Siblings- blessings

I don’t remember a time when my sister wasn’t there around me. She was always there. Always. So you can say we are more like twins. Fraternal twins. Not defying the myth that twins are very similar, but suffice to say that we are not so same same.

My other sibling, my brother came ten years after I did, so I do remember a time when both of us sisters were like princesses and our parents were bringing us up in the hollow of their palms. When my brother came, it got a bit crowded on the palm so with a sigh of relief we realized that we were being weaned off the royal treatment to live like normal girls.

Now he was the prince and we the regents who were bringing him up. Our newfound status was that of assistants to our mother and we did it to the hilt. In fact, when my brother grew up to be 12, he was tall and thin, lanky is the right word. Often people would ask him, “Why are you so thin and lanky?” And he would reply with a twinkle in his eye, “I have my mother and two sisters around me all the time. So I get no place to grow sideways! I can only grow upwards!” Uff! How thankless could he be, considering that we stepped down from our princess status only to make room for him? The baby to whom we were little mothers? Well to compensate for the unkind jibe, we beat him up when mom wasn’t looking. Blessed with a superb sense of humour, he kept us smiling all the time. In fact, even now, whenever we meet, it is a riot; a treat to talk together and laugh together- gives us the stamina to take life head on.

Those days, his friends would call us bossy too! While it did not hurt us but sometimes we  sisters introspected and then convinced ourselves we were just being good big sisters. “Bah!” I said one day when one of his little boyfriends from the US came home and called us both “bossy girls!” “Wait till I get my hands on you, you little pappu!” And he told them not to meddle with me because I was dangerous!

Life was good and my sister and I were growing up fast! In school we used to braid our long black hair into two neat plaits with black ribbons and wore long john socks with our very practical buckled ballerina shoes. Our mother was very sure that despite our upbringing, we must get into the habit of taking care of our own basic chores like for example, washing socks and handkerchiefs and polishing shoes. She said no one will do it for anyone and knowing how lazy I could get, my sister was specially told that on no account must she wash mine.

The result was that I was always late for school, aggravated by the fact that I was most loathe to get up in the morning and then polish my shoes, hunt for a clean pair of socks, wash my handkerchief and iron it dry, etc.

So going back to the time we were in year two or three at school, we went through the Indo Pak war of 1971 which coincided with the liberation of East Bengal rechristened Bangladesh.  Our dad was summoned to be a part of the Civil Defence Team which would look after the city of Jabalpur during any extraordinary security threats to the people and the town. You see, Jabalpur was an important Cantonment and also had a couple of defence manufacturing establishments- the Gun Carriage Factory and the Ordinance Factory which was a plum target for the Air Raid guys. It was not easy to access by Infantry or any Army Battalion by virtue of its location in the Centre of India right on the Tropic of Cancer 231/2 degrees North.

So, I remember that all the residents of Jabalpur were told to paint their windows and door panes black. The wailing sirens from the Control Room would signal an approaching aircraft suspected of being loaded with a bomb which the enemy would try to drop strategically to destroy the defence establishments. There were no Google maps and no GPS then, so they had to be guided by the lights visible from their fighter planes. And so we had to run and switch off all the lights in the house, the streetlights would go off and then we would see our father off, speeding away on his Royal Enfield with dimmed headlight, to the Control Room. My mother would hold our hands tightly and we would sit huddled together in a corner of our big house waiting for the long siren announcing “all clear.” I remember my sister holding tightly on to my mother and I remember just screwing my eyes shut because I was afraid of the absolute dark. I can never forget the huddle and the touch- it took us through the crisis. We never got bombed and my father received the President’s Medal for Civil Defence Service during war. We were proud daughters and basked in reflected glory. As sisters, we still felt differently about so many things but agreed on this one.

In 1973, the Comet Kohoutek made an appearance after almost 150,000 years and was also seen in India. People would wake up early morning to see the star with a broom like tail which they believed would bring them lots of bad luck. The country was reeling under a depressed economic cycle and superstition was rife. My sibling and I would wish for all good things to happen because now we were growing up and realizing that positivity was necessary for all living things. We were truly growing up and how. By now we had learnt all about the solar system so we would scare our little brother and younger siblings of our friends by telling them fiendish stories about these planets- just cooking up scary bits by telling them how evil Saturn could get or how cruelly hot Mars was. Our storytelling capabilities were perfected by our Elocution teacher in school and we actually made some of the kids scream with fear! Such fun days they were!

In 1975, we had a lot of unrest and conflicting politics. We were still in middle school and my brother had started going to nursery school when the Government of India announced Emergency in the country. There was turmoil and sometimes schools closed down because security prohibited group meetings. Then I spent my time painting on the backs of old calendar pages- those days we used to have big poster size calendars with 12 pages for 12 months and I used my watercolors to express my angst. I don’t know if my sister appreciated what I painted, but she wasn’t rude either and concentrated on her studies.

 We both found our own ways of keeping busy though often I wasn’t able to understand how one could be busy studying when there was so much happening around us. But she was a good student and her report card said it all. I got the rhetorical comment “Dolly can do well but she is so distracted!” By 1977, the emergency was lifted and things got better. But my distractions increased because under the frenzied wave of indigenization Coke was taken off the shelves and Cadbury was threatened- both of which were our sustenance. My sister and I would lament and envied our cousins abroad who had all of this and more. And I continued to be distracted and she continued to score good marks!

Life then was not as hectic as it is now, so my parents had a leisurely social life. Often they would go visit friends. We had very little family in Jabalpur but had very close friends. Then my sister and I would sit together in the drawing room on the wooden sofa with cushions and have coffee and cake. That taste of coffee is precious; I have not come across anything so beautiful and so full of love as that coffee my sister used to make. And that cake which our father baked was and is the best yet. My father has since, passed on to the next life and my sister now dishes out exotic grub, but that coffee still lingers on my taste buds. And I have never been able to bake a cake even half as good.

And when I got married, my siblings made it a perfect occasion. I couldn’t have asked for more. Now both my siblings are married too, happy with their own families while we support each other enriched with the efforts and sensitivities of our spouses. I hope we make our mother proud of us. It is with joy and pride that I belong to my family and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bits of Paper

I was tired of receiving pink slips. Even in my dreams, I would find these little slips of paper floating around, jeering at me, ready to tear me to bits. I would wake up, and then find that my manuscript was still on my writing desk and hadn’t seen the Editors pen yet. I would then screw my eyes shut tight, waiting for sleep and oblivion from the horrors of rejection.

Soon, to my utter dismay, I started seeing these even with my eyes tightly closed. I  started hating the color pink. In fact, one day I found myself hallucinating when I saw pink roses, and believe me, this was the most embarrassing moment of my life. In the hotel lobby, where I had gone for an official dinner, the array of pink roses sent me swooning to this stern lady Editor who threw my manuscript at my face and laughed out loud with disdain, “So, dear writer! Go back and learn a thing or two about authoring, and then come back to me with your story rewritten. I promise I will read it again.” I recoiled with the curt opinion, and came to with a squirm when someone jabbed me- and then heard someone asking me, “are you alright? Can I help you feel more comfortable? Is this the first time you fainted, or have you fainted before?” Obviously, I must have been looking ill. Like something with disheveled hair and sweaty palms that the cat dragged home. “Shall we call a doctor? The hotel must have a Resident Doctor on call…” I smiled, despite the recent hallucination, and plodded on with the martini that someone had put back in my hand. It felt weird and then I realized I was drinking martini in a plastic tumbler. I sat up and saw a mess of shattered glass and some sticky splashed liquid, which was probably my first martini before I swooned. I understood. Did not protest.

So this was my life, with the ebb and flow of thoughts, emotions and written pieces and also rejected pieces. After these seven years of authorhood, I had two prominent piles of paper on my table now- the “written” and the “rejected”. There was also a “pending” pile which had to be completed and awaited its fate. A small thin insignificant file of “accepted” sitting forlorn in one corner of the 4x6 feet work table (the biggest piece of furniture in the house) was my only solace.  And of late, I had started planning on starting a filing system for these pink slips too! Some publishers were going digital and accepting correspondence by email. Otherwise the embarrassment of having so many pink slips thrust in my hand would have obliterated me by now. I could almost imagine the grinning editor, the disdainful editor, the cynical editor, all owners of the e mail ids whom I had been writing to, and who just might open a goldmine for me, after they stopped making fun of me.

On one such day, when I was trying to figure out what was going wrong, someone came home. A ragged looking man called Stan, who kept saying, “I am the King maker.” You know what that means? It means he is very powerful. He can make or mess up your life. I hated him; just like I hate all people who show off. Reena had brought him home for a meeting. Reena was another one- I had told her many times to stay off my passion. I would manage to get my writing published; but she was constantly looking for someone who could get me published. And now Stan the King maker (read Queen maker) was here. Self-consciously I walked across to him to shake hands and offer him a seat in my home. Peremptorily, he offered me a chair instead. What guts!

Without much ado, he told me what a fabulous guy he was, with friends in the Government, Army, Navy and Airforce and also in the Mafia. And by the way, also in publishing. I widened my eyes appropriately and kept saying wow! Till my eyes started hurting and my lips started chafing.

“Time for some coffee….” I sang out loud, when he was in the middle of telling me how he had got an author to sell 5 million copies of his book translated in English. “The author was not so sure but I convinced him about the translation, and see what magic happened!” He was almost bursting out of his skin with the pride of his achievement.

Coffee took long to come; and the long noisy slurps alternating with loud crackles of cream crackers served in Celadon china, made me sick. I took Reena aside and threatened her. “Take him away before I kick him out of here. What a guy! How did you even begin to think that I might need his services?”

Stan sat there and bragged and slurped some coffee and noisily munched some crackers and then bragged some more. It seemed like all he could do was discuss himself. He spoke about how he decided to hang up his boots at 39 and spend his life helping people like me. “But why did you have to do that?” “Just so that no one would suffer like I did when I was trying to publish my book of verse.” Champion of the underdog, is he? “Oh, really, so you have been published already?” I asked him, with genuine curiosity, overcoming my first cynical impulse. A spate of name throwing and ‘been there done that’ kind of anecdotes followed, leaving me confounded and sorry that I even asked him. “So may I be guided to buy a kindle version of your book? What’s the title and who is the publisher?” I interrupted him just as he was embarking on another ego-trip down memory lane.

Reena continued speaking of him in glowing terms and in a hastily whispered aside she told me that obnoxious though he sounded, he was actually very well connected. It took a lot of convincing but finally when the coffee got over and he could slurp no more, I stood up abruptly and excused myself saying I had an urgent call to make. It was my house so I couldn’t be more rude. Hastily, I printed out a copy of the synopsis, gave it to him and wished he would go away.

I did not expect he would come back for anything except the money. Would not deliver any positive results either. And the synopsis by now, had become public property so I was not risking anything. Spinning yarns, anyway was my hobby, though not necessarily my bread and butter. And for this yarn, the embellishments could be changed if Stan tried his tricks. But I doubted he had the brains to even begin to read the paper I thrust in his hand. So for me, he was out of my life as quickly as he had come.

But my manuscript was still unread, unheard and unsung! The travails of a budding writer continued to haunt me and would not be slaked without blood. And then there were friends who would keep calling me and asking, “Have you found a publisher? Oh, you poor woman! Working so hard and burning the midnight oil; these people don’t have any respect for hard work….”

“Oh! How come no one is taking an interest in your book? You know you actually write very well- amazing language and such precise grammar.”

“Its possible that your story may not be very exciting? So what about tweaking it a little bit here and there? Adding some romance and some zing to it?”

“Hey you know what? Just get some well known literary genius to write the foreword or even a recommendation? You know those back covers full of good things about the book you just read or are planning to read?”

Feverish and consumed, I understood that each advice translated into an umbrella statement, “Never mind the pink slip. Never give up!”

Honest to God, I tried. And never gave up. There was a day in my life when, as I sat for breakfast, I noticed a pink piece of paper under the table mat. I screamed as if I had seen a ghost. “Will thou hound me here as well?” The housekeeper came running out and kind of pacified me. I dared not look at the dining table lest I see that pink paper again. But the evil woman dug it out and handed it to me. “This is the bill from the laundry. Give me the money so I can go and pick up the blankets.”

I went to see my Professor at the University where I had completed my Masters in Economics. Won three Gold Medals. Was offered a Faculty position as a career. I had spurned all that and now my Prof, on hearing my life story, simply said, “Talent is wasted.” That’s it. “Talent is wasted.” Such loaded words! Such famous words….. everyone who is someone has had somebody say that to her. Determined, I plod on, in search of the someone I will be. Kiss my hand, someone.