One Year Later

I wrote this reflection, "An Ordinary Friday," for the Nov. 12, 2017, service titled One Year Later at the Unitarian Universalist Church ofUrbana-Champaign. (Audio at the link above)

A year ago, in the days after the election, I was in the throes of grief, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through it. I wore black for a week. I love color, but I couldn’t face it.

In the year since, I have felt the need to turn inward, to find ways to nurture my compassion and my gratitude—to balance out my anger and fear. And to turn outward as well, to engage in ways I can sustain and which sustain me.

Over these months, I have found that the world has come to feel more fragile and more precious. I have come to realize even more deeply how much I love it, this world of ours.

I was reminded of the preciousness and beauty of our world on a Friday about three weeks ago. I was sitting in Westside Park in downtown Champaign, eating an early lunch and choosing the poetry I wanted to read for our UU coffeehouse, when I heard children’s voices behind me.

“It’s the Music Man!” a little boy exclaimed. After a brief pause, he added, “He’s going to make music!” The certainty in his voice moved me, and I turned around to look.

About eight children—they were about four years old—were walking one behind the other, holding onto a rope. They were heading towards the nearby preschool. A little distance from them, on a low stool, sat a middle-aged man, a bag beside him. He reached in, took out what looked like a small horn, and began to play music. Excited sounds came from the children.

I smiled and returned to my lunch and reading. A minute later, I heard more young voices.

“It’s the Music Man!  Hi, Jay!”

About a dozen more kids were on the path to the preschool.

                                                  

“Hi Jay! Hi Jay!” a chorus of voices called out. The man kept playing the music; the children waved and smiled and chattered excitedly.

I was struck by the joy the Music Man and the children brought each other through the repetition of what was clearly a regular event in their lives. I had been reading poems that emphasized our interdependence—and here I was witnessing the joy it brings. Witnessing it brought me joy.

I was struck by how this still goes on, this kind of kindness and interdependence, even while  chaos and cruelty dominate the highest levels of our government. Noticing moments like this is what has allowed me to nurture gratitude and compassion in myself, to avoid being consumed by anger and despair. There are opportunities every day, and I try to remain open to them.

That is how I get through: looking at sunlight on the tall tree outside the Champaign Public Library where I wrote some of this homily, or noticing the engaged looks on my students' faces at Parkland as they listen to each other discuss meditation or feminism, or witnessing the kindness and joy of strangers. These moments of beauty and attention and kindness are as real as the injustices and violations that capture the headlines. Each morning, standing with palms pressed against each other and looking out the living room window, I greet the day and bring to mind the compassion and beauty I witnessed the day before; this practice of paying attention nourishes me and strengthens me and opens me. It reminds me why I love our world and reminds me why I must keep fighting for it.

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Two works, introduced to me by Rev. Florence Caplow, our new settled minister at UUCUC, have helped lift me during the past year: 

the poem "Now, I Love You. Now, I Witness" by the UU minister Theresa Soto

and the song "I'm Gonna Walk it With You" by Brian Claflin and Ellie Grace.

What has helped you? 

Community has sustained me this year. These candles were lit at the beautiful Solstice service yesterday at our Unitarian Universalist Church; they represent individual goals for the solar year, goals pursued with the knowledge that we have the support of our community. 

Sindhi Children and the 1947 Partition of India

My notebook, pen, and voice recorder on my parents' bed in Bombay in 2012.  I had been sitting across from my Aunt Koshi, my father's younger sister, and asking her about the Partition.  It was probably the longest conversation we had ever had--though interrupted and added to by relatives coming in and out of the room--and one I enjoyed very much.

Our childhoods remain with us, coloring our experiences as adults, affecting how we make sense of the world.  The older I get, the more I realize how much of my past I keep with me, how vivid my seventh birthday is, how clear the memory of a high-school field trip in Kuwait.  My memories include emotions and physical sensations.  As I have entered middle age and this awareness about my past has grown stronger, I have realized that my parents, thirty-one years older than I, also have their childhoods inside them--an obvious conclusion but one that is also startling. 

In recent years, I have been talking with my parents and their siblings about a crucial turning point in their lives, the move from Karachi to Bombay after the Partition of India in 1947, when they were still children. During these conversations, I have been listening, through these adults' memories, to the experiences of those children.

Last month, my short essay, How to Interview Your Mother About Her Lost Childhood was published in Bluestem magazine.  The link above will take you to the essay and to an audio recording of my reading of the essay.*

Before that issue of the magazine was released, I showed my mother the essay, nervous about her response.  "It's all the truth.  It's short and sweet," she said.  And then she added, "You write really well.  You should write a book."  I thought of the essay and laughed.  After you read it, you'll see why.

*The essay is also available here.

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Below are some photos Marilyn and I took in 2012 in the Sion Sindhi Colony, the location of the first permanent homes in which my parents lived in Bombay.  They happened to live two doors from each other.  When I returned there, after a gap of many years, I was struck by how narrow the lanes were.  The homes on that lane now are sturdier and fancier than the ones my parents' families built in the late forties.

The house with the bicycle in front of it is on the spot where my mother's family's house was.  It was a much simpler, one-story structure with a small loft that held a bed.

The house in the left foreground and in the photo below is on the spot where my father's family home stood.

A view of the lane looking out towards the street.  

That's me in 2012  in the lane where my parents' spent their teen years (though the lane looked much different then): Block 8 of the Sion Sindhi Colony.

Another view of the lane, looking towards the railway tracks at the end, just beyond the wall.

This alley runs perpendicular to the lane.  My paternal grandparents moved to Block 16 of the Sion Sindhi Colony, and my brother and I walked countless times down this alley from the house of our Nani, our maternal grandmother, in Block 8 to the house of our Dadi, our paternal grandmother, whom everyone in our family called Ama.

This is the Sita Sindhu Bhawan, a community center for Sindhis in Bombay.  In 2012, I visited during a gathering, and I was touched that several elderly Sindhis there were willing to share with me their stories of the Partition.  Being surrounded by Sindhis reminded me of my childhood, when on the weekends, visiting my grandparents in the Sion Sindhi Colony, I would hear the sounds of Sindhi being spoken, see the Sindhi script on the newspaper on my grandmother's bed,  and smell the aroma of Sindhi food cooking.  I lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, where for most of my childhood ours was the only Sindhi family. So the weekends were the only time I had this experience of being immersed in Sindhi culture.

The Urge to Make Things

One of the yarn bowls I painted two evenings ago.  It will look very different once it is fired next week.

Two evenings ago, as the snow swirled outside the large windows of the Illini Union Bookstore, I listened enthralled to a reading by Andre Dubus III.  He urged the writers in the audience to write, that writing was the point, that being published was nice, but that we have to write in the face of the inevitable rejection letters.  He described writing his novel House of Sand and Fog in twenty-minute segments while sitting in his car before he went in to teach at one of several jobs he was juggling at the time.  

After the book became a bestseller, he worked  on building his family home. At his reading at the bookstore, he spoke of framing his daughter's bedroom.   His agent asked him if he couldn't now pay someone else to do that, couldn't he get back to writing?  He was writing, he told his agent, but he also wanted to build his daughter's bedroom, that it was like tucking her into her blanket at night.  

Dubus was describing making things.  He built his novel a piece at a time, and later, he built his family home.  They were both acts of creation.  

When I left the reading, I headed over to the Pottery Place, where I painted yarn bowls with a dozen other knitters.  Yarn bowls are ingenious containers that keep yarn from rolling away under the coffee table while one is knitting.  I had never painted pottery before, but my nephews have painted gifts for me.  As I chose colors and brushes and came up with a design, I felt like a child, playful and ready to experiment.  As I painted, I got lost in the process.  The blank surface of the bowl was like my blank computer screen or a blank page in my journal: an invitation to create something that had never existed before.  

I left the Pottery Place just as it closed, accompanied by another knitter, someone I had met for the first time that evening.  We talked about how remarkable it was that in this world of mass production, we had just painted bowls that were almost certainly unlike any others in the world, and how that was like the knitting we did, too, as we tweaked patterns, chose yarn, and knitted with our very personal tension, so that my stitches and hers would be different.

I came home wanting to write, to knit, to paint some more, and soon.  What I needed to do was to sit down at the kitchen counter to grade a paper.  The next morning, I had to teach, and to give feedback on a couple of dozen drafts.  And that was okay.  The delight and inspiration from my evening lightened the work I had to do, and I went in to campus the next day reminded that my students were creating, too.  

The cardigan I have been knitting and hope to finish before the winter is done.  I had to take apart over forty rows of over six hundred stitches and start the cardigan over in October, when I discovered I had twisted it when I joined it in the round,  but I haven't become discouraged yet.  

I finished knitting this hat last night.  I began it during one of the pauses in knitting the cardigan, when I had to wait to get advice about a next step.  

My favorite chair, where I often read and write and where I am writing this.  The red notebook is my journal.  I went through about half a dozen notebooks last year.  

November

The prairie on the last day of November.

Starting thirty years ago—when I moved to the United States after growing up in the warmth of India and Kuwait—November became the nondescript lull between the brilliant oranges of autumn and Halloween and the lights and sparkle of the holiday season.  Until Thanksgiving and my birthday arrived at the end of the month, November seemed merely grey and increasingly cold. 

This year, on a Saturday in early November, just when the trees had lost most of their leaves and the wind seemed to freeze my bones, this month of transition reminded me of the hope and faith it takes to move through our days. 

In the morning, Marilyn and I attended the church wedding of a middle-aged couple.  The ceremony was brief, but we could all see that the exchange of words had transformed the lives of the couple.  As they walked out of the sanctuary together, their smiles were wide, their faces nearly aglow.  With faith and hope, they had made promises that were to last them their whole lives.  Their whole lives. 

At noon, Marilyn and I walked to our neighborhood park, where an Indian family that lives two doors from us was planting a tree in memory of their beloved daughter and sister, who had died just before her twelfth birthday after a brief illness.  She would never marry.  She would not even be a teenager.  Her whole life was done.   

As I shoveled some dirt around the root of the tree and then watched her young friends and her six-year-old brother do the rest, I thought of the hope and faith with which we love the people in our lives. We plan for our lives together.  And then, sometimes, we are devastated by how our plans have to be laid aside. 

At the same time, I thought how planting that catalpa tree, which in November was bare, just a collection of skinny branches really, was an act of hope and faith.  In the spring, the tree will bloom.  In a few years, it will cast some shade.  Eventually, children may sit under it and have a picnic.  As we held hands in a circle around the tree, all of us, whose lives were touched by this young, bright, loving girl, imagined that tree.  One person had brought bulbs of white grape hyacinth to plant under the tree, and the children placed those around the roots, helped by the adults.

After the tree was planted and the kind men from the park district had set the memorial plaque in place and laid down the mulch, our small group hurried down the street to our neighbors’ house.  There we ate simple Indian food, sipped on hot apple cider, and found some comfort in being together. 

When Marilyn and I came home that Saturday afternoon, we worked on the annual task of moving the furniture from our deck to our garage.  As I moved the heavy umbrella stand in the red wheelbarrow, I imagined bringing it out again in the spring, imagined setting out the deck furniture and hanging up the backyard swing in front of the blue spruce trees.  I have faith spring will come again—and I hope it brings only what we are able to bear.

As I pushed the wheelbarrow, I noticed berries from the hawthorn tree gathered by November rain.

Grounding

           The landscape changing before my eyes—that is what I had hoped to see this summer on our twelve-day road trip through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, ending at the Grand Canyon.  On the way back, we were considering stops in Colorado and Kansas.  Thirty-six hours before we were to leave, our clothes were packed—unusually early—and most of our hotel reservations were made.  Then the phone rang, and the landscape of our summer and of our lives changed.  Marilyn’s brother Mo was missing.  Twelve days later, we found out that he had died by suicide in the woods not far from his home. 

            I know I have written about this before.  Those twelve days and the news we received at the end of them were so strange, so unexpected, so devastating that I expect I will write about them again and again, if only to try to make them more real. 

            Even as we cope with Mo’s death, we are figuring out how to ground ourselves in our lives, how to go on. 

            All through June, we made hour-and-a-half-long trips back and forth across the flatland on Route 72 to meet with detectives, to search for Mo, to plan the funeral, and then to attend the funeral.  The landscape did not change, but the skies did.   

            At the end of June, we drove west on 72 one more time, this time to celebrate Marilyn’s aunt Dorothy’s 90^th birthday; the invitation had come before Mo had ever gone missing.  We weren’t sure how we would do at a birthday celebration.  But seeing cousins and siblings again sounded comforting.  On the way there, we drove through a rainstorm—and then drove out of it, as is so common here in Central Illinois.  As I looked at the sky, ominously grey in the east and showing blue in the west, I realized I was once again seeking a metaphor for our grief. 

            The flatland grounds me. 

So does our newly remodeled kitchen.  Recently, I labeled jars and organized spices on the shelves of the narrow cabinet to the left of the stove.  I was proud of myself for tossing out spices that were old, for letting go.  And I found satisfaction in organizing what was left so that it would be easy to use.  I did all this on our new, bright white countertop. 

            This week, our nephews, ten-year-old twins, are visiting us.  This visit was also planned before Mo’s disappearance.  The countertop is now a place to experiment with the slime the twins bought at the dollar store last summer, when they were also here for Aunty Camp.  Boxes of sparklers and the twins’ novels and math exercises cover the kitchen table.  Occasionally, the boys break into the theme song for Gilligan’s Island, the 1960s TV show their “Aunty Mellon” introduced them to and which they now love.  Cutting up a peach for Sanjay and combing Sameer’s hair after his shower ground me.  I hear Marilyn giggling with them and am grateful for this reminder that life goes on, that we will all go on. 

 

The twins read every night.  They sleep on the floor at the foot of our bed.

The boys each have a cow they chose at the bookstore at Cedar Crest College, where they met me when I went out east for my 25th reunion.  The cows traveled to the Midwest with them and have had many adventures.  In a rare, quiet moment, Spotty here was reading A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The children's capacity for play and delight has been a comfort to Marilyn and me.