Wafaa ...

from a friend's post on Facebook


हमारे दरमियाँ ऐसा कोई रिश्ता नहीं था
तेरे शानों पे कोई छत नहीं थी
मेरे जिम्मे कोई आंगन नहीं था
कोई वादा तेरी ज़ंजीर-ऐ-पा बनने नहीं पाया
किसी इकरार ने मेरी कलाई को नहीं थामा
हवा-ऐ-दश्त की मानिंद तू आजाद था
रास्ते तेरी मर्ज़ी के तबे थे
मुझे भी अपनी तन्हाई पे
देखा जाये तो
पूरा तसर्रुफ़ था
मगर जब आज तू ने
रास्ता बदला
तो कुछ ऐसा लगा मुझ को
की जैसे तू ने मुझसे बेवफाई की

School Daze ...

another in the 'Humour for Kids' series ...


What shall we do, oh! what shall we do!
Civics is so boring, and History too!
Dead kings and generals haunt us with their 'noble' deeds;
Ordinances and legislations sprout like so many weeds!

Grammar, with its rules and regulations so tough:
However much you cram, it's never enough!
Who cares if nouns are proper or improper?
Gerunds and infinitives make me come a cropper!

The Americas and Africa; Europe and Asia:
Bending over maps could cause osteomalacia!
The mountains and rivers seem to mock at me --
Yes, Geography is something from which I flee!

Physics experiments -- I can never get them right
While numericals are enough to make me take flight!
Chemicals are dangerous -- they should never be allowed,
Bio specimens in formalin leave me grossed out and cowed!

Sanskrit, with its distinctions between I and me
Is dead as a Dodo -- why not let it be?
While France, Germany, Mexico and Spain
Would be good to visit, the language is a pain!

Computers are the most wonderful means of recreation:
But flow-charts and processes only cause aggravation!
Phys-ed and Library are okay, I suppose;
But crafts and arts my unhandiness expose!

The biggest puzzle, however, is, in spite of these frights
School life manages to be full of delights!

Cake ki kahaani

... a haasya kavita for Meghna's school

केक बनाया मम्मी ने तो टपकी लार हमारी,
नज़रें घूमें स्टोर की तरफ बार- बार हमारी.
स्कूल से लौटे, दरवाज़े पर खुशबू ने आ घेरा,
जैसे पेस्ट्री शॉप ने नाक में लगा दिया हो डेरा.
झटपट हाथ धो पहुंचे टेबल पर टपकाते लार,
बेसब्री से कर रहे थे हम केक का इंतज़ार.
पर यह क्या? मम्मी तो लायी रोटी और तरकारी:
हाय मिटटी में मिला दी सब उम्मीद हमारी!
'केक कहाँ है?' हम चिल्लाए, 'चुप हो!' वह गुर्रायीं;
शाम की चाय पर आ रहे हैं मेरे दूर के भाई.
तब तक बैठो चुपचाप, क्योंकि केक तभी कटेगा;
उससे पहले यहाँ कोई फटका तो बहुत पिटेगा.
चले गए हम मुंह लटकाकर, बैठे आस लगाए,
जल्दी से आयें मामाजी, चाय पियें और जाएँ!
आ पहुंचे मेहमान तो निकली केक की सवारी;
देखि उसकी मस्त छटा तो लपकी जीभ हमारी.
'मेहमानों से पहले, खबरदार जो हाथ लगाया';
दबी ज़बान में मम्मी ने यह सख्ती से समझाया.
रह गए हम देखते, मामा के बेटे ने झपटा मारा,
'कितना स्वादिष्ट है', कह कर चट कर गया केक वह सारा!

Grandpa: Of Love and Life

Grandpa was finally conscious after a week of concussion. Distressingly independent at ninety six, he had been ambling gently around the house when he stumbled and fell, hurt his head and lost consciousness. His speech was still a little slurred, but despite occasional bouts of delirium, he was clear-headed most of the time. His body, however, already wracked by old age and Parkinson’s Disease, had succumbed. The presence of male nursing attendants round the clock irked his free spirit, but he no longer had a choice in the matter.
‘How are you, child?’ he asked as soon as I entered his room with Rajesh.
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that Grandpa?’
‘See? I beat you to it!’ His eyes shone with glee.
‘How can he joke like this when he’s in so much pain?’ Rajesh asked dumbfounded, as Grandpa and I exchanged mischievous looks and chuckled.
‘That’s how he is,’ I replied tenderly, ‘And that’s what he’s taught us too: always to come up smiling, with a joke on your lips, no matter what’.
He passed away within three months of this, but I like to think that his dauntless spirit lives on in all his grandchildren.

My first clear memory with Grandpa is at the age of five. My male cousins had ganged up and were teasing me mercilessly, and I had fled to Grandpa. Ensconced in the sanctuary of his arms, I told him, between sobs, what had happened.
‘So … they called you a donkey … hmmm!’
I waited breathlessly for my tormentors to be called to book. But his next words completely threw me: ‘Where are your big, floppy ears? Where’s your tail?’
‘What do you mean Grandpa?’
‘I mean darling, that you haven’t really become a donkey. So why do you cry if some fools don’t know the difference between a beautiful little girl and a donkey? The Almighty has given you plenty of brains. So, think of a reply instead of crying when someone is unkind to you … crying will neither solve anything, nor give you any satisfaction!’
That gave me to think, and that lesson has remained with me to this day. Grandpa’s point of view was peculiarly his own. Left motherless among seven brothers at a tender age, with a father who became a workaholic, Grandpa was a consummate survivor.
He was a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom for all his grandchildren – the best Montessori school a child ever had. Showering us with unconditional love, he gave us a legacy of life-skills and mind-development exercises in the form of stories, idioms, conundrums, games, couplets and conjuring tricks – all done in such a way as to capture our imagination. His reminiscences about the Partition of the country in 1947 and the family’s transition to India, with my three year-old father in tow and an aunt on the way, were verbal manuals in survival skills and attitudes.
‘Whatever losses you sustain in life, always remember, you are not defeated until you choose to be’, he would say. ‘You can always rebuild what you have lost, the way we did after the carnage of the Partition, if you have your family and your health’.
Years later, working for a reputed newspaper, I found myself in hot water when my old boss changed jobs and the new boss, as usually happens, wished to clear away the old team and bring in his ‘own people’. I was an extra-special target since my niche was coveted by his personal protegee. Harassed in numerous intangible, petty ways, I was initially tempted to fling the job in his teeth – I did not really need the money. Besides, with my Master’s degree in Economics I’d been offered a plum job in Equity Research, which I had declined because of my love for writing.
However, Grandpa’s genes inside me would not let me bow to injustice. Being the granddaughter of Grandpa – the one who had left everything behind in Lahore, and starting over in Delhi in the face of prejudice against ‘refugees’ at the age of thirty four, had risen to the post of CEO at Tata Oil Mills – I refused to be hounded out of a job I loved and did well, and held my ground in the teeth of overt hostility for six whole months, at the end of which period the boss simply gave up and let me get on with my work! All through this time Grandpa was a pillar of strength for me, keeping my spirits up whenever the stress of the situation got to me.
We learned Chess from him, as well as Bridge, the ancient Chaupar, and a host of card games and conjuring tricks. To this day, I ascribe my ability to think situations through exhaustively and take sensible action to my grounding in Chess and Bridge under him. All of his grandchildren – my cousins, sisters and I – would clear all aptitude tests that came our way with little or no preparation, thanks to our childhood spent answering his puzzles and conundrums.
His immense love and joy in his family made us all feel cherished and precious, and gave us a core of self-confidence and security. It was never too late for him to accompany us to the market to buy something we had forgotten, and which we dreaded telling our parents about. It never, ever crossed his mind to refuse when his three year-old youngest grand-daughter demanded that he stop watching the Sunday movie on television and play with her in the garden. I am told he once rang up from Bombay (as it was then) when I was four, to ask my parents to switch on the radio, since my favourite song from ‘Bobby’ was playing on AIR!
In his later years he suffered increasing loss of hearing, blurred vision due to a spoiled cataract surgery, and the progressive tremors and phases of forgetfulness of Parkinson’s Disease, but never, till his demise at the age of ninety six, did we ever see him defeated in spirit.
It’s no wonder then, that the least demonstrative of my cousins – a notoriously taciturn person – was moved to write his first ever personal post on Facebook upon Grandpa’s demise: ‘Remembering my Grandfather -- one of the few people who inspired me’!

Remembering Ma

Published in 'Chicken Soup for the Indian Woman's Soul

Ma was dying and she knew it. She’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and had her first mastectomy at the age of 55. The biopsy report said ‘stage 2-B’, which, I learned later, was a euphemism for ‘stage 3’. Post-secondaries, her second mastectomy happened three years later, and it was then that she sensed that the end was near. It’s more than two years now since she passed away, but she lives in our memory (and the memory of all who knew and loved her) as the embodiment of love, grace, dignity and beauty.
I remember clearly her determined courage when she was diagnosed with the dreaded disease. My sisters and I just went numb – it was too much to take in all of a sudden; but Ma and Dad, working as a team as always, took prompt action, and without getting into the controversies of second opinions and conflicting advice from different sources, opted for immediate surgery and by next evening the diseased organ had been severed away. By that time we had managed to get a grip on ourselves and were concentrating on the task of mentally preparing Ma – and ourselves – for her chemotherapy.
The doctors told us that hers was one of the fastest growing strains of malignancy known to medical science and her chemo medicines were commensurately strong with their equally strong side effects, even apart from the usual debilitation, weight loss, hair fall, etc. They gave her four weeks to recover from surgery before subjecting her to the rigours of chemo. She was up within two, deaf to all protests and admonitions, determined not to be a burden on her two married daughters (or for that matter, on her unmarried one), her sister or her sisters-in law, all of whom had planned to take it in turns to stay with her during her treatment. She spent the next two weeks planning out the running of her home and the hired help, so that there would be the minimum possible disruption in our lives.
This was when we really appreciated the bond between Ma and Dad – the way they synergized their strengths to create a support structure, an almost tangible edifice of love, much stronger than their individual strengths. When her hair fell out overnight, the sight of her beautiful, thick, wavy strands lying in bunches all around her was traumatic, and not just for her. And Dad joked: ‘’You are my true companion, even sharing my increasing baldness,’’ making her laugh, and planning the different kinds of wigs and stylish hats he’d buy her ‘’so that I can have a beautiful wife with a new look every week’’.
I feel blessed in the surety that no matter what, we are always there for each other as a family. Even if we are physically absent, we are with each other in spirit, and not just in the clichéd sense. I can find no better illustration of this than the fact that even though I had to accompany my husband to a job posting in the US, halfway through Ma’s chemotherapy, I would dream of her frequently. And even though everyone back home made it a point not to let me know when her blood reports were not good, or when she developed extensive skin infection during radiotherapy, or when her finger- and toe-tips and nails degenerated as a side-effect of the chemo, I always knew something was wrong because of my dreams.
I returned from US fifteen months later, to find her horribly weakened in body, but indomitable as ever in spirit – making all our favourite pickles, drying herbs for our kitchens by the kilogram (I still have the dried mint and the pickles she made for me), cooking delicacies for us when we went over for our weekly visits. Perhaps her biggest joy at that point of time was spending time with my daughter and my sister’s son, pampering both her grandchildren with their favourite foods, toys, books (though she was as strict with them as she had been with us about standards of behaviour), and most of all, playing with them like a child. Her biggest worry was my youngest sister’s marriage.
At the back of her mind was always this desperate desire to see her happily married and settled in life. In that extremely weakened state too she would draw lists and make us shop for the necessaries of a wedding (in case something materializes I won’t be able to handle everything at once in this state, so it’s better to be prepared). We would protest at the incessant demands she made on herself; she’d always say: ’’I want to leave behind pleasant memories. I want you to remember your mother as a positive figure, not as a sick, querulous, weak old woman. Besides, all this activity keeps my mind off my body’s ills’’.
And then came the second big shock. After two false alarms (minor tumours that turned out benign, but which nevertheless had to be surgically removed), she was diagnosed with secondary malignancy in her other breast a little more than three years after the first mastectomy. I had gone with her to collect the report, fully expecting a third false alarm, and read the word ‘malignant’ in the report in a daze, looking at it again and again, willing the whole thing to be just a nightmare. Ma took one look at my face and twitched the report out of my hand.
‘’It’s nothing,’’ I said, hastily pulling myself together. ‘’Yes, I can see that on your face,’’ she said. After she had been examined by the oncologist and the date for pre-operative tests fixed, she said thoughtfully, ‘’I know I won’t live to see your sister’s marriage’’. Cutting short my protest, she continued, ‘’I don’t think I have much more to give you all. I just hope the end comes before I become a total burden. But promise me something: there should be no lack at your sister’s wedding. And just look after your father as best as you can. Fortunately, he is a very peaceful soul, but he’s going to be very lonely. Leaving him alone is going to be the hardest part of dying for me,’’ she finally broke down.
Nine months later, she was gone. She battled her cancer bravely to the end. The last month in hospital, with the malignancy rapidly spreading to her bones, and then her liver, ravaged her body, but could not daunt her spirit. She would receive all her visitors with a smile and joke with them, tamping down on the intolerable pain which ultimately necessitated morphia patches. Ten days before her demise, she insisted on celebrating Dad’s birthday in hospital, distributing sweets among the doctors, nurses and the paramedical staff.
During her final week, when smiling and banter became physically impossible, she gracefully declined to have visitors in her room. She was most peaceful when Dad was at her side. And that is how she finally died, looking at Dad. Even now, when faced with any problem, it is of her that I think, and as in life, she never fails me.