A Wedding Long Ago

When my Jalagam grandmother married my Gadadoss grandfather, she shone like one of the gleaming, granite statues from the temple come to life. Beautiful, everyone sighed.


Of my grandfather with the famed, nearly-white Gadadoss skin, they say he looked like a red yam.


Though only sixteen at her wedding, grandmother was tall and lissome, nearly grandfather‘s height.


The next year, to everyone’s dismay, she grew two inches taller than grandfather.

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My father's marriage and me

My father was supposed to marry a princess--the daughter of the Raja of Ettayapuram. When he paid the palace a visit with his family, they found her very short. Then a family friend took them to meet my mother. Her family weren’t “Poligars” or even Padma Velama, but the girl (my mom! my mom!) was tall, lovely, and college-educated. Amma offered my dad some coffee and he promptly fell for her. He also got too fond of retelling this story with the punchline, “Who needs a princess when you have a queen?” Reasons why I’m glad dad didn’t marry the Ettayapuram girl.

• I might have turned out short.
• I love my mom etc.
• The Ettayapurams got their titles for betraying Kattaboman and kissing British ass.
• Although a few generations later they did become Subramania Bharati’s official patron, so perhaps they kind of redeemed themselves.
• Let’s just stick with i might have turned out short.

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Can’t! Won’t! Shan’t!

There will be no posts for a while. I’m poised on a rolling juggernaut (miscellaneous deadlines) and it’s, sadly, going to be impossible to post.

I do want to thank you all for checking in on me. And you unknown but super regular readers from Lemont, Richmond, Ithaca, St. George, Clark, and Berkeley, thanks for coming back again and again :).

If you’d like to know when I start posting again (in a month--or two--or so) drop me a line--my addy is pocobrat@gmail.

Much love; be well.

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Once Upon a Time

Li’l A: So… Dad’s working tonight?

Me: Umm-hmm

Li’l A: So… can I sleepover in your bed?

Me: Nooooo!!!!

Li’l A: But why?!!!!

Me: Your stuffed animals stink!

Li’l A: I’ll sleep on Dad’s side.

Me: Oh. Ok, then.

12 hours later.

Big A: Will someone tell me why the pillows smell like goat?

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Pan’s Labyrinth

“It is only a word, only a word,” says the mother in Pan’s Labyrinth urging her daughter to call her new stepfather “father.”

But of course, nothing is merely a word. Not the word “father” And especially not when Vidal, the stepfather in question, can be patriarchal but is never fatherly. Words have to fit.

Although many things are, admittedly, beyond words… sumptuously Gothic fairytales, say--or intensely re-created histories of fascism. Pan’s Labyrinth manages juggles both brilliantly, and frighteningly. With unforgettable visuals. With inimitable words. With terrifying simplicity. And unreality. Who’s to say that a fascist tyrant pulping a peasant’s face with a heavy glass bottle is less fantastic--or, indeed, more gruesome--than a mantis that changes into an (ugly) fairy?

There is nothing simple in Pan’s Labyrinth. Even the beautifully pure and vulnerable face of its protagonist, Ofelia, verges on pubescence; is clued to a forthcoming awareness of imminently sexual fauns; is limned with a presciently adolescent disobedience and distrust of authority. And everything is serious. In fact--and this is extraordinarily atypical of an experience I count enjoyable--there wasn’t *one* humorous moment in it. Which is perhaps why despite the duality of the resolution, I reacted, with horror and dissatisfaction, purely to the ending that seemed more authentic to reality, and discounted the other.

Pan’s Labyrinth interweaves images and texts from a variety of childhood images and texts--The legend of the cunning Pan and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and C.S. Lewis; Ofelia’s strangely Alice in Wonderland-ish headband, pinafore and frock, and her Princess and the Goblin ensembles of nightgown and robe. The cumulativeness of this collective familiarity has the effect of nostalgically speaking to our personal childhoods. And so the loss of the child, prophetically named Ofelia (Ophelia), hurts. It recalls our loss of individual childhood, of security we once enjoyed within the fabric of family and certainty, of our inadequacy in the face of inexorable events controlled by mammoth historical fates. Or inscrutable fauns.

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SOLACE

Have to say

As the lies grow
Wide-lipped and
Tipped with white

Have to say

Listening
To new stories and
Those gone missing

Have to say

Say:
Everything will go your way
Okay?

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IN THE ROUGH

(Flood)

Perhaps oysters
String suffering
In peace.
Luminously.
As pearls.


(Blood)

Like pleasures
You press
Into my skin
Where they parade
Proud as tattoos.

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