Under the Mango Tree

The mango tree in my Nani’s garden is my ultimate metaphor for life. My most blissful moments of communion with myself in total peace happened in the lap of its wide branches during the long, hot, summer-holiday afternoons when everybody else was taking their mandatory siesta.

Hidden for hours amidst its rich leaves, I learnt so much about life in general and myself in particular. Alone with the tree on its branches, I could be a tightrope walker, an acrobat, a monkey, a cat…anything I wanted to be without adult admonishments and prohibitions.

Sitting on a high fork of its branches, I saw armies of ants carrying dead things up its trunk. Even the sticky sal-leaf tray that we’d thrown after we finished the jalebis Nana bought for us was painstakingly carried up the trunk and ended up in a small hollow near the top of the tree. I saw spiders making shimmering, filigree-webs between its branches to trap the evening insects. When an insect was caught, a spider would appear from nowhere and roll it up into a cocoon faster than you could see.

I saw the huge tree’s dense leaves grow thicker every morning and evening when the loud and raucous parrots came in hundreds and camouflaged themselves so that it seemed that the mango tree itself was screeching like a banshee, waving its branches in a witch-like dance.

I saw mom’s silver hair-clips become a crow’s nest-decoration.

I saw Kiku mama pulling Reshmi didi from next door behind the wide trunk of the mango tree and heard her giggling and then pulling away with a little shriek, her payals making a tinkly sound as she climbed over the wall and ran away.

The mango tree was at the bottom of Nani’s garden right next to the low wall that separated her bungalow from the house next door. Nani said that when the bungalow was being built my mom was very small. Nani used to take her to the construction site when she went to see what the builders were doing.

One day, my mom sat on a stool near the wall and sucked on a mango Indian style while Nani was talking to the architect. After she finished “putting the mango all over her frock” (Nani said), she had thrown the mango seed on the loose brown dirt where the garden was going to be. By the time the family moved in, there was a small mango tree with long, smooth, rich-green leaves next to the back wall. Nani said it was the first living thing born in the new house and that it was a very good omen.

Over the years, the mango tree grew bigger with Nani’s family until its shade filled the small garden and its fruits mirrored the bountiful blessings Nani gave thanks for in her ardaas every morning. Children were born, christened, educated and married. Grandchildren and festivals were celebrated and the mango tree stood witness and blossomed with each of Nani’s achievements, its very presence a happy manifestation of the life that exploded within Nani’s home.

Nani’s house was always overflowing with people, animals and things. Everything there was larger than life. Rice, atta, sugar and ghee were stored in huge drums. Biscuits came in varieties of 16 kilo tins. Tandoori rotis were made in mountains. Houseguests came and went by the dozen and for them, inside Nani’s cavernous shipping trunks, there was a never-ending supply of mosquito-nets, bed linen, towels, cool white sheets or soft, silky, makhmal rajais depending on the time of the year. Sherbet was made in huge burnt-clay pots and served all day with Nana’s incessant supply of pakoras or chchaina murkis packed in little sal-leaf trays.

When Nani’s friends came in the mid-morning, they would sit under the mango tree sipping tea and gossiping quietly as they worked on their embroidery. In the evening, Nana and his friends would sit under the mango tree and play bridge as they sipped on their single malt.

Eventually, Nana and Nani both died. I grew up and stopped going to Giridih. But the mango tree has remained a part of my landscape in all the cities I have lived in or visited. It keeps coming back—in memories I share, in stories I write, in other mango trees I see—always a metaphor for life, ever larger than life.

From Madness to Mental Illness

image: avsar-deeds.blogspot.com

I’ve been revisiting Foucault’s History of Madness and it has started off a thought process within me that, I think, is long overdue and was just waiting for a push.

As I look again at the journey of what I see as alternative states of mental (st)ability, the stagnation of more than a century of rut-thought is offensive. It is, in fact, a great disservice to those of us who are prone to or appreciative of those other realities of the mind.

The history of madness in the Western world begins with the Dionysian orgies that celebrated the irrational and reveled in the amoral energy of the animal frenzy that characterizes the chaos of creation.

In the Middle Ages, the church viewed insanity as a spiritual problem. For the medieval church, madness was a manifestation of sin, demonic possession, or moral defect. The only solution to the problem of madness, therefore, lay within church ritual, rigorous religious instruction, and failing all, exorcism.

Cut to the Renaissance and the “secularization” of the world and the hunger for knowledge. As the Western world became more secular in character, so did its solutions to the problem of madness. So far, the mad had been part of the family and of society—to be hidden, to be reviled, to be ashamed of, but to be kept within the fold, so to speak. Now there was no (un)earthly reason to “keep” and “hold” them. The figure of the wandering, vagabond madman came into being, living off the land and off charity outside the city limits like Poor Tom in King Lear.

In the later Renaissance, a more “global” society found a more efficient way to dispose of unwanted “fools” and the precursor to the toxic-waste dump-yards-of-the-sea, “the Ship of Fools” came into being. Unwanted social garbage was “embarked” and put to sea.

The next paradigm shift takes us to the 18th century and the development of the “rational” and “scientific” study of medicine and for the first time, madness came to be seen as a disease analogous to physical sickness. Physical cures were popularly prescribed to cure mental illness and madmen became objects of pity instead of blame.

Enter the hospital and later, the asylum.

That’s where the journey seems to have ended and Western society seems now only to be interested in finding ever-more “diseases” that afflict the human mind. What this does is entrench the idea of “normal” and “healthy” until every deviation is “unhealthy” and “abnormal.” Guess where this is going!

Odd as this seems given our restrictive, traditional societies, the East still accords more freedom to alternative ways of thinking and living and our lives include an everyday, banal tolerance of the unusual.

This is because we really don’t have a “past” history. We live concurrently in several centuries at once and so are not rooted in any one zeitgeist. Whatever the thought, whatever the lifestyle, whatever the anomaly, it is all valid in some part of some reality in a country of a billion people living in a billion times!

Sania Mirza's Mehndi and My Memories

It must’ve been the sight of Sania Mirza’s extreme mehndi that did it: I really have no better explanation for the sudden onset of my recent henna / hina / camphire / mehndi-centred thoughts.

Maybe it’s the early swelter of summer heat this year. I swear I can smell the mehndi plant in our garden. The hotter it became, the more the plant disbursed its distinctive fragrance into the dry, furnace-blasting air.

I’ve been beset with visions of my Biji returning from her daily barefoot journey to the Gariahat Market in the summer months. Biji had given up footwear and colour in her Satyagraha days and insisted on wearing plain white “dhotis” and loose white blouses for the rest of her happily married life. Her tiny, milk-white, tender feet were blister-red by the time she came home from the bazaar and as she came home, her feet were soaked in cold rose-water solution.

In the summer months, this did little to relieve her and I remember Lakkhi making a thick mehndi paste out of fresh leaves from our garden and applying it to the undersides of Biji’s feet. Biji would finally relax and lie back, her feet on a low stool, soothed by the mehndi’s “coolth” seeping into her burning soles.

I think of mehndi in a different context and without too much effort I can feel the raw excitement of my pre-pubescent heart beating to the visceral rhythms of the dholki as we danced during my masi’s mehndi ceremony.

Rummaging through my memory-banks now and I do definitely know that the Lawsonia Enermis plays a significant role in the cosmetic as well as health rituals of several cultures ranging from the Ancient Eqyptians to the Persians to the Southern Chinese between 7000 and 2000 BC. Many religions and regions use a paste made from the leaves and branches of this plant (first dried, then made into a powder, then mixed with water) as a natural dye in their rituals and ceremonies. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh marriages and other celebrations are incomplete without it.

I’ve been reading articles that talk about mehndi’s spiritual properties (many tribal and traditional societies imbue naturally occurring “red” substances such as blood, ochre and henna with properties such as energy-generating, empowerment, protection, love etc.) Some societies think henna patterns help ward off the evil eye and grant protection from malevolent djinns. In some places, mehndi / hina is used for its celebratory cosmetic properties in intricate patterns on different areas of the body, especially the palms and the feet. The unmistakable fragrance, the colour of the natural dye, the cooling effect of the paste also has its allure, I’m sure. Added to these must be the medicinal benefits of the paste when applied to skin or hair. It conditions and cleans and cools the scalp and the palms and the soles and thus soothes and calms the mind.

Ultimately, though, I think that the mehndi stands for all that is feminine (read: all those characteristics desired from the feminine in any patriarchal society.) It is one more way of emphasizing the time-worn feminine ideals:

Beauty, Grace and Gentility are embodied in the curves of the inter-linked vine like patterns of leaves and petals moistly climbing the palm and the inside of the forearm

Energy, as in the colour of the rising and setting sun: this red energy is vested in the very nature of the essential feminine. The shakti of Parvati to lure and rouse Shiva from his meditation; the blood-cycle that makes birth possible, the life-force that is necessary for fertility are all manifested in the colour-patterns of the henna.

Patience and Nurturing are evident in the intricate patterns as fundamental requirements from both the pattern-maker and the pattern-wearer. The slightest carelessness and lack of concentration on either’s part will lead to destruction. The pattern maker must keep her hand steady and her interest stable for the entirety of the time it takes to complete her task. The pattern-wearer must be able to keep her patience through the extra hours necessary to nurture the finished design with oil and sugar and lemon and keep it dampened for as long as possible if the dye is to deepen to the desired colour.

From Africa to India, across religions and regions, through centuries of use, the essential significance of mehndi / henna / hina –whatever spiritual names and characteristics we may choose to give it—is another one of those male constructs designed specifically to tell the female what she should (and therefore should not) be.

As I grow older, the feminist in me recognizes and respects the feminine in me, male construct or not. I like mehndi. I just don’t have the patience to keep it on for the required length of time.

Us Versus Them. And We All Fall Down

Us versus them--that is the essence of the civilized, industrialized, fractured world.

It is the absolute antithesis of the pantheistic nature of spirituality and the spiritual aspiration. The pantheistic sees everything natural as “us,” indistinguishable from “us” and therefore an integral part of the Universal whole and the param-atman--The Supreme Atman—the Source, the Primordial Energy from whence we came and will, ultimately, merge into.

Sustainable development is only possible when we realise the inter-dependence of every atom that participates in the expanding and contracting of the Universes.

Sustainable development comes from the spirituality of the recognition of the one-ness of the Universe; of the knowledge that the same string ties the entirety of creation together and that a tug here is bound to create a pull someplace else.

This knowledge is instinctive in animals and seemed to be visceral in all ancient and tribal societies. This knowledge was elaborately articulated by our ancestors and became part of our organised religion and of our traditional spiritual learning process.

The blame game of who destroyed the world and who is destroying nature’s pristine quality needs to be replaced by a loving concern for the biodiversity of the ecosystems.

We need to ask ourselves if we should be able to denude the world of its natural foliage. Can we strip it of all its natural resources just to ensure higher levels of self-gratification?

Can we bereave the world all the flora and fauna assuming that the world was created just to make humankind happy?

Did the problem originate with organized religions which assume that the Homo sapien is God’s preferred creature and that the world’s resources were all created for the pleasure and development of this favoured animal made by God “in his own image.”

Believing this, we destroy the natural habitat of other creatures as if their existence is only situational. God’s “lesser” creatures are lost and exploited and driven to extinction.

The same intolerance grows within the species as it were, and we begin discriminating against the poorer ones, the darker ones, the shorter ones, the ones with names unlike ours, the ones with facial features that look different…

The class divide, caste divide, religious divide, racial divide, political divide, international divide between the East and the West, the North and the South are all manifestations of a complex that the privileged are happy and they have everything to lose in allowing the less privileged to share their happiness or wealth.

Us versus Them is the mantra of success. Us versus Them is how we claw to the top of the food chain. Only, we're not satisfied just getting to the top. We must have it all. All of it. Every bit.

So much for Sustainable Development.
And we all fall down.

Religion and Spirituality

I've been getting questions on religion and spirituality or religion vs. spirituality. Or the relationship between religion and spirituality.

Let me, from the very outset, say that I don't really subscribe to oppositions. I don't really believe things must be paired either. And I certainly don't think things must be associated with each other.

In my considered opinion, therefore, religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. They are not opposed to each other. They cannot be paired together and they may or may not be associated. One may be caught in the process of becoming the other or it may not be.

I make no pronouncements and would not like to either credit or discredit anybody's personal beliefs and experiences. I think what I do and I feel what I do and would encourage you to do the same.

Talking about myself, I do see a distinction in my mind between “organized religion” and “spirituality.” A religion teaches a creed, inculcates a dogma and propagates certain fixed ideas about God. It is a human institution and thus, like all human institutions, it must fail at times.

Religions are born of other individuals’ experiences with that god-head and their individual experiments; their own discovery of the mystic bond.

Religions are born of those individuals’ desires to share their adhyatma-vidya (the mystic knowledge) with others and make others’ journeys easier by manipulating the economic and socio-political environments and provide the character-strength necessary to recognize and answer to the “long cable tow of God.”

Therefore, religions are the expressions of the spiritual man’s organized aspirations; his desire to look beyond his own individual self and into the commonality of the human condition; and his need to propagate the recognition of the “long cable tow of God” from “heart to heart” in his community of human beings.


Spirituality, as far as I'm concerned, is the individual realization of what has been called the "mystic bond;" the visceral, umbilical tug of whatever it is in the wild that calls to all the wild things; the individual process of aparallel evolution, of "becoming other," whatever the religious path followed—or not followed.

Deep in us is something that understands what brains cannot think; something which knows what our minds cannot comprehend. This is the "mystic bond" that, according to St. Augustine, “I know until you ask me—when you ask me, I do not know”

The Chicken and the Egg

When I think of how my self is constructed, I envision layers that are complete in themselves but that create and affect and are affected by other layers.

Each layer is not just a "container" for the one within. There is an active chemistry at work between and within and outward and inward and my body-mind-soul-spirit is an interactive construct not an exclusive one.

Which brings me to another set of questions:
Should my forays into my self-hood inward out or outward in?
Did the body create, affect and become affected by the soul or did the soul create, affect and become affected by the body?

What came before--the chicken or the egg?

Does it matter?

Tat Tvam Asi: That Thou Art

Thinking more of the body versus soul debate, I am impressed by some of the writings of the upanishads.

The father-teacher Aruni says to his son-disciple Svetaketu:
“Sa ya eso anima, aiatat atmyam idam sarvam; Tat satyam, sa atma, tat tvam asi, Svetaketo--”
(Chandogya Upanisad, VI.8.7)

Loosely translated:
“You are that Atman, infinite, immortal, and ever pure: that is your true nature. You are not this organic system; you are not this tiny flimsy individual that you suppose yourself to be. There is an infinite dimension behind your finite organic individuality. Try to understand it; try to manifest it in yourself and help others to manifest it. That is the science of human growth, development, and fulfillment.”

The first form of energy that becomes manifest in a human being is his/her muscular energy. This muscle power develops slowly in the child through his instinctive flexing of his limbs, through his continual, animal exercise of his body and through nourishment. This is, perhaps, a coarse form of energy.

Behind the muscle, there is a tiny nerve fibre that provides the more sophisticated electrical energy needed for the physical muscles to flex.

And behind the nervous system there is the even more subtle psychic energy system sustaining and controlling that nervous system.

So, as we go deeper and deeper into man, we come across subtler and subtler forms of energy within him. Each form of energy creates the next. It is like peeling an onion.

And just like an onion peel, the coarsest, crudest, least onion-tasting parts are the ones most apparent and right on the surface. The more you peel, the more “onion-y” the onion gets; the closer you get to the onion’s core, the more you get its essence.

And so, behind the body, behind the nervous system, and behind even the psychic energy system, comes the infinite core, the essence, the Being of the being and the Seed of the seed.

Animal pleasures

As I sit at my desk on this cloudy, sullen day, feeling sorry for myself, I suddenly see three squirrels cavorting. Even as I write this, they are running, jumping, skittering up and down my window sill, chasing each other, feeling the thrill of teetering on the edge—just because they can.

My Jack Russell Terrier Asterix has a frantically scampering alter-ego that my daughter has christened his TGV avatar. Asterix’s French fast train doppelganger runs crazily and uncontrollably up and down the house flying over furniture, screeching around corners, almost crashing into walls and turning at the absolute last moment leaving us all wincing and gasping for air. He does this for minutes at a stretch until he feels sated and returns Asterix to us.

I am suddenly filled with the memory of the pure pleasure I felt as I ran wildly down a mountain side as a child. There was such sheer animal enjoyment in that unreasoning physicality, the instinctive, visceral need to feel the power of my body pushed to its limits, the exhilaration I felt as the air whooshed against me.

A big part of me wants to join the squirrels in their mad dash just now. When did my soul slow down? When did it begin compromising? When did it resign and settle down in this middle-aged body?

The twinges, the yearnings, the ranting against my own choices, the urge to blaze like I know I could--if only I let myself--they come and go, off and on.

When they come, they kick me in the butt and knot my tummy and turn my placid, smug existence upside down.

I hate them. I want them. I look for them. I will them to come. I cringe from them.

Those restless, relentless, moody, lashing phases usually yield another period of creativity, another growth; another change, another defiance against death and dying.

Au revoir mon ami

At 11.50 am on January 28, 2009, Dr. Christopher Augur, a scientist working with the French government’s IRD in Mexico City, was shot in the head for a princely sum of four thousand eight hundred Euros. A friend was driving him after he had exchanged the money at the airport. As their car entered the viaduct, three cars blocked their way and two gunmen demanded the money from Dr. Augur. He handed over his satchel immediately but was still shot point blank in the head. He lay in coma in a Mexico City hospital until his family decided to remove the life support. He finally died on the morning of January 31, 2009.

Christopher was one of my best friends for the last 22 years.

Actually, after all the years of knowing each other and all the strange experiences we’ve had together; after all the meetings and all the staying over at each other’s over three continents; after all the getting to know each other’s families and friends and cousins and aunts at some time or the other; after all the ways our entire lives intertwined, we had become more than friends and more like family.

I remember my first meeting with Christopher as vividly as if it were yesterday.

I left the safety of my extended family two days after Holi in March 1987 for my first flight alone anywhere. I flew Calcutta-Delhi, Delhi-Frankfurt and Frankfurt-Atlanta with long stopovers in Delhi and Frankfurt. By the time I reached Atlanta, I was exhausted. It took me a long time to pull my two huge suitcases (in which my mother had packed everything she thought I could ever need including a pressure-cooker) and get my bearings and find the shuttle to Athens that the Foreign Students’ Office had suggested I take. Another couple of hours later, the shuttle dropped me off at the Georgia Centre at the University of Georgia. It was late afternoon when I got there.

I had been asked by Neelesh Bangalore, then the president of the Indian Students Association of the UGA to call him once I got to the Georgia Centre and he would come and pick me up. He was supposed to have arranged temporary accommodation for me until I found off campus housing.

I kept calling Neelesh and his answering machine kept picking up. Afternoon turned into evening and then night and with every passing hour, I became more and more numb and unable to think, too tired to actually panic.

At nine pm, I called the Neelesh again. The phone rang four times, again. His answering machine picked up again. I was now tearful when I started to leave a message, again. But this time, before I had gone beyond “This is Ranee again—” a strong, sure, matter-of-fact and very un-Indian voice came on line and said “Hang on. I’ll be there in 5 minutes.”

I walked my incredibly heavy suitcases to the driveway in front of Georgia Centre. It was a cold and windy March night and by this time, I was a jetlagged and bewildered zombie and the saree and bangles I had so patriotically worn for my flight out of India and into the United States now seemed impossible to control.
Five minutes later, a tiny white Renault Le Car zipped into the driveway of the Georgia Centre. A tall-ish blue-ish eyed blonde man jumped out of the car, stalked towards me, said “Hi, I’m Christopher. I’m Neelesh’s roommate. Let’s go,” hoisted my heavy bags into the boot of his carlet and opened the passenger side door for me.

In another 5 minutes, I was ensconced in the warm and cosy living room of the small on-campus home of Vijay and Gayathri Kumar. As Gayathri hovered over me asking me what I wanted to eat and drink, Christopher answered for me in his firm, no nonsense way: “Nothing. Just let her sleep.” Immediately, 3 year old Puneeth was thrown out of his room and I was in his warm and soft bed.

I slept for sixteen straight hours.

Christopher, Vijay and Gayathri were my first friends at the University of Georgia and over my years there, they became my surrogate family.

Birthdays, picnics, fevers and colds; dawn drives to the annual Rich’s warehouse sales; visits to the farmer’s market; all-night back-to-back Hindi movie marathons; pot-luck dinners at Diwali and Holi; India Nights; watching Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson; movies, malls, haircuts and grocery-shopping with each other; dropping and picking each other up at Hartsfield; taking each other’s company and homes and vehicles and food completely for granted—since that moment I entered their lives, we were just people who sort of got along well and then we just stuck.

After our PhDs, Vijay-Gayathri stayed on in the US, I came back to Calcutta and Christopher eventually returned to France. Thanks to Christopher’s jet-setting and our ritualistic fervour for summer vacations we kept meeting through the years. We met in India, in Europe, in the US every one and a half year or so on an average.

Christopher came to Calcutta a few days after I got married. My husband Sanjib and my friend Christopher thankfully got along famously after an initial sizing-up period. Over time, Christopher became our friend. In fact, I will even admit to a tiny spark of jealousy that my exclusive rights to Christopher’s friendship were so easily usurped by my husband.

To my kids, he was Christopher Uncle. They adored him. They loved his wicked sense of humour and his rapier-quick repartees. They were in awe of his life-style and the way he would constantly jet from one continent to another with that schoolboy satchel and that tiny suitcase. They admired his eye for the beautiful things that he collected relentlessly, then obsessively labeled, numbered and photographed before he packed them up into cartons. They so totally appreciated the way he could be rude to me and laugh at me and make fun of me the way they never could! Christopher was great with all kids. He connected with them on their level; he understood them; he never, ever talked down to them.

Christopher, Vijay and Gayathri spent 5 days at our home in Calcutta just 2 months back. In fact, the photograph on the right when we went for a sunset cruise on the Hoogly river in early November 2008. It was the first time we were all physically together in one place since 2001. In retrospect, I’m so happy we could all get together one last time. We will never get another chance.

I can’t believe I won’t see him this summer. On the day he was shot, I got an e-mail from asking me to hurry up with my summer plans so that he could arrange how and where to catch up with me. But always the intrepid traveler, Christopher has gone ahead of us to discover new worlds.

Wherever he is, I hope it is sunny and warm there because Christopher hated the cold. He absolutely loved Mexico: he loved the people, the landscape, the art, the pottery, the atmosphere but most of all, he loved the weather there. That’s where he wanted to open all his cartons full of treasures and set them up forever. That’s where he wanted to live his final days.

He did.

Christopher got his way in most things.

Is this it?

This morning, I had breakfast at the Tollygunge Club with one old friend I see often and another I hadn't met for 26 years. The first lives and works here in Calcutta and the other teaches at MIT now but years ago, all three of us studied French at Alliance Francaise and read for our undergraduate degrees at St. Xavier's.

As they sometimes do, the years in between just seemed to vanish in the first few moments of our meeting and almost instantly, we were doing the typical Bangali philosophical adda thing even as we tried to catch up with each other's lives.

At one point we started talking about things of Universal significance (again a typical Bangali adda thing) and what if "this was it" and if, when we went, we were just gone--like "blips."

Would we be disappointed if we came to know there wasn't anything more?
No "rebirth" in another time; no reincarnation as another genus or species; no "passing on" to another plane of existence; no journey upwards or downwards; no rewards and no consequences; no being recycled again and again, here on this earth, until our souls couldn't be used anymore...

No reason to anticipate enduring the "going hence" as we endured our coming hither. Therefore, no "ripeness" no "before his time" no grief or mourning for what could've, would've, might've...

Would I be disappointed if "this was it? "
I guess I would be. I guess I'd feel a bit betrayed, as if the Universe promised more than it delivered.

From the gyres of dense black hole pin points growing to ever-expanding galaxies condensing to dense black hole pin points and the poetry of quantum strings endings are not really ends and beginnings aren't really beginnings and the vibrations never end.

Things collapse and regenerate endlessly.

Alia destroys and devastates and kills hundreds of thousands of land creatures but at the same time she churns the ocean and sea life prospers and has a boom year.

Is this it?
Maybe for this consciousness it is.
Maybe for this soul it is.
Maybe for this matter, this essence; this element; this form of energy; this dimension of existence; this universe...

But I'm reasonably sure there is a process and that we're some part of that process and will be until the process is done.
Only to begin again.


Ultimately,
Do I care if I regain this consciousness?
Do I care if there is a collective consciousness?
Do I care if consious life continues hereafter?


It would be nice, I guess, to merge into a paramatman and continue as a conciousness that holds on to the aggregate of all awareness and have the onion peels of the universe unfurl.

It would be wonderful to have the Universe validate this life and begin another becoming into something else.

For the traveller within me, it would be exciting to have the journey continue.

But I'm not going to sweat it. If this is it, so be it.

I'll blip.

Turkish Dynamite

One perfect, balmy night in a small Turkish town, I met Hulya Celek.

Back home, I find myself thinking of her at odd moments. I am glad I met her. Her spirit inspires me. Her confidence uplifts me. Her kindness, warmth, hospitality and above all, her laughter as as she constantly battles the custodians of tradition make her unforgettable.

It was Rubik’s 16th birthday and we were in Selcuk in Turkey. We spent the morning lazing and walking around the town centre, then went to the Pamucak Beach (about 7 kms West of Selcuk) to swim all afternoon in the special Agean blue in Rubik’s honour.

In the evening, after a revitalizing swim in the heated hotel pool, we walked back to the town centre for dinner. On the way, we saw a bakery and bought a birthday cake for Rubik. Cake in hand, we stopped often to admire the colourful shops full of exquisite carpets, kilims, clothes, ceramics and silver displayed in the shop windows. As we crossed a shop, we heard a clear, loud voice calling from behind us,

“So whose birthday is it?”
Rubik turned shyly and made an automatic reply: “mine.”

A diminutive woman with dark hair and expressive eyes walked up to him and gave his hand an enthusiastic shake. “Happy Birthday.” We exchanged polite pleasantries for a while and went our way.

On our last evening in Selcuk, we went shopping. Rubik wanted to visit the shop of the woman who had wished him so warmly on his birthday, and so we went. The children went into the shop to browse for gifts for their friends while we stood outside on the sidewalk. We could see the lady talk to them animatedly and we heard shouts of intermittent laughter wafting out of the shop. After what seemed to be a long time, I went in to get my children out and found that they had really bonded with the tiny Turkish woman.

They must have spent close to an hour in that shop and Hulya had only about 4 YTL in sales to show for it. But selling didn’t seem to be her primary goal. She was just enjoying the children. “Allah hasn’t given me any of my own, so you must let me enjoy yours for a little bit” she said.

Hulya and I hit it off immediately. While we were inside the shop chatting, her husband was talking to my husband on the sidewalk. As she gave the children their change, Hulya suddenly asked me if I would join her for a cup of chai. I said yes and we found ourselves sitting with our spouses on a table and 4 chairs on the sidewalk, poring over Turkey maps and chatting about Sufism and life in Turkey over many, many cups of apple tea.

Hulya talked to us about her difficulties as a woman entrepreneur in a society where owning and running a retail business was still very much a male bastion. She was constantly bad-mouthed by her neighbours and small, niggling troubles kept being sent her way by other shop-keepers and the keepers of tradition around her.

She talked about the gender prejudices just under the skin of “modern” Turkey. She was candidly scathing about the “new” Turkish women of the big cities (“I know it is so wrong of me but forgive me, Allah, for talking badly of other people!”) and the contempt most men still held for women like her who wanted to live and work like men (“because you see, our hair is long so our brains are much smaller”). The contempt, she said, extended unfortunately to her husband, who was seen as less than a man because he chose to play a supporting role in what was essentially her business.

We were joined somewhere along the evening by Margaret, an Irish woman who was on an extended trip to Turkey and the conversation turned to the seamier side of the tourist boom, which was luring little girls and boys to all the wrong things (“easy money, gambling, little dresses, pubs, discos, drugs--they don’t want to work anymore!”); the thriving “granny tourism” in the Ephesus-Kusadasi area (where older western women were “entertained” by young Turkish men in exchange for gifts and good times) and the general failure of the system vis-à-vis the common citizen.

As we talked about her life, her world, our world and the world in general, cups of apple tea kept materializing and when we reluctantly got up to go back to the hotel, we realized that it was almost 1am!

We walked back to the hotel hand in hand, thinking of the children, hoping they were fast asleep. When we sent them back to the hotel from Hulya’s shop, it was only about 7.30 pm and we had told them we’d join them in half an hour or so.

Rubik was waiting for us in the lobby pacing anxiously and looking like an irate dad.

“Don’t you guys have any sense of responsibility? Is this your half an hour? I was just about to go looking for you!”

We slinked quietly, guiltily, to our room.