Top of the class

An obscure number can never contain all the dreams that kept you awake all night,working.
Neither can it count all the tears cried in the battle to balance out an education,
nor portray the pain you felt curled up on the bathroom floor,telling yourself you'll survive tomorrow.
I read somewhere,today,that experience is what you get when you don't quite get what you want,
and maybe,just maybe,
the intricate grace of a dancer's hand gestures,creating imaginary flowers with her fingers
and how your grandmother no longer smells of the specific kind of tobacco she used to chew
and how her sleep-like silence is a sharp reminder of all the stories she no longer tells you,
the smell of your dog's paws that lingers long after they've left the room,
the surprise you're taken by when someone notices the shadow of a cheekbone under your tired,waiting face or how one of your ears is missing a earring,
and the painful relief of watching someone you love lie in a hospital bed,recovering,as you sigh away the night
The wonder that strikes when you see comatose patients or cases of emergency,breathing heavy,
wheeled away to their destiny,questioning finality.
The small act of kindness when you least expect it,sometimes just a smile or a "hi" in the school corridors,or when someone let you get away when you were one too many times late for assembly.
Just the very the bittersweet loss of what once was a possibility
The gratitude of just having survived so much..just maybe
a number can never give away all of that.
A number can never personify all the stories left to tell and people waiting to be met and growing up left to be grown into.
No,a number is not enough.You are.
You are symbolic of survival,these numbers are just infinitesimal fragments of a universe of infinite possibility-
yes,they might matter in the moment,maybe for a while longer.Yes,they reward the best with medals and news paper articles and admiration,
but topping in an exam has so little relation to keeping well in life,it is such an inaccurate reflection of  ability.
After all,brilliant is an adjective,not a number.
It took me a week or so of moping to get to this realisation,because after having done conventionally "well",it did not feel like enough,it did not feel satisfying,It was too empty,and too full,at the same time.I realised I've been wasting time waiting for an approval that is not and will never be mine,my whole life.Almost like an indoctrination of how academic validation makes me good enough.
And all it felt like in the end? A fucking joke.
That's what all these numbers we compete for and compare with,and measure by mean.
Almost nothing.

Hachile

Dear Hachi,

I come to give a spotted yellow mango and some hand picked wildflowers inside the small circle where the guava sapling was planted,on your grave.
It's your season again,my little man.Peak summertime when you spent entire afternoons devouring whole mangoes down to the seed,held carefully between your fore paws,you'd lick it clean.
The first time I think I tried to understand death,was at age three, I picked up a dead moth off the floor and asked my caretaker why it was lying on the floor,and not sitting on a window,why it wasn't escaping my palm like it should.She told me to throw it because it had died,somehow,I didn't have heart to do it.She insisted that it was old and dead,and I needed to let it go,but it did not make complete sense.I did not understand death,I was only fascinated by it.I don't think much has changed since then.I guess I understood that old age meant imminent death,and I noticed old age on our cook,Abbas bhaiyya,who would make us some of the best sweet,caramelised bread when we were little.I noticed the age in his crow's feet outlined by surma,that deepened as he smiled ,in his fine silver hair,age looked so gentle on him,it did not scare me.I wondered how such harmless looking signs could mean death,intriguing.It was not until I was 11 that I understood young people could die too,though,Until I had read the cancer stories out of chicken soup books,cover to cover and cried for hours.Until I had surfed all the childhood cancer survival pages,shocked by the homages that faded with time.And it was only at fifteen,that I realised losing someone,and losing someone young were both things that were possibly going to happen to be.But I still don't understand,nineteen now,I don't think I ever will.How a heartbeat stops forever in a blink of an eyelid.How it is even possible for you turn your back one minute,and lose something so easily before you can turn around and help.When someone you loved remains physically only in memories and photographs.How can someone stop existing,there is no getting over loss,no end to mourning.Those are lied perpetuated by those in denial,there is only making peace with what happened-and that is so fucking hard.

The first time I laid eyes on you,I almost mistook you to be a rabbit,and when I held you in my arms,you were a quiet,cottony ball.You were least interested even in licking me,unlike other puppies,and that's how I knew I'd be taking you home.We brought you home on Ashtami,the eighth day of the dusshera festival and although I've never been religious,the name Hachi,which is Japanese for the number eight,somehow seemed symbolic and a good fit.

It's strange,but I don't remember the last time I saw you,I don't remember the last few moments with you-unless the ones where I held your limp,lifeless paw,praying in vain and put my palm on your tiny heart,still,count.But you were already dead by then
I do remember the little things from your short and beautiful life,though.The way your eyes sparkled when you were excited,the plump,curled up tail which was a phenomenon in itself.The way you were always a shallow breather and had asthma attacks sometimes,and needed help finding your breath.The way you'd gallop over our legs,excited when we lay in bed-I swear I will never see another creature jump like that again.How you were not a light sleeper,but always woke up and followed our trails even in the middle of the night.Those multiple mornings when you would lick water off  of my ankles,wet from a shower as I hurried to get dressed for school.That one time you were so sick,and barely two months old,that you couldn't even walk-we googled solutions and decided to make your drink water and sugar and watching you get up on your feet after two entire days was when we stopped worrying too much.The way the small white portion on your head,stuck like snow white duck fluff,smelled like hung curd.The way you smelled like cake batter until you were half a year old.The manner in which you would squat on the floor,mid walk,back paws spread out-too tired from walking three steps.The time we took you to a dog carnival and you refused to walk and had to be carried around,even on stage.That one haircut you got after which you were a sudden burst of teenage energy.Your slow,but eventually,successful attempts at climbing up the stairs,first your front paws,then the back.The day you finally learnt to jump onto the bed,after we had long given up on the idea.Those nights at the dinner table,when you would get tired of maintaining your usual,gentle-manly and aloof distance and ask for offerings by scratching our laps and whining loud.All those early mornings when I drank my cup of milk and you ate your share of biscuits,carefully held between your forepaws on a doormat.That was a favourite habit of yours,wasn't it? When ever you were offered food,you would carry it off to a door mat and carefully eat in a safe distance away from the other dogs,guarding,protecting,slowly savouring.The sound of your paws on the floor,softly scratchy and your penchant for nurturing stuffed toys-carefully making them sit between your front paws.Your tendency to hide everyday objects in secret hideouts-under rugs,beds,book shelves,even under your bed.When something was amiss from the household,we knew you had claimed your possession on it-torch lights,plastic containers,dolls,chewy sticks and even eaten mango seeds.You were one possessive little fellow.The way your heart beat louder than television at full volume,during Diwali or every time someone burst crackers or when Misty scared you or the mosquito killing electric bat was in your sight.You'd hide under the old iron almirah,in the small gap under the bed,sticking out only your head or in the crook of my father's arm.
The gravel in your bark when you saw a stranger in the house,the peace on your face when you fell asleep in nooks and corners.Your tooth that never grew sharp,forever blunt and babied.The languid body language of your stubby feet and your furry face,almost a flower in full bloom.All these things you did and were,funny,adorable,pure,endearing,mischievous-were so phenomenal,we started to call them Hachile.
It's your season,my little man.The mangoes are back again,but you will never be.I leave them here for you,in hope that you might taste them,somewhere.I try to look for you in doorways and nooks of empty terrace,the stretch of lawn and all these little moments of the year you were alive,because maybe this was your happy place.
The look in your eyes before anybody got to say goodbye,wide open with surprise,sure did not look like the end of any suffering.Maybe your heart just stopped.
Misty missed you a lot,you know,she'd grown used to your company.She left us two weeks after you did.

We have two of your children now,and the most of you that I can keep alive is in their presence.They are not you,never will be but they are so much like you in the little things that it's almost as if you never entirely left.


Lots of love and mangoes,
yours truly.

Mulligatwany

That small gesture of dotage,where you let someone you love walk with their feet over yours,from one end of the room to the other?

The first time you learnt what a vein was it was a language teacher pointing at the green lines on your wrist and saying you call it "nas" in Hindi and all afternoon,sitting atop  the jungle gym in the play ground you traced lines back on forth along the length of your arm

The old creaky four poster bed,complete with a canopy of mosquito nets hanging like billowing veils,

in the village house where you played one summer,the only thing you carried home is the flavour of home in glass jars with pickled bamboo shoot,sun dried to last longer.

Maybe that's why your neighbours tried to grow chillies from the north east in the square of back garden they incorporated in their first floor apartment flat,plump,little fiery chillies you only had to grow to find in different places.

The itinerant peddler who sold moon biscuits door to door,vanished from the streets because everyone now wanted store bought cookies.To him,a customer was a mirage as his glass box full of biscuits he stayed up all night to bake make no sales,he is vanishing like all baby teeth when you turned around eight.You were not sure you wanted to let go of them,even if you didn't need them anymore.

The way your grandfather used to smile at you and say thank you,all he ever said to you..like you shared something special,between the two,probably not,but it felt like.He died the summer you turned three,and you don't remember the funeral or even news of the death,just a slow trickling down of the mention of his presence.Kind of like the time you had sand in your eyes,and blinded vision for a day and you never realised your father didn't come to the hospital because you couldn't see,but it felt great enough to be able to open your eyes and see form and shape and colour again.

The teacher in the first grade,at the new school who had a scorpion tattooed on her forearm,her name sounded like what you would call a pet scorpion.She was a sweetheart,who never called you off for spelling hundred wrong.She wore orange sometimes,it was her favourite.The irony that sometimes there is more corporal punishment in a mainstream,corporate school than a convent won't hit you until years later.

The second grade teacher always matched her  bangles or shoes with her outfit,and sometimes even wore flowers in her hair,sometimes.The only adult you will ever know who incorporated so much glitter into their wardrobe,ever so elegantly.She often read out stories on Friday,she called them surprise gifts and they were.She never picked on someone for spelling and stuff like that,once you gifted her hand plucked flowers from the garden that coincidentally matched her outfit that morning.She couldn't tuck them into her bun and make them stay,so she put them in a glass of water on her table,that day was beautiful.

In the eighth grade,you could never draw the longitudinal section of the maize grain right,and after not being able to accommodate the embryo after several attempts,you remembered what a teacher the previous year had told you,about how she always drew mangoes instead of the human heart in biology class and the teacher hated her,but that's how she knew she would sell paintings someday.She was a good teacher,we were her canvas.

The first boy who ever called you a princess did not come with a bunch of roses,but a single dry rose pressed carefully in his journal.It was a really warm thing to do,almost like that time your cousin said "we both look like dolls,tonight".

All those flowery patterns you'd never learnt how to embroider because straight stitch made as much sense to you as summer snow,made you realise you never actually need a lot of things they tell you ,you do.

Aubergine sounds like an English Lady to you,Augustine Aubergine.Brunette,Clementine,mandarin,tangerine,Auburn..all sound as elegant as lady names,and beneath this sheath of elegance they have artichoke hearts,and asparagus hair beneath their bonnets.So what if your name wasn't as pretty,you could always make up people in your head who will die only with your death.

Remember how,as a little girl, you always wished your name was Rose and you sat on the staircase at night praying to stars to change it.Maybe you'd never be a rose but you are not necessarily born into something unless you settle for it.You might just be vegetative propagation of a stem,tampered to ensure growth,but still alive and more viable.

I guess you never were good at thank you speeches,but in all that you never said,there were promises,

and here,you've said it all in the sharpness of a single sentence interspersed with insouciant instances called moments,because they don't last very long.