. –

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

That I consider as an expression of existential angst, but I am seized with the reality of fleeting time. My angst is one of unfulfilled desires so as another year ends I am tempted to write –

An Ode to the Year gone by

Oh! Maybe if I had not blinked,

The year would not have passed me by,

All the tomorrows are now yesterdays

And the year a yesteryear,

The days no longer creep,

But pass me by at furious pace.

Oh! Maybe if I had not blinked,

I could still have held on to those moments lost,

Moments when I had willed,

Time should stand still.

Though I know time and tide wait for no man

But couldn’t they wait a little longer?

Oh! But I blinked,

I couldn’t do otherwise

For therein lies my destiny.

Yet another year has passed us by. As I now stand at the threshold of the dawn of another new year I look back to see what I have left behind. ‘Nothing much’ I say to myself, nothing which I can retrieve and carry with me except unfulfilled resolutions and a bucket that never seems to empty. I have only grown in time and carry with me the hope that the morrow will usher in further resolutions to keep me going and maybe a chance to take care of the list that still lies in the bucket. I remember when I was in school we were asked to write an essay on ‘My New Year Resolutions’. I did a commendable job in expressing myself in words for that’s what the teacher told me. But he was intrigued by the two lines with which I had ended the essay –

To every resolution made

A goodbye did I bade

He asked why I had written that and I answered truthfully that they sounded fine for they rhymed. He gave me a quizzical look and proceeded to advise me that it only reflected a defeatist attitude and there should be no room for procrastination in future. He cut out the two lines and said that now it read better. I learnt my lesson. I learnt that resolutions keep us going. Whether they are ultimately resolved are not, they take us forward. And life is all about going forward as much as we can. All our dreams do not come true that does not mean we cannot dream.

The ode that I have penned above is not procrastination or defeatist. It is only to convey the anguish I feel in not being able to hold on to moments that would soon fade away into memory. The rule of life however ensures that everything fades away, but I take comfort from the fact that every year that fades away soon gives way to a new year with renewed resolutions and renewed hopes and will give rise to moments that we shall cherish once again (and hopes that moments which gave us pain do not recur though that is hoping for the inevitable).

I recall the visit of a dear friend who stayed with us on one of his trips to India. He took out a paper and showed me what he called his bucket list. If I remember right there were nearly sixty items which included – learning new languages including Japanese, Spanish, taking part in adventure sports like paragliding and learning to play the trumpet etc. and mind you he was in his late sixties at that time. When I met him a year or two later he told me that he was still in the process of ticking of items in that list and there were quite a few which he had ticked off. If you ask me whether he plays the trumpet well, I will say does that really matter. It makes me wonder, that while I have been sitting and only dreaming of things I want to do, here was a man who has tried to turn his dreams to reality. Ultimately not everyone can attain perfection; it is the process of undergoing the experience that matters. At the end of the day life is all about experiencing.

It is important setting a goal for oneself, for that is what makes you move forward. It is on the way, on that journey, that we start seeing and experiencing things which we have never really understood before. You see things with a new perspective, a perspective that has been sharpened by the experiences on the way.

At the beginning of the year I had one major resolution and that was to complete my second book and have it published and that happened. Today as I sit here writing all this, I do not evaluate its success, though it does make me happy when a few of my friends tell me that they liked it. To me writing the book was the experience and it carried me forward during the year. Someone asked “So what now, when is your third book coming out?” I am not sure whether he had read my book, for he did not have anything to say about it, but I did reply “That will be my New Year resolution”.

We age every moment but we measure our age in years. May be that is for giving enough time to balance out the bad moments with the good ones and end up with a net balance of happiness and that is why we wish each other a happy new year for that is what we ultimately aspire for.

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

― Robert Frost

Aside from my own reflections and thoughts on the year that has passed us by and my aspirations for the year that is on the threshold, I wish all my friends a New Year of fulfillment, happiness and peace. To each their resolutions that will take them towards discovering new frontiers and self-discovery, I wish all the best.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017

TRANQUILITY

Tranquility

On this mountain slope,

A cool wind’s caress,

Sweeps across my face,

With a lover’s tenderness.

The distant sun blushes red,

At this strange intimacy,

As it prepares to go to bed,

The end of a daylong spree.

Flutter of tired wings,

Stealthy sounds of retreat:

A shepherd’s call rings,

The bustle of homebound feet.

When the sounds of the day,

Have come to die,

And the nightly music

Is yet to begin,

A  muted stillness exists.

There appears now,

My long awaited lover,

At first peeping, then ascending

Towards her heavenly bower.

She beckons me to her bosom.

Gazing at her radiant face,

Tranquillity reigns,

As I come to rest,

In her soothing soft embrace.

GONE WITH THE WIND - CHENNAI

GONE WITH THE WIND - CHENNAI

A year ago I wrote a post – ‘Submerged – The Day Chennai Sank’. The rains that battered the city were unprecedented as it was reported that it was the highest in the last 100 years. I was there then. For the first time I saw Chennai rise up as a single united force without relying on the unreliable support of the political class, to battle the forces of nature to ensure the survival of the city. And this they did for the city was back on its feet again. There are many who are still recovering from the losses they had suffered.

This time around I was not there when Nature decided to unleash its fury on the city through wind – the cyclone Vardah. When the city had already geared itself for a repeat of last year’s heavy rains, disaster struck from elsewhere. Last year the city was underwater, this time it was blown away. As I saw the visuals on the television of the devastation caused all around, my heart missed a beat and a feeling of profound sadness overtook me. Not only because of the misery that had befallen thousands of people for the second year in succession, but the fact that the cyclone had uprooted along with the trees the very soul of what was once known as Madras.

Fifty years ago I remember cycling down the avenues of Adyar, Theosophical Society, Kalakshetra – trees, trees everywhere. With the passage of time a number of them vanished with apartments taking over the places of houses/ bungalows. But still the green cover did exist, and the older trees did stand as testimonials to an era gone, guardians of a spirit that still flickered in the memories of old timers like me.

I have been told that most of the older trees (definitely older than fifty years) have been uprooted and fallen on the ground blocking the roads. They will be dismembered, the roads will be cleared and the gaping hole where once they stood will be filled with mud and concrete (well could we call it a decent burial?). As I saw the photographs of these giants laid low by the fury of nature I felt the sorrow of having lost a dear friend. There is sadness at the loss of human life and property, but for me this is the end of a generation.

I do not deny that I did spend a sleepless night wondering whether the tree under which my car was parked would fall down and smash it to smithereens. As expected I did receive a call from my neighbor that a big branch of the tree was perched precariously above and with the next gust of wind was bound to fall on my car. I told them where to find my car keys (the house key was with the neighbor) and promptly four of the younger generation had the car moved to a safer place. Though rebuilding homes and lives and the city is going to be a long and painful process, I am sure that like it happened during the floods last year, Chennaiites will rise once more to bring back normalcy to the city as soon as possible

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. –  Hermann Hesse