entering yet another phase, and a new project... 6 months later / one year later

I restarted some kind of work today, on a new project, and by coincidence this happened almost exactly 6 months after we came out of 14 days of isolation / quarantine due to dad's covid infection in January. 

These 6 months have been interesting. I had suspended all work over these months. This partly came about from the fact that a couple of weeks after we came out of isolation / quarantine, I ended up getting a slew of strange health issues over Feb-March-April - old issues undergoing some modifications and new issues. I am pretty sure I never got covid, although I could have been asymptomatic... I never got tested for a complex set of reasons related to my role in taking care of dad and not knowing who could step in instead of me. Anyway, I had isolated at home with dad and his nurse (who stayed with us almost 24-hours at the time) and so my being covid positive or not did not particularly matter since I was not going to infect anyone else. The nurse tested negative, he knew I had not tested myself, and he and I took many precautions around each other, and he took major precautions so that he does not catch anything from dad. But I digress. The point is that the health issues that I faced over Feb-March-April had nothing to do with covid, and probably had to do with physical and mental exhaustion and stress I faced due to everything that had unfolded over the previous few months, topped off by dad getting covid. 

Having turned away more and more from allopathy medicine over the past some years, I dealt with all of these health issues without any kind of medicines, through the guidance of some fantastic folks at The Health Awareness Centre (THAC) in Mumbai. In the process I committed to better understanding my body, dis-ease (the way THAC approaches the notion of disease) and health & well-being - understanding these both intellectually and experientially. It has been a most interesting journey, one which continues because while many of those health issues have been sorted enough for me to re-engage myself on other things, the experience has re-oriented my life in some important ways, even as it has raised number of conundrums for me - from questions about the socio-economic privilege that makes it possible for me to follow this path (I can see that the dominant structures and consequent socio-economic inequality makes it more and more difficult, even impossible, for the less privileged to take such an approach towards dis-ease and health / well-being even if they are inclined to do so) to dilemmas around how to understand and deal with covid given that the western medical approach dominates almost all our understanding and actions around it (THAC has a different approach, one which I am still trying to understand, come to grips with, figure out what aspects of their approach I am confident of adopting and what I am not). 

Not just the last 6 months but the entire last year has been interesting, and might I add, completely unanticipated upheaval of sorts, not only due to the pandemic. The lockdown last April-May was the trigger to the changes in my life as it upended the housekeeping system at dad's place which had allowed me to live on my own, do my own thing, for 5-6 years. But there is no way of knowing how my life would have changed had the pandemic not happened because it just so happened that we began to see a new set of symptoms with dad around the same time, last May-June-July. Some really challenging symptoms appeared in the second half of December and I kind of lost it at the time, but thankfully many of the most challenging symptoms have since come under control. The point is that I don't know what I would have done, how my life would have changed, to deal with these changes in dad's condition in the absence of the pandemic. However, as I said, it all occurred around the same time. I moved to dad's place on June 2nd last year to take over the reins of the house and anchor his caregiving, throwing myself in the deep end without quite realising it... and thus began a difficult, confusing and illuminating journey for me in many many ways. 

On a mundane and lighter note this includes realizing that although I wasn't a morning person and had never been responsible for another person's stomach for 45 years of my life, things can change and I am actually capable of waking up at 6-6:30 am every single day and making breakfast for another person (for bit more than a year so far... remains to be seen how much longer I can do this). And this has been very good for me for it has disciplined me in a way that I did not think was possible. It also includes more profound illuminations about all kinds of things which I will not get into in any detail since I need more time to think and articulate them in words. But they include the relative ease with which I seem to be able to take on certain challenges. I am quite sure this is not an innate ease that I possess but one that has developed through irregular but more engaged meditation over the past several years and quite regular meditation since early last year (in fact the best thing that happened to me is that I was in a 10-day vipassana course between March 5-14, 2020, literally just before the lockdown happened). These illuminations also revolve around my relationships with the staff at home (the daytime nurse, the night-time attendant, the 8-hour house-help), dilemmas around these, and my struggles to let go of some of my habits (from living alone for so many years) and my personality traits, and find the energy to interact and care for them, share the house with them, adjust and accommodate the ups and downs of their lives. I am sure the difficulties, confusions and illuminations will continue in different measures. 

But meanwhile, in the last week, quite out of the blue, I suddenly felt I might be ready to reopen the work part of my life, taking on a project that I have been vaguely thinking of doing since few years. What this project is...well, I shall disclose it once it I make more sense of it, but let me throw out some keywords: Archive, Alternative histories, Ahmedabad, Urban Space / Spatial Restructuring. I started some structured thinking on the project today...and it certainly has promise. I do not intend to take on work outside of this project, given the current context of living with dad and all that this entails; a desire and need to focus on my physical & mental health and the journey in relation to that; and my own interests which have been evolving over the past some years in multiple directions. With regard to these multiple interests, I want to note that towards the end of 2019 / early 2020, I had decided that I would stay unemployed for the most part in 2020 and spend the year traveling in Gujarat and the bordering areas of Rajasthan, MP and Maharashtra. I had hoped to understand food and water systems in this region and see what was happening on this front in terms of taking a more sustainable approach at the local / micro-local level. Simultaneously I had also intended to explore labour migration and migrant lives across the rural-urban by spending time in the migration source areas in this region. Of course this plan went for a toss with the pandemic, and is likely to remain tossed for the foreseeable future given my current predicament vis-a-vis dad. But I have had other evolving interests too, and this project has been one of them (the other interest that has emerged over the past few years is to try to write a novel, recently conceived as an illustrated novel...not sure I could call it a graphic novel.. but not making a project out of this yet). Although the idea around the Archive project has been vague, it has brewed a bit in my mind every now and then over the past few years. So I am going to give it a shot. And I hope it will nourish my mind and my soul while contributing something worthwhile around things I care about, and that have driven my research over the past 15+ years. 

Three and a half years later... oh, and a link to some water blogposts

Have not written a blogpost in 3.5 years. Time really does go by...

For those of you who read my last blogpost: I lasted at Dad's home with my "shedding" philosophy for barely 6 months before moving out! Its a long story that I am not inclined to share here. What I will say is that the struggle between wanting to be there - physically and emotionally - for an elderly ill parent, pursuing research and other stuff that interests me, and taking care of myself physically and emotionally seems to have defined my life (and me) since a few years now. Moving out of Dad's home was part of that struggle; it was an attempt to find a better balance between these three things. And while I have not found the perfect balance - who has? - it turned out to be a step in the right direction. 

So what have I been upto over the past three and a half years? Well, among many other things, I was involved in writing some blogposts on veditum a few years ago when some friends and I developed two water walks in Ahmedabad along the Sabarmati river. You can read these posts here, here and here. One of my plans for 2019 is to do such walks along various waterbodies in Ahmedabad - the river again, and also around number of lakes. If these plans are realised, you shall see a blogpost here.

Like the last post, I hope this post marks my return to the blog.

2 days short of 8 months

2 days short of 8 months. Since mom passed away. 

It is unbelievable in some sense that life has continued (for others… for me) after her. Some days it feels like it was just yesterday that she was hale and hearty, being her usual energetic, relentlessly talkative, always ready to listen to me, sometimes unbearably opinionated, self. Then some days it feels like it was just yesterday that she could barely sit up in bed – in fact, could not sit up, but would try to, breathing heavily, breathing with a noise?sound? that will remain in my head forever.

But much has happened in the past 8 months. Yes, things at work, a work and holiday trip to South Africa, but what stands out foremost for me in the progression of time over the past 8 months (2 days short of) are the shifts in my non-work life in relation to my dad and his home. My home now. Well, it was always my home, but I also had my own home. Which I do not anymore. Since more than a month now, I have been living with dad, and about three weeks ago I decided to give up my apartment and move in fully with dad. I will not dwell on why and what etc of that (in fact, in my experience, I do not have to explain why I have moved in with him – if at all, I had to explain why I was not moving in with him, because it was unfathomable to folks other than me, my dad, brother, sister-in-law and maybe 2-3 friends, why I would want to live by myself when he was alone and I was alone. Someone once asked me "don't you get along with your dad?" Um, I do, so what? Anyway, that is another story and I do not want to digress tonight). What I wanted to write of here is how this process (of moving in with dad) has forced me to shed: some of my stuff, mainly furniture; also a lot of furniture and other material possessions at my parents’ home in order to make space for my stuff. This is what this post is about (though it might veer off into something else): Shedding stuff. Shedding some of my private space. Shedding attachments. And the journey that I anticipate as a result of this shedding.

Tonight as I sit in my bedroom – what used to be the study in my parents’ home – I see the photo tackboard propped up on a table, waiting for me to decide what to do with it. 

It was where my brother and I had pinned up phone numbers of doctors, nurses, the place where one could get a oxygen cylinder, etc contacts w.r.t. mom's illness. I have not been able to throw away that stuff. I have often thought of doing so, and have gone to stand in front of it to start unpinning the stuff, but haven’t had the (not sure what it is.. courage? probably something else) to go ahead with it. So it has remained like this for all these months. Maybe I can’t do it because I am afraid that I will forget her illness, forget how much she suffered the last few months. I don’t know what it is… this holding on to the painful memories also, as if forgetting what she went through those last few months would be a betrayal of her. I don’t generally dwell on this though the thoughts and emotions flutter in and out of my head every now and again. I dwell on them mainly in such moments where decisions have to be made about shedding stuff. A cupboard from my apartment now occupies the wall where the tackboard used to hang. So temporarily it has been propped up on a table, but it cannot stay there for too long. Especially since I am a stickler for neatness (am I like my mother on that, I automatically wonder, but it could also be that in this, I am much more like my dad - I cannot be sure though. It is, after all, past midnight). In any case, the table needs to be moved to the living room. 

I also survey the bookshelf brought in from my apartment today evening. I have two blue bookshelves. Lovely ones I got made last year. The other one had to be placed in the adjoining bedroom, which is the room that has become S’s room. S is with us 24-hour to take care of the house and dad's domestic needs. But I digress – I shall perhaps write about S another time. What I was saying was the blue bookshelves. I was really keen to have both bookshelves in my room. After attempting all sorts of furniture arrangement scenarios in my head tonight, I realized that it cannot be done. This bedroom is also where my brother and sis-in-law have to squeeze into when they are here, and I want there to be maximum possible space for three people, so the lesser the furniture in the room the better. But before I digress again… The point is that this attachment to my bookshelves is something that I struggled with all evening. And then as I sat back on my bed and surveyed the room, I realized that my attachment was not just to my books and the blue shelves but equally to an image of what “my” room should look like, not just to me but also to others. In a sense this is not surprising and there is nothing wrong with it. We all arrange/design our interiors as a reflection of ourselves. But it is not just ourselves, is it? It is the image we have of ourselves, images that we are very attached to, images that we also seek to project onto others.

Over the past few weeks, I have often had the thought that maybe I was meant to question many of my attachments and many of the assumptions I have about myself, my needs and wants, etc. This sentence ("meant to") has the strange sound of destiny. I don’t mean it that way though, or maybe I do.

In any case, as I sit in a half-arranged room, I have this sense of starting a new phase of life, for I suspect there are new discoveries and learnings and transformations awaiting me. I don't expect it will be quite so easy. I crave solitude and quiet; I thrive on solitude and quiet. And living with a household comprising of not just dad, but also S, then dad's daytime and night-time male helpers, and a couple of daytime domestic workers who come in and out for various jobs, are not quite the ingredients for solitude. There are times when I am convinced I am in training to become a HR manager. There are moments when I frantically wonder whether I'll be able to cook a meal in utter silence for there is always someone around who wants to help or thinks they should be helping. Some months ago I had cooked a bit in this house and I had to shoo S out of the kitchen. It wasn't the same with the sense of a person lurking outside the kitchen. But maybe she and others will get used to my ways and I will learn to ignore the lurking. And I have to admit that there were days when the help was welcome, especially for cutting onions. Still, I like to cook alone, even when it involves cutting onions. 

As my mom's illness got worse, she would often tell me that you returned to Ahmedabad and that’s why you got stuck with our (her and dad’s) health issues. I think… I know… she felt bad about that. She always wanted my brother and me to live our lives independently – she did not want to tie us down, impose on us. It hurt her, I think, that her illness required us to put in so much of our time and energy. She was a proud woman not used to asking others, even her children, for support, even if she needed or wanted it. The most that she ever asked me really was to listen to her talk :) sometimes to get things out of her system. I am glad I could give her that sort of support when I was near and far, and I know that meant a lot to her. But during her illness, it was different and I did not always have the energy to deal with stuff and she could see this. Some of it had to do with other personal stuff in my life. I think I tried to tell her a couple of times that I really wanted to be there for her, and my lack of energy should not make her doubt this. But I don’t know how clear I was in communicating this to her. And anyway, she was thick-headed and it was difficult to dislodge certain thoughts from her head (yup, that was mom). In any event, I wish I could still convey to her that it is not about what happens in life and what we get “stuck” with. It is about the kind of journey we choose to make in the process. 

This blog has been dormant for way too long. Keeping the blog was something I truly enjoyed. As I survey this half-arranged room before switching off the lights, here's me hoping that all this marks my return to the blog, even as I shed, shed, shed…. (and I don't mean tears :))

The Three (adorable) Elders of Akola

Indu-foi with book and my winter topi

Kanu-kaka with the Indian flag

Ansu-foi in embroidery-mode

in her element

after a long year of fighting cancer and losing enough weight to make her compete with me on the thinness quotient, she is as energetic as ever. she wanted to push dad's wheelchair at the bird sanctuary even though devabhai and i were there to do that. we had to literally shoo her off from such pursuits.