Heading west..... (guest blogger Bindu Desai)

From: Bindu Desai 
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:53 PM
Subject: Heading West..

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place, everywhere, at home nowhere.  Jawaharlal Nehru               FLYING HOME I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,   through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I        am going  home once again from another   home, escaping the weave of reality into another    one that gently reminds and stalls.....          But what talk of soul and skin        in this day and age, such ephemeral things......         What talk of flight time and flying         when real flights of fancy are crying          to stay buoyant unpredictably in mid-air         amid pain,peace, and belief: just like thin air.....  .             Sudeep Sen   After 4 and a half months in the land of my birth, months spent complaining endlessly about uneven pavements( only a giraffe or a camel can negotiate these with ease!), a generally cavalier attitude to safety, chaotic even dangerous traffic especially the 2 wheelers, from a place where with a cacophony of sounds: the hourly well attended crow convention, the ear splitting cell phone chats of so many invariably at night, the various days firecrackers exploded to celebrate Dashera, Diwali, weddings etc, the many cars that drive at top speed through our little lane,mostly the wrong way up our one way street, the students at Ruia College talking oh so loudly on their mobiles, practising for an Inter-Collegiate 'Disco' music programme, then for a street play protesting the abysmal treatment of women ; to a place where an all pervasive silence reigns, more pets than people are to be seen, splendid and huge parks exist with hardly anyone in them,  traffic rules are observed, safety is generally accorded respect, encounters with various government agencies are pleasant and require no additional clout: a difference for sure........ For Bombay, though changed these past few decades and mostly for the worse, is still a city where I have so many linkages; especially KEM hospital where I spent 2 happy days each week with residents from Akola, Amravati,Sangli, Yeotmal, places the Express train does not deign to stop at! Their eager faces, keenness to learn, their interest in the larger world, the wonderful case conferences and seminars, the astounding clinical pathology, their analysis of them often influenced by the MRI scans they have seen! Then the Adult Education English class a total delight , the 90 minutes passing like seconds, Shanthi Kurien, the volunteer coordinator and teacher for 6 years,  an angel if there ever was one.... So many friends met, so many books/movies/political essays read/written and argued about! A few notable seminars attended, meeting Anjali Monteiro another rare individual, her students at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, superb with their cinematic inquiry  about Bombay/Mumbai and how it has been transformed by the anti- Muslim pogroms of 1992-93, listening to John Dayal, passionate and clear about the plight of Christians in Orissa, Harsh Mander outlining how an anti-communal violence bill presently languishing in parliament might restrict mass massacres,Javed Anand and Teesta Setalvad in for the 'long haul' to try get justice for victims of the far too many massacres that have occurred these past 3 decades, hearing Rudi Heredia discuss the society and its need to pursue justice, the Indo-Palestine Solidarity  forum where an American participant Paul Larudee was deported some time later from India( the long reach of Zionists and their friends)....  So many troubling events: the state funeral accorded Bal Thackeray, the horrific rape in Delhi, the murder of young Muslims by police in Dhule, the execution of Afzal Guru, the promotion of Narendra Modi as possible Prime Minister, the accelerated looting of the resources of Adivasis and so much more....  And so Westwards to a country I have lived in for over 4 decades with its unique blend of smugness, ignorance and arrogance, its militarism and determination to be top dog for as long as possible.... I come out of of the "Customs and Border Security" area where I waited for more than an hour to clear immigration, then meet a supercilious Customs official who oblivious to my 14000 mile journey and 20 hour flight has me lift my 3  admittedly heavy bags onto an xray scanner. Exit the hall to a place where  too I have links, personal and professional,some going back 4 decades and because of them oddly enough this too, is home.

OMG—I just saw my dead grandmother!

OMG—I just saw my dead grandmother!
I went to my Vermont apartment kitchen for a snack. I found my basket and unclipped a clothespin where there are three separate bags of snacks-unfinished:

This is something my grandmother, Eva, deceased (RIP), would have done.  She was the epitome of self-restraint—we would give her a box of Sees chocolates for Valentine’s Day and, eating only one piece a day, the box would last her until Easter.

Other things I do because of my maternal grandmother:

--flatten milk and OJ cartons  (she HATED taking up extra space in the garbage can.)

--pick up lint off the floor (or pick weeds from the cracks of the side walk in the front walkway)

-know Bible stuff (I started going to Sunday school in a serious way when my family moved to San Diego in 6^th grade—broom hockey Sunday nights and memorize the verses/books of the Bible by day/teach Sunday school to the toddlers/counselor to junior high group)

but, okay, I don’t, as she did:

-ask someone to cover up snake pictures in the dictionary lest she come across them while looking up a word (I think Grandma Eva had a snake-penis phobia)

-I don’t forgo playing  games just because I  might lose (i.e. Grandma Eva would not even play cards)

-I don’t wash my tinfoil and baggies to re-use (But then, I didn’t go through the Depression as she had.)

Grandmother Eva (she did NOT tolerate Grandma or Grannie) wore a dress and stockings and "pumps" every day of her life.  Here she is at 70 something, on a group trip to China and Taipei, memorialized on a souvenir plate, still intact in my possession. She taught me to sew and in 6th grade I was making my own clothes. When her eyesight got bad, she would have me thread 6 or 8 needles at a time on weekends for her so she could still mend or baste.

 Her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 36 yo, leaving her a single mom with 2 daughters, her first two children already dead:  Margaret, at 4 yo of pneumonia and Donald, at 16 yo in an airplane crash.  Geraldine (my mom) and Greta (my aunt) struggled along with my Grandma Eva working full time for an ad company. I remember her recounting one tale of varnishing broccoli so it would look very shiny in the pictures. If we think it’s hard on single parents nowadays, I can’t image how difficult it was for a widowed mom in 1940.

My mother, a pedestrian in a crosswalk, was hit by a car at age 16. The driver had run a red light. Back then when you fractured your femur, you were in the hospital a long time. I mean three years long time. My mom, when she was 16 to 18 years old, was in a Chicago hospital with her leg in traction requiring 10 different surgeries for the osteomyelitis and complications and skin grafts. She was always embarrassed to have me see her left inner thigh which had divot the size of a piece of toast where they had harvested a slab of skin to put on her right shin. Little suture marks went all the way around the square on each leg, like a hobo’s patch on his blue jeans. She hated wearing skirts/dresses because of her leg scars and this was back in the 50s when it was just beginning to be okay for cool women to wear pants. Thank you Elizabeth Smith Miller and Coco Chanel.

http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture/elizabeth-smith-miller.htm

In fact when my mother got the instruction sheet, as an enlisted man’s wife, about how to go to a Captain’s wife’s tea, she had to wear a skirt. This ticked her off no end. My mom became a big women’s libber in spirit pretty early on. (Except she really wasn’t a bra burner, more because of social pressure to wear a bra than to admit it gave her any comfort in harnessing the double D breasts.) Here’s a picture of not-my-mom, but Elizabeth Miller’s first pants.

www.nps.gov -www.nps.gov -

My mom loved babies—anyone’s babies but especially my babies. It ripped her heart out when I moved from the west coast to Maine, taking baby Malindi with me. She always wanted to volunteer to rock babies in the hospital but it seems like there wasn’t a real need for that--not enough orphans, I guess. Instead she volunteered in the Hospital business office until she was Volunteer of the Year and they offered her a job.

 Here's a picture of my mom, with me as a baby and with me the day I went off to Peace Corps after a friend's wedding.

She loved the color orange and traveled a couple times to Maine to see the autumnal leaves.

She loved fresh tomatoes that my dad would grow in the terraced garden of our southern California canyon back yard. (A different blog entry to come.)

My mom taught me to write thank you notes, a skill which has served me well. After one Residency picnic at the Director’s house, Dan Onion wrote my mom to say the only thank you card he’d received was from me and she had taught me well.

My Mom loved me –  from when I was little to when I was big. I know because she told me often and showed me in her ways. She sent holiday cards, gave me little treasures she knew I would like. When I was in Kenya in Peace Corps, she sent me weekly packages with home made recorded albums on tape, packages of pea soup, film canisters of Lawry’s seasoned salt.

the end-- because I'm moving out of Vermont now--maybe I'll see my Grandmother or my Mother in other things I do  (or don't do) later.

I appreciate this lady's blog post

I don't know the blog-ly correct way to appreciate this lady's blog post, but:

http://findingmarjo.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A Big Project starts little

Street Art Utopia

little free library

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Freedom to Read

In Canada, during the week of February 24 to March 2, we celebrate our intellectual freedom, guaranteed us under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It sounds silly that we should still have to fight for this right, but schools and libraries are still regularly asked to remove books and magazines from their shelves, and books are stopped at the U.S. border.

The librarian at my neighbourhood branch and I were going through the selection of banned books just last week, and trying to understand why Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" was in the stack. It took a while to decipher what became more absurd by the minute. It would seem that ham could have children thinking of penises, which is just a short toss away from homosexual behaviour... 

Well, I still haven't decided which book to read from during the 24 hour Freedom to Read marathon on March 2nd at The Millennium Library - so I'm welcoming suggestions! Last time around, I read the whole of a banned French children's book. I'd like to read from an English one this time.

Educate yourself about the men and women around the world who still die, vanish, or are imprisoned for daring to write - visit PEN Canada.