The Week Before School

Traveller, we could go
to Damascus. There.
Damn. Mass. Cuss.
It's my humming body

It's skin like chipped dreams
and questions, small cases.
I can wear a Kanjeevaram sari
you will wear a week's stubble

We'll soon travel all summer
in slumber, blessed stateliness
supplicant to windows radiant
with swimming celestial doubt.

_

References Have Been Checked

Breakfasts have been a lot more leisurely since the semester has ended. So leisurely that Li'l A has to be shepherded to school before Baby A has even dipped into her cereal or her cheesy eggs. Before she has finished telling me every single detail of last night's dreams. 

So Li'l A went off to school, and Baby A is dawdling at the kitchen table.


Baby A: I don't want milk or eggs anymore.
(Accusingly) YOU don't eat eggs or drink milk!

Me: I don't now. But when I was a kid. I drank milk all the time and ate an egg every day.

Baby A: No, you didn't!


Me: I did, actually!


Baby A: Ok. Call Ammama [grandma, my mom] let me ask her.

I initiated an international call and was duly exonerated.

_

Selective

For these are the measures of the everyday assassin
wash hands and sanitize.
Moisturize.

Every thing in its place.
Hair. Bullets.

For you will assume news is anachrony.
For you will know anarchy is nothing.

Nothing.
Nothing is nothing.

Below, a window--
To the window.

All is quiet within.
And you are steel.

Smile.

un-koothu

Despite an increasingly adversarial situation in one of my classes that's psychically depleting me, I managed to send off my proposal for a chapter on Mangai this evening. Yay, me.

Mangai expertly uses traditional, low culture forms like koothu to interrogate feminist issues including female infanticide and feticide. Or so I say, and because I was writing about it, I guess my mind had been working hard to process these cruelties and make sense/contain them. And so...

***

Last night, I dreamt that I led my three-year-old daughter  on to a public bus in Tamizh Nadu crowded with standing grownups and gave her instructions on where to sit (in the middle--it's the safest) and where to get off the bus (after two stops).

She said, "ok mama," but bumbled around like the three-year-old she is. The sort of happy, carefree bumbling around that--especially in the mornings when our deadlines are tight as a noose--can make me want to cry and/or laugh helplessly.

The bus conductor was very helpful, promising to help, but as I walked away from the bus, I realized that he was following me around chatting away. And then I realized I'd left my baby on a bus where she didn't know anybody.

Nothing happened. But the possibility of disaster, the sense of menace was huge. I couldn't fall back asleep even after I'd checked that both kids were in their beds. And not on buses.

_

Party, Pythons

Partied really late last night. I got a cheek-ache from long stretches of laughing while playing "Dialogue." (Making fantastically fake dialogue to conversations too far away to hear. It's fairly rude, but Big A always does his in a British accent so it sounds posh.)

N drove us home--we should go back and retrieve the Mini from his house on "the only hill in Ohio" sometime today.

Although, there's not much of "today" left; I got out of bed at 2:30. Big A had taken the kids out to breakfast and then haircuts, leaving me free to finish reading my book in bed, take a shower, and yearn for my family. (Usually they're around so much, I never get to yearn.)

I haven't seen Big A since early this morning when we woke up with match-y nightmares. Big A's was about a python that had spawned a baby python on his alarm clock on the nightstand. Mine was about a big, rubbery, lipstick-y mouth called an "a-poco-lips." Get it? Get it? My subconscious makes jokes that are as stoopid as my awake jokes are!

_

Wake up call

A long time ago, I had a dream.

Li'l A is a toddler crawling through one of those giant mall play tubes. He doesn't walk yet, and he seems to be having a good time. I used to call him "Aachu" back then--a mispronunciation of his name and also a mispronunciation of the Telugu word for love "Aasa." Kind of like how "Holla" is neither "holler" nor "hola"--but actively alludes to both. But, I digress.

It starts to storm, getting both late and dark at the same time; I start to call Aachu, but he doesn't show and I'm immediately scared and frantic. Then in that weird third-person narrativity of dreams, I can see him inside the tube and realize that he's crawling away from the sound of my voice as fast as he can. And not merely to be naughty or prolong playtime but because my voice terrifies him. This was at a time when his GERD-y refusals to eat and my Indian mom instincts to overfeed as much as/whenever possible were at the point of worst conflict.

I cannot begin to describe how sad and disappointing it was to see his fear. And I cannot begin to quantify how much I backed away from my pig-headedness about eating right away.

I think I remembered my dream because I heard Amy Chua (the infamous tiger mom) on the radio this morning and she described how her daughter would yell that she hated her. I'll admit to being the mom who expects all of Li'l A's grades to be As, to asking what happened to the missing two points on a quiz that garnered 98/100.

But I wouldn't be able to deal with my kids not loving me.

_

Martian sends

My mind clutches a phrase, rubbing it raw in its sweaty fist. I'm awake now and realize that this nugget-- "ColdMartin Locksheen"--is merely an unappetizing and useless amalgam of NPR, Pandora, and Jezebel.com.

Odd the way this mind grabs the surprise appearance of Coldplay, a.k.a. Chris Martin, on the Phoenix station on Pandora, news of tech giant Lockheed Martin's U.S. Army contract, and Charlie (son of Martin) Sheen(anigans) to produce some Palin-esque puffery.

Although this is the closest I've come to deciphering how a poem happens--starting out with a phrase that surely expands through all the hours of rote existence.

_

A Monday (Spring, 2011)

These dreams are like demons

Where ice breeds fibrous

Before you were born

You were an ocean.

Here, everyone is moving

Their apologies like smoke

Still under the new road

An older one flows.

_

Living January

Is to dream

of one blade of sea

on the far

side of a sandbox

 

Is to think skin

is no boundary

to waves

volatile as time

 

Is to plant

footprints and undress

prophecies too

delicate to translate

 

 _

New appointee?

 

Big A:  I was going to look at Haitian protest posters to design an introductory diagnostic for the postcolonial course.

Me: Ohh… (wishing I had thought of it first)

And I got my wish, because Big A seems to have some awesome pedagogical ideas--but only in *my* dreams :).

_

Passage

You help us all into the box.

It is shaped like a coffin.

We are to leave for Mars.

They say 

That Earth will be uninhabitable.

We are to lie inside

this box,

that is like a coffin,

for three days.

 

It takes that long to get to Mars.

 

For five hours I try 

to teach the children

to say,“uninhabitable.”

Their mouths fail to shape this noisy word.

 

I think about the

impossibility

of keeping 

the two-year-old quiet

 

or still. 

Three days.

I think of the improbability

of saving the child with Asthma.

 

I say, 

I’ll stay 

here on earth with our children.

Underneath sacrifice,

Artifice.

 

The anxious place 

of silence

in my deep 

and small space.

_ 

Asides

 

In a dream

I took

(my husband)

 

(to)

your apartment

 

looking for

proof

of

(a different) life

 

all the pictures

you had

were of your brother

 

But you’d saved

(a colony of chittering mice

for) me

_

Actually, intellect

Last night I dreamt I was at a party with Tom Stoppard. 

Um. Actually, I was married to him and he was alternately showing me off, arm-candy style, while also patronizing me in an arch, I-can-only-describe-it-as-British way. I, correspondingly, alternated between blase indifference and intense irritation leavened with the odd moments of begrudging astonishment at his always breathtaking wit.

At some point in our private conversation (albeit conducted in the presence of a highly interested audience), he told me that theater was sometimes "converse prose," and I woke up clutching that strange phrase like a talisman rubbed raw.

When I told Big A, he said, 

Well, you've always been good at crushing on elderly intellectuals.

I wonder how intellectual I look when my mouth is hanging open.

__

The 25 things meme

Today's post was easy, lifted straight from my Facebook exercise of yesterday. Try it; it's interesting to see what comes up when you let your mind wander...

1. Culturally, I've always been something of an outsider/diasporan all my life. Even when i was an Indian living in India, i was of the Telegu diaspora in a Tamizh state.

2. I've been engaged twice as many times as i've been married. And i've been married more than once.

3. I used to be terrified of the paranormal. Then one night (which in my melodramatic, adolescent state i no doubt termed "a dark night of my soul") i faced my terrors down in the dark with a stray wolf for company, and some unexpected, nearly drunk college kids in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

4. Before anorexia was widely diagnosed in India, i was anorexic for three years out of a sense of exacerbated solidarity with the human condition in general and famine in Africa in particular. I started to put on weight again out of vanity. This is counter to most anorectic case histories and incredibly bathetic.

5. I don't think i really understand that i can control my monetary status. When i have it, i spend it; when i don't have it, i don't. I have been well to do and i have been fairly poor. I cannot imagine being wealthy.

6. My sister is my rock. We share a shorthand of memory and linguistics. And unconditional love.

7. My parents claim that they never find any but their own kids (that's me and my sister) cute, sweet, virtuous, etc. On the contrary, I haven't met a kid i didn't find fascinating.

8. I have memories of my dad helping my mom wax off her underarm hair, but my parents deny this. But i remember the horrible chemical smell.

9. My earliest recurrent dream since i was around three involves me running down a flight of stairs holding in my hand a spindle that grows as it rolls around in my hand. I'm not frightened by this dream, mostly repulsed. I began wondering recently given the phallic nature of the dream symbols if some adult male had exposed himself to me when i was a child.

10. I used to have really thick hair and a maid used to help me wash it twice a week. My husband thinks this is hilariously privileged.

11. My mother told me once that even if God himself told her so, she wouldn't believe that my dad could have an affair. I was so impressed by the trust she had in my dad. Until she added, "He really hates to spend money."

12. My father claims that the most beautiful women he has ever seen are his wife and daughters. He's not right, of course; but he's not fibbing about how he really believes it.

13. I want to be able to raise my kids to be happy, loving, confident people who will make a difference in the world.

14. When i was little, unsolicited soothsayers told me that (a) my son would be as beautiful as the young Lord Murugan [true] (b) that he would change the world. [i hope.] They didn't say anything about my daughter. But i know she's beautiful and hope she changes the world too.

15. I would be happy if my daughter chose to be lesbian. I think that heterosexual unions come with embedded hierarchical differences that are difficult to negotiate and impossible to overcome.

16. I used to be a near omnivore. I've eaten goat's hooves and tongue and i *enjoyed* eating goat's brains (egh!!) as a kid. Now i'm on the road to veganism. (O chocolate, why must you have dairy in it?) (And while we are at it, why is there no good soy cheese?)

17. I worry at any putative (or imaginary) harm that may befall my babies. If i had one superpower, it would be to make it so all the kids in the world were fed, healthy, and happy.

19. I can listen to my parents' stories all day and all night. And i can argue with their politics all day and all night too. When i visit my parents i like to climb into the space between them and listen to stories of their childhood.

20. The level of marital discourse between me and A is infinitely infantile. I cannot imagine either of us living without the other. I can cry thinking about how much *he* would cry if something were to happen to me.

21. I seem to have incredible good fortune in landing awesome mothers-in-law.

22. I went through two or three paperbacks a day as a kid. I read de Sade, Joe Orton, and a lot of Martin Amis when i was thirteen. It was in hardback and my parents didn't investigate. Now, thoroughly grown up, I sometimes still read Enid Blytons.

23. I'm confused by why it is "thoroughfare" and not "through-fare" when clearly it refers to passing through and not to being thorough.

24. Are we there yet?

25. When i yell, "family conference" it usually involves everyone piling into bed to snuggle.

I thought i would dream about the dead bird

I didn't dream about the dead bird. 

But i kept on and on thinking about it. Because although i try not to believe in signs and portents, my attempts at rationality disappear when there's a very sick baby in the house. 

Long ago, before i had--or even thought about kids of my own--i knew a Tamizh teacher who told me that she got pregnant after/because a house sparrow built a nest inside her house. And a couple of years ago, i even blogged about how house sparrows were trying to nest in our home, but i didn't think about any connection until i was well and truly pregnant with Baby A. 

So now we are at the point where i have a very sick baby lying face down on my chest and a dead house sparrow lying on the window sill with its legs curling upwards pathetically. And i keep on returning to that equation and assuming the worst. Later on, my mother part coaxes, part bullies me past this image. 

My mom: Did Big A dispose of the bird?

Yes.

Oracle Mom: I think that means you've just rid yourself of any danger stalking Baby. 

I'll take it.

FTW Mom: Also, remember that your first house sparrow didn't actually nest or hatch in the house. It wanted to, you chased it away, and you still had a baby.

I love her. And i have to admire the way she can turn anything on its head with the best contemporary theorists.

_

He dreams of lesbians

I woke up extra early this morning to call college admin in England and intuiting my absence in our bed, Big A's subconscious threw up this dream:

For some undeterminable reason* i was mad at him so i invited all the lesbians i knew over for a huge party and served vegan tomato-spinach soup. So that when Big A turned up wanting to eat some Honey Bunches (HB being his favorite cereal) there were no bowls to be had! The lesbians had taken all the bowls! It made him feel very unloved! Waa!

This kept me giggling all day because i would keep flashing back to this woebegone look on his face when he was telling me that "but there were no bowls!" 

And i really don't want to get into the gritty analysis of what "Honey Bunches" and "bowls" imply in the context of the much feared "lesbians." And if you're thinking this has something to do with this--Just. Don't. Even go there.

_

* And of course i resourcefully (and ever so usefully) asked him *what* he had done in his dream to make me so mad at him. Because i'm so much more rational these days and don't get mad at him anymore for stuff he did in *my* dreams. 

_

I have an Obama dream

I woke up when Big A leaned over me to say Good Morning to the baby (who, btw, who stares at me every morning silently, with cannibal-level passion.)

I had a dream about Obama, says I.

Big A pounces: was it a sex dream?

Kind of--I didn’t have sex with him, but my friend T was trying to get him to have sex with her younger sister N. Oh, and also, we were all at the big seaside hotel and no one seemed to recognize him as the presidential candidate at all, except for politically savvy me. What I really liked was that he had two balconies: reportedly one reserved for looking at the sea and the other one for drying his towels--very bright man that. Vote!

_

Fried Eyeball

A splash of boiling oil to the right eye. Excruciating. Pain.
Big A gave me some Erythromycin goop that helped immediately and thanks to percocets I’ve been having dreams with incredible parades of long-ago, long-lost friends.

Friday Update: Saw the doctor who says I’m ok, won’t go blind, and don’t even need glasses yet. (sigh on that last one : / )

Friday night update: Awesome how the body heals--the burn mark on my eyeball has completely disappeared! Still *bleeping* hurts everywhere else though.

_

Happy Husband Day

I dreamt last night that my sweet, sweet mother-in-law threw me a party and baked me a cake and the glittery chocolate frosting on the cake said, “Happy Husband Day.”

So when I crawled back into bed at 9 (a.m.! Don’t judge!) to wake Big A, I told him about it, and declared today Happy Husband Day. He was super sleepy, but nevertheless mildly pleased, and he then started making lame-o, low-key requests such as-- “I want five more minutes of sleep,” “I wish my phone was charged” etc., until I had to spell it out for him.

Ummm, Hello? It’s Happy Husband Day. Kinda like Happy Birth-Day. So i'm pretty certain it’s actually MY day, ok? Then I gave him the list: Cake, party, presents...

He was asleep before I got to the messenger bag I really, seriously, desperately need. (Know this: An outsize Canal Street knock-off Balenciaga will give you shoulder pain. I lived and learned. Hopefully, you've learned without pain of your own.)

_

AlternaWriting

At the end of a women’s studies seminar in 1999, my friend Susan Stone told me that I absolutely should read The Little Princess. It’s not the kind of thing I ever remembered to reserve at the library, but recently, I found a copy at The Strand that I picked up for under two dollars and then couldn’t put down.

The novel is pretty precious--after all it’s by the same Frances Hodgson Burnett who wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. But there's plenty of dross of a cultural nature that i found extremely interesting--the titular character comes from India (she’s the daughter of a British colonial officer) and there’s an Indian butler, Ram Dass, who has a fair amount of agency in the latter half of the novel.

Also, I guess that I was subconsciously hooked (!SPOILER AHEAD!) to the plight of the motherless child who suddenly loses her beloved and doting father to illness. Because at some point in the night these words emerged:

Now although you may believe that Sara’s father had died and perished in the forests of India, in truth, he was biding his time in order to re-enter his beloved daughter’s life at an opportune moment. Only the contemplation of her jubilance allowed him to rein in his impulse to present himself to her at once.

And so the next day, I continued with the rest of the novel quite optimistically.

Until I reached the end of the book and the child's father, kind of obstinately, stayed dead.

And then I realized that I must have dreamt that buoyant passage.

I wonder how much of my reading I habitually morph into a shape that is more agreeable to me without realizing it at all.

_____________________________________________
Although my subconscious is continually playing wordy tricks on me, I’m somewhat mollified by the passable imitation of Burnett that it accomplished.

_