Suti's Stories

Celebrating Life

2010-10-25T13:59:00.005+05:30

Today is Pink Ribbon day. This day is dedicated to those suffering from breast cancer. In May, this year, I lost my maternal aunt to metastasis from breast cancer. She was one of the liveliest persons I had met in this lifetime and this article is dedicated to her.

Celebrating Life

It was the first day of the MA class. Swati entered the class late, and hurried to her seat when she was greeted by a bindi and salwar-kameez clad lady, around fifty years old of age, with a gentle smile.
“Ma’am – I am sorry to be late – it won’t happen again”, she said and the rest of the class burst into laughter.
In her confusion, she started apologizing further and the other students roared with laughter. Till someone explained to her that this fifty year old lady was not the teacher but just a student like her. And this lady went ahead and introduced the rest of the class to her.
She happened to be my mother’s sister. Jhumamashi, I used to call her. My first memory of Jhumamashi was as a four year old when I would snuggle on top of her while she slept. As a seven year old, I lost my mother and Jhumamashi, wanted to take me with her to Delhi and rear me up like a mother. Small things like wishing me on my birthday every year, remembering that I loved shammi kebabs and hence ensuring that I had a plateful the first thing whenever I landed in Delhi, gifting me my first watch, my first camera made Jhumamashi my favorite relative.
Jhumamashi was very attractive, of medium height, with a lilting voice that carried a lot of warmth, never without makeup and loved to dress up well. Her husband was very well established and she had always a fleet of cars and a posse of servants at her disposal. After spending some twenty years of her life post marriage in rearing up her two children, she decided to further her career goals that had got paused with worldly responsibilities.
She became very popular in her class and was called Mommie Angel by her fellow classmates, all of whom happened to be younger than her by at least twenty years. I had taken up a job in Delhi when she told me that she has entered college and I asked her “Why?”
She answered “Why not?”
In 2003, she was diagnosed with a tumor in her left breast but the tumor was arrested with mastectomy. Or so it seemed. But that did not deter her from completing her studies and then joining the staff of a college as a teacher in psychology. It was a matter of days before because of her positive demeanor, became very popular with her students. Whenever she would enter class, the class would gravitate around her while she would regale them with interesting stories.
After some years, I moved to Hyderabad and started seeing less of her. Still she ensured I had my plateful of shammi kebabs whenever I visited her and would still give me a call on my birthday. Our communication was mostly through jokes forwarded via SMS. In the meantime, her son grew up and left home and her daughter entered high school.
In 2009, her daughter completed her schooling and moved out to medical college. Before that, Jhumamashi went to Goa with her daughter and her daughter’s friends and they had a great time. The child in her was always smiling, always eager for a little adventure.
However around the same time, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In an article titled “Buddi, don’t give up”, she wrote “Just when all the kids left and I have all this time to do so much ... I don't know what test God is putting me through ... I will fight this cancer”. She told me “What doesn’t break you makes you stronger – don’t you make that sad face”.
While most of us knew of her terminal illness, she did not tell her daughter, saying “She needs to concentrate on her studies. I want to live to see her become a great doctor one day and who knows, she might cure me”.
She would be always cracking a joke and used to collect jokes on her cellphone to keep them handy to cheer people up. “I would be the first mother in law in India to share dirty jokes with my son’s wife,” she would tell me.
Her chemotherapy sessions started in late December and she lost all her hair. Her daughter, who used to call her almost every day, sometimes did not get through when she was busy in the chemotherapy sessions and used to tell her “Momma, you are so busy with your teaching that you don’t have time for me”. She replied “Darling, I am sorry but you will understand one day”.
She continued to teach and help her students with their assignments. “Give a little bit more”, she would tell them. Whenever I would visit her, she would be deep in a stack of student assignments.
I visited her in January 2010 and she was sporting a very stylish wig and she laughed and told me “See – my new hair – people ask me ‘did you change your hairstyle’ and I tell them ‘yeah’.”
“At least now I have more hair”, she laughed.
She had watched “Three Idiots” and wanted to discuss it rather than discuss her illness and I let her have her own way. She didn’t like the shoes I was wearing and rushed me to a shoe shop and insisted I buy a new set. She was panting on the way back and she suddenly said that the chemotherapy sessions are very painful but then assured me she would be fine soon. She called up my son, aged eight, and told him “Come to Delhi – we would have golgappas together.”
She ensured I had my plateful of shammi kebabs before I left.
In April, she messaged me “It has spread to the lungs – please pray for me”. Her lilting voice had become a rasp but she helped her sister-in-law with her housewarming party and still kept sending the jokes. However she stopped going to college.
She was admitted to hospital in late April. First, she would lift her hands and smile, and then she would only lift her hands. In early May, my uncle, her husband, called me and said she has been brought back from the hospital as doctors have given up.
She died in mid-May 2010, survived by her husband, her son and her college going daughter. I was amazed to see the sea of well-wishers- her students, her fellow teachers, her classmates and sundry others.
Perhaps God needed her more in some other place.

Joker's Adieu

2008-10-24T21:16:00.006+05:30

Recently the joker has come to the news, albeit for the wrong reasons as the evil guy in "Dark Knight", enacted superbly by the late Heath Ledger. Though my poem might seem to have been influenced by Heath Ledger, it is actually not. I wrote this poem when I was in college though (actually I was 20 years, 9 months and 5 days old when I wrote it). Hope you enjoy it.

Joker's Adieu
The joker took the centrestage,
For twenty years, nine months and five days
He had been doing just so -
Always appearing at the wrong moment,
Fumbling on the ropes, mumbling through the lines
All with a painted white face.
"Always wrong - never right" -
That was his watchword
For twenty years, nine months and five days.

This time, too, he came on the stage
When Bozo was juggling the hats -
The audience loved to see him that way -
"Always wrong, never right"

This was to be his last night -
He said he couldn't do it anymore,
So he came to the stage with a painted face,
"Always wrong, never right" -
Fumbling, mumbling, he told them all -
His final, parting speech:
"Last night, I tried and tried in vain
To solve a jigsaw puzzle, part by part,
Sometime in the morning, I would try again
To solve it right from the start
Till that day, my friends, I bow to you
And with a smile, I bid adieu..."

Perhaps he had some more to say
But the poison encroached his silly heart -
He fumbled, rushed through the lines
and stumbled, stuttered and fell to the ground,

"Always wrong, never right",
The audience burst into laughter,
They loved to see him that way...

To Sirs (and Madams) with Love

2008-10-01T10:06:00.004+05:30

I know this site is mainly for stories and poems but then the wise men (and women) say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I recently completed a yearlong long distance (via satellite) course in Business Management from IIM Calcutta and during the year, it seemed to people that I had taken a lot of notes. Now that the course is over, I am letting people take a peek at the notes I have taken and bask in some fond memories of our teachers ...

Dead Man’s Tale

2008-09-13T14:05:00.007+05:30

The great man had died. He was suffering from emphysema and other lung complications for the last few months and today at around 5 pm, he bid goodbye to the big bad world.

But the state government was satisfied with him. There were many great people who had bid snappy farewells, catching the hapless state government on the wrong foot because when the poor government tries to make amends by showering them posthumously with awards or felicitating some clueless relative, it is ridiculed by the unsympathetic citizens. He, on the contrary, had given the poor representatives of the people ample time for paying their last respects and they had expressed their gratitude by giving him more awards than what he had deserved. Nevertheless, there he lay cold as stone and many heads were surrounding his lifeless body, sniffing and tickling him while trying to outmanoeuvre each other with louder howls, larger teardrops, heavier and smellier garlands and other tried and tested tricks. Some of the genuine sufferers sat there with pale faces amidst some others who pretended to do so while photographers noisily clicked away. All the major television channels were there, interviewing everyone from the maid who was rueing an imminent pink slip to the ward boy who had come to clean some bed sheets but decided to linger longer, seeing the gravity of the situation. Outside the hospital ward, a crowd had collected and a frog-faced policeman was trying his best to orchestrate them with an ugly baton.

The cub reporter from ‘The Daily Bore’ was moving briskly amidst the mayhem – this was his first individual assignment and he knew he had to make a scoop. After all, the great man was no ordinary great man. He had written some twenty six novels (actually eleven before he started outsourcing the work to talented, needy strugglers), around a hundred short stories, five history books when his school buddy was made the education minister, eleven and a half film scripts, over two hundred billets-doux and countless I.O.U slips and had cut the ribbon or given insipid speeches at many literary adventures. Then the cub reporter saw the humbug from ‘The Whines of India’ interviewing the people with great fanfare. A lens-man, who accompanied him, was catching the people in various unflattering postures. The rival, not-so-successful novelist said, with tears on his plump face, “What can I say – I feel just the same as you feel so you know my feelings”. The publisher, who on better occasions, would have snubbed the great man as “an irritating fellow who interfered too much with my work”, said with well rehearsed poetic punctuations, “he was an ocean, a versatile genius who detailed me with the type of paper, the font-face, the font-size and even... even the small details like the picture to be used on the cover” and so on. The politician behaved a if he had just lost a poetry competition –“he was a fountain, a river in our lives, the bejewelled crown of the nation”, he bubbled effervescently while another somebody recited many dirges and elegies after saying, “What can I say ... I have no words”.

The cub watched all this with bemused irritation and decided to have none of it. He would, he resolved, attack the situation from a different angle – he would try to find out the great man’s last words. Did not Gandhi say “Hey Ram” when being shot or Martin Luther King say “Free at last, free at last, thanks to God Almighty I am free at last”? Did not Rajiv Gandhi say “Don’t worry. Relax” to his security men before being killed or Noel Coward say “Good night, darlings. I will see you tomorrow”? All these became historic quotations and he would do the world a great turn by finding out this great man’s last words rather than by interviewing these petty, selfish individuals.

Systematically, he approached the doctor, who was rushing down the aisle (really there was no need to do so now but a doctor must always look busy), for he was the one to see the great man die but the doctor disappointed him. “You see...” he said and a long pause ensued. The cub obeyed and looked diligently up the aisle and then down the aisle while the doctor struggled for words. When the cub decided that the doctor had nothing much to show really, the doctor broke the silence and continued, “... he had been in a state of drowsiness for the last three days and the last person he spoke to, as far as I can recall, was his wife”. The cub started sniffing for the wife. Soon he found out that the wife, in turn, was sniffing at home so he caught hold of the son, who was trying to clear up the hospital bills. The son showed him a mighty fist and gave him such an excellent demonstration of his vocabulary (who said genius is not inherited?) that he tucked his imaginary tail between his legs and fled. But he did not flee far for he stopped, panting, outside the hospital ward and waited patiently so that he could follow the cortege to the crematorium in the hope of catching the wife there.

Many people came and few of them went. Breathing became difficult and his eyes grew bleary but was determined – he would, by hook or by crook, have the great man’s last words.

At 1 am, the body was shifted from the hospital directly to the crematorium and he followed. At the crematorium, he caught sight of the wife who had come directly from home, and when he reached her, after some deft moves amidst a jungle of people, he was shoved aside by a burly, pig-faced, pot-bellied man. When he told him of his predicament, the man gruffly told him to come at 8.am sharp. The cub sighed. It may have been for the better, he told himself. The wife, sitting with watery eyes in the corner, was perhaps, not in the right mind to speak. He would come in the morning as decreed, he decided.

At 8 am sharp, he arrived. He had had barely time for a few hours’ sleep, a bath a small cup of tea before he had rushed out of his house. After all, it was his first assignment and the scoop was not yet ready. The burly man of yesterday shoved him into a sofa. He looked right and then he looked left and saw, to his utter dismay, numerous other reporters of various shapes, shades and sizes waiting beside him, all of who were perhaps asked to come at “8 am sharp”. He closed his eyes and doggedly decided to wait.

A sharp tap on his back woke him up and he saw the red, pig-face of the burly man looming over him. He glanced at his watch – gosh: it was eleven-o-clock and his turn had arrived now. “Better keep off the senti and controversial stuff,” the pig-face warned him and he nodded. “And don’t ask more than three or four questions”, the pig-face proclaimed.

The great man’s wife was sitting on a large armchair. Her face spoke volumes of the months of strain that she had gone through and before he could overreact to the frail smile on the intricately crafted, pale yet beautiful face, pig-face slammed him down into a chair and growled, “Remember, only three or four questions. She has been harassed enough by your breed”.

“Indeed I would only ask her one question and please reply. I would like to know his last words.”

“His last words?” the wife stuttered, “Oh, let me think – well, they may not interest you”. She went on slowly and haltingly, and her voice wandered, “no, certainly, they would not interest you”.

The cub, noting the absent-mindedness in the wife, recalled that sometimes the last words, though apparently trivial to mere mortals, may speak volumes. Did not Oscar Wilde tell his nurse not to put out the light because he did not want to go home in the dark? His face grew brighter and he said, “Still ... and please quote him verbatim, I want to know the exact words”.
Pig-face interjected, “This is getting too far- I had asked you to not go far. No personal or controversial stuff I had warned”.

The wife raised her palm at pig-face and said quietly but resolutely, “That’s all right – I will try to repeat in the exact sequence, but I may not be able to tell it verbatim. I would try my best.”
“Please do so”.

“Well,” the wife went on, “it went something like this – you know, we have a window at the leftmost corner of our living room whose grill has rusted- so he told me, ‘ I hope you are closing the left-corner-window every night’, you know he used to call it the left-corner-window, ‘ there are too many cats around’...”

The cub stared at her. After some time, he gave up trying to extract the profundity of the statement. He decided to think later. Right now, his mind could not keep pace with his fiercely rumbling stomach. After mumbling some words, he dashed off to the nearest restaurant.

But then who can blame the great man? Did not he too have a wish to live a couple more years?

The Way of the World

2008-06-28T17:54:00.006+05:30

When I was 15 years, I had written "The Way of the World" and it had fetched me a medal at the Shankar's International Children's Competition from the hands of the president of India (Mr R. Venkataraman). When I wrote it, I didnt know much of economics and now when I read it, I realize, I had tried to exemplify the concept of demand/supply of microeconomics and then extend it to aggregate variables of macroeconomics and thereby touch upon the basic measures in macro-economics. Well, lets get on with the poem:

The Way of the World

(The story of the Johns and Josephines)

Flowers were blooming and the weather - good,

And under a pine, sweet Josephine stood.

She wriggled and swayed on that day in May

And then John noticed her wriggle that way-

"Ah ... such heavenly grace.... wish she was mine"

And he approached her slowly under the pine.

Gallantly he performed all the great acts -

Revelling in revealing all his bitter facts,

Then one fine day, he blurted out the question,

She gingerly smiled at its mention.

That was all - at some church they tied the knot

And soon they were found near the baby cot.

The newly wed couple were very pleased

But then the world population increased

And the venerable PM's brows creased:

The taxes were raised and foreign debts scaled

And people's angry, hungry faces paled-

All because John noticed, one fine day,

Josephine wriggling in an artful way.

Axel de Fersen on the demise of Antoinette

2008-05-22T21:59:00.012+05:30

So much for contemporary history - I decided to go some centuries back this time. In 1990, I had read the synopsis of a book titled "Louis and Antoinette" by Vincent Cronin. This book, while it chronicled the lives of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI on the backdrop of the French revolution, it also talked about a character in the king's court, Axel de Fersen, who was in love with the queen but could do little when the juggernaut took over and watched helplessly while the queen was guillotined.
I had written this poem on reading the synopsis. Hope you like it:

October 16, 1793
When a page softly broke the news,
His face fell, his eyes were aghast:
Lips stuttered, and cheeks changed their hues
And he wept, chewing on the past,
"I shudder to think how she's gone,
Parted by the ominous blade,
Leaving behind me to atone
Memories that never fade ...

Memories haunt this guilty mind:
I loved neither king nor his throne
But his lady, she drove me blind
And left this weak heart to atone
For all those sweet, fleeting moments
'Oh God! Why did she have to go?
Make me bear such fiery torrents-
I cannot face their whipping flow.'

'Forgive me, o departed prince
For worshipping your wife divine,
The loveliest of all the queens
That enraptured this heart of mine'
But alas! I cannot find her
For she left me to start anew ..."

And his heart was torn asunder
And he too, couldn't start anew.

An ode to Lorena Bobbit

2008-05-19T23:17:00.007+05:30

Recently a friend of mine had run a quiz on orkut by showing a photo of Lorena Bobbit and asked folks to identify her. The clue said that she represented a violent form of feminism. Answers ranged from "my ex" to "Mona Lisa with a makeover". Somehow the whole stuff jogged a chain of memories and I was compelled to pen a few lines on her. Agree that Lorena Bobbit is not the ideal thing to start a blog but somehow I felt that people should remember her just like they remember Jack the Ripper, John Lennon, Babe Ruth or (even) Hillary Rodham Clinton.

So here is my poem offering to Lorena Bobbit, hope you enjoy it:

Not long ago, in an American state

Started the trial of someone whose mate

Suffered at her hands, a curious fate:

The legend of Lorena Bobbit.

To a prison she was sent

And on an on, her trial went

When she blurted out,"For all he did,

I just let him have it!"

As lawyers let the gory facts roll by,

The aghast judge heaved a sigh,

"I dont want to hear the rest,

Why dont you just cut it?"

To a renowned bishop, the judge did send

And she told her tale till she reached the end

Said the troubled bishop in front of the nuns,

"Its okay, my child, to do such things once

Hope by God, it doesnt become,

a deadly feminine habit"