A belated letter from June, in July.
A recovering perfectionist makes peace with missing her self-imposed timelines.
This was bound to happen.
A clash between the long and varied list of things I want to write about. The time needed to do sufficient (and not superficial) justice to them.
A typically runaway month, that didn’t allow the twain to meet.
If this reads like a set of disjointed bullet points, sans the dots - that’s exactly how my June was lived out in staccato bursts of intensity at work, some travel and very mindfully scheduled socialising, for a bit of levity and balance.
These days, ‘mindful’ and ‘intentional’ are among my frequently used words. I use them like a sieve to choose the things I do, eat, read, watch. The places I opt to go to, the people I make the time to meet, or speak with.
All in the pursuit of being able to steal away some time for myself, instead of tying it up in unnecessary knots to please someone else or accommodate plans that aren’t my own. And yet, being able to meet my self-imposed schedule of posting here every couple of weeks, has ended up being a casualty.
In order to write well, I earlier felt I needed the perfect laptop with the softest keys. The perfect writing corner, with the right ratio of elbow span and light. If this looked out on a vista of trees or a body of water, that wouldn’t just be perfection - it would be heaven. And, of course, then I would write speedily, the letters flowing in an energetic rush from my fingers tapping on the keys, to form wise and witty words on the screen.
I am loathe to admit that despite the manifestation of this auspicious combination of things, I still struggle to write. To even begin and to continue, later.
Perhaps the real culprit that holds me back, is not the perfect desk space then, but an expanse of available headspace. In recent years, finding the time and will to clear a path to write through an endless litany of to-dos at work and home, feels as futile as chopping one’s way through the Amazon with a kitchen knife.
This weekend, I finally have the holy matrimony of both - a brief bubble of time away from Mumbai in a friend’s breathtakingly beautiful home awash with Goa’s scintillating shades of monsoon green, and a corner to write from, that is any writer’s dream come true. My gracious host, Ajay didn’t waste any time after I’d settled in to ask me how my writing was going.
I smiled back at him with a degree of embarrassment, mentioning this abandoned draft. A couple of hours later, with the sound of the rain as the perfect background score, here I am confronting my tardiness while typing on without chastising myself for missed deadlines or a flow of consciousness piece like this, devoid of any real theme or structure.
Writing is muscle memory, like cycling and swimming are. Whenever I am doggedly regular with my morning pages, I write in an unbridled manner, my thoughts looping and swirling like the elaborate, endless whorls I make when I am testing the flow of ink in an old fountain pen, refilled after months of neglect. Writing for an audience, to be read by another makes me more conscious, maybe even cautious, of how I frame my thoughts into words.
Between the first few paragraphs of this newsletter and the last two, almost all of July has gone by. And as I cast back at the past few weeks of both June and July, I remembered something about connection and presence from many years ago.
Someone entered my world for a brief moment at a pivotal time, leaving me with a lifetime’s worth of gratitude. It was a typically hot July, that summer. My youngest uncle, most beloved to my father, had passed away suddenly. For his last rites, I travelled from Delhi to Gorakhpur, a town in north India, where my uncle used to live. The house was overcrowded with grieving relatives and I was farmed out to the home of Mr. and Mrs. B - my uncle’s friends, to sleep at during the nights.
Their son, R, was exactly my age, only a month older. He was home for the summer break from an engineering college he studied at, down south. Over a week of spending the nights with this family, I was drawn by R’s warmth, his effortless humour, and generous affection. We spoke about anything and everything, our contrasting worlds only making me more curious to know about his. He turned 22 while I was there, and it felt special to bring in his birthday.
R and I kept in touch over the next few months. He was preparing to leave for America to do his Masters there, but he made the time to write to me. His letters were brief and frequent, speaking of the impact our conversations had on him. He was thoughtful and sent picture postcards from a trip to Pondicherry, following it up with a Speed Posted envelope containing a tied and dyed silk scarf from there.
I wasn’t able to forget him either. I had been unwell when I met him, deeply immersed in my third year of treatment, and surgeries for a malignant tumour on my left knee. The joy of getting to know him, had temporarily made the gravity of my condition pale in significance.
Towards the end of that year, I became desperately ill from complications of a failed knee transplant for the third time. My parents and I travelled to Chennai to meet my surgeon and overnight, I took the difficult decision to undergo an amputation of my leg.
I wrote to R before setting out on the journey, not knowing it would lead to such a life-altering outcome. I decided to tell him about the surgery, only after recovering from it. The last thing I expected was to see him in the hospital’s waiting area the morning I was admitted - and yet, there he was, just as I walked in with my parents. After reading my letter, he had travelled all night by bus, and rushed to the hospital when our family friends in Chennai told him about the operation.
That day, in the last few hours of my being a biped in this lifetime, R took on the unenviable task of keeping my spirits up. I forgot to be terrified as he regaled me with what he was looking forward to, in his new life in the US. A few hours later, I saw him off, conscious that I was walking down the stairs with him on my own legs for the last time, and feeling immensely lucky to have had the chance to meet him.
The hours and days immediately after my amputation were spent in a miasma of agony. The constant phantom pain of an absent leg drove me up the wall. My right leg reflexively and futilely, sought out my left. A thousand severed nerve endings tingled, pricked and throbbed, my brain unable to process that it was sending signals to a part of me that no longer existed. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my subtracted body and often prayed for an escape.
Into this hellish nightmare, R volunteered to come in and see me. As many times as he could travel down, while in his final term at college. He flipped me over on the hospital bed, when I couldn’t change sides on my own. If I wept, he held my hand. His presence meant laughs and comfort, reminding me of hope and possibility. Most importantly, he kept showing up even as he saw me at my worst and never flinched.
Perhaps connections like these are meant for a reason and not a season or lifetime, and hence have a short shelf life. Our paths diverged soon after, the bond we’d shared relegated to a specific time and place. R and I stayed in touch sporadically. He got married some years later and became a father in due course of time. I built a career and life in Mumbai.
Earlier this month, he celebrated a milestone birthday and I reached out for my phone to text him. I hesitated for a moment - it had been a couple of years since we’d last spoken or exchanged a message. The memory of a distant July that turned strangers at the cusp of 22, to instant friends, finally gave me the impetus to hit ‘send’.
His response was almost immediate, and warm. Our messages went back and forth for a few hours, as we caught up on news of our families and each other. I slept well that night, my heart full with the emotion of a lasting ease of connection that has transcended time, tremendous distance, long gaps in communication and two very disparate life conditions.
In parallel, also during this July, I have been witness to my dearest friend K’s brave journey with her ailing mother. There is nothing I can do to help, K says. I worry about her. So, I text her often to ask how her mother is and to remind her to look after herself.
I visit her one day at the hospital after work, and we sit on a bench in the outpatient department, talking about the things that really matter in life, the minutiae of treatment protocols, the hopes we once held for our lives and chuckle at our acceptance of how they’ve actually turned out. I have known K since 2003 when I first moved to Mumbai, and her friendship has been consistent, even as the city and I have changed diametrically. I can only hold space as I marvel at K’s grace and dignity during such a trying time.
As I do this, I realise it is the legacy of connection and presence when a friend needs it, that R taught me through his example. Even a single individual who arrives at a storm’s edge and stays only long enough to steady us, can leave us with a lifetime template of how to show up.
Just as a missed deadline for a newsletter doesn’t mean much in the larger scheme of things, but the emotion it speaks of, does.
So hauntingly beautiful Su! The first few paras of this piece don’t prepare the reader for the sheer honesty and emotion that follows. Amazing writing! I hope it’s healing you too as much as it’s cleansing me.
You're a brave and honest woman. I will wait to hear more from you.