2013
“If running is the
answer, then what is the question?” Ron wrote me, provocative as always, when I
told him I had taken to long-distance running.
To stay the course, you have to slow down your mind, turn it from outside
in, use your awareness to ease your body, even while pushing it. Running became
easier in 2013, and I ran 3 half-marathons, all at an even pace, and without
the fatigue of my first long run, in 2011, where I melted at the finish line.
Can I find more
lightness in running, more grace?
And in life?
There was grace in my
birth. India reminds you of your privileged circumstances every minute - when domestic staff do your laundry and your
dishes, when you see people cooking on the pavement outside the hospital in
which they hope a family member will recover.
For my son Kedar, I
pray the inheritance of grace doesn’t harden to a sense of entitlement. This
summer, we took him to Ladakh, to volunteer at government schools in the
remotest villages of the region. “This is the failure of the demographic
dividend”, I told him when we left Turtuk, where the children sat cross-legged on
gunny sheeting, the school’s only atlas was irretrievably locked in the
Principal’s cupboard, and science experiments would be just another remote
account in textbooks. “How can these children ever jump the great divide
between how you learn and they do?”
From the Nubra
Valley, we returned to the dusty, faintly hippie cosmopolitanism of Leh, where
smudgy cakes and stodgy Italian food were on offer, alongside Ladakhi momos and
roadside kebabs. On the last leg of our Ladakh trip, high above the cobalt
waters of Tso Moriri, we heaved our carcasses up to the snow at 16,000 feet,
and for the first time that summer, I felt reasonably fit. We were all
stretched, though, and Kedar said he had never been so exhausted in his life.
Yet, when we returned to Delhi, he said he would go back to Ladakh any time.
Earlier that summer,
Kedar had taken two flights and a long ferry ride out to Havelock Island, in
the Andamans, where he earned his Advanced Open Water Diving spurs. The shark
and the mating octopi he saw on the dive are among the highlights of his year.
His first major adventure without his parents. Letting go…
This was also the
second year I let go of my annual autumn trek.
With Pa’s condition frail, time away from the family seems an
indulgence. We had planned a short circuit around the base of Stok Kangri when
we were in Ladakh, but the freak June weather made us abandon our plans;
instead, we stayed in Leh, and watched the horrific images on television, as
the Chorobar tarn burst, washing away the Kedarnath settlement. The temple
still stands, and I hope the new settlement that comes up around it will be
more restrained, more aesthetic. On my first trip to Kedarnath in 1969, I was
exalted by its beauty, by a sense that it connected us into a cosmos of deep
velvety blue, lit by intense silver stars. Since then, I have watched with dismay
as it deteriorated into an ugly, plastic-littered slum.
In 2013, I made several
visits to Sangam Vihar, supposedly Delhi’s largest colony. At its northern
fringes, where it borders the opulent Sainik Farms, this settlement is becoming
distinctly middle-class, with 3-storeyed structures painted in crisp white
paint. Three kilometres deeper in, though, land dealers carve agricultural land
into hanky-sized plots which house more recent immigrants into Delhi. Joint
families of 3 generations sleep in one room, and spend the day on the narrow
lanes that grid Sangam Vihar. At the end of one such lane, we bought 150 square
feet of land for a man who has worked part-time at our home for over twenty years,
and seen two earlier home investments go sour. Three months after the papers
were transacted, and four little brick columns erected to mark the plot, it
became apparent Prakash would never find the money to build even the tiniest
hovel; in for a penny, in for a pound – I commissioned a local contractor to
build Prakash his home. The family was extremely happy, and the room, with an
attached loo, is larger than the one they currently rent, but a part of me felt
like I had forever condemned a family to a space that is really too small for
decent living. In India, you can put every dime you earn into lifting people
out of pitiable poverty. How much you do, and how you do it, is a function of
what we call ‘apni apni shraddha’, your
level of devotion.
Premila’s devotion is
to another patch of turf, in Satoli village, where we have had our mountain
home for nearly two decades. This is where we spent the first 6 years of our
life together, and Kedar grew from a freshly minted baby to a school-going boy.
This is where he learned to walk and talk, to swim in the tank shaded by peach
trees, and to put his favourite movies into our clunky desk-top computer. Over
the last 10 years, Satoli has seen a rush of second homes, and Premi’s
recurrent nightmare has been a row of town-houses overlooking our little patch
of heaven. Every year, we have put some money into buying pieces of the forest
behind us, and into stitching together the little holdings that make up the
meadow to our west. As our quilt of land grows larger, we feel more comfort in
the prospect of a peaceful return to Satoli.
That is still a few
years away – Kedar needs to finish school, and be guided into University and
beyond. My father’s retreat from the world is at the same time organic and distressing;
though my younger sister Kanika takes on the main responsibility of caring for
him, my presence supports her, and Kedar and Premi are two touch points for my
father, two lamps of light in his world that is increasingly clouded and
timeless. By the serenity of his mien, I like to believe that his clouds are
not threatening or obscuring, but vast cushions of comfort, intimations of the
eternity beyond.
Have a wonderful
2014.
