Living with Thatha: The Moments in Between

My grandfather called out to me ‘Chinchu, I can’t hear too well, so please make sure you listen for the score okay? How much India made in the match, against Sri Lanka…’ I look up from my chemistry textbook. My grandfather is listening to the evening news, sitting in his ‘easy’ chair. That’s what he calls it. And it really is the ‘easy’ chair. You can ease yourself down into it, it has wooden frame with a piece of happily stripped cloth that hangs low across the length of the chair. Much like a cloth lounge chair, but with so much character, so much history. If ever, a chair could speak, it’s this one. The ‘easy chair’ is some 80 years old; it used to belong to another old lady from Dohnavur Fellowship where my grandparents grew up. All the furniture I’ve seen in my life has disintegrated at some point, but this chair and my attachment to it, fosters feelings in me akin to those one would relate to seeing an old friend again, a solid reliable, unchangeable one compared to me. I have grown, and times with the chair have gone from my little 5 year old feet dangling over the edges, to adolescent seventeen year old limbs planted firmly on the ground.  Everyone from my family; cousins, uncles, aunts and me, we draw strength from it, comfort, Thatha’s comfort. It as though some of the wisdom left over from the hours that he sits in that chair is palpable, like a tangible frequency we could absorb into our young, proud, inexperienced minds. We fight to sit in it, even if it’s for a minute, but as soon as my Thatha needs it, it is given up with all due respect. And much awe.

‘Has the part about the match started yet?’ he asks me again. ‘No, not yet Thatha… do you want me to turn the volume up?’ I asked him. Rather loudly, as the voice of the radio newsreader reaches daunting decibels in her recitation of President Pratibha Patil’s speech. ‘Yes, please’ he answered, and I got up wondering why he hadn’t told me to do that before, so he could hear for himself. The radio was turned already turned up to full volume, it was loud enough for the entire closely packed street full of matchbox houses to hear the national news, but not for my Grandfather. He couldn’t hear it. ‘I’ll tell you the score when they read it out, okay?’ I shout across the room. He nods in response, rests his head on the back of the easy chair and closes his eyes, his fingers tapping the worn teak of the arm rest in time to the rhythm of the changing news headline background music. My thatha always likes to close his eyes when he eats or drinks, he also likes to sip his tea with a spoon sometimes; he says he appreciates the taste better and for longer that way. As he munches on some freshly fried onion pakodas he tired to brush away a crumb from his big characteristic nose with his strong, fingers. They are slightly curled. The tendons and veins are clearly visible as they are stretched taut under his wrinkled, aged skin, and I expect his hand to waver as he raises it uncertainly to his face, some 5 inches from the target, but he gets the crumb of anyway. It’s funny how this simple action can seem so endearing… ‘Sri Lanka won the toss and the score stands 125 at the loss of 1 wicket…’ explains the earnest newsreader, going further to say that ‘… India does not have good prospect at clinching the series at this rate…’ How astute. I relay the news to my grandfather, who is now suddenly alert, telling me how ‘India gets too overconfident, they need to be humble, and they really have to bat well this time.’ With this he leans back, and I hear his breath even out as falls into easy slumber. As I turn back to my chemistry textbook, continuing to read the passage on Electron Affinity, I realize that if anything could make my life worthwhile, it’s this time, this time in between.

Some perspective.

Morning has broken, like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird

Praise for the singing, praise for the morning

Praise for them springing fresh from the word

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven

Like the first dewfall, on the first grass

Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden

Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning

Born of the one light, Eden saw play

Praise with elation, praise every morning

God's recreation of the new day.

- Eleanor Farjeon

For when we lose sight of the greater picture, for when the fog of daily hussle closes in and makes you lose hope. There is a greater purpose, and their is happiness, we get to see a new day, while many others slept last night and didn't wake to see another day. Let's not take that for granted.

Morning has broken.

Wishing for Pangaea: An Ode to Long Distance (Friend)ships

According to Wikipedia, ‘Pangaea’ is the supercontinent that existed before the earth split into its current continent configuration some 250 million years ago. It also goes onto say that the earth is in the habit of doing this random drifting apart and shifting around every 300-400 million years.

And at each point we have managed to come up with names to describe it, Gondwanaland, Pannotia, Rodinia… the list goes on. How anyone comes up with these numbers and postulates is anyone’s guess and I’m pretty sure I sound daft and nerdy as I go on about something very irrelevant to anything today. Do bear with me, I have a point. You see, when there was a combined landmass everyone lived together, continents which are now separate, then overlapped to form common ground. Everyone lived on the same piece of land. There was no divergent evolution or natural selection, no survival of the fittest or random elimination. Therefore, my best friend and I have come to the conclusion that the origins of our friendship were somewhat like that, until that fateful day when the continental drift decided to come along, aka graduation. Yes, the continental drift did also cause an intermingling of populations and a division of pre-existing populations due to tectonic plate shifts resulting in many of the hypothesis that Charles Darwin and Mr Lamarck liked to throw around. However, for friends such as mine, it rendered our life a bit chaotic and more than a little lonely. On opposite corners of the world in completely different external environments, we now had to adapt to circumstances previous unforeseen and to a good extent, unwanted. Our routines diverged and so did our communication. Add to that a long list of limiting factors such as time difference, internet inconsistencies, the issue of paying to talk on the phone, living you current life as well as holding onto the good old Pangaean times, new people, new food, the obligatory growing up etc, and you get the perfect recipe for being friend-sick. That’s right. Here’s a sickness that’s not given as much care and attention as compared to “love-sickness”. We speak on end about long distance relationships, of the separation of love which is meant to be together. But what of two friends sitting miles, oceans and continents away from each other, staring at a computer screen waiting for a word, a phrase or chat conversation with their significant other. What of the heart break you feel when the video freezes, or the voice get cut, when the bars on the internet signal plunge down, when the computer decides to be dodgy, when the phone line goes dead because you’ve run out of money, when you’re greeted with missed calls instead of a familiar face, when sending the package costs more than what’s in it, when in a country like India it just ends up getting lost anyway…. What of those chuddy-buddies, those brother’s-in-arms, those homie-G’s, those machas, those roommates and dorm mates and classmates, those people that made up your day, and marked your calenders. What happens when they end up like those continents separated by seas of… everything!? It takes time and effort to keep it up, to keep it going, to keep in touch. It’s harder to be there for someone, and it’s also harder not to think about how it ‘used to be’ and what ‘could’ve been’ instead of focusing on what is and has to be done. As my friend and I do absurd things to overcome the time difference, from downing tons of coffee and green tea to having showers to stay awake, one this is for sure, we will come together. Maybe physically, like the earth does every so often (note: 300-400 million years) or maybe and most probably, mentally, in that way we look to the future, for better things are definitely to come. It something like the commonality between the Tasmanian Wolf (a marsupial found off the coast of Australia) and the Placental wolf (found on the mainland)… although they were victims in separation of the continental drift, and were subjected to various different environments that they were required to adapt to in order to survive, the end product, i.e., the current species of the same, are not very different. Yes, they appear different and function differently but their purpose is still the same; to hunt and survive. Forgive the crude simile, for we all seek to do more than hunt and survive in life, but in essence the mechanism is parallel. Because when my friend and I saw each other a couple of days ago after almost 8 months not having been around each other, we picked up as though we were in the middle of a conversation we hadn’t finished. Although we’re separated by different cultures and lifestyles and oceans and what not else, we still are and always will be, Pangaeans.