Of 2021, post covid healing, and capacity to dream
...for even in moments of despair, we need to and will build shrines of hope
2021 is inching towards its fifth month. I am too tired and dispirited to even say: when did that happen? For hasn’t the pandemic and the virus taught us that we are fools to believe that we are arrogant puppets controlling the strings and movements of time? Again and again, the only space we have right now is this moment. Only this.
I am writing here after over six months and they seem like a blur. I can’t remember how I saw 2020 out, just like I don’t remember much of last year. Did we go to the temple? Did I buy flowers? I must have eaten some dessert. I simply can’t remember. The last few months of 2020 had brought alternate personal blows and losses to me and I simply wanted to see out the year to a closure, neatly packing it in the attic of my life. As for the new year, mind you, I did not construct any impressive cathedrals of hope or longing for the forthcoming year: life had already made me too wary to do that. I built little shrines instead, of small, singular dreams, a yearning, a desire, something radiant and beautiful to infuse my jaded spirits with meaning. 2020 had not made lifeless ruins out of us yet: we were simply gardens waiting to be watered and breathed life into again.
So 2021 came and I gently began to put it together as and how I could. It was my husband’s 40th birthday a couple of days after the year began so we took ourselves to Benares, a city which he had been wanting to visit for years. Perhaps, apt in a time when mortality and life were in dialogue more deeply than ever - and where else could we be more present and aware of it than there? It was our first air trip during pandemic times (even calling it a holiday seemed a travesty) and I remember with trepidation flying before landing in the dusty, crowded melee of a city where no one was wearing masks. We walked along the flat jade green Ganga, fed migrating Russian birds Banarsi namkeen, munched on chaat, photographed kite-eating trees, heard a boatman’s longing for Doha, offered wishful flowers to the river (despite my mangled, bruised lack of faith), and merged into the watercolour ghats of the city.
I sometimes wonder at our bravado, the fact that we had somehow lulled ourselves into believing that we were insulated from and vigilant to the pandemic. Were we? Guilt layers hindsight, cobwebbing clarity and making it difficult to understand what we were actually thinking and believing at the time.
A month later, I boarded yet another flight to Dubai, where I met my family after having been separated from them for the longest gap in all this time: thirteen months. They had finally moved there from Muscat after over three decades and were beginning the arduous process of making it their new home. Despite every effort to the contrary, Dubai too now was a product of the pandemic, desperately glittering and yet, only showing glimmers of paled down excitement, desolation and darkness apparent nonetheless. Even the Burj Khalifa was a contemplative Ozymandias, wondering its scheme in diminished state of things.
For me, that time, the period of helping my family settle into their new home was marked by long, warm, solitary morning walks below a blue desert sky, surrounded by familiar and new flowers, by golden trumpet trees which I had never seen before in Dubai but whose appearance made me so glad. But then, I had always been a visitor for few days in the city I often described as Disneyland, migrating from one artificial reality to another, shopping or eating or consuming but never fully being present.
This time, I gazed into yellow hearted vermillion bougainvillea, saw berry-heavy trees sprinkle marbles of fruit on constellations of pebbles, mohawk-haired Eurasian hoopoes breakfast in lawns, birds feed on water and growing grain, finding homes in lovingly made birdhouses. I saw nests and gardens and homes and families. An empress cat looked down at me while a fox like dog elegantly offered its affection. I tried to embrace the sea here for what it was rather than thinking of its Oman cousin, which was unfortunately yet so near and still closed to me (the country has long been keeping its borders closed to hold the virus at bay). One morning, as I stood below a ivory blooming neem tree and a pink-ivory tinted bougainvillea bough, I allowed myself to embrace and accept all that I had been denying about Dubai for long.
And then I left Dubai and came back to India, preparing to start a new chapter in my life.
But covid caught me. Or I caught covid.
The experience still being fresh for me, still prodding me awake at nights, filling my sleep with odd, scuttling creatures of fear and disbelief, I will simply present these thoughts I wrote here on Instagram.
If I bottle too much in my head, squeezing and jamming every single feeling I am experiencing, the thoughts threaten to subsume me to the point of dissolution. Talking with dear friends, processing it on social media, writing poetry, anything is helping me walk down a street of healing while simultaneously nourishing myself and honouring my energy (easier said than done, I want to do everything and anything as if to put the horrible days behind me, my mind has always worked in this escapist way, to deny what has happened). Each step that I take matters; as much as my fear and anxiety threatens to take me backward and immobilise me, I know that I have to keep on walking. Each step leads me towards a different form of healing. I have seen and experienced enough of life by now to know that healing is and cannot be a linear process: it loops endlessly and endlessly and endlessly. It will reveal a gift one day; the other day, it will lead me back into corners and spaces that I thought I had long escaped from. But that too is another learning, a further expansion of understanding myself and the events that have led up to my life right now. And I am overwhelmed, utterly so by the love, compassion, support, warmth, and support I have received from my community: a community forged from affection and humanity. If I have despaired in weak moments for those who could and did not be there for me, I have to powerfully remind myself of the goodness of those who have prayed and blessed me and that I belittle their good spirits and hearts by focusing on those who did not have it in their hearts to think of me (should I be even thinking of these things? Or is it just human to feel so?)
So what now?
Can I tell you that I am daring to dream? In spite of the suffering and anguish and terror and horror that is befalling the world right now?
Can I tell you that I see myself below a friendly cluster of strong, green, healthy, tall trees - flowering, non flowering, it doesn’t matter? I see words, flowers, thoughts, secrets, colours surrounding me. I see a community: a community of women, breathing in fresh air, knowing that they are where they want to be, where they can dream of wanting to be what they want to be. Where we can nurture and be nurtured.
It is not a cathedral I am building. It is a shrine to myself and my dreams and yours.
I do not know what will happen of it. I do not know how it will happen.
But know this: if you wish to be part of that dream in any which way, please let me know. I will be waiting to hear from you. The dream may take months and weeks. But it will happen for sure.
In those moments, lying on the hospital bed, marooned on a desolate island by a frightening sea, both of them nameless in that time, I dreamed. And no matter what happens, no matter how relentless things become, I shall always do so. For a while, I had thought I had lost the capacity to dream: I did not have the right to dream anymore, I had forgotten how to dream. But no more of that.
This is it from me now, my dear readers. I shall gradually come back to this space with perhaps more coherent ramblings and notes. But for now, I wanted to speak from my heart, unadulterated, complicated, unvarnished. This has been a life altering experience for me and it is seeping into the bones of everything I am thinking of and doing and believing these days. And I wanted you to be part of it.
Cherish yourself and then, again. Cherish your dreams. Cherish your shrines. You matter and will always do.
Ending with a little ode to love I wrote yesterday as part of my healing process through what matters to me the most: words and images.
With much love,
Priyanka