One foot here and the other...

I guess I will be a wandering soul till the day I die.

I have always envied those who say I grew up in one place, went to one great school and made some life long friends. On the other hand, it seems like I was born with a suitcase already packed and all set to travel. All through my school years we were constantly shifting, so I was constantly saying bye to a lot many friends pretty frequently. So my list of life long buddies who have known me since my first tooth popped out is a big miserable zero.

But I love talking about my school days if ever someone asks me about it. From my earliest memory I have been travelling. I spent my kindergarten , stuck with a bunch of screaming toddlers in Dubai New Indian Model School. I was too petrified of 20 odd kids all simultaneoulsy bawling that I forgot to cry when my dad left me with them. Thats my first memory of my first school. 

For my first standard I got a new uniform and new bag and a new set of books and a new school in a new country! Vijayamatha convent at a small town in Chittur district in Palakkad was my next school. My only recollection of that year was getting into a jeep loaded with other tiny kids. Loaded would not begin to describe how many kids were stuffed into that jeep. Well the van lost a kid next year when I moved back to Dubai.

Second standard mom barely had barely unpacked the suitcases when the year got over and we came back to India due to the threat of the gulf war. I joined a new school in Palakkad. I stood out like a sore thumb here with my English speaking ways and inability to play the games that these girls were experts in. 

Two years later I was again on a flight bound to Dubai to a new school where I would spend the next 6 years. Std 5 - 10 at VIPS Dubai was a particularly long stretch for me considering the record so far. I loved that every year I was with the same set of people. But hated the fact that all the girls I liked where already in a gang since ages and I was always an outsider. However, I had some of my most wonderful years there and met some very lovely people. I lost some of my shyness during my fourth or fifth year which pretty much improved my over all situation.

Having given my tenth board exams I said bye to my friends at VIPS and moved back to India.Two more years and officially my school days were over. 

By now I was used to being different. I knew I would never truly be another face in the crowd. From the way I spoke to the kind of clothes I had, I was always odd one out. And finally at some point of time in life I let it be. I guess time had come, that I wanted to be different from others and my schooling helped me do that without me trying too hard. Those terrible teenage years that everyone keeps talking about missed me by a mile.

I am now a mutant in my native place. My name is a dead give away that I am a mallu. But I am ignorant of most of the old customs and traditions. I never go to sit on my grandparents knee and hear stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata. So I made my own stories. I know my mother tongue but gosh its a slippery one. I would rather speak in English. I do not know the malayalam months but I do love celebrating my birthday twice a year. The couple of years that I spent in Kerala finally made me fall in love with the saree, but I love it only in moderation. I am still to get over my allergy to any TV channel in Malayalam. I find Kerala beautiful, but Seattle is equally lovely.

 

I know I am not alone. There are millions like me who live outside their native place yet neither embrace their new place nor completely let go of their homeland. We are stuck somewhere in the middle. 

I would rather be the mutant in my state than be anywhere else in the world. If someone asks me where are you from I give the answer I am supposed to give. But I don't call any place home. The only constant thing in my life has been my family. They are my roots. If my family choose to move to the Himalayas tomorrow I guess my internal compass would point to the mountain tops as my home.

The bottom line is now I love having been to so many places and seen so many people. My perspective has changed so much after all this travelling and it continues to change the more I see of the world. I don'd mind being the wandering soul anymore. But would I want the same shifting sands for my children? I am undecided yet.

At home, on top of each room we have stacks of old, broken suitcases from all our years of travel. They are reminders to the fact that my life has been like the cut kite in the sky. I go where the wind blows. 

Eeny teeny woman

Story told by a 11 year old to her 8 year old sister.

Eeny teeny woman lived under the earth. Being such a small person she had of course weeny teeny features. Her face was very small with eeny teeny eyes and her hands and feet also were so eeny teeny that you couldn't see them unless you looked carefully. She had an eeny teeny house for herself which she was very comfortable in. The eeny teeny house had several eeny teeny rooms but eeny teeny woman had no other family so she was all alone in that eeny teeny house.
The eeny teeny house was located at the end of an eeny teeny street. There were eeeeny teeeny streetlights on either side. There were eeny teeny supermarkets near the eeny teeny house so eeny teeny woman never had to walk far on her eeny teeny shoes.
Everyday morning eeny teeny woman would put on her eeny teeny dress and pick up her teeny weeny umbrella and teeny weeny bag and set out to the market. Her companion was her teeny weeny dog who followed her everywhere. She would go shopping and buy some eeny teeny vegetables and cook them in her eeny teeny kitchen. Her eeny teeny friends would come over once in a while to talk or they would call each other over their eeny teeny telephones. Eeny teeny woman was very content with her life.

If  you thought that this story was right up your alley, then either you are an eight year old or someone with the maturity of an eight year old. I take that back. In this Harry Potter era the entire world seems to be loving fantasy stories, myself included.

Anyhow my sister loved these eeny teeny woman stories! I remember for a long time she would always ask me at bed time for an eeny teeny woman story. Initially it was fun making up stories. My ground rules were , start ever line if possible with the words "eeny teeny " and add in as many inconsequential eeny teeny stuff to the story and hey presto, a story that would last 3 - 4 minutes. And obviously I would always stretch my eenies and teeneies as far i could. However there is only so much that a lonely old woman could do so later on new eeny teeny characters came into the picture like the eeny teeny guitar man with his guitar and so on. I think on one rare occasion someone from eeny teeny land even made their way up to the surface.

Thankfully this phase of our lives didnt last long. Either I ran out of eeny teeny stories or mom told us to not talk anymore in bed. How the eeny teeny saga ended is a mystery to me. And I am equally confused on what I must have told her all those nights that had her asking for more stories the next day.

Years later my sister brings home a book which she says she liked. Its by a new author Eoin Colfer and revolves around a boy and fairies who live below the earth! I read it and I like it too. However I only recently made the connection between this and my literary escapades over two decades ago. Our stories have really nothing much in common other than a few small ideas. Leaves me to ponder, if I had fine tuned eeny teeny woman, added a few guns, a few gizmos, a fight scene, or a love angle maybe I would have been the Eoin Colfer and he would have been blogging about his stories and how they were similar to mine:)

PS - Once and only once I made the mistake of asking my sister to tell me a story one night when eeny teeny woman refused to budge an inch. I will save her story for another post.

Life is not a roller coaster

For a long time I had kept this quote on my office messenger window - "
"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'WOW What a Ride!'"
the source of this is unknown..


I used to believe in this... Life was certainly hectic when I was working. Work, friends, family, cooking, exercise etc my time just flew past so quickly. But just as the wear and tear was beginning to show, I married. And nothing has been the same ever since.


Since my wedding day one year back life has been a succession of one black hole after another. And we seem to be falling in all of them in succession. There is no roller coaster of a ride anymore, its more of a slow merry go round which just never stops.


Black hole number one was when we waited for 7- 8 months for a visa for me to join Reni here in the U.S. Fate was certainly very inventive and original in the number of twists that happened in those 7 - 8 months.
Imagine handing over the keys of your car an hour before you were supposed to leave and then coming back to office to find out you were going to be stuck there for another 6 months. Well that happened to me. Funny thing was I needed those extra six months to get the dealers to give me my money in return for selling my car.


But coming to the main issue, my visa to enter USA. I pushed matters from India and my husband pushed matters from US and ultimately when we were completely fed up, I was granted a visa. 
No that is still not the complete story. I forgot to mention that when the interviewer from the consulate congratulated me on getting my visa I handed her another paper which said I had to get my passport notarized. So instead of sending my passport to get my visa stamped she handed it back to me. Time froze that instant as I realized that I had just landed myself in another mess.


And a mess it was. Chasing people all over Chennai, running up and down stairs papers in hand trying to find someone who would take my passport back to the consulate. Turned out that this someone was right next to the passport office. But he was on his lunch break when I finally reached him. So while he took his lunch break I gave a liberal dose to my hubby on the phone telling him this was all his fault. Poor guy had called me to console me. Guess what I got no more calls from him that day. At the end of the hour tired, hungry and baked in the Chennai sun I handed him my passport.


No more surprises and one week later I got my passport back with the visa stamped and with a lot of good wishes I landed in the US on April mid of 2010.


So finally we were together and living plain ordinary days filled with nothing. Looking back now those days were too few because barely 2 weeks after I reached he filed his visa extension.
PLONK!!! You guessed it. Next black hole. 
For the next three months conversations in the house went like this.


Me : " Honey the sofa is almost brown in colour. Its really dirty and its stinks too. Lets buy a cover for it."
Reni : "Let my visa extension happen, then we will see. Cant risk spending too much and then losing all this when my extension gets turned down."


Me : "Honey the TV screen has turned yellow. Time to throw this and get a new one" 
Reni : "Let my visa extension happen."


Me : "Honey ...What do you say to... Oh! why bother I will tell you this after the visa gets extended."


We patched things up, covered up the stains, liberally poured room freshener over the stinky spots and stopped watching TV.


Today finally the visa petition has moved ahead one stage.
You rejoice thinking that perhaps we are moving to the happy end of the story.  But no, we are not the happily ever after kind of people. We are obviously Gods favorites. 
The next stage that the visa application has moved to is "request for evidence". This basically means that someone somewhere is not convinced that we need to stay here for some more time and that we need to provide proof to convince them that we need to be here.


So the originally green sofa remains grey - brown, the TV remains switched off and we remain Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods.


Adios...

Irony of life

A bit about me. In all honesty.

Imagine the irony of my life...

My teachers told me - I write well
I didnt say my mom wrote about three fourths of that essay.

Was I good?
My mom's help didnt last long
And I had to keep up appearances at school.
So I continued to write...
My friends said I wrote well.
I am not sure whether I do.

But I know, I can write better than I can talk
I can spill my deepest, darkest secret in any email, letter or poem
And believe me , the words gush out.
But I hate writing for the very fact that
I am not ready to reveal too much about myself.
Not yet.

Its not like I have the paparazzi hounding me.
I am no star.
I have stuff to say
But do I want you to hear them?
I have opinions to air
But do I want you to judge them?
I have tears to shed
But I dont want you to see them.
So I laugh and smile a lot
Which hides the real me very well.

But the strain of hiding what needs to be out in the open -
Catches up to me in unbelievable ways.

A pin drops and I cry
But the tears dry up easily
Coz they are not for the pin [imagine crying for a pin!]
It was for some memory some pain which I had stored away in my cupboard
Which let itself loose.
I yearn at times for someone to understand me
But most times I rather that people misjudge me.
I dont want to correct your opinion about me
But I do want to be liked.

I might not make sense to anyone out there
But to me I make perfect sense!

So this marks the beginning of my constant struggle with myself.  To write or not to write is just one small snowflake in the avalanche!
The ruins of the past ( read old blogs which never took off) warn me that this is going to be another crash landing. Fingers crossed and hoping for the best.