The Longing

It tugs. It pulls. It frustrates. It yearns. It mourns. It weeps. It lashes out in anger. At the world. At me. It hopes. It dreams. It hurts. It bruises. It yells and screams.

The longing of a caged heart just to fly free.


~vagabond~ © 2009

Restless rain

Dark gray clouds threaten the angry sky above me. The raindrops continue to pound noisily against the rooftop just as they have all morning long. A silver bolt of lightening darts through the sky, its silvery whiteness brightening up a dark gloomy day, if only just for a moment. A loud roar of thunder escapes through the clouds, its resonating boom waking up the quietness of a lazy afternoon. I gaze out of the window and watch the water puddles swallow up the ground beneath them, growing bigger in size, one quick raindrop at a time.

When I lived in Kenya, rainy days made me feel happy inside, in an ethereal, dreamy sort of way. There is something extremely satisfying about watching the first of the long rains of the season end a stubborn drought. The dry thirst of an entire savannah quenches up before your eyes, as the yellow brown ruggedness magically transforms itself into a luscious green. Back then, I found rains inspiring. They quenched the thirst of my own parched soul. This Midwestern winter storm that rages around me just doesn’t soothe my soul quite the same way. Instead it makes me unbearably sad. And restless. And extremely homesick. Except that, for the longest time, I’ve been wandering around lost, and just can’t seem to find where home is.

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Splat! I stomp through mud puddles, a spunky five year old, dressed in my favorite bright yellow rain coat, holding on tightly to my mother’s finger as I skip along the road. We run from one side of the pavement to the other, hiding under the rooftops of various stores along the way, seeking shelter from the monsoon rains. The streets are already starting to flood and I’m just happy that school has been cancelled for the day. As we pause for a break through the rain under a rooftop, I spot a man roasting singodas (chestnuts) on a charcoal stove along the side of the road, a big red umbrella covering both him and the singodas and the stove all at once. The earthy smell of the fresh roasted singodas wafts its way through the raindrops towards me. It’s my favorite street food of all. “Pleeease mum, can we buy some? Pleease? Pleeease?” I beg and plead. “Okay, okay…we’ll get some.” She gives in. “But you can’t eat any until you get home. You’ll get the black soot all over you.”

In that moment, beneath the flimsy shelter of a roadside store rooftop, basking in the warm heat emanating from a charcoal stove, watching the monsoon rains flood the crowded street ahead of me, reveling in the thoughts of eating hot singodas once I got home, I felt completely at home. It was the only home I had ever known.

Mumbai, India. Where countless memories of a carefree childhood lie buried. Where the earliest of my memories were formed. Is this home?

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We’ve been driving in circles for the past hour. The rain continues to drum a steady beat atop the Range Rover as the windshield wipers sway wildly back and forth frantically trying to clear away every drop. Long branches from the trees around us reach out and grab at the windows of the car, scratching it as we drive along the narrow dirt trails carved into the forest. In the midst of the thunderstorm, the forest ahead of us looks dark and eerie and we are by all counts lost. Lost in Mau Forest. I regret ever coming out here today. I regret my year long internship with the WWF (World Wildlife Fund). We had gone into the forest to search for the mouth of a river, had found and marked the origin of the river but lost ourselves on our way out of the forest. We didn’t have any food with us, no water and we were slowly running out of gas. And the steady rain made it impossible to see through the forest ahead of us. What was I thinking when I had decided to go along? A herd of gazelles suddenly bursts out of the thick forest around us, interrupting my thoughts, darting out from the trees on one side of the narrow road, disappearing into the nothingness on the other side of the road. I never should have come.

And then all of a sudden, the forest gets thinner, and the narrow trail opens up and we look through the rain to see a small village dotted with mud huts along the edge of the forest. We search around for someone to ask directions from and then we see her. She sits by the doorway of her mud hut, watching the rain pour down, patting to sleep a baby wrapped up in a bright purple khanga around her chest. She looks at us with curiosity as we approach her, her face lighting up into a bright smile as she realizes that we’re just lost. She invites us into her cow dung plastered mud home as she calls out to her husband to help us. “Mzungu! Mzungu!” a bunch of small children surround us, touching our face, feeling our hair, exclaiming in joyful astonishment over how different it is from their own African features. As I stood in the doorway of her mud hut, sheltered from the rain, I felt safe once again. I felt at home.

Kenya. Where I first discovered what I wanted out of life. Where I first learnt to pursue my dreams. Where I truly grew up. Is this my home?

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And then there is this angry Midwestern winter rainstorm that I watch outside my window today, that bears an eerie resemblance to all the storms in my life that I’ve weathered over the past few years to create a career and a life for myself here.

America. The country that I came to in the hopes of turning dreams into a reality. The country that showed me a secret courage I didn’t know I possessed. After having lived here for eight years of my life, shouldn’t this be my home? And if it is truly home, then why does this storm outside sadden me, and make me miss home today?

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Living segments of my life simultaneously on three very different, diverse continents allows me to soar free amidst them, opening up my life to cultures and customs so different from and yet so alike to one another. And for that unique perspective of a free flowing life, I’ll always be grateful. But it also gives me the saddest feeling of fitting in everywhere and yet truly belonging nowhere. Each of these places that I’ve lived in, that I’ve grown up in, that I’ve had life changing experiences in, holds on to bits and pieces of my soul, but there is none that my soul stakes its claim on. I recognize the turbulence of the storm outside. I recognize the restlessness it brings. It’s time for me and my gypsy soul to move along, in search of a new home. I’ll wander. I’ll roam. I’ll search some more. And perhaps I’ll realize that while there is no one place that I can call home, all these places that make me me together define home.

~vagabond~ © 2009

PS. This post was eerily written around the same time that Bindu asked "where is home?". She has an extremely interesting post (read it here) answering the same question. Bindu, you have my answer now.

In the footsteps of strong women

She throws the fish head into the pot of boiling water and searches around the empty kitchen for something else to put into the soup. She tosses in idle pieces of carrots, a tomato and an onion, the last of any food in the house, even as she contemplates over what to serve for dinner the next night. It has already been a month since the mailman brought her any money – the money her husband tried to send her every few months, his small income from toiling away as a manual laborer in another distant village. There is no telling when some more money will arrive again. Until then, she will just have to find ways to stretch the meals, to raise and feed six children all on her own.

Perhaps she’ll get lucky, she reasons as she stirs the watery broth. Perhaps she’ll get some more fish heads for free from the market at the end of the day – left over pieces that nobody else wants to take home. Saving her worries over tomorrow for another day, she pours the watery liquid into six small bowls. “Not fish soup again, Ma”, complains a little voice. “Drink it up, fish head soup makes you smart”, she encourages.

Each day brings with it a new struggle. There are always school fees to be paid, doctor visits to be made, shoes to be repaired, old clothes that need stitching, six mouths that need feeding. And yet she faces every day with a resilient spirit, refusing to be knocked down by whatever struggles life brings her way.

There is a knock on the door. It’s the post man with some money. But even as she stretches her hand to receive the money, it quickly passes from her hands into the hands of all those who stretched their hands before hers, demanding payment for every favor lent in the past.

I admire her spirit of resilience, her silent tenacity. I admire this woman who is my grandmother.

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She takes her first step into her husband’s home. She stands in her bridal clothes by the doorway inspecting the tiny two room house – the small kitchen and the living room that makes the entire house. There is a communal toilet outside, some distance away from the house, shared by everyone else who lives in the neighborhood. He shows her the tiny bathroom he built into the kitchen just for her, so she can take a shower with some privacy in the mornings. She peeks into its tiny space and wonders how she’ll wrap her sari around in its small space. Or how she’ll comb and braid her long hair without a mirror in the house. Lost in anxious thoughts, she looks up into the face of the man she had chosen to marry. Had she made the right decision? She had turned down suitor upon suitor because she contended, she didn’t want a rich husband who would take care of her every need, she had wanted an educated husband who would respect her and treat her as an equal. He looks at her, trying to gauge her reaction to the house, wondering what she will say. “It’s just a starter home. I’ll work hard, we’ll save money to move somewhere else later.” She looks up at him and smiles, knowing she made the right decision.

Months turn into years, and she tenderly turns the two room house into a home. Then one day, he comes home, bursting with good news. He has just been offered a job abroad, should he take it? The very thought of leaving all her friends and family depresses her. Her first instinct is to put her foot down and say no. No, they can’t leave this home that they’ve created for themselves. No, they can’t leave the family or the life that they’ve created for themselves here. But then she looks up into his face. And she sees the enthusiasm, the dreams, the ambitions, the hope, the possibilities contained within. And she nods. Yes. You should take the job. We’ll be okay.

She gazes out at the view from the airplane as it takes off, rising high up into the clouds, leaving her country, her home, and the life that she knows behind her. In that moment, she chooses instead to put her own dreams, ambitions and hope into the hands of this man she has decided to trust. To trust him completely as she starts life afresh in a whole new continent far away from home.

I admire her implicit faith in life, her very strong courage. I admire this woman who is my mother.

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I turn around to take one last look at my family as I walk on to the airport gate to check in my luggage. I see the tear that rolls down my mother’s cheek, and I want so desperately to run back to her and wipe it away. She smiles at me through her tears and waves a goodbye. I lift my hand and wave back in response, a tight lump forming in my throat. The enormity of what I am about to do dawns upon me and suddenly I feel scared and afraid. Why am I leaving the security and the comfort of the only world I know to start a new life in a country whose culture and ways are alien to me? I don’t know anyone in America. I have no friends or relatives there. I will be completely on my own. What if things don’t work out the way I’d imagined them to be? What if the elusive dreams that lead me there disappeared from sight along the way? I contemplate turning around but then stop and take a step forward heading to the gate.

I’ve wondered about that moment so many times over the years. What stopped me from turning around at that moment? What prompted me to take that first step ahead, to have the courage to move to America? What made me believe I would be okay despite it all? I still don’t know the answer but somewhere deep down inside, I think it is the power of the legacy I possess. I walk in the footsteps of strong women.

~vagabond~ © 2009

A few moments with myself

Lately, I cant hear the voice of my soul speak to me. I miss our conversations. The searching, the dreaming, the creating something out of the nothing. Finding myself within myself. Discovering thoughts misplaced. Ideas forgotten. Dreams abandoned. Planning new journeys to undertake. Instead, a noisy chaos surrounded me. A blur of rushed activity. Overbearingly important and seemingly necessary yet meaningless and unuseful. As the noise from the chaos around me grew louder and more demanding, the hushed voice of my soul spoke softer and softer, growing tired and weary, fading away from a whisper one day into the stillness of a tormented silence. I missed the voice of my deepest expressions, the nurturing voice of my dreams, the voice of my innermost conscience, the voice that calls me to live life again and again. Lately, I've been straining to hear it speak to me again. I've begged and implored it to talk to me again. To speak louder that I might hear it above all chaos. When all I really needed to do was just to step away from the noise, to walk away from the chaos, and to just listen.

~vagabond~ © 2009

Thoughts

So many thoughts in my head.
Noisy and cluttered. Disarrayed. Confused. Jumbled. Knotted up. Tight and twisted.
A thousand different emotions all tangled up.
Demanding. Wanting. Longing. Hurting. Nostalgic. Sentimental.
A messy cobweb.
Incoherent and loud.
And yet not five minutes of calm serenity to de-tangle it all.
To pause. To breathe.
To just express it all.


~vagabond~ © 2009

8 weird things that you didnt know about me

I normally hate doing tags but this time I've been double tagged by both Alok and Cuckoo to do the same tag and I can see them giving me the evil eye every time I stalk their blogs, walking right past the tag and ignoring it to the best of my ability. So for once, I'm just going to raise my hands up in the air, surrender and just do the damn tag. So here goes...eight weird things that people don’t know about me.

• A snake or a rat? Which one would you pick up if you saw it on the ground? Which one would send you out of the room, screaming and shouting for dear life? Which one would give you the creepy crawlies? Which one could you absolutely not stand? This is where things get weird. Because you see, while I have perfectly no problem holding a snake or even two in my hands, I go absolutely nuts when I see or even hear about the faint possibility of a rat being present within a thirty mile radius around me. During my undergrad years, I co-founded a herpetology conservation and education program in my university and snakes do not faze me out one bit. Rats on the other hand are a whole different creature. They creep me out endlessly. I cannot stand the sight of one. Not even in a photo. They give me the heebie-jeebies. It would bring me endless joy if every single last one of them got exterminated and were wiped out from the surface of earth.
  
  
• My taste buds. They're quite possibly the weirdest thing about me. My favorite vegetable of all is karela. I once got one of my American friends to try it by enticing her with "It's delicious". A disgusted face, two glasses of water and three candies later, she still hasn’t forgiven me for it. And the last time I checked, I am still the reigning queen of unusual, disgusting and weird food combos. Ever tried peanut butter-banana-and honey sandwich? Or a bhel puri sandwich? Go on try it, it's delicious. You can thank me later.
  
  
• I absolutely hate makeup. Detest it is more like it. I hardly ever use it, and on the rare instances when I do use it, I walk around all day painfully uncomfortable like my body just got taken over by an alien whom I barely recognize in the mirror. In fact, I did not even know how to use makeup until I was midway through my twenties. I learnt how to apply foundation by video-googling it because I was too embarrassed to tell my friends that I didn’t know anything about it. Girly conversations on makeup still annoy the daylights out of me even today. Deep down inside I attribute it all to having more guy friends than girl friends when I was growing up. Which had an upside and a downside. There, that's a whole lot of weird contained in that paragraph right there.
  
  
• I can be totally OCD about some things. Obsessive-compulsive to the very last bone in my body. Like setting the alarm at night to wake up early in the morning. I just don’t trust myself to wake up without an alarm. So I set it. And then check it before I go to bed. And then settle into bed and check the alarm again to make sure I set it for the right time. And then place it on the side table. And read a book. And turn a page. And check the alarm again to make sure it's on. Put some lotion on my hands. And check the alarm again. And then adjust my pillows. And check it again one last time before I turn off the lights and go to bed. And of course, I recheck it if I get up in the middle of the night to pee.
  
  
• My right leg is jinxed. Over my lifetime, I have twisted my right ankle three times. Fractured my right leg in two places all at once. Bruised the same leg black and blue endless times when I was learning to play hockey in school. And even have a scar to show from the time I fell off my bike and jammed a spoke from the bike into the cut in my ankle. Klutzy things happen when I am around.
  
  
• I once ate mosquito repellant thinking it was toothpaste. I blame it entirely on the packaging of the tubes. Both tubes had the same white background with red writing on it. Except that I didn’t read the writing and proceeded on to eat the repellant. After which it took endless amount of eating actual toothpaste to get rid of the taste of repellant. After which I was disgusted by the taste of both toothpaste and repellant and stopped eating both.
  
  
• I have horrible observational skills. In the words of Joe, I would be the worst person to be present as the only person present at a crime scene when it happened. Because I wouldn’t remember the color of the murderer's hair or eyes or clothes or anything particular about him or her or whether it was even a him or a her. I once told a work colleague how her new hairstyle really made the color of her eyes stand out only to get a dirty look and be told, "I haven’t changed my hairstyle. I switched over from wearing glasses to wearing contact lens" I stunk at my hematology course because I would look at a cell under the microscope, look up and get asked how many nuclei I saw within it, and say "Erm. Hang on, I need to look again."
  
  
• I cannot for the life of me parallel park. I just cant do it. No matter how many times you teach me to do it. Which brings to light the other bit of weirdness I possess. I have the patience of a flea when it comes to learning something I don’t care for. I do not like to learn to crawl and then walk and then run. I just want to get to the running part and get the heck over with learning how to do it. Already. And thus, I cannot parallel park. Because I don’t have the patience to figure out how. How I passed my driving exam to get a license without knowing how to parallel park is a complete mystery to me. On the day of my exam, I was able to miraculously parallel park for the first time in my life and the phenomenon has never repeated itself since.
  

Erm. Is anyone still reading this crap? I think I may have put a little too much weirdness out there and lost my audience. See, now this is exactly why I don’t do tags. But if I'm going down, I'm taking all of you down with me. So to spread around the embarrassment of being a weirdo, I tag 'A', Trisha, Bindu, Lakshmi, and Dust and Vamsee. Muhahahaha!

~vagabond~ © 2009

Charlie and me

I had read the book Marley and Me long before it ever got made into a movie. And it immediately became my favorite book despite the fact that the ending made me choke up and cry. Sob is more like it. Which is why I was so hesitant to go watch the movie version of the book. I wanted to see it and yet I didn’t want to see it. I was afraid if the movie was anything like the book I would burst into tears in the movie theater itself. I finally watched the movie this weekend and yes, the movie did make me cry but it also inspired me enough to pen down bits and pieces of my journey with my own dog.

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CHARLIE AND ME

Charlie at eight weeks old

Charlie today (three years old)

I didn’t really need another dog. I already had a dog. And yet I couldn’t just drive by the house advertising German shepherd puppies without taking one small look. Just one look, I promised. I had absolutely no intention of getting another dog. I was only going to look. How much can a look hurt, really?

I had barely stepped out of my car when I saw a small patch of brown fur wiggling free out of the small fenced in backyard. Seven other puppies yapped around him, cheering him on as he burst through the small opening, dove right past me into the blueberry bushes along the side of the garden. “Oscar!” I heard a voice shout out, “Come back here, right now! Oscaaar! You’ll get yourself run over, you silly puppy!” Excited over his new found freedom, he joyfully sniffed through the bushes, running around in large dizzy circles all around the garden, before finally coming to a stop right at my feet. Panting heavily, he looked up at me with his big brown puppy eyes, a blueberry colored tongue sticking out on one side of his mouth, inspecting me with a cheeky grin on his face.

Before I knew it, I had laid out a blanket on the car seat next to me and he was coming home. “Oscar, huh?” I said to him as I picked out burs and dry leaves from his blueberry infested coat. “What a solemn, grown up name for a dog as goofy as you. You don’t look like an Oscar to me. You need a more goofy name. Like…maybe…hmm…Charlie?” “Charlie?” He perked up his ears and cocked his head to one side and looked up at me. And Charlie it was.

A little girl came up to me one day, not too long after I had brought him home and asked me where Ears was. “Excuse me?” I said. “Ears. You know, your puppy with the big ears. That’s what all the other kids call him.” For the longest time thereafter, everyone in the neighborhood called him “Ears”. Strutting down the street with his happy go lucky personality, and his big, oversized ears, he soon became everyone’s favorite puppy.

I remember the first time he saw snowfall and puzzled over the soft white flakes that fell on his face. He looked up to the sky with the most perplexed look on his face. “It’s snowing, Charlie!” I shouted out happily to him, rolling up a snowball and throwing it at him. “Woof!” he barked as he caught the snowball midair and bit into it, baffled over where the ball had disappeared. A few more barks later, he was in love. He jumped in and out of the white blanket that covered the ground, burrowing his nose into the snow, biting at it, coming up with a brain freeze, and trying to figure out where it all came from and where it all disappeared to. Winter is still his favorite season of the year.

And then there was the day I came home to an exceptionally quiet Charlie. Gone was the rambunctious little dog who would greet my arrival with sloppy kisses and instead he just lay there, tired and exhausted, barely able to lift up his head. “Want to go to the park, Charlie?” – his favorite sentence of all time and nothing. I brought out his red ball and tossed it in the air. And still nothing. No reaction from him whatsoever. He just lay there on the carpet, not even wanting to eat or drink. I frantically called up one vet office after another, only to find them all closed for the day. I would just have to observe him through the night and get him to an animal hospital first thing in the morning. As I sat down on the floor next to him, he placed his head into my lap and let out a big sigh. I stroked his head and sang softly to him and hoped and prayed that he would be okay. The next day, the vet declared he had panosteitis – a self limiting, fairly common, not-so-serious disease, equivalent to growing pains in dogs. A few days later, Charlie had recovered completely but to this day when Charlie is afraid or ill, he nudges into my armpit, places his head on my lap and doesn’t settle down until I sing to him.

He is my sunshine on cloudy, gloomy days. No matter how miserable a day I may have had, he makes me laugh in his own silly, goofy way. Whether it’s the day he was chasing a ball and ran into some ice and went skating on all four paws or the splashing around in the lake that he calls swimming, it’s hard not to laugh when you’re around clumsy Charlie.

And then there are those days when I just need to talk to someone and he listens. There was the day right before I quit my PhD when I wondered where I was going in my life and called home and cried over the phone in sheer frustration. After I placed down the phone, I was consumed with the enormity of what I was about to do, and a flood of mixed emotions swept over me, and as I sat down on the couch, tears suddenly flowed down my cheeks. And there was Charlie, sitting by my side, licking away the tears as they poured down my face. Or the day when I had a terrible fight with Joe and just lay in bed too angry and upset to talk to anyone. There he lay, right by my side, nuzzled next to me as I hugged him and cried.

When I first got a dog, everyone warned me about how destructive dogs can be. They told me about how they’ll chew up slippers and shoes and furniture alike. And how noisy and yappy they will be. About how they’ll break things. And how they’ll pee and poop all over the place. But Charlie did none of that. He turned out to be an incredibly obedient dog and amazingly easy to train. What no one ever warned me about however was how he would trample all over my soul and leave his indelible paw prints scattered across my heart.

Life wouldn’t be life without Charlie in it. He shows me how to laugh out loud. And he shows me just how unbelievably irrelevant a lot of my fears and anxieties are in the bigger, broader doggy context of life. How my job is just a job and does not take precedence over playing in the park. How it is so much better to sleep and dream of chasing squirrels than it is to lie awake in bed worrying over tomorrow. How it is so important to just be comfortable in your own skin and accept yourself as you are – big, silly, clumsy goofball and all. How nothing in life is quite as important as a walk around the neighborhood every evening. And how sloppy kisses from a dog who loves you just for you can make everything seem better.

From the first day since he stepped into my life till now, it has been quite the journey for Charlie and me. Over the years, I’ve changed careers, moved apartments, moved cities, almost had to return home, gotten a new job, gone through the happiest moments of my life to depressing, abysmal moments when nothing seemed to go right, and through it all the one thing that has remained constant is his presence by my side. No matter how circumstances may have changed the chaotic background of my life, through it all there has always been Charlie and me.

There are dogs. And there are dogs that leave a paw print on your heart forever. And then there is Charlie.

~vagabond~ © 2009

To see more photos of Charlie, click here.