Tomato

She crushes the tomato in her hand. Juice runs through her fingers, all the way down her elbow, dripping on the floor. The tomato seeds stick to her fingers and when she wipes her hand on her chest, they stick to her body. My baby girl. I hold her and kiss her and she smells just like a tomato.

Her face and hands are sticky and delicious. She grabs my glasses and insists on putting them back on my face herself. If I dare take them away from her, she'll break them. She twists them terribly, threatening me. I give her an angry look and she grins, which makes me smile. My lioness.

I keep looking at her, then at the movie, then back at her. She is so alive, so whole and curious and active and full of life, and not at all interested in the screen. She feeds me her tomato.   

Tube Lights

For better or for worse, we all die. That is a fact. We are usually remembered by a maximum of two generations after us. Unless we do something significant, write or create or somehow change the course of things in a memorable way, leaving something behind. 

Our peers remember us according to how we have affected them, negatively and positively. For a person who spends a lot of time alone, and a lot of time inside my head, this is bad news. 

I don't know how I come across to others, though I have my suspicions. Fizzah has no choice at this point except to tolerate me... and what choice do I have but to tolerate her? My husband says he's happy but is often walking on eggshells around me, afraid of my mercurial temper. What sort of happiness is that? But it must be real, because he is grounded in reality. He accepts things for what they are - a remarkable trait. A difficult trait. A confounding trait. Most people (I mean me) think often of how they want things to be. 

I want my white walls and shabby tube-light house to have soft yellow lights, easier on the eyes, much comfier to hide in. I want a comfortableness that doesn't exist in our house. A soft chair, a single sofa perhaps, to sink into. A sofa that doubles as an ottoman or a rocking chair or something equally terrific. And I want a library at home. I won't go on anymore about what I want. What a dull paragraph - full of neediness. 

:)

We don't always know what we are doing, but when we do, isn't it nice?

I know how to sit with Fizzah and show her the colours and shapes and animals in her books. I know how to take her to the bathroom, and how to cut her nails while she sleeps. I know how to choose a movie on Netflix, when I go on without knowing what to watch.

I know how to write. Sort of haha. I know how to colour with colour pencils. I know how to cook and I know how to sleep. Look at all the things all of us know how to do. Eat, clean, sweep, wash dishes, mop, hang, fold, and look at all the machines we know how to use: washing machines, laptops, phones, microwaves, dishwashers, stoves, food processors. Aren't we talented! 

Geography

In another life I would have been a geographer. Someone out there with diagrams and a computer and a video camera, chasing tornadoes and traveling to the core of the earth. I would read weather signs in the wind. Me, a team, a map and a whole lot of data recording equipment.

Resarchers, Masters and PhDs go out there. The other options are either you work for the government, as an environmental scientist, which sounds cool, or, you take the better paid position of being the environmental person that consults with construction companies and other private companies that want to build over the land and effectively destroy it, as long as you can give them the go ahead, and tell them where the drainage areas are so their buildings don't flood. 

A woman by happenstance

When I was studying English at U of T, I was furious that writers like T.S. Eliot and Yeats were considered intelligent when they were obviously so sexist. Why do we study such people and give them time and space? Why are they respected?

I would leave class fuming, hyper-aware of myself as a woman, seeing signs of social injustice and inequality everywhere, offended by these old, dead poets. The patriarchy was at work right in front of my eyes. My own home had my mother doing all the cooking and cleaning, even though both parents worked full time.

I left a South Asian Lit class in tears, angry and embarrassed, because Salman Rushdie is a misogynist. I stopped attending the class. It was too much.

I don't remember what made me realize the chains were all in my mind. I was suffocating when I didn’t need to. I had felt fine before coming across all these issues. So I broke my mental chains, and decided to live it up. I consciously chose not to analyze the decisions of my life through this “women are powerless and disadvantaged; men run everything” lens.

I don’t go around thinking of myself as a woman all the time (though I often think of myself as a mother - a very seperate thing). Being female is not at the forefront of my mind. But obviously being a woman affects my life in several ways.

One of the ways is how I socialize. I am new here, in Anjeerwadi, and in this Indian / Bohra culture that we live in. Since I am a woman, I mainly socialize with other women. I hardly talk to the men, and when I do it is always a much less personal conversation than when I speak to the women. The women ask me about Fizzah right away, and listen when I talk about whatever new things she’s up to. The men don’t ask.

This is not the case necessarily for family friends. But even then, the men talk to me about India and its state compared to Canada, or about work opportunities or something like that. The women ask about cooking, and about Fizzah and the family, they talk about work sometimes, but not in the same way as men.

I don’t like making these generalizations. Women this and men this. I don’t like saying that because there are always exceptions and it’s wrong to assume things. But here in Anjeerwadi and surrounding Mumbai, in this culture, the men talk to the men and the women talk to the women.

Here in everyday life, misogynists are not respected. In some households, I think, they are tolerated. But the number of talented, ambitious and remarkable women definitely balance out the status quo.

Regrets

Anger comes rushing out, making my voice and my face ugly. It is a dirty mess of vomit out there. Worst of all, or perhaps best of all, it has no effect on Fizzah.

Well, it must have an effect, of course. It teaches her that this is an acceptable way to respond when someone does something you do not want them to do. But it doesn’t work. I want Fizzah to not throw food, I get angry, I bark orders in my vomit voice, and she just sits there, watching the show.

After a minute, once I’ve calmed down, she changes the topic, asking me for something else.

Run Along Corona

We are about to enter total freedom. I can almost taste the hotel chicken on my tongue. The yumminess. The red masala-ness. The following diarrhea-ness.

I am looking forward to going back to normal in this coronavirus world. We will bunch up together tightly in the taxi, and the Covid molecules will stay away from us. We will show them a united front.

There is a kind of therapy called laughter therapy, where just the act of laughing out loud is believed to boost your immune system and give you a whole cartful of other benefits. I think this will be a potent weapon against corona. Ha. Ha. Ha!

Who We Are

What gives you that "living life to the fullest" feeling? At what times are you in the zone?

We are not cut-throat business people, with our eye on the profit line at all times. We are engineers, teachers, professors, salesmen, accountants, tutors. We are people that do something for other people, and thus go through our day-to-day life, living. Rock climbing and swimming and hiking, cottaging and getting together on Thanksgiving and Christmas and in the summer. We are readers and writers and dreamers and builders. Creators.

We are transitory. What do we live for? A sense of peace, perhaps. A sense of balance. A feeling of walking within truth.  

Cyclone No More

Cyclone Nisarga came and went this afternoon in a couple of rainy, windy hours. We were all terrified by a precautinary message sent by the administrator of our building: that we will have no power or water for the next 4 days. We stocked up on water, for drinking and for use, and I realized in times like these we really should have an emergency kit ready to go. In this kit I would have two things:

1) A flashlight with fresh batteries (or even better, a rechargable flashlight)
2) A power bank

You can always buy drinking water from the kiosk on the corner.

P.S. They don't take returns. 

Grey or gray?

The thing about the lockdown lifting is that I want to go out, but I don't want to go through the effort of wearing clothes, or finding clothes to wear, or dressing Fizzah or taking her to the bathroom first.

I am sometimes not here, if you know what I mean. I am at a beach or in a studio or in a forest cottage. I am not in Anjeerwadi in Mumbai. If I was really here, I'd know what people here were up to. We would be up to the same things.

What are the people here up to? And how do they manage to keep their homes presentable? Or do they?

A drop of rain

What a breath of fresh air! This morning we wallowed in our first rainfall in eight months, and with the lockdown measures relaxing it feels like a second life. The sky is cool-grey and cloudy. Sounds, muted, float up into the air: construction and car horns and crows; the pulse of the city. I never thought I'd want noise.

Inside, it is quiet. It is my favourite time of the day: Fizzah is asleep. I chuck my duties aside and sit down to write. Who I am blurs, no longer defined by motherhood.

Although, this, too, is part of the definition. This teasing recess: 1.5 hours of toddler nap-time.