Of The Mouth Is Brahman Born

During the dark period after Sirocco's death, many were persuading me to go on anti-depressants. I stubbornly refused. I have never taken any sort of medication -- other than the rare tylenol -- and I was not going to weaken and grow dependant on anti-depressants.

Chocolates work great for me :)

And mouthwash.

Yes, mouthwash. Impossible to feel down and out when my mouth is tingly, pepperminty fresh. These days, I see more and more ads focusing on oral hygiene. And then I think of our forefathers and the wealth of knowledge they packaged in that one line, Of the Mouth is Brahman born, which would get me to play with some ideas and begin writing.

Some books that I found particularly useful.
On Becoming A Novelist -- John Gardner
Writer's Idea Book - Jack Heffron
DK's Visual Dictionary
Spunk & Bite -- Arthur Plotnik

Cheers :)

Anu and Decorum

And someone said to me, Anu you're a published author, you have to act with some decorum.

Oh help. I'm enjoying being ME again and not that Tara character who completely took over my sunshine personality. One of my readers emailed me saying how much she empathized with me...with my speech problems. I'm glad I was able to portray Tara's tongue-tie realistically, but I personally have a very nimble tongue.

This morning I woke up bubbling with laughter. I was soooooo high. No, I don't do drugs. No, I don't drink alcohol (my niece can tell you of the hilarious time everyone had when I took a few sips of champagne some Thanksgivings ago). Oh, but I do, do, do binge on chocolates. Though today's high is not sugar or cocoa induced. It's just pure me.

Built for fun.

A priceless trait that we three sisters possess is this ability to laugh. For a while -- after Sirocco died -- I thought I had lost it. It's two years now and I'm finally coming out of the sorrow I sank into. I had to keep telling myself, Anu you have another son that you have to care of. But in that dark period in 2006, there were many times when I felt I had no right to live. You have to stop blaming yourself, everyone said. Sirocco could have picked up the corn cob from anywhere. But I knew, oh well I knew, that I have now and then given him corn cobs. He enjoyed playing with them. An autopsy showed a piece of corn cob – smaller than a bottle cork – stuck in his intestine. Will I ever forget my boy stretched out on the vet’s table? Oh I was there, watching the scalpel split open his belly.

How could I live?

I thought of many ways to die.

Sirocco was a chocolate lab. Big, beautiful. Majestic. And I lay my head on his body that had now turned to rock. Sirocco was gone. When he threw up that day, I thought nothing of it. Like all labs, he gobbles up food and then throws up. He’d be fine. The feeling that he would be fine strengthened when my neighbor said that his dog throws up all the time. Nothing to worry. I decided to take Sirocco to the vet the next morning. Just to be sure. But the next morning Sirocco was dead. He had gone to the vet only the week before, for his shots and his annual check-up. And there was nothing wrong with him. Then, how?

No, I must not invite such thoughts again. For then I'll start running away from this house. As if it were the house's fault. And i'll start staring at the kitchen tiles and wonder why I had made such a fuss about the width of the grout line. Why had I not allowed the tile-setter to stay with the original 3/8 inch? As if it had anything to do with the grout thickness. No, I must not head in that direction for I'll surely go mad again.

Relax - Goes To Hollywood

I like switching to various radio stations to listen to the language of the hosts. For example, you're not likely to hear expressions like 'kick ass' in NPR. And I like to know the various Englishes out there because I sound mostly as though I have stepped out of a Jane Austen novel.

While I was listening to a station that was playing some 80's music, I heard a song that my body responded to wildy. Sometimes when I am writing, I become so still and this song was so energetic that I had to jump up and dance. What song was it?

I immediately called a Know All in-law on speaker-phone and said, 'Hey listen to this music and tell me what song it is.'

'That's Relax, Anu,' she said. 'I could make out from the opening chords. It was a big hit in India during my college days. Do you know it's an M song?' The M represented self-stimulation (I have to be careful about the words I toss in here. Earlier I was cautioned by a family member not to fashion provocative subject titles as I had previously for the one about flesh).

'Listen to the lyrics properly,' she said.

And I listened to the lyrics properly. Not that I'm particularly good at catching words especially because I have this marvelous quality of mishearing lyrics. For example, when I first heard Sledgehammer a long time ago when I was in Chennai, it sounded like SnakeCharmer to my Indian born ears. And to this day, when I hear that song, it continues to sound like Snake Charmer. Anyways, I tried my best to listen to the lyrics and then gave up. The good thing was that now I had a title I could search on the web.

And listen to it...and dance :)

Taking the ouch out of mammograms

In 2005, my husband noticed a bruise on my upper arm. Had I bumped into something somewhere? No...oo...ooo, I said, slowly, trying to remember my activities during the week. A colleague of his who had developed strange bruises on his upper arm had been diagnosed with leukemia. The chilling thought that I might have cancer crossed both our minds and off I went the next morning for a much overdue check-up. Some finger probing later, my physician said that I ought to have a mammogram, guiding my hand to the small lump on my left breast. While I waited for the big M-day, I gathered as much information I could about mammograms though I could have done without some of the stories I heard. My dentist spoke of a woman who had died a year after being diagnosed. The dental assistant said that her neighbor, too, had had a similar bruise as mine and she died within two years of being diagnosed with cancer.

Grim.

About this time I was still rewriting and rewriting The Finger Puppet (I must have written the first chapter at least a million times over and then struck it out completely in my final edit). Convinced that I was going to die in two years, I decided to wrap up the novel and send my manuscript to Ann McCutchan (to learn more about Ann McCutchan please go to 'links' on my website www.anujayanth.com) for her feedback before sending to literary agents/publishers.

What were we going to tell our son? In the next few days, I kept myself busy by doing a massive clean-up of all my things. A friend of mine had found a stash of Playboy magazines in her late husband's closet and had felt terribly betrayed. No porno magazines or old love letters in mine but I certainly didn't want my husband going through all my stuff.

As it happened, the lump was just dense tissue which showed signs of calcification a year later, soon after our dog, Sirocco, died. In a stereotactic biopsy, the technician drilled out seven pink worm-like pieces of my flesh which had little white eyes (calcified spots) and then left a pinhead bit of stainless steel in that area. Anyways, I had a mammogram last week. Oh what torture! Looking at the digital images of my breasts on her computer, breast surgeon, Arlene Ricardo said, Wonderful. All was well. That certainly took the ouch out of mammograms.

The Day After America's Election of Obama

I was leaving for Austin the day after the Election. At the gas station, while my husband was checking the tire pressure of my Acura, I looked around me. There was an African American at the telephone booth, his face and voice exhibiting the excitement of the Obama win. Then a SUV pulled up and parked alongside our car. The driver of the SUV -- another African American -- smiled at me. I smiled back. I have exchanged many a smile with many a stranger before. But this was different. This smile was not simply that of a polite stranger. This was a smile that would have been reserved perhaps for his wife, or sister, or daughter, or mother, or a very dear friend. And his eyes seemed to say, yes we did it! I didn't want to spoil the moment by blurting out the truth, that I am just a green card holder and I played no part in the voting -- as most minorities had -- except perhaps to wish mightily for Obama to win. And whoop and cheer when Obama and his family made their appearance.

On reaching Austin, I quickly got on my laptop to record the solidarity I shared with the stranger. And then I saw an email from a long ago friend. It brought back a lot of memories -- good and bad. Of another period in my life that I had swiftly blanked out. It was the first few years of my marriage. My husband and I were young and so terribly immature and we made a complete mess of our lives. But we held on, even though we were so totally incompatible. And when Yadav, our son, came along, driven by the responsibility of providing a secure home for him, Jay and I worked hard on rebuilding our marriage. We continue to have our disagreements but I know that he is just the right person for me. And I for him. I keep insisting though that he got a better deal because I have so many different personalities and so, for him it's like having a harem of women :)

-Anu Jayanth

Rima Kaur

Imagine how thrilling it must be for me to hear from my readers -- especially because you, Rima, were the very first to write me directly! Of course, I had to publish your comment along with my reply in the hope that it would catch your attention someday :) It worked.

I have always wanted to blog but I lacked the courage. Soon after launching The Finger Puppet, I felt emboldened to go naked, write about the real me. The thing is, because I looked back into the past, into a childhood life and world I had blanked out, I was now flooded with long ago images of India. I had to pick up my paintbrush again. Blogging will have to wait...

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Blogger versatile.frost said...

Hi Anu!
Rima again! I just typed my name in google to see where in this web-world I have left my footprints, and I came across your blog. Surprise Surprise! You actually replied to my comment! And not only that, you converted it into a post! Wow this is so special for me, I cannot thank you enough! I have actually saved that particular page. I'll have some serious showing off to do in front of my friends now! And now I'll go through your website too.

Thank You ever so much. I never ever expected a reply!

October 31, 2008 6:10 AM

Self-Therapy Through Writing

Prior to writing The Finger Puppet, I have never really had any insane desire of becoming a writer. That sort of sneaked up on me. In its origins, the book was about youth and longevity and all things bright and beautiful. But in the many years it would take me to write, I discovered that the quickest way to aging was to become a novelist. I wish John Gardner had warned me of this in his fine book, On Becoming A Novelist!

Going back into the past and reliving our lives in Horror House where I was no longer a writer but a helpless child watching, watching, watching - all the things I didn't want to see or remember - had to have some impact on my mind. In person I was fine, playing wife, mother and the good friend. But when I sat at the computer I was not sure who I was anymore. There have been moments when I was terrified that I might walk up to someone and say, Oh please may I borrow your head? Alas, that is the charmed existence of a writer! Thankfully the loopiness did not extend beyond the computer screen :)

The writing of the book was certainly a healing play, a leela as Vasantha Surya writes in her Dialogues with Daemons. Immediately afterward, of course, I found it very hard to step back into the present. But as the months pass, I am so happy I wrote -- crazy though the novel is. The idea for the thumb as the main protagonist came out of the blue. In a summer workshop with Farnoosh, one of my fellow writers was working on a short story about a size 6 shoe model whose big toe gets chopped off by a dog's leash. As I imagined the big toe flying in the air, I found myself drawing features on it, remembering my finger puppet playing days with my sisters.

Now I must focus on my body -- exercise/dance off the extra pounds, get rid of the horrible slouch, and step out in the sun.


Dialogues with daemons

VASANTHA SURYA

This novel affirms that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions and thoughts is a healing play, a leela.

Filthy rich and clean broke!” — that’s the situation of a dysfunctional family sitting on a gold mine of stolen antiques and prime real estate in Tiruchirapalli, and are reduced to eating rancid curd rice with mango pickle to disguise the taste. Thanks to a megalomaniac pater familias, who fancies himself to be a rationalist and a “modern”.

Set in the mid 1960s, with a speechless 12-year-old’s thumb as the protagonist, Anu Jayanth’s debut novel is about many things Indian. Put together in the eclectic fashion of a Navaratri Golu, she holds together the whole show with some startling insights into the nature and function of language.

Restoring faith

The book’s much- more-than-whimsical illuminations have proved wrong my distrust of a whole genre of Indian English writing, sparked long ago by Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. My reasoning then went thus: Here I am, drenched and gasping in this torrent of ‘India’ — what can a diaspora writer have to tell me about it, from that abstracting distance? This story of a deceptively phlegmatic maami and her three daughters who subvert feminist stereotypes and intelligently resist patriarchy without detesting their yajamaan, has taken the sting out of my defeat. Now, after all these years, I shall accept that for many outside India, as much if not more than for those who are here, India is not a geographical expression but an area of consciousness which can accommodate and sometimes ingeniously reconcile opposites. Its darkest patches have a way of suddenly lighting up.

Tara has been silenced by the experience of domestic violence. Unwilling to burden her beloved co-sufferers with her own struggle to cope with a seething welter of contradictory messages and feelings, she takes to talking with her own thumb. A common enough childhood daydream, you think. We remember whispering to invisible companions, and not just long ago. But when it’s the coping technique of a victim of abuse, unsettling questions can surface: is this child “disturbed”, or “depressed”? Does she have behavioural problems?

Changing conceptions

Our guesses on what constitute sanity and insanity have been changing, as we strive constantly to align received wisdom and apparent commonsense with what is currently seen as politically correct. Discoveries in neuroscience tempt us to speculate on the role of will and consciousness in human systems ruled by self-propelled neural impulses. The sense of losing ground and authenticity in a world of fragmenting identities has driven us to look anew at old ideas about the mind.

Lest you should think Tara’s is a case of what goes by the name of schizophrenia, or the now-discredited diagnosis of “dissociative identity disorder” or multiple personality, hers is a instance which does not fit into that model of mutually exclusive or antagonistic selves. Tara’s is a personality which grapples with but also celebrates and embraces its own “split”, to use a phrase no longer fashionable in psychiatry. It divides itself not to escape from its daemons, but to have a dialogue with them from two standpoints. To remain integrated — and sane — without erasing the line of division, she plays … and how she plays! Her daemons, once confronted, turn into curiously endearing presences…

Serving a purpose

Like the many swamis and devis in the puja room, each of them a loving concatenation of human aspirations, Tara’s daemons are there for a purpose: to guide her to solutions not available through the usual avenues of logical analysis. Tara and her sisters discover that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions, observations, and thoughts is a healing play, a leela. What saves their flights of fantasy from turning into pathological delusions is the sense of fun that flutters around that house, under the indulgent eye of the “shock absorber” mother steeped in Vedas, ayurveda, ahimsa, and Carnatic music. The father who insists that it is just a figment of his silly womenfolk’s imagination slowly sickens, while his wife heals herself of all her deepest griefs with her customised version of occupational therapy. She assures her children that their crazy father loves them all “in his own way”. Positive reinforcement? Or just self-defense? The family breaks away at one point for sheer survival’s sake but returns to care for him till the end. For, he is one of them, a pitiable fragment who has “lost it”.

As Anu Jayanth weaves together the fabric of life in Tiruchi with the khadi values of Gandhigram, the motif of the finger puppet pops in and out. A strange kind of sutradhar, the finger puppet somehow manages to tassel together the many loose ends in this perceptive tale.