Poornima Manco

Author

Poornima Manco

A balancing act

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It started out as a challenge for me. Known for writing dark and disturbing tales, I was asked if I could do something different. Perhaps a light and frothy book? Something that would make the reader smile or chuckle?

Could I?

As a writer, particularly one who loves experimenting, this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I started by trying to write a love story. It proved harder than I could imagine. Struggling with characters and tropes that are ubiquitous in romcoms and romance novels, I found myself consulting my teenage daughter on whether this was reading ‘right’ or not. Used to dealing with the thought processes of deviants, I was suddenly adrift in a sea of normality. What was I to do with this?

Humour was another matter altogether. I could do gallows humour, I could do sarcastic and twisted, but would it translate to the reader I was trying to get a laugh out of? One man’s funny is another man’s lead balloon, after all!

Sweet and sappy is another area I struggle with. A cynical optimist, I took off the rose-tinted spectacles many decades ago. However, I do like to look at the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. Could I convey that in my stories about grit and determination, resilience and hope without turning the reader’s stomach by being saccharine-sweet?

Ultimately, it was about finding a balance between light and dark, happy and sad, frothy and deep. Playing to my strengths while exploring areas that seemed uncomfortable, to begin with.

Finally, Covid-19 came along at the same time as my book launch. Had not foreseen that, but perhaps, in some small and strange way, it proved fortuitous. In these unprecedented and uncertain times, who wants to wallow in misery? We all want a bit of hope and a bit of joy.

Did I pull it off? YOU tell me!

Holi Moly! & other stories

Change

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Where are your vanities now

Where is the makeup, the hairspray, the nail varnish

Where is the tie, the suit, the briefcase stuffed with papers

 

Why do you sleep past noon

And stay up past midnight

Why do you drink every day

And turn away from the mirror

 

Why does the car sit unused

And the holiday brochures unread

Why are you wearied by the sight of your wife

Why do you long for the day your husband returns to work

 

Why do your children hide in their rooms

Talking only to their friends

Refusing to meet or mingle

With those that birthed them

 

Who walks past you now

Keeping his distance

Head bowed, eyes averted

A glance: guilty or accusing

 

When your home seems a prison

Your existence a question

Your enemy invisible

Your future uncertain

 

Why do the birds sing their evensong louder

Why does the sky seem brighter

The air clearer

The moon larger

 

How is the land

So fecund

Thriving, as though

Someone loosened the chokehold

 

Why does distance suddenly seem to expand

And your world shrink

Why does a cough or a sneeze seem scarier

Than the thought of growing old

 

Can the hollow men and women of our age

Change

Will they learn

Or

Is it all

A wasted effort

Nature’s last attempt

To show, to teach, to amend?

Stay safe, stay sane

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So how is social distancing/ self-isolation going for you?

Most of us are in some kind of lockdown situation right now, and even the homebodies amongst us are starting to chafe at the bit. Like a friend said to me recently, it’s all very well to want to self-isolate voluntarily, but when it’s imposed from the outside, the natural impulse is to be irritated, to feel caged and to want to rebel. PLEASE don’t!

I cannot overemphasise the importance of practising social distancing at this moment in time. This is not about our individual freedom to do as we wish. It’s about the greater good, about understanding that only flattening the curve (delaying the spread of the virus) gives us a very real chance of beating this and that overburdening our medical system when it is already stretched beyond capacity will rebound on everyone in society. If doing our bit is staying home and staying away from other people, then surely that is not too great a sacrifice to make?

So, stay safe and stay informed.

But how does one stay sane? After all, the novelty of lie-ins, endless bags of crisps and binge-watching Netflix is likely to wear off sooner or later. All that lovely family time that we’ve yearned for in our frenetic work lives will start to grate upon our nerves when it’s just us and no one else to break the monotony. So, what does one do? 

Here’s the thing: look at what you’re missing out on in this phase in your lives and try to replicate it. I’ll give you an example of what I’m doing and you can cherry-pick what works for you.

Routine: In our ordinary, everyday lives, we have some kind of routine going for us, determined by our work hours or the nature of our jobs. Try and create a new kind of routine for yourself, one that is sustainable long term. I wake up at 7am on weekdays, check my phone for emails and social media, and then get ready for my daily walk.

Exercise: Here, in the UK, we are allowed to go outside once a day to exercise, as long as we keep a two-metre distance from other people. I go for a daily walk to get my dose of exercise and fresh air.

Meditation: My yoga is the form of meditation I practise each day. It makes me focus on what’s going on internally and to learn to let go of all that is toxic, negative or beyond my control. Yoga, above everything else, keeps me sane.

Work: For those of us who can work from home, it’s important to set up a zone that you associate with work and work alone. In a home environment it is so easy for lines to get blurred, but to keep to the discipline of work hours, it is important to delineate the two. 

I have a favourite chair that I retreat to when I need to write. It’s like a switch has been flicked on. I go into work mode almost instantly, despite whatever else may be going on around me. I plug into study music that allows me to tune into my innermost self, shutting all the outside noise off, literally and metaphorically.

Creativity: Art flourishes in the most straitened of circumstances. Now, more than ever, its time to explore your creative side. Is there a hobby you’ve always wanted to pursue? Is there an unfinished work that you need to complete? Go do it! Think of all the commute time you’re saving and use it towards creating something that matters to you.

Family meals: The rule in our household is that we meet for at least one meal a day. That one meal is our time to reconnect, to chat, to joke and laugh, to recharge our connection before we disperse to our separate corners again. 

Movie weekends: Another family ritual we have established is that every weekend one of us chooses a film that all of us watch together. It can be a romcom, a golden oldie, a cartoon or a highbrow serious movie, but we all have to watch it together. This way we are exposed to a variety of films that under ordinary circumstances we wouldn’t have bothered watching.

Reading: This is a personal one. As a writer, I need to read. It’s my way of switching off from writer-mode and switching into being a recipient of somebody else’s words and imagination. It is how my mind exhales, it is as necessary as breathing to me. Regardless of whether you are a reader or not (I’ll hazard a guess that you are if you’ve read this far), pick up a book and read. There is no better way to end your day than in the company of a book.

Weekends: To stop the days melding into each other, Sundays are my days for a lie-in, with a coffee and the papers. It’s the day I oil my hair and call my dad from the bed. It’s the day I make aloo parathas and halwa and give myself a break from my new routine just so I know that it is a weekend.

Makeup: This may seem trivial or superficial, but I’m making it a point to dress well, paint my nails and put on some makeup. So, so important not to slide into a mild depression by living in pyjamas day in and day out. There is something about the very act of dressing well every single day that allows me to keep the blues at bay.

Calling people: Video call someone every day. Look at their faces, listen to their voices, reconnect in this manner if you cannot (and really, should not) in person. I cannot extol the therapeutic qualities of a daily chat enough. No matter that you are not in the same room or even the same country. Just the fact that you can touch base in this manner can feed your soul fairly satisfactorily.

Laugh: I’m lucky that 50% of my household is comprised of genuinely funny people. These two make the other two laugh, a lot! They see the humour in the most bizarre situations, they make everything into a joke and annoying though that may be at times, it does restore perspective and sanity to what seems at times to be a world going mad.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s one that I’m trying to abide by. I cannot say I haven’t had my moments of cabin-fever or meltdowns, but overall if this lockdown extends to another three months, then I know, these things will preserve my sanity in a way nothing else can.

Stay safe and stay sane everyone. See you on the other side. ❤️

Shrinking

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In a hyper-connected world, suddenly we are being asked to practice self-isolation and social distancing. A pandemic has revealed to us all our vulnerabilities, our incapacity to deal with something as virulent, insidious and subversive as Covid-19.

It’s 2020, a new decade in a century that has seen all kinds of borders shrink into nothingness. Travel and communication have made our world into a global village. And yet. We are scrambling today to understand how to prevent, how to contain and how to defeat this virus. We, the supposedly most superior species on earth, the one that has wrecked this planet, are being laid low by an infective agent, too small to be seen by light microscopy. Quelle ironie!

Is it my imagination, or does it seem that Nature has her own way to culling this over-populated planet? We, as humans, are living longer, and for the most part, healthier lives. We take more than we give to the planet. We are a selfish, self-absorbed species, interested only in our own survival, detrimental to almost every other living being. So, is it any wonder that to restore the natural order of things, viruses such as these mutate to infect and kill? Is it a surprise when supposedly dormant volcanoes erupt or the oceans churn themselves up into a Tsunami? Natural disasters aside, epidemics and pandemics aside, maybe we need to reflect upon ourselves, our behaviour and our greed to try and understand what is preventable and what our actions have contributed towards.

I’m no scientist or politician. It is not my place to tell you how to behave at a time like this. I cannot tell you don’t panic or don’t panic-buy. I cannot tell you that a vaccine is just around the corner, or herd-immunity will occur with mass exposure. What I can say, however, is that if you are being told to self-isolate, then do it. Just because you may not display symptoms, does not give you carte blanche to infect other, perhaps more vulnerable people. If, at this moment in time, containment is the only way forward, then please follow the guidelines being given.

Also, this may be a good time to just hunker down. In our frenetic lives, how often do we get time to stop and smell the roses? That is just an expression for stopping to appreciate the very many blessings that we have been granted. Spend this time with your family and loved ones. Pare back your life to the basics. You will find a renewed joy in a life that is most likely riddled with anxiety and fear currently.

Finally, without trying to sound like some kind of new-age guru, reflect upon the fact that we all come into this world to leave it at some point. We don’t know when that will be or how that will be. Recognising the very simple fact of Death and acknowledging that no-one is immune to it, will lead to an acceptance of all scourges, calamities, hardships and disasters as par for the course. A sanguine outlook that will benefit us all.

 

It hurts!

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“It hurts mummy!” My daughter sobbed, pointing to her chest, trying to identify the epicentre of her grief, “It hurts here!”

“I know darling,” I tried soothing her, my heart breaking as I witnessed what bereavement could do to a person.

To a bystander, this grief would seem disproportionate. After all, it was only a hamster, a tiny little rodent that had a very short life span anyway. But, to my daughter, little Luna had been her world, a repository of her love and a symbol of life finally turning positive after years of pain and suffering that a series of health issues had caused her. Luna, the Russian dwarf hamster, had been bought for her birthday, after much pleading and cajoling on her part. She’d never had a pet of her own. The first two hamsters had belonged to her sister, the steady rotation of fish we’d bought for her had never really felt like her own pets as I’d been the one who’d ended up cleaning the aquarium and caring for them. So, this pet was meant to be hers alone. And she was as good as her word. She fed her, cleaned her cage and played with her daily.

Luna was a delightful little thing – full of spunk and vigour. She was incredibly sociable, always happy to be held and passed from hand to hand. We filmed her climbing her bars and swinging from them like a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist. We photographed her chucking all the food out of her bowl and sitting in it. Her antics became a source of amusement and entertainment for the entire household. Even my husband, not a pet person at all, found her to be a sweet little thing.

A week before she died, my daughter noticed her behaving strangely. She hadn’t come up to the second level to drink any water all day, which was very unlike her. Her food remained untouched. When we raised the roof of her little house, she crawled out uncertainly, wobbly on her feet, dragging her hind legs as though injured. Fearful that she might have broken a leg during her acrobatics, we started googling hamster ailments straight away. Nothing definitive came up, but the advice was to have her checked out by the vet. So, we rushed her to the clinic near our house. The vet wasn’t in and an appointment was made for later in the day. All-day my daughter worried about her, scared that Luna was in pain. In the evening we put her in the little pet carrier and once again, carried her to the vet.

As soon as the vet put her on the stretcher, she seemed to perk up. Running hither thither, she seemed perfectly fine, casting doubt on all our previous worries. We were gobsmacked! This was the same hamster that had been dragging her legs a half-hour ago. The vet discharged her with advice to give her a food supplement and just keep an eye on her. We were perplexed but happy that she seemed to have recovered on her own.

For the next week, Luna’s new ‘normal’ was an exaggerated version of her former self. She climbed her bars constantly, throwing herself down like a kamikaze pilot, she started to chew on them, as if wanting to escape her confinement. She also became increasingly nippy, chomping down on our fingers whenever an opportunity presented itself. Her increasingly bizarre behaviour seemed to transform her from a happy, peaceful little thing to an irrational, hyper, angry little mammal. We could not understand it, and I spent hours trawling the internet trying to figure out what was going on.

Then, a week ago, she didn’t emerge from her house all day, once again. Upon returning from her weekly physiotherapy session, my daughter noticed that Luna’s breathing was shallow and that she was curled up like a little ball. The internet revealed that she could be in a state of ‘torpor’ brought on by the cold, and extremely dangerous in little animals. We heated up a hot water bottle, placed a towel on it and tried to warm little Luna up. But it was too late. She had slipped away silently to wherever cute little hamsters go to when they die.

I took it hard because I had grown increasingly fond of her. But my daughter took it even harder. She didn’t sleep all night, crying into her pillow, weeping at the unfairness of it all. “She was just a baby!” she wept. Yes, she was. Less than two months old, Luna should have had at least another sixteen months of life.

My daughter’s back pain has come back with a vengeance, once again underlining how psychology influences physiology. She feels like the Universe is conspiring against her, that nothing seems to be going her way. But more than anything else, she is grief-stricken at the loss of her pet, her darling little Luna Yves.

For people who don’t own pets, this may seem incomprehensible. For people who do, this will be completely understandable. Pets, little or large, become a part of the family. In their quiet and unconditional love, in their reliance on us and their domesticity, they bind us to them in infinitesimally small and unseen ways. When they die, a part of us dies too. When they die unexpectedly and so very young, a part of us is wrenched away in the shock of the arbitrariness of it all.

Perhaps Luna had an underlying condition we were not aware of. Hamsters can be prone to heart issues and/or diabetes. Perhaps her bizarre behaviour was symptomatic of her condition, her ‘nipping’ a way of conveying her pain and discomfort. Perhaps. A lot of questions remain, but we didn’t have the heart to have her little body cut open for an autopsy. Instead, we gave her a little burial in a plant pot, with a beautiful yellow rose plant bought especially in her honour to commemorate the joy she brought into our lives. The little plaque I had made for her notes the date of her demise and how much she was loved by all. It is glued on to the outside of the planter.

Too much? No, not in my opinion. There is a reason that we have certain ceremonies or rituals after death. These are a very visible way of bidding goodbye to a loved one. They are the first steps that we take towards healing. After the pain of the loss comes denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression and finally, acceptance.

Right now, my daughter is trapped somewhere between anger and depression. The acceptance will come, I know it will. But in the meantime, it is important to acknowledge the magnitude of her loss and to show her that Luna’s little life on earth meant something to us. In time, hopefully, we can bring home another little hamster. But right now, we grieve the passing of our little friend. May she rest in peace.

Life lessons from exercise

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This is the heaviest I have ever been weight-wise. It’s showing in the clothes I wear, and more importantly, on a face that’s already chubby, it’s showing in the new double chin I sport. How have I allowed it to get to this point and why? Well, incrementally and because drowning my sorrows in food had become my go-to in the last few months. But photographs don’t lie, and the last lot of photos I had my husband take for my new book, showed all the lovely over-indulgence on my face, much to my horror!

For years my one big fear was of being overweight. The overriding reason being that diabetes runs in the family and having seen my mother and uncle suffer from it, I was acutely aware that I did not want to end up in the same boat. I tried to eat sensibly, not always succumb to my sweet tooth and exercise regularly. This worked like a charm for many years. But slowly that iron-grip I had on my diet started to slip, and a pound or two creeping up didn’t seem so bad. Till one fine day, I woke up 28 pounds heavier than my ideal weight! While it was all fun and games putting it on, taking it off is a long, hard slog, one which I have to prepare myself for physically as well as mentally.

Through it all though, what I am proud of is the fact that I have not stopped exercising. I may not be as fast on my feet as I was before, but I sure as heck am willing and able to move. I consider myself fairly fit and on the odd occasions that I have been unable to exercise for a length of time, I miss it horrendously.

You see, over the years exercise has taught me so much. At a time when I feel particularly low about my appearance, this list is a reminder to myself that I cannot and must not give up.

  1. Endurance: In one of my hyper exercising phases I fell into long-distance running. The first half-marathon I ever competed in, I was ill-prepared and injured to boot. But through sheer doggedness I ran the distance, hobbling the last mile or so, telling myself that I could not quit at that stage. I suffered from a bad knee for months after that, but I learned two valuable lessons that day. One, that the mind could conquer anything and two, that preparation was key. The next few marathons I competed in, I enjoyed and completed utilising the lessons I’d learned the first time around.
  2. Resilience: Ever tried doing an exercise class after a bad night’s sleep, when you are particularly tired and cantankerous? No? Well, I have. Those are the worst days, the days you want to stop before you’ve even begun. When the cheery warm-up seems like torture and every move designed to punish your already tired body. But it’s those days when you discover your reserves of strength. When you push yourself to do just that little bit more and keep pushing till suddenly you realise that you’re done and it wasn’t that bad after all. That resilience I have applied to many other areas of my life successfully. It is something I learn time and again on my bad days, and know that it is an invaluable tool that I will utilise for the rest of my life.
  3. It’s not a competition: I’ve recently joined a Body Balance class. I wish I’d done it much earlier as it is a class I love. It’s also a class I’m woefully inadequate at. A combination of Tai Chi, Pilates and Yoga, it truly balances you and fills you with a sense of calm. The first time I ever did this class, I looked around me and spotted many different age groups, but that told me very little about their ability. There were ladies in their seventies who were far more flexible and bendy than I could ever be. But nobody was judging anyone else, and no one was judging me as I tried to get into positions awkward and unfamiliar to my body. In time I have improved. Also, I’ve stopped looking at other people as I realise that there is no competition here. Each one of us is here for ourselves. It’s our journey and how we see fit to complete it, is up to us too.
  4. Happiness: This one has been bandied about a lot, but it’s true. In a crazy, rushed life, taking a bit of time out to do some good to your body by way of exercise produces the happiness effect. Physical activity stimulates the release of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, as well as endorphins. These brain chemicals play an important part in regulating your mood and overall sense of well-being. Sometimes a little bit of exercise is all it takes to lift yourself out of a funk.
  5. Belonging: Exercisers become a part of a community. There is an unspoken understanding between them, a recognition of why they do what they do, regardless of the reasons that propel them. Over the years I feel like I’ve grown to belong to this club of people who enjoy the many benefits of exercise without being preachy or ‘judgy’ about it.  

So, having listed all these wonderful things that keep me exercising, I know that all I have to do now is to get a handle on my food habits, cure myself of emotional/binge/comfort eating, get regular sleep, keep hydrated and fingers crossed, I will be well on my way towards getting back into my favourite pair of jeans. Wish me luck!