Women like Minu...

I had not seen Minu for many days. She used to come for a chat sometimes, but she had not been seen for quite some days. Her friend who lived on the opposite side of the lane saw me one day and on inquiring she told that Minu was not staying in the colony anymore, she had moved out with her daughter though she came two days in a week to give tuition to some children. I requested her to inform her that I wanted to meet her. And she did come. ‘Where did you go and why? Why didn’t you tell anything about it before leaving?’ I bombarded her with questions. Without least effort she told, ‘My husband came back from Dubai after twelve years! That’s why I moved to a bigger flat.’ I didn’t ask her anything about. Just expressed my sincere happiness. I understood what would have happened. Earlier, whenever I looked at her face, I used to be intrigued. She wore nothing. No ornaments, no bindi, and no vermillion in the parting… but she had a daughter, a big girl who was studying in college. I often felt like asking whether she was a unwed mother or separated from her husband. Whether she was divorced or was a widow? But I couldn’t muster courage to ask. I was afraid that she might feel hurt. That day, on knowing that she had a husband who had comeback to her, I felt truly happy, because as she was happy. I asked her if she felt no bitterness, no resentment towards her husband who ditched her twelve years ago leaving behind a ten year old daughter. She told she didn’t. She told that she had gone beyond any expectation and she was just happy that her daughter had got back her father. A young girl needs a father’s presence and that’s what was important. She told that she didn’t feel any resentment and in fact she had forgiven him completely. I looked at her very thin, pale but beautiful face. It was the face of a saint. I knew she had risen above the ordinary. At this level, nothing could have disturbed her peace. She went on to tell me how she lost her sanity after her husband had abandoned her with the daughter and had gone away. She had wanted to run away from everything, from known places, from family, friends and relatives, from everything familiar. She went to Delhi, requested a complete stranger for accommodation and had got shelter in their family. She did a job there too, for sometime. Later she migrated to Bangalore and worked in a school. With time, when sanity returned little by little and reality settled in, she came back to Bhubaneswar and settled down with her daughter. She started working in a school and made her students and her daughter her life. She channelized her loneliness and the energy of her youth in another direction.She started living for all the people who she came in contact with and developed a fellow feeling with the whole human kind. Thus she became love. Love that flows and only gives. Love that patiently understands and never thinks of being hurt and takes revenge or thinks negatively of anything or anyone. 

Minu’s is a sad story. There are sadder stories upon this earth. But people like Minu know how to love completely. True love forgives and accepts. It never thinks of causing harm, retaliating or taking revenge. It understands, forgives and forgets. True loves purifies our soul. It goes through pain and tears, but it elevates our conscious to a new height and ultimately liberates us. If only people could understand this, life on earth would be heaven.

The Wanderer

It was very dark 
where the train stopped.
A few passengers got down, nobody got in,
but in the faint light I saw somebody sitting or crouching
at a distance, his or her robe
fluttering violently in the wind that had 
picked up speed.

 As the wheels started rolling in'
a line of houses showed themselves 
in their own lights,
the grills on the outer walls visible
with a  comfy feeling about them.
I dreamt  myself in one of those houses,
living with a husband and two or three children,
a scene dipped with blissful domesticity.

I imagined and perceived it so odd
as I looked at the wall of darkness outside
and the two three lights visible and flickering
among the trees.

How can I be in that house,
in that tiny bit of world
when the whole sky, the coconut and palm,
the mysterious light above the dark corridor of
the earth beckoned me, when all the people 
who lived their small and big lives,
Sometimes lonely in the crowd,
and a crowd in their solitude fought, smiled and 
got involved and shrank away sometimes,
called me, 
to be a part of them.

How can I be at one place,
When I needed to stretch my hands and touch
the existence with my soul, to wander 
in aloneness and see the magnificence of
everything with my eyes wide open,
and pick up the gifts that were mine alone,
until another wanderer came along,
and picked up the muse
with solid and fearless, unwavering hands.



 

The Waiting

That one was a jealous girl,
Only wanting to be loved the most,
Attended the most.

The there was that girl, who wanted to be
seen as human,
Fighting and struggling, inside and outside,
Flinching at the unjust and unwritten rules for women,
She kept on fluttering her wings
for quite some time.

Then she fell in love with letters,
letters that never defined men,
Letters that never revealed the lies and the fear,
They only flew over misty rivers and
mountain lofts,
The time also came when she cried her tears into the rivers
and healed up.

A time came when she found herself,
in pages,
pages that smelt of defiance and disobedience
Pages that negated all the truths of
all the rats, and all the sheep,
She found that life can exist,
Without choices,
Neither climbing,nor falling,
Only in staying wherever you are.

One day she met a shadow,
That held the promise of immeasurable births
and new moons,
Which waited for only the earth and the sky,
to send it a sign,
But before time, the shadow grew restless
and lost its shape,
It scattered its strength and died.

Nowadays she looks around, for a lurking hope,
Of meeting that shadow again,
Of a birth again,
Days and moments smoke out and vanish
without a trace of anything,
Except a waiting for the unborn.

A Visitor called Death

Only that day,
she was plucking flowers for her Gods,
and chatting with the good neighbours,
Talking of her owes, and her falling health,
but she shone like the afternoon sun
her poplar like body standing strong and erect on her feet,
her forehead clear and voice crisp like potato chips.

Munna, the boy who lived in her house on rent,
was running from here to there and
there to here since early dawn,the next morning,
His face, a wooden block
divulging nothing of what was wrong,
The maid went to her house at eight, and was driven away,
by her freshly arrived son and daughter,
She went to another house and wailed,
Alas! Rekha Maa is dead.

The news spread, and people came flocking,
Rekha Mousi lay , with her lips slightly parted,
cold and dead on a mat.
Women whispered, the frowns questioned,
'How did she die?', she who was only fifty seven and as
straight as a stick,and as agile as a d0e,
What death embraced her in one night?

Munna, who had become her only salvation in a life
of utter solitude, sobbed and
told, Mousi had all the lights on at twelve in the night,
and didn't pick up a call,
He called her son and daughter at midnight
and told his fear,
And they came running from eighty miles,
and broke a door,to find Mousi sprawled on the ground,
as dead as a stone.
Another son expressed sorrow over phone from distant States,
He will reach for sure and attend the Karmas, he told.

How did Mousi die?
Why death visited her so untimely, so young,
without any pre-signs?A heart stroke?Or a brain stroke took her,
Or some secret pain, or the loneliness of years after
her husband died and the children left the nest?
The sons and daughters looked serious and sombre
in their loss,
Munna and his wife looked pale,
and fearful,their faces smeared with tears.

At nine in the morning,
The funeral party left ,with a neighbour at the wheel,
The driver simply refused to drive,
The son, and Munna sat with the body
at the back, Mousi in the same saree and the blouse
with silvery patterns,
she loved to dress to her liking.

Rekha mousi went away,
with many of her older neighbours still alive and shocked,
Accepting that the call came when it came,
Age or health notwithstanding.
All wondered at the enigma of her death.
The death of a woman full of life,
a lonely woman who filled lives with her rantings and laughter.

The Interview

One interview didn't go very well. It happens sometimes.I learnt that I don't know certain things and I know certain things. And I can learn the things I don't know provided that my children need those things and I have the capability and the drive to learn and relearn. But in my mind there were questions.Does memorizing poems makes a good teacher? I can love and remember Frost's lines in a serious poem and can recite it, but I may not like an humble poem by Wordsworth. We don't live in the romantic era anymore. Our life is diversified. We can't cram our mind with not so necessary information. English has become functional. Our children need to know how to write a job application, how to dominate a group discussion, how to write compositions and e-mails. They can read and read and write and write and can become Arundhati Roys and Bikram Seths. They can get a Man-Booker prize some day. We need originality, we need expression, we need crisp and correct English. We don't need to know what is "mood". We need to know our moods and transform them into authentic writing and speaking. The world and our lives are changing. While retaining the value system, we need to move ahead. Rote learning has given place to comprehension and understanding. We cannot remain stagnant in nineteenth century.

Interviews are great teachers and eye openers. They teach us great spiritual lessons. If they make us feel disappointed, they teach us that expectations beget disappointments. We feel bad because we have nurtured a seed of EGO within us. And when this ego is hurt, we feel angry, shaken and frustrated with others. But the fault doesn't lie with others. It lies within our self. We have created a self image of ours and if this image is tarnished in any way, we are hurt. It tells that we have allowed our happiness and peace to be dependent upon others. This way we become slaves of outside agencies and allow them to hurt us.

The setbacks also tell us that life is a journey with ups and downs. It cannot always be a straight line. When we get happiness, we don't think how they came our way. Rather we smugly think that we are worth it. But when we meet failures on the way, we question, 'Why us?'Thus failures propel us to meditate on the truths of life and to learn to accept life both way.But we are so attached to our comforts, joys and successes that we cry havoc when we face defeat at times. We are unable to accept things and feel frustrated.

The solution lies within ourselves. We should make ourselves so strong that no external power can hurt us. We should be humble and should keep our expectations low. Besides, we should know what we really are and should not depend upon the opinions of other people to know what we are. When we have shed this dependency on external factors, we will be immune to pain and hurt. And we will be humble enough to forgive people and love everybody from our pure centre.

The world of knowledge is vast. We have so much to learn from others. I am happy that I could understand my problem immediately and purge my mind of negative thoughts so as to be humble and establish my faith in the almighty as I always do. I have learnt to be grateful to the people who let me know my weaknesses and my strengths. This understanding becomes our source of peace and contentment and our ultimate salvation.

Reminiscing

It's a cobweb or a jigsaw puzzle?
Or it's just time streaming forward?
Moments and faces lose their shape and fade out,
People you have allowed to shear your heart
walk past you nonchalant
with a new song in their heart,
You fall apart,despite yourself,
and dwell upon your rights,
the pluses and minuses that tell you
that may be you never deserved love.
But you gave away unreserved
without thinking,
what darkness and deceit awaited you.

Your violated self doesn't revolt, but questions only,
because love still lives, for its own,
like a cloudless sky changing its colours softly,
evanescent and lingering sometimes.

The beloved that was born of love,
lost itself somewhere,
but your widowed self turns
the yellow pages sometimes,
in tender melancholic moments,
and holds the dead to the heart.

Another eventful weary day ends ,
without intimate conversations between
lonely souls,
and without the maddening touch of love.

A Day Named after Teachers

Gone are the days when the teachers used to be revered as Gods. In today's times the teachers and the students are equal partners in the process of teaching and learning. Thanks to the knowledge explosion because of advanced technologies, teachers of today are not a group of professionals who know everything. Children of today are exposed to a lot more things than they used to do earlier and they know things even teachers don't know. So, a teacher has become a facilitator, a guide and a friend who not only teaches but also learns from the students. The teacher also grows in all directions because of the curiosity and the inquisitive attitude of the students.

A teacher's life is full of activity if she or he thinks that it is a great responsibility that God almighty has bestowed on him or her. She has to be loving, just, impartial, fair and compassionate. She has to be strict lest her students go astray and don't grow in a balanced way. She has to listen to a hundred complains each day and act as a psychologist and a counsellor pacifying them , understanding their sentiments and healing their wounds. Her heart shifts in its place seeing any one of her children sick, pale-faced or bleeding.She has to inspire her children each and every day to study, to behave, to be disciplined and good. She has to deal with hundreds of restless, impulsive, talkative and fickle young minds. She has to stand for hours at a stretch and strain her voice to disburse knowledge. She has to find ways to mould the character of a pampered and arrogant child who errs continuously. She has to handle the children who are disabled, shy and subdued. She has to make them laugh, make them study and make them write their lessons.

A teacher is a professional, yes. She works for a salary. But a teacher is also somebody who has unfathomable love for her children that she gives out every day, every minute, from a pure centre, from a pure heart and that love has no price. It is very easy to be a jobholder but it is very difficult to be a teacher, especially in the changing world scenario where every day is a new revolution.

Education has been transformed into a commodity now and the parents are like customers.Educational institutions are mushrooming everyday and there is cut throat competition to market education. Old values and notions are dying and man has become prosaic and materialistic. The teachers fraternity is not held with reverence anymore. The definition of success is being counted in terms of marks. In these difficult times, working under a lot of pressure every moment and trying to strike a balance between delivering the goods and maintaining a value system and a proper standard, the teacher is often sandwiched. Engaged in teaching and evaluation, besides a hundred other related tasks, the life of a teacher is hardly easy. But it is a teacher who is busy grooming our young generation and shaping the future of a country every day.

On the occasion of this teacher's day, let's raise a toast to teachers. Let's wish them good luck. May God help them in sustaining their energy so that they never cease to be what they are; the builders of a generation and the architects of generations to come.