Slipping like Sand

through our fingers

Namaste Readers,

It has been more than a month since I last posted. Tragedy after tragedy has found us. On the two-month anniversary of my father’s death, I lost one of my cats. He was four and a half years old. He developed a hemoprotozoa infection. Just four days before he died, he was his usual, playful self. His departure was so sudden and traumatic that I am visibly struggling to find ways to integrate all of this as I navigate through my waking life.

I hope you, my friends in the colder parts of the planet, have been soaking up the grace of the summer light. Here in the Eastern Ghats of India, the monsoon is making its way through the Bay of Bengal, bringing with it torrential rain and storms. The anticipatory mating calls of the magpie robins at the windowsill cannot be missed, even for city dwellers. Mynas and crows have been arriving with higher demands for grains and crackers to feed their hatchlings. The little ones are harbingers of the monsoon winds and the season of survival through these wakeful nights of maddening downpour.

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Just for the mangoes…

I live in an old cantonment area that used to be an important military base for the British East India Company during the days of the Raj. Near my house, there is a two-hundred-year-old market built back in those days. It is our favorite spot for all essentials of life. Its narrow, overcrowded lanes are best explored in the winter months when being outdoors doesn’t entail drowning in sweat. However, since mangoes are in season, I didn’t mind an hour of exploration. The bazaar was brimming with a delicious spread of mangoes in varieties that one can barely memorize: Himsagar, Malda, Langra, Dasheri, Banganapalli, Chaunsa, Badami, Neelam, Totapuri, Sindhura, and Malgova, to name a few.

Jackfruits are in season too. Just yesterday, I encountered a man selling gigantic over-ripened jackfruits grown in his in-law’s yard, which he guaranteed would make a sumptuous pudding. I didn’t care to check the vegetables, but there was a definite abundance of okra, bottle gourd, ridge gourd, cowpea beans, purple and green aubergines, sweet potatoes, red amaranths, spinach, and fenugreek greens among the season’s common offerings.

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Everything seems to be in place, in tune with the flow of the season as it is supposed to be—except for me. I feel alienated by the gravestones of loss on my heart, each beat a remnant of the wails and laments I have lived through, the pieces of my heart I cremated and buried. Ever since my little orange baby was gone, words have left me. I cannot seem to form sentences with the ease and lightness that my fingers used to find when they touched the keyboard. I have been grieving quietly in the inner chambers of my being, searching for some solidity to step onto as my body sinks constantly like a stone in wet sand. The passivity of my inner compass demands that I surrender to this dark night of the soul and wait patiently until I arrive back home in my own body. I stumble my way through the darkness with but one candle of trembling courage, making slow progress.

The quivers of grief take over more often these days, but I feel no shame in wearing my raw humanity, no peril in speaking of my dwindling faith. It is through these dark corridors of grief that I have found the solid, resting relief of a marbled shrine within. I am aware of an expanse of the world that wouldn’t have opened up if not for being coerced and pulled by the hands of tragedies. I am roaring against the demands of existence to tame my raging, pulsing life. I am akin to an exiled beast wandering in longing and remembrance of what once felt like home.

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Time is the ultimate master, the only antidote to human conceit. It is in charge of our stories, weaving the intricate threads of our destiny into complex formations, indifferent to our aspirations. Time reveals that we are all searching for something we know deep down we will never find. I often open the dossiers of time to run my fingers over what now only resides between frames—the pictures of the past, the only time machine we will ever have.

Although time keeps clawing big holes out of my soft blankets of happiness, I keep finding patches of love to stitch it all back together. It might never be enough, and it might never look like it used to, but this action transpires into a strategy to handle the transience of life. I cannot stop life from passing, so I might as well live with as much awareness of the present moment as possible because this is the last time I am living this moment in all my life. This moment will never reoccur twice in the river of time. Time is relentless but so am I.

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Sweat, tears, and sea—salt water is the salve for all human despair and desperation. I long to run wild with tears and sweat on a beach, where a necessary spiritual catharsis awaits. The shore and the wave are a pair of opposites, a union of duality. The shore represents indefinite eternity—stable in its form and presence—while the waves embody impermanence—fluid, formless, and transient in both arrival and departure.

When I am at the sea, with my toes buried in the sand that slips away leaving pockets of air from which tiny crabs emerge, I awaken to my limited human form within the eternal cosmic movements. I have always loved the sea; it is there that my body disappears into the endless tides. So, when I break into sobs, overcome with unconquerable grief, I remind myself that it is alright, that I am the sea pretending to be human for a while.

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The sea, the wilderness, and the human - all children of the universe

Our clementine sunshine visited the sea once in his short but exciting life. Mostly confined indoors, he was our overprotected darling, while his papa and I walked hand-in-hand on the beach barefoot at the break of dawn. I remember the serenity of the coconut and palm trees rustling in the late monsoon winds, the Arabian Sea swelling with terrifying force. Like life, not everything was perfect; things were out of place. We huddled under the threatening storm, but we were together, and we laughed until we forgot why we were afraid. We snuggled with our fur babies and called it a day when the tide engulfed the beach.

The next morning, we sat on the deck with breakfast as the babies curiously prowled behind the curtains of the French windows. Salt water swallowed the wild, shrubby path that led to the beach, and we observed the liminality of unused fishing boats turned upside down, floating in the transience of the sea’s rage. We saw beauty born from horror without shuddering: the purple-grey sky and thunder splitting it apart from heaven to sea in flashing golden strikes, the rumbling of the earth with all its mortals.

Maybe beauty is always hidden in the macabre and waits patiently for the foresight to find it. We tried and tried and tried to love all we could, to live a full life in a day’s time, to hold back those we were afraid to lose. We tried and tried and tried to grasp the moments, to keep them safe in the folds of our palms, but they kept slipping like sand through our fingers.