Ripping the Veil

“The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” (~A. E. Housman)

I yearn to write something meaningful; something simple and translucent. Something that shines like mica on the reddish brown Jharkhand dust.

What I feel, though, is despair. Wherever I look, the bad guys ---the greedy, corrupt, evil—have me by the throat. I just looked up citizenship requirements in Vanuatu. This, after 54 years in this country. Of course, that is as incomprehensible as migrants crossing convulsive bodies of water, land and space, starving, dehydrated, and sick only to be criminalized and catapulted into another manufactured hell.

I read today that the authorities are proposing cutting off aid to families where one parent is undocumented. I understand that over five million children live in such families.

I got lucky in this world. Really lucky. It was simply that. Luck.

Lucky to not know hunger, feel cold in winter, suffer the stifling summer heat. To be educated and speak English, still the most-spoken language in the world, fluently.

It just happened. I won at the craps tables in this life. I didn’t have to think about the Darien Gap.

I don’t live on a sliver of land that is bombarded daily, where more children have died than anywhere else in the world over the last few years.

I meet with children of Holocaust survivors and we say the same thing. The killing must stop. I don’t think we are heard.

I’m about to start lapping my final stretch. At seventy-five, I’ve outpaced my entire family and my grandparents on both sides. Though I feel physically fine, it would be good for my financial spreadsheet if this molecular construction, my life, ended. There, I’ve said it, the truth of the matter. The calculus of a modern life. Can my savings outlive me?

The world, though, spins in unfathomable ways. It’s never all one way or another. In the shadings between darkness and light are dazzling flashes. Jafar Panahi winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year for It Was Just an Accident and returns to a hero’s welcome in Iran, a country that had jailed him and banned him from making films. And, Banu Mushtaq’s Booker-winning Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories, written in Kannada about Muslim women as central characters, and translated by Deepa Bhasthi. You have to be from South Asia to understand the import of this. Muslims in India, though numbering over 211 million, and being the third-largest Muslim population in the world, are discriminated and marginalized daily in today’s India. As are the Dalits, in a caste-obsessed society. Rage spills over in public places and bares its deadly teeth shocking no one. A few days ago, in western India, a man was killed for addressing a tea-seller’s son as beta (my boy) because the man was of a lower caste and had overreached his allotted station. You can get immune to this.

Where is this post going?

My younger self always felt that the possibility of effecting observable change for the better was within reason. What could be changed if I put my shoulder to the larger effort was not something to ponder and debate but to DO. A question in my late teens one year was “What will you say you did when the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) marched?” Of course, you know my answer. Except the PLA never formed and didn’t march but many across the urban and rural topography especially of eastern India were shredded without much fanfare.

Growing older was also a dance of the seven veils. Covering up insecurities, fears, missteps, disappointments, and manufactured entitlements. Addictions and obsessions are often part of the veiling wardrobe. To know oneself; to accept oneself was the way to the rustling green grass pastures of serenity.

To know oneself seemed a throwaway desire. To know what I came into this world with. The genetic disposition. The reflexes and innate behaviors. Then the learned behaviors. Riding a bicycle; learning how to swim; safeguarding myself in face of danger. Without getting into a long-winded summary of behaviorism and nature versus nurture schools of thought, the key question for me now is:

“Why am I the way I am?” What’s genetic; what’s learned; what were the factors that solidified my behavior in this world?

The search for this self-knowledge fills me with terror . As we know, the first five years of human life congeals the cognitive, emotional, social development. By age 8, it’s all over. We take our personal arsenal of responses to the world and make the best we can. I, of course, didn’t sit and think about my self-deceptions aka armor.

The terror now is that the family I grew up in, which had the most profound impact on shaping my behaviors, is gone. It’s a complicated set of relationships. Nothing that anyone reading this post would be unfamiliar with. I might have to see them in a different light and will my deceptions to date overwhelm me? There’s no way to tell, except to get to that spot.

So, the last lap of my life is possibly the most important of my life.

“With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life. There never was a person who could so easily be made happy. Especially someone who writes without ceasing, and moreover never anyone who has failed so persistently and senselessly amid such happiness.
  Write until your eyes close, or the pencil falls from your hand, write without wasting a second or thinking about what and how it should sound; write from a feeling of untapped life that has become so huge that it is like a massive mountain gathering inside of you; write without setting up a hundred different plans and restrictions, and with the danger that it will not last, and the danger that it will fall to pieces; write because you are still breathing and because your heart, which is probably already diseased, still beats; write until something from the mighty mountain of your life is carried away, since an entire nation of giants could not carry it all away; write until your eyes close forever; write until you choke to death.”

(~ Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death; 1962 entry)

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PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED