Between earth and sky

It’s been a crazy one+ week, since 22 October. I tried to end my 13 year marriage at 11.35am on Saturday. Didn’t plan it nor strategised, as my friends would know me to do. The words just came out. Calmly, measured, without a wavering of doubt. Obviously, he didn’t take it too well. But I did detect a smattering of fear behind that angry face that I’ve come to know so well.

In the end, he used the children as bait. Something I knew he would.

But something else happened, that I didn’t foresee. As I emptied my heart of the painful memories coiled deep inside, I surprisingly found the vacant space quickly filled by an alien feeling - that of Love. Has it always been there, but I couldn’t feel it, so consumed I was with anger, bitterness and pain? In the deep depth of my despair, who knew that I would finally find the light.

So, where are we now today? Call me a coward but I just couldn’t bear to see my two children so sad. So, I am still here in the marriage. He said that he will mend his ways, and he has kept to his words 10 days after. But out of habit, I still wait for the other shoe to fall. And I still pray for strength. For that one day.

I watched Avatar again, and am reminded of the first time I was completely blown away by the world that they had created on screen. Most of all, I love the freedom that the Na’vi people enjoy – the unadulterated, abandoned joy of living at one with the Spirit. In contrast, our lives seem so suffocating in our concrete jungle.

When I was younger and didn’t know any better, I admit to being attracted to good looks. Thank god I have outgrown that. Now that I have seen more of the world, I am able to discern a distinct pattern in the kind of people that I am drawn to. Writers, poets, composers, film makers and photographers. Not for me the corporate captains with their expensive watches and talk about the stock market.

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Another favourite piece of mine resurrected from a dead blog. This trip to Angkor Wat was taken in August 2008.

I’m typing this as a girl no more than 18 years old pounds my leg. She can’t speak English and I can’t speak Cambodian. We communicate through smiles and rudimentary sign language which would get me nowhere if I were marooned on the island that Udayadityavarman II built in the middle of the West Baray. Which king would built an island in the middle of a manmade body of water, built for irrigating the entire Angkor city, to meditate by himself? But that’s the Angkorians for you.

As I walked through the ruins of the Angkor park, I marvelled at the kings of yesteryears who had temples, palaces and ceremonial terraces built for them from sandstones transported by elephants and bamboo rafts from the Lychee Mountain. One after the other, they built designs much bigger and grander than their predecessors. Today, these monuments which have withstood the passages of time, countless battles, civil wars and Khmer Rouge are replicated as fridge magnets and branded on beer cans sold to tourists for less than a dollar.

It’s hard to ignore the poverty that greets you as you step off the air condition bus. Children in grubby tshirts flock around you selling all sorts of merchandise. 5 for 1 dollar they chime in sing song English. I met a young boy who charmed me with his American accent and toothless grin.

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Another resurrected writing, from a now dead blog. Make of it what you will. It reminds me somehow of Bertha, the mad creole wife of Rochester in Jane Eyre.

I wished him death yesterday. In a car accident. A heart attack. In his sleep. The possibilities are endless. People die all the time. Why can’t he? 

This morning, he looked at me like I am a puzzle he can’t quite figure out. An element he can’t control. Brows furrowed. A disapproval he can’t quite hide, clearly etched on his face. But there’s also a sadness there, underneath, if I allow myself to look past my anger.

I hate him. Yet love him. This bitter, serious man who first came into my life as a 15 years old teenager. The star athlete who could have his pick from any of the besotted girls in school, but chose me - the unbesotted - because I was different. For 10 years, we played hide and seek with each other. He, still attracted to my difference, my free spirit, that promise of something else that the other girls in his conventional universe didn’t have.

Today, he fears the difference. And the indifference which I don’t bother to hide anymore. He tries to mould it, temper it, control it, shout it out of existence. The more he tries to change me, the angrier I get. Am I not good enough for him, my mind asks. The rage simmers impotently within me. Sometimes, it comes out as frustrated taunts. Calculated words carefully chosen to jab his ego, push him right over the edge. And it’s at that point - when he loses all rationality - that I allow him to see the real me.

I love the rain. Especially when it’s raining exactly the way it is now - accompanied by dark clouds and the even darker sound of lightning. I think it’s the drama of watching the sweet blue sky turning into an ominous colour, as if gathering all the dark energies of everyone on earth, and the ensuing contrast of white flash as it pierces the darkness. I can understand why the Greeks thought the the gods lived high above the sky. When it rains like this - all thunderbolt and lightning - it does feel that the gods are raging upstairs.

I’ve always been fascinated with the darker side of Mother Nature. Raging volcanoes which spew ashes and unleash molten lava, deadly tsunami walls, earthquakes that split the earth etc. And I feel, like Mother Nature, all of us have a darker side within us. Except some are better at hiding it than others.

I was reminded of The Bucket List starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Truth is, I’ve never seen that film from start to end. It was one of those nights when I couldn’t sleep (I do that alot). Everyone else had gone to bed, and I was  just puttering around the house, picking up the toys and newspapers strewn on the floor when I saw the most beautiful view of the Taj Mahal on tv. It was such a dusky pink, so different from the one that I saw in India last year. I ended up sitting down on the sofa and tried to make sense of the movie. And totally loved the idea of the bucket list.

So, inspired by that, here goes my list. Some I realise are similar to the original bucket list - but the Louvre, Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramids are such icons that it feels like you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen these monuments - so they’re here in my list too.

1. Watch the sun rise over Borobudur with my two best friends

2. Find the Joy in my life

3. Learn how to cook boeuf bourgoinon

4. Spend a week in quiet green Ubud with my two kids, away from the urban madness

5. Walk on the Great Wall of China

6. Trek up to see Machu Pichu

7. Sit on the dusty steps of the Great Pyramid

8. Spend a week at the Louvre

9. Publish my own writing (done! :)

10. Get invited by a complete stranger to have tea with his or her family in a foreign land

11. Explore the Middle East, souk by souk

12. Catch U2 in action, live

13. Skydive

14. Reading books under the shade of a giant old tree with my two children

15. Make a complete stranger happy (done! :)

16. Pray in a church, temple, mosque and synagogue (almost there)

17. Have a song, poem, short story or book dedicated to me

18. Attend the Jaipur Art Festival and watch the annual camel race

19. Get a tattoo

20. Watch the sun set over Uluwatu with the Joy in my life