The Book of Questions

It rained today while I was walking to work.

I was wet from the cold winter rain, smiling back at strangers... with Neruda swimming dreamily inside the puddle in my brains... making me, like he always does, recite mentally my favourite lines from The Book of Questions:

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendour of their roots?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?

And for the thousandth time in my life I wondered if there is indeed anything sadder than the sight of a train standing in the rain? Yes, may be some... but not many that I can think of.

Notes to self 101

When I wait for something, I want time to go fast....

I have learnt in life that the best times are those when you are anticipating for something nice; and once the object is within reach, the magic starts to wear off. At least somewhat; or maybe it’s my ‘bipolar’ way of thinking... maybe for the rest of the world it’s mostly ‘eternal sunshine’- or maybe not. Who’d know?

But regardless...

... when I wait, I wait.

And if this ‘waiting time’ is- indeed- the ‘best’ time of the whole deal, I am working on not to let it go by worrying how empty it will be again when the wait is over.

Got to remember that.

The Ripple Effect

I was looking the sleeping form of my kitten the other day and my mind went back to his day 1.... the little kitten that I saw 1.5 years back while walking past a pet shop in the Central.... way he was looking at me from the shop window with those unusual blue eyes and I stopped to look... I just had to, he was so beautiful!

I know how many humans go insane mad when they hear that I got my kitten from a pet shop, proposing that I should have adopted from shelters instead. I get their point, well... kind of- that everyone should consider adopting from shelters because there are many less than fortunate kittens in the shelter, and that cat breeders who sell through pet shops are sometimes quite irresponsible in their jobs and all that.

Yes, but don’t you see it? It HAD to be him. He was not just any Tom-Dick-or-Harry kitten... he was my Sherkhan- it had to be THAT kitten in the pet shop. Yes, it was THAT very kitten I wanted and it was THAT very name I wanted to give him: Sherkhan.

I can get quite a bull-headed one-track mind occasionally, I know.

But, believe it or not, I always wanted to have a cat named Sherkhan. How wonderful is it that now I do? I call him ‘Shera’ for short though, it means ‘best’ in my native tongue.

Now- I look at his sleeping form sometimes, I watch him play with Crazy and me, I watch him demanding attention, I hear him purring loud, I feel his head-butts and greet him with ‘nosies’ (it’s a cat thing)... and I realize, again and again, how I love to see him grow... and how lucky it is that I did not just walk past the pet shop that evening.

A kitten named Mushroom

Today, I’d like you all to meet ‘Mushroom’.

Here is Mushroom:



She was a one month old stray kitten when my brother found her on a street of Dhaka. My brother, who has always had this soft spot for cats, could not just leave her there- so he picked her up and brought her home. All these he did despite my dad’s... umm... 'reservation' about anything ‘cat related’... (If I did not look so much like my dad, then this thing alone would have prompted me to be absolutely convinced that I was adopted).

I’m proud of my brother for holding his ground, for keeping Mushroom with him no matter what, for saving this little girl. Now, as my mother tells me- with much amazement and wonder- that Mushroom is my dad’s favourite, that dad now calls home from work to know how Mushroom is doing, that he picks Mushroom up whenever she asks him to, that Mushroom’s favourite sleeping spot is my dad’s lap.

I’m proud of my dad too, for letting his ‘cat person’ self take him over.

Seems like I would not have do go through a DNA test after all! :D

Rained in

It’s a rainy and cold day in Melbourne.... I listened to the calming pitter patter ALL day, looking out of the living room window many times. It’s one of those tentative and iffy rains that is so typical to this city, the kind that I’ve grown used to through the years and now even love.

But from time to time my mind is anticipative about my time two months into the future when I will be watching the wild monsoon rain from the pretty veranda of my parents’ house, oceans away from where I am now....

I always loved the monsoon rain, that’s my favourite kind!

I’m slowly letting myself get used to the idea... of going to Dhaka, of watching the rain, of standing under those big fat drops letting them drench me, of my mum’s cooking, of holding the kitten named ‘Mushroom’ that my brother picked up from the streets, of seeing my dad again....

It helps to focus on the good stuff, you see. It does. It gets easier that way to avoid the thoughts of a Dhaka without my grandmother, for example.

You see- when I’m focusing on the positives- I’m less aware of how empty Dhaka would be for me without her there... yes, despite it being one of the most densely populated cities of the world... and how I will be forced to finally accept that she is, indeed, gone.... for good.

[Photo Credit]

The Right Thing

A date around the middle of this year is set...

... that is when we’ll take a plane to a land far away, a land that has seen me growing up into this complex person that I am today. There are a lot of things I would have rather avoided... like the tropical summer- humid and impossible, like the familial situation currently, like many lost friends, like how you have to be a person who is more ‘socially acceptable’ and forget who you really are, like leaving the kitten behind to a cat boarding for 3 long weeks ...

Don’t get me wrong please... I love that land still of course, it is still home in many ways- but it’s just so much easier to stay away.... but we booked our tickets as we had decided that we would, and I made a call to my dad- letting him know.

It is not until I heard his voice break and him crying in the phone, out of pure delight at the sudden news, I knew that I did the right thing- and that I’m not deluding myself in thinking how long the last four years have been for him.

Shaking... shaking... & shaking... the nightmares off...

I don’t know which one is worse...

Is it worse being awoken from a moderately creepy nightmare in the middle of the night feeling the earth shaking; or finding not a single news item anywhere the next day to indicate that there actually was an earthquake?

Well... the plus side in this whole situation is that the nightmare was cut short. The down side-however- is that if this persists, it gradually forces a HUGE question mark on the status of my sanity.

... and yet I cannot decide which one of these is worse.

E-value-ation

In many ways, things are better.... like the big credit card debt- that we had had to make so that we could go ahead with repairing the car- is slowly coming to a close, like my mate Sal is back from her honeymoon and we are once again taking our little coffee breaks, like the pocketful of Hershey’s chocolate- a proof that I was thought of during a friend’s visit to the US, like the upcoming long weekend for ANZAC day....

In many ways, things are just as they were.... like the chicken corn soup I made this weekend that upset me ‘profoundly’ by its blandness still sits in the fridge, like the kitten that can make me smile many times a day, like that email that’s sitting in my inbox, like Crazy by my side year after year- I must have done something right to deserve this....

In some ways, things are worse, too.... but I don’t want to think about them. It’s so much easier to drink a truckload of coffee and close my eyes to them and be all ‘fun n’ games’. Okay, not exactly easier- but still easier.

I make a hell lot of sense, don’t I?

Well... it’s a tricky thing and I’m far from mastering the art of ‘seeing, but not seeing’; but- trust me- with some help from the coffee and the Hershey’s- I’m getting there in record time :).

Serendipity

Sometimes nothing seems right, even when you cannot find a thing that’s not in order. That is when there rises the need to make the right, right... be it in redecorating a perfectly decorated room, or cleaning an already clean sink.

Who knew that the solution was in a stranger’s smile- given generously to you- while you were watching the rain from the train window- clad in your formal skirt, office shirt, stockings and stilettos- holding out unmindfully, but not reading the Kindle that is in your hands- lost in the beauty of the rain?

I realize that the solution is right there between my eyes- that perhaps I need to let go, that perhaps- for once- I need to unload years of burden, and learn and re-learn to appreciate the random everyday moments of life.

Well... at least, in the process of looking for a solution, I at least have a shining clean sink... that can hardly ever be too bad :).

A journey to another life

I am yet to book the flight- but I have set a date when I’ll fly.

Things are, as they are much often, less than ideal. I cannot elaborate on it further, I’m not ready to- but it involves a chance of not being able to see a family member when I’m there. There is more than one reason that I hate drugs..... It strips you off of many things- and not just in form of your mortality.

But- I’ll still go. I must. I’m having weird nightmares; I need to go before they somehow find a way of coming true.

It’s strange how one of the reasons I was not ready to face it for so many years is so prevalent now, and yet I am packing my bags to dive into the middle of it all. Sometimes even I cannot figure myself out.