Poornima Manco

Author

2020

So little

by

There was a time

When every word

That dropped from your lips

Was a little bit of heaven

 

When your presence

In this world

Was enough

To guarantee happiness

 

There was a time

When I waited

Breathlessly

For you to enter a room

 

But that was before

I knew

How little

I meant to you

 

There was a time

When I changed myself

To be

More like you

 

When all that mattered

Was your approval

Your smile

Your glance

 

There was a time

When everyone else

Paled into insignificance

Beside you

 

But that was before

I knew

How little

I meant to you

 

Today I move on

Without looking back

Without shedding another tear

Over a wasted love

 

Now there are only

Memories that fade

Sepia-toned

Into the recesses of my mind

 

Here I stand

A little broken

A lot stronger

Much much wiser

 

For if love

Only meant

Worshipping at your altar

Then you are no God to me

 

Because

Your arrogance

Your ignorance

Your indifference

 

Merely curdled

All that was

Warm loving

And good

 

As I walk away

From those wasted years

Of adoration

I realise…

 

You matter so little to me now.

*********************************

The value of self-esteem

by

I’ve often talked about the ill effects of social media – the addiction, the need for outside validation, the mental health issues, the ‘all that glitters isn’t gold’ aspect etc. But recently I stumbled upon yet another disturbing trend. Young girls filming/photographing themselves in their underwear/bikinis purportedly to support a body-positive movement.

Now, I’m a strong advocate of women of all ages and sizes being comfortable in their own skin, and I will shout it from rooftops if need be. I believe that every woman should have the right to wear what she wants, as long as she is comfortable with the sort of attention it attracts. However, flaunting one’s body on a public platform to elicit the approval of strangers, is where I draw the line.

Firstly, there is the safety aspect of it. How can one monitor who is watching/downloading these pictures? Where are these pictures being circulated? How are they being perceived? Secondly, there is the sleaze factor. To a young woman, body acceptance by way of photographing herself may seem to be progressive and life-enhancing, to the two-bit scumbag salivating over them, it’s just another way to jerk off. Sorry about the imagery! But there is no other way to spell it out clearly.

What has happened to our social fabric where it has become perfectly acceptable to derive one’s self-worth from the most shallow of sources? Yes, it’s wonderful to be young and beautiful and to enjoy the spring of one’s lifetime. But if acceptance of one’s self hinges on what other people think, then what happens when that body changes through life, childbirth, disease, accident or ageing?

Isn’t it time that we taught our children that self-worth and self-esteem need stronger roots than just body acceptance? Values such as humility, charity, empathy and forgiveness, character traits such as determination, resilience, patience and fortitude, are purer sources of self-love than any amount of pouting and preening before a camera lens can be.

Healthy self-esteem needs a healthy wellspring, and that can only come from working upon what lies inside. Yes, outside packaging matters, but only up to a point. If you unwrap a beautiful parcel and find it filled with junk, what are you likely to do?

The pitfalls of social media are well documented, but the insidious nature of its erosion of our children’s values and self-worth will have far-reaching consequences unless we start to combat it now. But first, we need to turn that mirror towards ourselves and look at where we are investing our time and teachings. It isn’t too late to steer our children away from conversations about their bodies, to conversations about their minds and souls. Perhaps then, they will realise that the value of self-esteem is far greater than the cost of self-doubt.

A good life

by

“She lived a good, long life.”

When someone dies at ninety-four, you tend to hear this refrain. As though good and long are interchangeable, longevity standing in for joy and fulfilment. As though the very act of having survived for over nine decades is remarkable in itself and death as a consequence seems to be just a footnote.

But what if that long life wasn’t a particularly happy one? What if it was fraught with unimaginable tragedy and loss? Would it still be considered a good one?

 

A woman, orphaned young, brought up by a maternal uncle and his family, not treated well by her aunt with no recourse except an early marriage to a young pharmacist with a promising future. Great start, right? Just when things are looking up and when life seems to be settling into a happy pattern, a division occurs – the partitioning of a nation, the cleaving of land, a clumsy attempt to separate a country by religious belief, asked for by the citizens and granted by the retreating former rulers. Caught up in the tides of her times, she has to leave everything behind, carrying her infant son and escaping with her husband’s family to the Hindu nation of India, all of their lands and properties being absorbed into Pakistan. A refugee, she learns to survive on little, adjusting to a diminished present, but grateful to be alive when so many others perished at the hands of their own brethren. Now life can finally start to get better.

It does, for a while. A decade or so of a happy married life, two more children and she can finally exhale and put her past difficulties behind her. Or, can she?

Losing her husband to a brain haemorrhage before she even turns forty brings her right back to where she started. Except that now she has three children to provide for, one of whom is barely five years old. Once again, with characteristic stoicism and fortitude, she submits to her destiny. She takes up sewing jobs, alterations and tailoring, whatever it takes to make ends meet. She allows her brother-in-law to run the pharmacy in her husband’s stead, hoping that someday her young sons will be able to step in.

Two of her sons stand like rocks beside her, throughout her life. The third betrays her.

Together with the uncle, he cheats and embezzles. An arranged marriage brings an ambitious and shrewd young woman into the family, who wishes to better her own prospects at the cost of all others. Together, the trio tries to usurp all the assets but are foiled at the very last minute. A long court case ensues in which the youngest son tries to get his mother imprisoned, furious at being denied his entitlement.

Estranged from her son and his family, she lives out the rest of her years with quiet dignity, adding this privation to the ledger of losses she has stacked up her entire life. Her other two sons stand by her, through thick and thin and that is the only saving grace in a lifetime beset by misery and misfortune.

Does this sound like a movie? Or a novel? It could be, with all its twists and turns and convoluted plot lines. Except that it isn’t.

 

This is the very real story of my paternal grandmother. A woman whose life was filled with suffering and pain. Never one to complain, she withstood every storm that was sent her way, trying her best to stay strong and uphold the ideals of her generation. She was not a particularly educated woman, but her knowledge of home remedies was next to none with people coming from far and wide to consult with her. Always willing to provide a listening ear or a helping hand, her wisdom came out of her own lived experiences, not out of books.

A lady who favoured plain saris, little jewellery and had her hair pulled back in a bun, her simplicity was her best adornment. Skin like alabaster, she was a classic beauty, completely unaware of and unconcerned about her looks. Outside packaging mattered very little to her and through her the lesson of learning to appreciate what lies within percolated down to me.

In the last decade or so, she had become a prisoner in her own body, her faculties slowly starting to fail her. Unable to see or hear, there was always a dreamy, contemplative look on her face when we visited her. At first, she could tell who it was by touching our hands or our faces, greeting us with a contained joy. Slowly that tapered off too. On my last visit in January, it was clear to me that she didn’t have long.

She left at 1458 hours on Tuesday, the 18th of August. There were just three people at her cremation, two of them her sons and one a kindly neighbour. In Covid days, it was a quiet and unassuming funeral, much like the lady herself.

 

We enter and exit this world alone. In all the time that we spend on this earth, we accumulate family, friends, material possessions, lands and riches. We do good and bad, we create, we destroy and we try to leave some sort of legacy behind. One that declares that we were here and that we led a good life.

But what constitutes a good life?

Is it one that is full to the brim with happy experiences, an easy and comfortable existence, or is it one that forges you into gold by throwing you into fire repeatedly, refining and purifying you each and every time?

If it is the latter, then yes, she had a good life. In her ninety-odd years, she might not have accumulated much by way of wealth, but the love and the loyalty of her two sons were worth more than all the riches of the world. Her legacy, such as it is, is the deep respect, regard and love that we feel towards her. In mourning her passing, I feel not just the loss of a grandmother, but of an age and an era that I will never encounter again. They do not make them like her anymore. ❤️

 

Obsession

by

Then there is that dimple in your shoulder, the one that my finger touches repeatedly, dipping in and out. In and out. At other times, it is your gap-toothed smile that catches my attention, a tunnel into that full-bodied laugh. Your hair, a curtain – thick, dark and heavy like the forests of our past. Your smell, like the sea – salty and full of secrets. My hand traces the curve of your stomach, lined by life and children. My eyes try to peer inside your soul. Each time we meet, I rediscover you. Only to lose you once again.

Invisible

by

Am I invisible

Because I am old?

Does my grey hair, my wrinkles, my painful joints

Deny me the wisdom of my years?

 

When I was young

You saw me

My hair was like spun gold

My body agile, fertile

 

But my mind was impetuous

Uninformed

Feckless

Reckless

 

Yet, housed as it was

In that body

You listened

You heard

 

Now I know

So much more

Life has taught me

Patience, gratitude, forbearance

 

I could tell you to

Slow down

Take a breath

Think a bit

 

That life is

Accumulated

Through moments that pass

Much too quickly

 

That being present

For yourself

For those you love

Is the most important task

 

That sometimes difficult days

Are given to us as an exam

To teach and test

And pass we will

 

That boredom is

The providence

Of the very fortunate

As is leisure

 

That failure

Is far better

More virtuous

Than regret

 

Would you listen though?

Or, would my words

Pass through you

Like milk through a sieve

 

Has age no meaning

Years no gravitas

Experience no value

Sagacity no usefulness?

 

Because here I sit

In a crowd

Of young ones

And no one hears my voice.

Open-ended

by

Why am I so drawn to ambiguity?

Endings with multiple interpretations can be perceived as unsatisfactory. After all, we all want to walk away from a book, a movie or a television show with the feeling of having completed a journey and reached a destination. What could be more annoying than to stop at a fork in the road? Or never really find out what happened, or worse still, have to sift through the many choices the end presented us with, expecting us to arrive at our own conclusions?! No tidy little bows at the end, no ‘happily ever after’? Why would the writer/director/producer of the content do that?

For someone who gravitates towards such inconclusiveness, here’s why I think endings such as these are far more effective in the long run.

Think back to ‘Gone with the Wind’. After many years of being in love with Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler decides to leave her at the very same instance that she discovers that she truly loves him. He walks away, leaving her heartbroken. But we have been witness to her stubbornness, her wilfulness and her tenacity for an entire book. When she vows to win him back, secretly we are rooting for her. There is no definite ‘happily ever after’ here. She may win him back, she may not, but that depends on the reader’s estimation of her character. That is not an ending you are likely to forget in a hurry.

Haruki Murakami, the famous Japanese author, has often employed the technique of an uncertain ending. His off-kilter characters regularly find themselves at crossroads and many a time, you have no idea which way they’ll head. Which makes the entire experience doubly surreal and unforgettable.

Christopher Nolan’s movies often end in a riddle. Take the example of ‘Inception’. Dreams layer upon dreams until it becomes impossible for the protagonist to distinguish between reality and a dreamscape. At the very end, the viewer is left wondering whether they have witnessed his return to the real world or is the entire segment just another fabrication of his mind?

I can see how incredibly frustrating this can be to someone who just wants a linear narrative, a satisfactory end and entertainment for the sake of entertainment.

But for those who want a little bit more, the lure of an ambiguous finish is almost impossible, to sum up. Think of the many permutations incertitude offers us. The multiple paths that may be explored, the multiple ways that the story reached this conclusion. Mind-boggling? Yes! But that is the whole point, you see.

An Indian film by the name of ‘Andhadhun’ was a big commercial and critical success in 2018. The premise was a simple one – a young musician pretending to be blind unwittingly witnesses a murder. His life goes into free fall from that moment onwards, even as he scrambles to keep it all together. The resolution when it arrives is unexpected and once again, open to many and varied interpretations. Is he really blind? Did he succumb to the evil that had dogged him? Accident or murder? Uhhh, no clear cut answers for you, my friend. Read into it what you will.

And that is exactly my jam!

For those who have read my books and stories, they are often confounded by an ending they did not foresee; that little unanticipated twist in the tale. It’s a tactic I enjoy because I want the reader to think, to wonder and then to arrive at whichever conclusion works best for them. This isn’t the lazy writer’s guide to uncertain endings. It is a very deliberate modus operandi to shock and excite, but also leave a lingering vacillation as to whether their interpretation was correct or not.

Tell me that you don’t end up debating those ambiguous, open-ended denouements far more than any others! Yes? Thought so. Mission accomplished.