Poornima Manco

Author

2023

Custodian

by

What am I

But a custodian?

 

You take root in me

My body nourishes yours

You grow

 

For nine months

I house you

Protect you

Nurture you

 

Then you emerge

An infant

Bawling

Suckling

Sleeping

 

I care for you 

As a mother

An attendant

A guardian

A protector

A custodian

 

The time seems long

But really

It is short

Moments turning to minutes

Hours to days

Days to months

Months to years

 

Suddenly

You are grown

 

You have your own mind

Your own ideas

Your own thoughts

 

Your destiny is yours alone

I dare not question it

Or debate it

For who am I?

 

Just a mother

A guardian

An attendant

A protector

A custodian

 

I am of a different time

You tell me

Out of touch

Out of step

Out of line

 

I step back

Hurt

Confused

Pained

Startled

By your anger and resentment

 

Your words 

Your eyes

Your actions

Blame me

And me alone

 

I am at fault

A mother who has failed

 

What am I, then?

If I am no longer your custodian?

 

You fly away

Far away

So far from me

 

I cannot reach you anymore

Not through words

Or actions

Or love

 

You are making your life

In a different land

With a different plan

Than the one 

I had envisaged for you

 

But that is okay

As long as you are happy,

And if you are happy

That is all 

I have ever wanted

For you

 

When you return

It is a surprise

A welcome one

Even if 

you return with 

Tears in your eyes

And a swollen belly

 

You are home

I am your mother

 

Someday soon

You

Will be a mother too

 

That is when

You will understand

That

You have to be

Everything I was

 

And more

 

For

What are we

But

Guardians and attendants

Protectors and custodians

 

For those

Who come after us

Forevermore…

THE END

An I for an I

by

I am a puzzle.

Parts of me are jagged; they do not fit. Parts of me are missing; I don’t know how to find them. 

All my life I have tried putting myself together. Sometimes to fit the world I’m in, sometimes to understand what I am exactly.

Born in a land that was enslaved for hundreds of years, perhaps I carry those shackles in my blood. I look westwards for my future. I revel in the words of a foreign language, eschewing my mother tongue. I believe erroneously that the white man is superior, in experience and knowledge, in wisdom and intelligence. 

I am a child of separation. A land cleaved into two and a marriage turned toxic. Father is a remote symbol, a picture on the wall. He is the father of the nation, but he died long before I was born. I sing his paeans in school assemblies, conditioned into mute acceptance.

Where is my own father, though? Amputated out of our lives, a stranger to me forever. It isn’t until I am in my sixth decade that I seek the answers only he could have given. 

Answers for the half of me I do not understand. A body that sickens in an alien way, a mind that reacts unnaturally. Is this him? Is this the bit that lives on much after he has gone?

I am a child of a contradictory country. Rich, poor, spiritual, dissolute, innocent, corrupt, ancient, nascent. It is a land that defies description.

Caught between it all, I yearn for simplicity.

* * *

I am a woman.

Fertile, precious, yet infinitely vulnerable. Besieged for being the weaker sex in a country that prays to goddesses and burns its brides. Groped, catcalled and abused even before awareness of femininity has arrived.

My colour is a dilemma. Dark brown isn’t pretty in my town. My people worship the fair, conflating colour with virtue, assigning it supremacy, degrading all other skin tones.

I wish to flee the confines of this existence.

Escape comes in books. It comes in stories of women in faraway lands living faraway lives. Surely they are free? Freer than me, surely? They are not answerable to their families, their communities, their societies; to misogyny or patriarchy. They have to please no one but themselves. Such freedom is a dream.

I try to toe an invisible line that keeps shifting and changing. I want to belong. If belonging is a feeling, then I am six yards away from it. 

Like the six yards of a sari that my mother drapes on her body. Saris made from the softest mulmul and the glossiest silks. Her only token to convention. She doesn’t belong, either. Strong, brave and outspoken women rarely do. 

Perhaps my estrangement is generational. A desire to fit in when every atom of our beings conflicts with conformity. 

* * *

I am a foreigner.

In the land of our former oppressors, I think I belong. In the language, the liberties, the modernity, I feel I am free. Until the same demons ambush me.

My colour, my language, my body are once again in an alien landscape. Micro aggressions show me I do not belong. How dare I believe I am an equal? How dare I try to escape the clichés of my origins?

I am an alien. I am incomprehensible. I babble, Babel-like. Babble babble in a tongue I thought was mine. Only to be met by blank faces and polite indifference. 

“Excuse me?”, “Could you repeat that, luv?”, “It’s the accent, dear!”

Retreat. Isolate. Repeat.

My existence is confined to the walls of my apartment, to the walls of my office, and back again.

I am a loner. A piece of a puzzle long separated from the main. My edges are blunted and I no longer try to fit in.

Small kindnesses and friendly overtures send me into a tailspin. People who approach are confounded by my overreactions. Too much, they think, and they recoil.

Too much, too little, not enough.

Am I destined never to belong? To be adrift in an ocean of humanity and never have a safe harbour of my own?

I am muted. Automaton-like, I function, but inside I am dying inch by inch. Community, connection, cognisance, is all I desire. But it is out of reach for someone like me.

* * *

I am still alive.

There is that.

Little by little, I have settled into this little life. Everything is surface level here. No one cares enough to encroach on my freedom. I am free to live or die, as I please. And I do a bit of both each day.

Lovers come and go, friends meander through my life, family keeps its distance. Mother gone, father never found. I am an orphan, a foundling, a wanderer in search of the elusive.

I write, bleeding onto pages. I write my grief, my loneliness, my ache, my desires. This is my release; it’s my catharsis.

Slowly, I come together. 

I belong here amongst words that tap out of my fingers like birds flying off branches. Amongst sentences that weave together like rivers converging. Inside paragraphs that are deep and mysterious, like the oceans of the world.

I find myself in stories. I discover myself through sentences. I create myself through characters. I mould, I shape, I scrub out. I recreate. I procreate.  

This is where I belong. A place where my colour does not matter, my shape is irrelevant, my gender inconsequential, my heritage mine alone. This is where all my languages come out to play. This is where my mother tongue and my adopted tongue walk hand-in-hand. This is my release, my liberation, my homecoming.

At last, a place I can call my own.

I am a child of this earth, and I will return to her womb someday. Until then, I will live amongst books. Mine and others. For, at long last, I have found my peace, my home.

This is where I belong.

***

(This is a work of fiction)

The Mystery of the Missing Mentor

by

Many, many moons ago, when I first began writing as a hobby, the only way I knew how to get any validation was to submit my short stories to various competitions. This was well before social media, and I’d scroll through different sites on the internet to get a feel for different competitions, their submission guidelines, and whether the price of the entry ticket included some kind of review or assessment of the submitted piece. Now these were the best bang for my buck. Whether I won, whether I even got an honourable mention, was immaterial, because I was getting something invaluable—feedback. To a novice, this feedback was worth its weight in gold. After all, how else was I to know if I was any good?

Amongst the very many competitions that I submitted to, there was one spearheaded by a retired English professor who, for a small fee, would give a breakdown of what worked and didn’t work in a particular story. Over time, and multiple submissions, I came to regard him as something of a mentor. He was a fair but forthright judge and his comments/suggestions always served to improve my work. Perhaps he developed a certain fondness for me too, as one day, quite out of the blue, I received a friend request from him on Goodreads.

Back in the day, when social media was a nascent entity, a multi-headed hydra that no one knew much about, we signed up for nearly every account going. If you’d asked me to distinguish between LinkedIn and Twitter, or Facebook and MySpace, I wouldn’t have had a clue. Goodreads was another one of the ilk. To someone who loved books, wanted to write books (however deeply suppressed the desire might have been), finding myself amongst other book lovers in a virtual world was a dream come true. This was where my mentor (who shall remain unnamed) reached out to befriend me. I still remember my squeal of delight in a bar in Budapest. I was on a family holiday with my husband and daughters, and when that little red notification popped up next to the bell icon, I clicked on it to discover that Prof X wanted to be friends!

Looking back, perhaps he was new to the platform too and was befriending every Tom, Dick, Jane and Joan on it. I might have been one of the many “suggested” friends that he clicked on. At any rate, I took it as a good sign. The next year, I signed up for his email course designed to help new writers like me improve our craft. The course was good and to my eternal dismay, I consigned it to the memory of an old laptop that crashed, and I could never recover the contents. Long story short, this man was instrumental in getting me off my mark and on the writing track, however slow a runner I might have been. (I remember him saying something about reining in the metaphors… hmmm!)

Anyway, as the years went on, and I got more serious about my writing, I began submitting (and placing) in more prestigious competitions. In the interim, Prof X had wound down his competition/feedback site. So, imagine my surprise when one day I received an email from him. When I opened it, I found it was actually a missive from his daughter who said that her father had had cancer and had passed away a few weeks ago. She was informing all his contacts and emailing all his previous students.

I was shocked and saddened. Prof X hadn’t seemed that old, but that doesn’t mean a thing with cancer, which is a cruel and formidable foe. For many days after, I would think of the Prof and the many pointers he had given me all those years ago. I prayed for his soul to rest in peace and hoped he hadn’t suffered too much.

More years went by. Now I was a published author, and long and winding as the road might have been, the destination had always been books. My own books of short stories and women’s fiction. Books that were sold on Amazon and Apple, Nook and Kobo. I was nowhere near giving up the day job (which I still enjoy very much) but slowly I was building an alternate career, one that I hoped would take me through retirement and into my dotage.

I was still active on Goodreads, but more as an author than a reader. I knew now that it was bad form to slate another author’s books or try too hard to promote one’s own. I refrained from doing both, only occasionally commenting about a new release, or liking a favourable review. So, the next thing that happened shocked the living daylights out of me!

One day, as was my habit, I wandered into Goodreads and posted a brief comment about a forthcoming release. Moments later, I noticed someone had liked my status. I clicked on to find out who…

Prof X had liked my comment!

What???

I thought he’d long passed on.

Had I imagined it?

I tried looking for the email from his daughter, but that had disappeared alongside the course and possibly my sanity.

Was Prof X alive and kicking? And if so, why had his daughter lied? If not, who had taken over his Goodreads profile, and why?

Questions that circled in my mind like vultures. I nearly reached out to him, but then wondered how to introduce his demise in the interaction?

“Dear Sir,

Is it true that you died several years ago? If so, how are you performing this miraculous act of functioning on Goodreads from the Hereafter?”

Nope. I slunk back into my shell, terribly confused and forevermore bewildered by the turn of events.

I wish I could tell you I solved the mystery. I didn’t. I’ve had no further contact with the Prof, and one day I found he had disappeared from my friends list, never to be seen again.

But what I can tell you is this. Once a person has passed on, their social media handles need to be retired too. This instance was the first in what has now become the norm. I see my Instagram stories being viewed by the spouse of a friend who died not too long ago. I see clueless people wishing deceased friends on Facebook on their birthdays. I get jarring reminders of social media anniversaries with people who are well beyond the veil now.

Stop. Just stop.

Much as I would like eternal life for all my friends and family, social media is not the place to acquire that status. Can we all set something in place whereby once we are gone, our social handles disappear too? I’d like to do that for myself. I don’t want my grinning face popping up on anyone’s birthday reminders list after my demise. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to my dead self, either.

Meanwhile, Prof X, if you are reading this, please could you just sort it out once and for all? Are you still amongst us? And if not, does the great beyond have its own social network? If it does, is it as hellish and confusing as the one here?

Oh, wait. Maybe Fire and Brimstone are just alternate names for…

 

 

 

Balance

by

It’s nearly the end of January and how are those resolutions coming along?

Years ago, I’d start every new year with a long list of tasks I needed to do, things I needed to change about myself and milestones that needed ticking off. Over the years, that list shrunk to just a sentence or two, until I came to the realisation that even those few items were too fraught with the possibility of failure. So, I settled on a word. One word that would define what needed accomplishing that year. That word has ranged from kindness, discipline, health and relationships to travel, adventure, happiness and contentment. Specific to nebulous, I’ve covered the gamut.

This year’s word is balance.

I am apt to get swallowed whole by my latest venture/hobby/passion. I hurtle into projects, bite off more than I can chew, and spread myself too thin, too often. I never do things by half-measures, and while that can be extremely useful sometimes (like completing a project to a deadline), mostly, it isn’t healthy; it isn’t sustainable and often it leaves me feeling wrung-out and close to collapse. So, what is the answer? Balance, I find.

Balance in all aspects of life. From food to sleep to exercise; from work to writing to travel. To truly enjoy and get the best out of all the above, it is necessary to apply a modicum of restraint to them all. An equity that translates into a calm, even-handed application of self to pursuits of work and pleasure. An equivalent proportioning of the day that encompasses everything with the harmony of parity. No one task is greater than the other, and to each I give the same time and attention.

Easier said than done.

Applying this gentle word to all aspects of my life is proving to be a challenge. Getting carried away is a part of my personality. If I’m writing, and in the flow, how do I just abandon that to get up and mop the floor? If I’m watching a particularly riveting episode of ‘Peaky Blinders’, how do I switch it off to go to bed because it’s 10pm? If the pizza I’m indulging in is really yummy, how do I set half of it aside for lunch tomorrow?

Balance is tricky. It requires a dose of discipline alongside.

There are days that I’m exhausted and can’t get out of bed at the first sound of the alarm, when the snooze button is my best friend, and the duvet a cocoon I refuse to leave. There are also days when I simply cannot fall asleep at will, when my mind is jumping from thought to thought like a manic acrobat, insomnia mocking me from the digital time reflected on my ceiling. There are days when sugar is the only solution to problems little and large, chocolate the only answer to an existential conundrum. What then?

Kindness is another ingredient that needs adding to this dish called balance.

Months can go by when friends are too busy to make plans with me, and then, suddenly, like buses, social engagements can arrive all at once, derailing the month of calm, collected work/life balance I’d planned for myself. Family crises rarely announce themselves in advance, they just occur. And when they do, everything is thrown into disarray, including whatever notion of balance I might exercise in that moment. Flights can cancel; travel plans can change. Health can play hooky, backs can twinge, and coughs can lodge themselves deep in chests. What happens to the harmony of parity then?

Surely, a dash of improvisation wouldn’t go amiss with this balance thing?

Moods are another battlefield. Not naturally sanguine, I’m not always Debbie Downer either. But each day can bring a different mood in its wake. I could go from sunny to stormy in a nanosecond. My hormones can drive me batty at the drop of a… (you name it). I can switch from Glinda to Elphaba on a dime, channel Cruella or the Dalai Lama on a whim, be the fairy godmother or the wicked stepsister, depending on which way the wind blows. Not the even keel I envision when I picture applying balance to my life.

Clearly, balance is a heavy word. Too heavy for me. I’m already getting bent out of shape trying to practise it.

Tell you what: let’s just dispense with this entire New Year, New Me concept. I like the old me. I’ll stick to her and muddle through this year as I’ve done through all the others before.

Now, isn’t that the most balanced thing you’ve read today? 😉