Bangalore Diaries - The stories of Beku Mia - Part 1 and 2

Prologue                                                                    

I am not a cat person. I have never have been one since childhood. We lived in a sprawling house in Madras in a big joint family and the gardens, the garages and haystacks were always full of animals. When I was probably two or three years old, there was a dog, a very old pom called Teddy at home but it died when I was very much a kid. That was the last pet that was at home. We had a cow shed for a while but that too seemed very long ago. And then there were the unwelcome guests - cats, monkeys ..why I had even seen a mongoose as well besides the rats and the other rodents. The cats used to frequent our place very often . Even today I can hear the squirrels send out an alarm call when a cat prowled in the neighbourhood. The cats and us - well. we had an arrangement. The gardens, the compound wall, the terrace, the outside staircase - they could roam freely all over these areas , but they were strictly not allowed in our house. And thus we had a live and let live relationship and my indifference to them continued and they ignored me. But marriage eventually changed all that.

                                                                           

Part One

My in laws in Bangalore are however deeply attached to cats. And one cat was part of the household. I was initially a little annoyed to find that their cat refused to accept boundaries as the ones in Madras had done. This one was always on my favourite couch or sitting on my chair at the dining table, or even worse, used my rug rather happily. The cat was faithful to my inlaws, curling at their feet and listening to their commands , while my mother in law insisted that it called her " Maa". instead of " Meow."

The cat, I called it Bekku Mia, as it received the maximum respect in the house. And its favourite duty was to follow my father in law downstairs to the road, or to accompany him all the way up the stairs inside the house, if it spotted him in the distance entering the building. We learnt to leave each other alone ; later tolerance turned to mutual liking and then we learnt to appreciate each other's finer qualities. Beku Mia was a funny guy and he often tolerated the other members of the house, including my husband and played pranks to keep us entertained. He would never enter the kitchen, never create a mess and would announce his presence only when he was hungry. He was lazy and was happy being fed than chasing rats. And his favourite activity was to snooze the whole day long. My mother in law was the first to support him. " Papa, he would be hunting all night long, let him sleep now..do you want some milk now ?" she would ask him lovingly .

 One fine day, he brought another guy to give him and my inlaws company, as if he knew his days were numbered. The camaraderie continued for a while, but Beku Mia would clearly indicate to the other guy that he was the pet and hence special attention was reserved only to him.

Soon time passed by and Beku Mia fell ill. The family recounted the many days he had survived after a spate of ill health, but it seemed like his nine chances were over  . One sad day, he succumbed to his illness and departed  Beku Mia had come home as a kitten in 1998 and he was with us until 2011, the longest stint that a cat had ever stayed with them.  His friend left us as well , leaving my inlaws mourning.  A photograph was left near the mantel piece which was his favouite place.

Part 11
                                                                          

A year went past us and not a day passed without a reference to Beku Mia. My father in law missed him the most but he was averse to more pets, lest attachment took over his life. And one day, we heard a little " Meow" near the window sill. A carbon copy of a younger version of Beku Mia stood before us. A kitten, barely a few weeks old which looked exactly like Beku Mia had found its way home.  The eyes were different said my inlaws, but I am no judge of identifying resemblances among cats. So, we had our new Beku Mia who was well on his way to being pampered and spoilt.

He played his cards well. He knew his masters were my inlaws and would only listen to them. He would run away on seeing us and would shyly avoid any new comers. He entertained us with some new tricks. Playing with a ball was one of his favourite antics. But what fascinated us was that he would accompany my father in law everyday to the door, when he saw him leaving the building. He would stand on his hindlimbs, reach out the latch with his forelimbs and open the door for him  And this privilege was only given to my father in law. Six months passed and Beku Mia became a fixture in the house.

However tragedy struck again. My inlaws had stepped out for a few hours and only a kitchen window was open in the house. When they returned, all that they saw was the scene of a battlefield. It seemed like Beku Mia was hunted down by an older cat and there was blood and hair all over. There was no sign of either cat. We looked around, checked with neighbours, visited vets, looked at every starving, battle weary cat and kitten and wondered if Beku Mia had left us again . Theories flooded . Some said that cats had nine lives and so it was nursing itself somewhere in its own haven. We waited with hope. Months passed.  The yoga teacher offered to give us some kittens from home. The maid brought another wild kitten which looked similar to Beku Mia. It jumped from table to chair to mantel piece to the window, drank the milk and jumped out of the house. And four months went past us.

And suddenly, out of the blue, a Meow was heard from the window sill.  Beku Mia had returned home after four months. Plumpier, braver, he was still the kitten that had fought valiantly against the older cat. And it barely took him time to find his way around his old home. He seemed to have licked his wounds and nursed himself back to good health. He rallied around my inlaws as always, opened the door for my father in law, allowed my mother in law to ruffle his head, but stared at us with his big innocent eyes . We were amazed that a cat, often not known for his loyalty and attachment would find its way back home to those people who had taken care of it as a young kitten. Beku Mia has grown up today to fight his own battles, but he still remains pampered in my in laws house. At this point, he must be enjoying his afternoon siesta.

Who are these faces ?

Dear diary,

Everyday I wade through life meeting countless faces ,rubbing many a shoulder and shaking several hands, before walking home to enjoy my own private space . While some of these social meets are pure networking opportunities, many times, I have met people with whom I share similar wavelengths or can enjoy a laugh or even share a personal moment. Sometimes these moments become intimate - not necessarily physical, but also emotional and then I do not know what to call these relationships. For want of a better word, I call them friends .

And then there are people who are around me all the time. People who are related to me, is married to me, who has nurtured and managed me, people with whom I share a bond, And I call them family.

Sometimes there is a blur between the two, when friends become family and family become friends. But then to me, that doesnt matter. I remember when I was 17 and I was still in high school. I made a promise to myself - that I will try and be independent - financially, mentally or intellectually and even emotionally. While I have managed the same to a large extent, the emotional bit has always been a bit challenging. And that is when I learnt not to have too many expectations, except to people with whom one Ive been extremely close to. And these are people, Ive learnt to trust and believe in over the years and very few friends , besides family belong here, And even then, my dear diary, I have maintained a certain discretion - as they are individuals first and then my parent ,sibling or spouse.

But this is not to say that friends are secondary. There are times when I have leaned on them and they on me , but then neither can be a permanent crutch for the other. I have gotten up and moved on several times and have been grateful to my friend for being there and I have also offered myself as a crutch when the need arises. But then, dear diary, there is a difference between being there and being used na.and very often the lines are blurred as we are dealing with feelings here . Yes, I have been used and thrown and there are times that I have used, but I believe that I havent thrown anyone as yet..but then I am also human . I do not believe in formulae, my dear diary..

But then I refuse to believe that anyone unconditionally offers themselves to the other - be it friends or family. There is always a need that one is satisfying - be it loneliness or a feel good factor or just a selfish need to feel special and cared for, or show off to the world that you are loved and cared for . I think its also a hidden urge to prove to oneself that one is not really alone and hence the success of so many social media sites that seek to satisfy this gratification. You know, as Im writing this , there is probably a desire inside me that someone out there is reading me and nodding their heads ..


I have always been a private person and even though many people think that I am quite social and an extrovert, I draw a line when it comes to me and people. Be it family or friends, I realize that 9 out 10 people I meet and have met in my life are mere acquaintances. I am happy to share a conversation with them, laugh with them, crib to them, spend some time with them, even let them touch my life to a certain extent , listen to them, offer myself as a crutch to them, but then I draw a boundary . Call it a safety net, but it has worked for me.I go that far and no further. And I avoid favours for that brings in emotional dependency, because it weakens me further and creates a false sense of obligation. In rare cases I have opened my doors to strangers and very few have actually become part of my life . Most of the time, the relationship has either drifted away, in some cases, it has failed . But what I often realize is that when i have had have zero or little expectations of people, especially friends, then the relationship survives .

Expectations I realise only sets the field for disappointments , which in turn result in failure. Sometimes when my emotions for someone are not too deep, then the disappointment does not really affect me and that I believe comes with emotional maturity. I have faltered many a time here , but then I realize that my emotional investments on people have also been very low. This is probably one of the reasons that I do not go out for parties, or prefer big groups of friends or care for attending marriages and social dos. If I feel like connecting to the people I want to connect, I just pick up the phone or drop them a line or meet them over for lunch. And then I am done, until the next time the need arises.

And believe me, everything is a need - emotional, intellectual or physical. As we evolve, our needs change and with it , our circle of friends and family. Ive often seen the pattern in which people seek out each other. While many are out of sheer attraction,lonely people look for their types and intellectuals find their own group.But who are these faces ? What do they actually mean to us ? Do they just gratify our immediate need or give us a sense of belonging or a sense of security that we are not alone..Do we really need them ? And if we do, where and how do we draw the line..

Bombay ki hawa..5

Recently in a conversation with a friend on people, I found myself saying the following without comprehending the full meaning of it. I said there were two kinds of people in the world - those who are with you and those who are not. My friend didnt react and I found myself brooding over it for a while.

Very often we meet people at different points of our life . They don several roles like classmates,friends, lovers, mentors, colleagues, bosses,partners, acquaintances, neighbours..While some choose to stay with us, some drift away into the oblivion. I am not referring to the broken relationships or the failed marriages here . Im talking about those people who have held our hands and lifted our hearts , laughed and cried with us and yet,they become faceless memories and the emotions that we shared at one time become fossils nestled in our hearts .

I remember my classmate in my nursery who told me not to cry as she felt like crying. I dont know where she is now. In my 8th std, I befriended a srilankan tamil and we used to spend hours chatting. I have no clue if she is in india or in srilanka.

But this post however is dedicated to those two men who I met in Bombay and are today lost to obscurity . No amount of combing through facebook, orkut, linked in have brought them back to me. I wonder where A & S are .

A&S. I cant help smiling thinking about them. I met them first in a flight from Madras to Bombay in September 1995 when I was returning to college after a brief holiday. I was just 3 months old in Bombay and I was already feeling like a veteran . We made eye contact quite frequently during the flight, but something held us back. I was 21, single and footloose, trying to grapple with my independent spirit and they were probably trying to get over a boring flight . But the body language was unmistakable. We finally spoke and when we did, it was about directions. They had to get to Worli and my destination was Breach Candy and we impulsively decided to share a cab after a five minute conversation.

A, I learnt was from Bangalore. Dressed casually in jeans and T shirt, he seemed to be indifferent to the conversation that S and I were having. When he did speak, he spoke in a quiet tone and always asked pointed questions. A seemed impatient with S who was giving me his entire story. S was a Syrian Christian from Trichur and was very friendly. He rolled his sleeves as he spoke and his wavy hair kept falling on his face. He was slightly darker than A, but his big eyes were warm and his thick mustache stood out in that very soft face . Both of them were IT professionals who had just returned from US and were on their first trip to Bombay. As South Indians in a big cosmopolitan city, we connected instantly in the cab. S had by then told me all about his family in Kerala ,while A kept looking out of the windown.We reached Worli and S said a quick good bye and rushed out while A took his time . He stretched his tall frame and reached out and paid me Rs 500/- It was agreed that we all three shared the money, but A would have none of it. And for the first time, he smiled as I looked up into his eyes and at his weather beaten face. Take care, he smiled again and the cab left . We didnt share numbers .

The Pandora Box

She leaned against the window and shut her eyes tight.The present seemed to ebb into the past. Time, she told herself is an illusion.The night lay threadbare as she unlocked her mind.

The images blurred. But she heard those words .They spoke to her in a different voice. The monotone of the fingers tapping the keyboard, the murmurs, the laughter..they all merged .

It had rained a bit. They told each other stories the entire night.Dont go,he had said then.The rains formed a pattern on the glass . She retraced her steps back in her mind.

The pitter patter dogged her as she let the sound of rains drown those voices but the murmurs grew. They merged with the words that emerged now in front of her. Were they just words, or were they emotions?"Leave," he had said then. He had the last word always.

She reached out to herself. The words stirred in her dead mind. A long lost emotion frozen somewhere in the depths ..She was lost in a timewarp. Time she told herself is not a healer.

She had flung them in the recesses of her mind, as they became fossils. But no body told her that fossils will not disappear. He brought them afore again. The words had a different meaning, but they chased her. The Pandora box had just been opened. Memories flew out. With them came the dead embers of her mind. But the wounds were still fresh.She couldnt feel the pain though.

The rains fogged the window. She stood there still for a very long time, listening to the pitter patter, long after the rain had stopped.

Broken

Was it a toy or a relationship that just broke ?

Sometimes, you just need to kill your darlings

I have been going through a severe writer's block for a while. Lack of focus compounded the issue as a few issues were weighing down my mind. My emotional highs and lows added to the entire problem as I am trying to grapple with an incident that happened more than ten days ago. Nevertheless, as I moved on listening to the head rather than the heart, the mind refused to stay focussed.

So I was struggling the entire day having written just one sentence of a 2000 word piece. I almost gave up when Arun, a blogger and friend asked me if I had managed to write the second line. I laughed and sent him the line I had written , telling him to continue from there. He read the line and in his own pragmatic way told me that it is not his kind of line. I replied indifferently that thats the only line I have for now, for words found expression in that single sentence . I shut the system and meditated for a while and then went on a walk.

As I played Arun's reply in my mind, I wondered if the problem was really the writer's block or my own inadequacies or the issues that refused to go away from my mind. Suddenly it struck me that the problem was so in my face and the solution was extremely simple. It was exactly what Arun said. The problem was the opening line. It wasnt a bad sentence , but it wasnt the right line for this particular travelogue that I was writing and hence I could not really continue. It was a deadlock and there was nothing more to say . In other words, I had to change the approach and the thought process.

I returned to my desk and changed the first line and sat down to write my story .My first cut of 1800 words poured out in less than three hours. I did struggle and several parts still need to be rewritten, but I had crossed the initial hurdle. After 12 hours of holding on to a single sentence, I deleted it and wrote 1800 words in less than 3 hours.Sometimes I realized you need to stop clinging and just need to kill your darlings cos they dont really work out.

I paused for a moment after writing like a demon possessed and wondered why I did not apply this logic to the other issues weighing on my mind. Probably, if I had the right approach, the incident would not have happenned at all to begin with , but whats done cant be undone. Nevertheless, I realized that I could still use the thought to get over it. After all, its just about changing the line, the thought, the approach and your own point of view, wrt people or issues. Its about realizing that whether its people or thoughts, you need to stop clinging on to them and kill your own darlings, cos they may not be the right ones for you.I just did .

Shadows ...

She looked at their long thin shadows that drew a pattern on the sand. They were distortions, an exaggeration of their relationship, she thought. Shadows can never be real .And yet, they are an extention of the self as they can never exist by themselves.

Her mind flitted through the various shadows of the past that merged into the present. The shadows of relationships, the murmurs of conversations, the echoes of laughter ..she carried them with her. And yet, as every relationship faded into another shadow, she wondered why she hadnt learnt from them

Where do you draw the line ? Questions punctuated her mind. There was a conflict of emotions. The feeling was too strong to shrug it away and yet, it was just a shadow of an emotion that flitted in and out of her mind.

The shadows of the past interrupted her . The vulnerable moments, the emotional dependency ..she wished she could let go, feel a sense of gay abandon . And yet, she wondered whether she had let her guard down .

The sun changed directions and the shadows diminished . Were they for real, she asked herself or just empty emotions to fill the void ? She walked into the mind of the shadow..did she really feel them or were they just shadows of her own feelings.

They were delusions like the shadows she pursued .Her dilemma continued. Should she step outside the shadow and see the real world or step outside the shadow and let them see the real her ?

How are human beings valued ?

Two separate incidents that happenned over the last few days have got me thinking..How are human beings being valued ? Is it purely on their utility value or is there a respect for age, emotions, relations , bond, past achievements ? The incidents by themselves cannot be compared as we are looking at oranges and apples here, but they tell a common story.

The first one was narrated to me by X. In their office, a top management personnel who was once responsible for putting in strategies and systems in place was probably asked to leave as he was now redundant. In the days of recession, his CTC was not working out. He was probably a mentor to a few, but now there was no use for him in the organization. That apart, he had burnt bridges and could not handle politics.

Being in the corporate world, we have always learnt that everything comes with an expiry date and we are as good as our last assignment and we must learn to look at the writing on the wall, long before it is too late. So, for most of us, this is just another day in the corridors of power and another casualty on the block. And the survival is always about the fittest, recession or otherwise.

The other incident was much closer home and was straight out of a saas bahu serial, except that it does not refer to the women folk. A recent marriage ceremony threw enough light on who is wanted, who is respected, who is of use (the word being " help") and who is redundant . Respect and redundancy go hand in hand. You are given respect if you are not redundant and are of use to the families . A senior couple, well past their 60s and a bit unfit health wise due to certain ailments found themselves cold shouldered in a wedding they had attended in a city as they could not be of much use to the wedding party. They were not from the city and the reason attributed to the indifference was many - many people to look after ,there was "family" to take care of the couple and the couple themselves were part of the wedding party and they should probably take care of themselves .

I will not go into details here , but the long and short of it was that the two stories brought out one common thought..how are human beings being valued ? Is there an emotional bond, respect for seniority and a value for your past achievements and success or is it the sheer usefulness of an individual that is being taken into account. In corporate life, it is probably taken for granted...but in families too ... ?

I think I can read the writing on the wall..what do you say ?

The crab ...

The night lay bare and silent. Potent in all its nakedness. It was nature’s own canvas spread over the once vacant blue sky. A sheath of silver, dark and yet bright. With its own tinge of glamour, like the city it enclosed. Sometimes, the sky was like an open ramp, each dim model , twinkling in her raw beauty , like a star. It was the night sky that beckoned her.
She smiled, as the moon fought its way out from the clouds. To her , it was a personal victory. Clouds of memories had choked her, as she struggled to shrug them off. The moon stood alone in its brilliance .The pursuit was in vain. She will not let her past catch up with her .
The voices kept recurring. They were ghosts haunting her from the recesses of her mind. Piercing the gentle breeze, there were like car horns shrieking through the silent road. It was the sea that had toned her down. Restless waves bathed her mind –life cannot always flow, there has to be an ebb sometime. She leaned on the rocks. The water tickled her feet . She recreated the scene in her mind.
She had almost hurt herself that night . He had been right behind her. And yet, he had walked ahead as she called out to him. “Surely, you can manage on your own, “ he had said . She had by then recovered from her fall. She smiled, looking at the thin outline of the moon . It was that look… She thought it was forever . The moon slipped again. This time, she knew it will take a long time to emerge from the clouds. He will never be with her again.
The veil soon lifted itself. The waves were hitting an all time high . Swept with passion, the foam caressed the surface, lashing at the waves. Raw and rhythmic . To her, it was a mere ritual. She likened herself to the rocks, locked in an embrace that had freed itself a long time ago. She watched as love retreated; yet another relationship cracked on the rocks . Strangers replaced friends who had become strangers and the cycle repeated itself. She thought for a moment .
The crab had climbed onto the rock. They had heard the splash together. The crab had lost its hold. They had forgotten about it. He had brought her to see the crab. The crab, was there bathed in moonlight . Relationships, she realized are often like that – the essence forgotten , the joy of being there, together gone . It was all in the mind, he had said. They met, very often, in groups. But the crab swam, forgotten.