Poornima Manco

Author

acceptance

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. ❤️

 

Balance, patience, perspective

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Lately, I’ve been unable to begin any blog post without referring to the Coronavirus that’s affecting our daily living. Who amongst us remains untouched by it in some form or the other? Unprecedented times see us hunkered down in our homes, our only weapon against this insidious virus being social distancing, and no one knows how long this will last and what sort of world we will encounter as and when this is finally over.

But I’m only telling you what you know already!

Today I want to talk about something different, but really related to this time as well. For years, I’d been wanting to return to yoga. The last time I’d practised yoga was in 1998 and that too for a very short while. I remember my yoga teacher being a lovely redhead, perhaps in her 50’s, quite large, but incredibly flexible and very patient with newbies like me. As a twenty-something, I’d come to yoga out of curiosity. In my heart I prized other forms of exercise over it, believing it to be too slow for my young body and wanting the challenge of something more aerobic, something that made me sweat and strain and transformed me visibly. For the seven months that I went to my Thursday yoga classes, I didn’t not enjoy them, but maybe, didn’t take away quite what I was supposed to. When my mother died, overcome by grief, I dropped everything including yoga. And then, inexplicably, I never went back to it.

Well, twenty-two years later, I have returned. In all those years of living and growing, pounding pavements in marathons, jumping up and down in various classes, somewhere within me there started to emerge a yearning for something more soothing, more nurturing for my body and soul. With the lockdown in place, this was an opportune time to return to the yoga I had abandoned all those years ago. This time, all I have is an iPad, a youtube channel and a determination to practise as often as I can. You see, this time I’m no twenty-something limber young woman chomping at the bit. Not only am I older and wiser, but I am also far less flexible and far more life and weather-beaten than before. Yoga is the cradle of comfort I take this rather battered body to as often as I can.

People far more articulate than me have elucidated the benefits of yoga, so I won’t do that here. I will, however, tell you about the little discoveries that I have made. Never the most patient of people, yoga has taught me that nothing can be rushed. There is a time and place for everything. My wanting to plant my heels on the ground in my downward facing dog didn’t happen overnight, my calves were not flexible enough, to begin with. With time, regular practice and patience, I have improved incrementally enough to have miraculously done it yesterday! A tiny, tiny improvement but one that I am immensely proud of, because it has taught me not just what my body is capable of, but also that I must apply this lesson to my life too. I cannot expect instantaneous results, I have to work my way towards them.

Similarly, balance is something we all strive for, whether it is a work-life one or whether it is in our temperament and our response to what life flings at us. I struggle with my tree pose, unable to plant my foot sufficiently high up on my opposing thigh. Yet, yoga teaches me that it is finding the balance between the opposing forces, setting my eyes upon one spot and breathing deeply that can help me stand rooted, tall and firm as a tree. Tell me that isn’t a lesson we can apply to our daily living too?

Finally, even as I struggle with the more advanced positions in yoga, I can’t help but look back and see how far I have come from those early days. If I put in the work, where might I be in a month, a year, ten years? Perspective, after all, is a point of view, and a point of view is determined by where you are standing at any given point in time. 

For those of us who are struggling with the uncertainty of our lives and futures, take a deep breath, find the patience to get through this time and remember, nothing lasts forever. Not even a ruddy virus!

 

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.

Why not me?

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Into each life, some rain must fall. So said Longfellow in his poem, ‘The Rainy Day’. Adversity does not discriminate, it does not pick and choose its recipients. So, when tough days come your way, as they inevitably will, is there any point in asking “why me”?

It is so easy to get lulled into a false sense of security when everything is going well. But life, well, life is never ever straight forward. Sometimes it doesn’t chuck just a bit of trouble your way, it chucks a bucket load and then some.

2019 was annus horribilis for us. It started out fine and then as the year progressed, my younger daughter’s health spiralled down once again. From pain in the back that was initially dismissed as a Vitamin D deficiency, then attributed to a muscle strain, I saw my active, mostly healthy and happy child become bed-ridden and dependant on crutches, while we ran from pillar to post for a proper diagnosis. This was not her first brush with ill health. She had suffered previously from other issues, nothing life-threatening thankfully, but enough to have affected her self esteem and joie de vivre.

The end of the year saw us turn a corner very cautiously, with hope in our hearts and a little prayer on our lips. Improvement was slow and steady with a few minor setbacks thrown in, but enough for us to see a little light at the end of this long, dark tunnel that we’d been trapped in for quite some time.

Then something else happened. It was a minor allergic reaction to something, but it brought all her previous fears rushing back. For nearly five years, it had been one thing or another, and my poor child was fed up, frustrated and at the end of her tether. She broke down in my arms, sobbing, asking – “Why me?”

I pacified her as best as I could, then calmly, almost clinically, asked her, “Why not you?”

It’s so easy for each of us to feel that we are hard done by, that no one else has the troubles that we do, that our suffering is monumental, that everyone else is living the dream while our lives are a nightmare. But look around, really look around. No one’s life is perfect. That social media perfection is the gloss that hides the daily grind and grime from each other.

Years ago, my mother had taught me a valuable lesson. She’d said, if you have to compare yourself to anyone, then do it with someone far worse off than you, because at that moment you will realise how blessed you really are.

I said the same to my daughter. I spoke about X, a young boy we knew well, who is now a young man, debilitated for the last 11 years, laid low by an unknown virus, unable to walk without aid, eat unassisted and completely unable to vocalise his thoughts or his emotions to his devastated parents. That, I said to her, is a tragedy. Yet, they keep putting one foot in front of the other and carrying on loving and taking care of their precious son.

I didn’t say this to diminish or ignore her suffering in any way, but to demonstrate that the Universe hands out its cards randomly and that what we are dealt with is our lot. We can choose to accept the challenge or be buried under the weight of it.

When life throws you that curveball, instead of asking “why me” which immediately casts you in the role of a victim, ask “why not me?” because that shows that you understand that you are not exempt from life’s woes, but more than up to the challenge of facing them head-on. You are NOT a victim. What you ARE is a survivor.

I’ll close with Longfellow’s poem as a little reminder to us all that rainy days will come, but if we are patient and resilient, the sunshine will follow soon enough.

The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;

It rains, and the wind is never weary;

The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,

But at every gust the dead leaves fall,

And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;

It rains, and the wind is never weary;

My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,

But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,

And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.

– H.W. Longfellow

Hurry up, slow down

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Where has 2019 gone? I mean, seriously! I know we tend to say this every year when we look back, but this year in particular, has just sped past. Scarily so! Is this a side-effect of ageing? Remember when we were children and time seemed to pass soooo slowwwwly?

So why the ‘hurry up’ in the title of this blog post? Well, it’s quite a personal thing. You see, I am now more than ever, acutely aware that my time on this planet is limited. Gone are the days of youthful insouciance, knowing in one’s bones that there are decades to follow, many many years to accomplish, live, love, party and work. Now, it’s a slow winding down to a more sedate living; less partying, possible retirement and fewer accomplishments. Not yet, I know, but not that far off in the future either.

Hence, there is a need within me to try and hurry up in accomplishing all the goals I have set myself. Writing more books, travelling to far-flung places, reading all the classics I missed the first time around, watching highly-regarded Television shows, discovering little-known gems of movies, doing more and being more. All these desires and the realisation of the paucity of time.

One could argue that no-one knows exactly how long we have to live, so really, the mantra should be to live every day as if it were your last. In reality, though, that is an exhausting thought. Who wants to spend each day chasing goals? I don’t know about you, but I have good days and bad days. Days that I want to do sod-all and days that I am at my productive best. It is in fits and starts and bursts of energy and inspiration that I move forward.

My slow down is an appeal not just to time (when has that ever happened?) but also to myself. In hurtling towards doing more and being more, it’s easy to miss the beauty of just being. There is so much joy and satisfaction to be found in sitting around a dinner table with your family, discussing the mundane details of life. Such pleasure to be had over a cup of coffee with a friend, catching up or reminiscing. So much contentment in sipping a glass of wine in front of the fireplace, sitting quietly with your partner, letting the hypnotic dance of the flames lull you into a serene state of equanimity.

Perhaps it is finding a balance between the hurrying up and slowing down that allows one to live one’s best life. So, here’s to 2020. May it be the best of both.

🍾🥂🎊