DUCK SURGERY: A LAST TAIL OF THE YEAR

It wasn’t her tail that broke.

The title was misleading. I’m sorry. It was a broken leg. As clearly stated in her medical record. 

Her name is Emerald. But she was christened Esmeralda in the doorway of her first home. She was born with green boots and bought with love, but sadly her adoptive co-parent turned out to be less than keen.

One day, I walked across the road with my twin nieces and there in the front porch on her way out (little did she know) was the matching duck to my own William (of the blue boots).

My neighbour was thrilled to pack Esmeralda off for a ‘holiday’ and here, in our home, she has stayed. 

Not without incident.

Back to duck surgery.

William lost a boot soon after the arrival of the twins so Emerald is in good company. This is all my fault of course - I ought to be a more responsible duck owner, but it’s Christmas and the New Year is almost upon us and I am just too tired, shattered, exhausted, knackered, whacko blotto, to quote my friend Colette... 

I am hanging on by silver threads and the golden web of imagination. Cob web... I feel old and in need of hibernation. But a new day, a new year, is on its way, and must be attended to. Some energy must be found from somewhere. How? Where?

In friendship. In kindness. In the generosity of spirit and attention.

Are you listening to me?

I am listening.

But do you really hear me?

I am trying.

Samuel Beckett wrote, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better.’ Beckett seems like he was a kind man, with the best of human interest at heart. There is something about growth, new growth, in the old broken parts of us. We break, and we make something... new? Better? Something, anyway,

Neil Gaiman, another kind man, put it like this ... ‘I hope that in the year to come, you make mistakes, because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing the world... So... make new mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life...’

Or ducks with broken legs... or bodies with broken immune systems... on we go, onwards, ever onwards, the old and the new... gathering extraordinary memories. The tale of William and Esmeralda really all began with my beloved friend Mary sending me Jemima Puddle Duck for my birthday in August - a gift of cheer. Mary thought I would appreciate the graceful lines of a duck in pink wellingtons. Well, I did. I do. And so the family grew...

HAPPY NEW YEAR my dearest readers, thank you for the love, concern and the memories. Happy new year to us all xxx

ROUND UP 2017

I've never done a round up of a year before... maybe a little hopeful contemplation as the year floats away that I did alright, I wasn't a complete disaster, love prevailed... but I feel like recording a few things for this last day of 2017. The brights and the shadows. 

The year started off with a flurry of rejections, which does rather set the spirit at a low hum of despair. But in amidst the form rejections, I had several personalised letters, which I have since learnt is an achievement in itself. Here is the most special among them - inspite of the rejection, I genuinely loved it.

Dear Shaista, Thank you for sending me Blind Wolf, Butterfly Woman and for giving me the opportunity to consider your work. I was consumed by your poignant, affecting story. I found it beautifully and truthfully depicted and it resounded with me deeply. You demonstrate remarkable courage in expressing your story, and I hope that you have found the writing process in some way helpful. Your attitude to your condition is truly an inspiration. However in spite of this I am unfortunately unable to make you an offer of representation. I am really concentrating on building up my fiction list, and while your story is incredibly moving, I am not sure how I would break it out commercially, with a mainstream publisher. The market at the moment is so competitive and publishers are being extremely cautious, particularly when it comes to acquiring memoir. However these judgements are always subjective and you may well find someone who feels very differently. Again, I very much appreciate having had the opportunity to consider your work and wish you all the best in finding the right home for it. Best wishes, ...

Then I had a rejection from the University of Cambridge to do an M. Phil on Vietnamese American post-war literature, and then I had an acceptance from the University of Cambridge to give a TEDx talk on creativity!

I think I successfully convinced everyone in that room that creativity can and must be taught, particularly to young children, and particularly at school. Perhaps I will share my speech another day. I didn't realise it wouldn't be recorded, but it was a TEDx salon talk, and those are more intimate. It was a special day, the 25th of January, Mum and Dad's anniversary, and as you know they are very much central to my creative life.

In February I was rejected (or rather not included) in (ironically) the Anglia Ruskin University TEDx event. I don't know how the event went in the end - it was inaugural, so hopefully it was a success. I was extremely fortunate to have been excluded because I developed kidney sepsis at the end of a lovely but hectic surprise visit from the Singaporean crew. Mum's birthday on the 10th of February was a wonderful time of celebration until right at the end, when I was bundled off to A&E, burning up, throwing up. Mum even wore mismatching shoes to the hospital, it was so muddled a morning.

Back in again with more infection at the end of March and into April... and then again in July and August... I had two PICC lines for two different infections, which took such a toll on me. And yet, while in hospital, I recorded a video to accompany my book for a crowdfunding platform called Unbound Publishing. When I was rejected from that I did feel quite awful. I spent September in bed for the most part. For World Poetry Day at the end of September, I recited poetry in the hospital chapel, which was very healing, and by the end of October I felt inspired enough by my summer experience of video making to start a vlog channel and recorded four wonderful talks with my friends Colette and Daisy on living with lupus. I was on radio in November reciting poetry and talking about hospital shenanigans, but that wasn't recorded on a podcast either, so hilariously the only two people who heard me live were the two people I told - Mum and Dad, the two people who listen to me every day, anyway!!

- And our beloved friend Victoria who drove me to the radio station and sat quietly, and supportively, in the booth beside me!

And finally on Boxing Day, I had a piece published in sisterhood mag, on my complicated and beautiful religious and spiritual life. Deeyah Khan, the founder of the magazine, and an extraordinary documentarian, had tweeted me earlier to consider contributing, and I am so glad she did... 

http://sister-hood.com/shaista-tayabali/half-parsi-half-muslim-full-woman/

We lost dear friends this year - our beloved John Haybittle, and two days ago, our childhood friend Vinit. We celebrate how wonderful they were, and hold on to each other more tightly. Tomorrow it will all be the same, and yet a little different. Happy New Year, my dear friends, whichever it is. 

AUNT ALICE AND THE MARSHMALLOW FLOWERS

Dear Aunt Alice,

Somewhere, in other worldly places, you must surely know that I have inherited your perfect signet ring. Initials AJ carved in pretty curving script. I have been wearing your ring from the moment I received it from your niece Mary, because she thinks I am an aunt worthy enough to be in your mould. I thought of taking it off before a jaunt into London to keep it safe, but decided I wanted to take you with me since I suspect the last time you tripped around London as a young woman was, perhaps, a hundred years ago.

Liverpool Station was freezing cold, but once we were in London proper - Oxford Street proper - I warmed up. No snow to offer you this Christmas, but the lights! An assortment of charities paid towards these giant leaping angel figures. Beautiful for the crush of humans below to behold.

Shopping commenced. I'm not sure you would have approved of my purchases, but they were safe enough - a cosy camel turtle neck sweater, a leather bag and a pair of sunglasses. All on sale! Mind you, the prices, even on sale, would probably shock you. To ease the shock, my sister Angelina ordered cronuts and hot chocolate from a famous bakery called Dominique Ansel. Now this would have impressed you - a marshmallow cut like a crown was dropped into steaming hot chocolate, instantly blooming into a flower...

Later, on Great Marlborough Street, we stood outside Liberty and admired the Tudor Revival frontage. Did you know the timber was built from the ship HMS Hindustan? Or that in 1885, Liberty brought forty two villagers from India to stage a living village of Indian artisans? These handy facts are available from an extraordinary web of information us global villagers dive in and out of 'online'. I wonder what you would have made of Wikipedia? Here is something Wikipedia doesn't know: my father had three of his watercolours exhibited and sold by Liberty in the 1970s. Wikipedia you may have been on the fence about, but my father you would have loved.

I did feel a trifle faint in Liberty - so many people! - so was glad first to plop onto an inviting bed in Anthropologie, and then to mesh our way from Carnaby and Kingly Streets towards a Japanese restaurant, which also served my favourite Korean dishes, and to my delight, a delicious plum wine. For a nineteenth century Englishwoman, I suspect your gastronomic tastes possibly didn't stretch to the Orient, but maybe Mary will surprise me and tell me you loved experimenting with the new!

I got muttered at by a stranger for temporarily blocking the entrance to the tube - did I mention this was the day of the human crush? At these moments I am very much the hokey local from a tiny Cambridge village. By the time our train was hurrying us home, we were shattered and ready to slide, submerge and otherwise disappear into sleep. I hope you enjoyed the day out. Today is the last day of the year 2016. Soon 2017 will be upon us. 2016 has been a truly difficult year, for most of us, not least your beloved Mary. If you possess any magic, wield away. We need some magic. I can only be sure of one thing in the new year - I will continue to be the most loving and creative aunt it is possible to be. Keep your spirit beside me!

With love,
Your new friend-in-auntyhood across the century,
Shaista

Photos courtesy Debra Edward

BRIDGE OF BALI OLD, BALI NEW

It's the difference between silence and sound. 

Just outside the bathroom a farm, with crowing roosters fluffing dust and gravel off their tails. The villa is harmonious with both breeze and screeching gecko. I hear each crackle and rustle as the rooster places his claw, regal even in this clump of fallen twig and dead leaf. 

The villa is silent of human sound. The other nine occupants have left on various adventures - water park, shopping excursions - I, lone wolf, among the ants and my words. 

I have been to Bali before; two years ago, in a villa like this, but with a koi fish pond and the beginnings of a raw grief. The rain gods began kicking up a storm from the moment we arrived. One night found me huddled on the cold bathroom floor, wishing away my barren life, wishing instead for a fertile womb, a baby. I wrote something that night:

34

Nothing bold. Perhaps the saddest year.

Certainly the loneliest. 

A storm outside does nothing to console me

inside, on the floor of a bathroom in Bali.

You will get everything you wish for.

Even sadness. Especially sadness.

That is the curse.

That is the price.

You would have been willing 

to pay anything (you thought).

Anything, but that. 

But that was then. And I am here now, a different self in the same place. The raw grief that haunted me has dissipated. I feel lighter. Not accepting, exactly, rather adjusting to each new discovery of a life less travelled in some ways, deeply traversed in other ways. All that matters is that I am here, now, surviving the wild heat and submitting to what will come.

A WALKING POEM FOR THICH NHAT HANH

I bought a treadmill.
What would Thây say?
Would he smile and shake his head

or look bemused the way he looked
that day I waited in line
to ask a question that did not need

answering?

The birds are busy and my shoe is broken
and my foot turns out and in
to awkward positions. My unfocused eyes

make nausea of the green world around me.
Oh dappled light, what would Thây say?
Walk outside!

Thây who is struggling to sit upright,
is recovering from the stroke,
which left him paralysed and comatose;

Oh Venerable One
who took three months to drink
a quarter cup of tea,

who watched the full moon patiently
like when he was sixteen,
and Têt promised endless treats

of moon cakes and dragon dance
and calligraphic Buddha chants.
Oh Patient Impermanent One,

these broken steps are made for you;
these perfect steps I make for you
make me free.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015
first image prompt via Magpie Tales

LET'S PRETEND!

Let’s pretend that I don’t have fever for the first time in over a year. Let’s pretend that I am really a magical creature with super powers and this tiredness and pain are my pretend body. The truth is I can fly, and talk to animals and this sofa is a ship and this moment of this year, round with possibilities, will never end.  

At the bottom of my nephew’s bed at the top of the stairs of a house in Singapore, my father scratched around and found Paddington. (PB to those in the know.) He examined the red duffel coat and blue felt hat. And then went to his room, to bed. I nipped downstairs for a last cup of tea. When I returned, PB was missing. Since the nephew has been ruthlessly evicted from his room by his Aunty Shai, and is keeping his parents awake in their room, there was only one suspect.

 ‘I’ve never had a soft toy,’ said the thief. ‘I think I’ll keep him...’

At the local library, Rafael borrowed a book called ‘Let’s Pretend’: a book which I find extremely peculiar. To be three years old, and be able to distinguish between pretending, imagining for real, and the real, seems to be a feat of extraordinary mental prowess. No wonder the little dude gets so exhausted by the end of every day. He traverses three worlds at all times – two more than we do. He is a leopard, prowling between table legs, claws and teeth at the ready. He is pretending to be a leopard, escaped from the zoo, but is also a hungry boy wanting chocolate and ice cream instead of invisible chunks of meat. He is not a leopard at all. He is only a little boy. And not really scary at all.

In my suitcase at this very moment is a leopard suit. It is awaiting his birthday, but so far, just the thought that there is a leopard in my suitcase, unseen, has satisfied his imagination. Will the suit delight or repulse him? I shall report.

Meanwhile the niece and her grandfather embark on convoluted conversations at breakfast and lunch, and call out to one another at the top of their lungs. Some things are wonderful just as they are. No pretending required.

Today is Navroze - Parsi New Year. Happy Navroze to all of you, and may the rain rain, or the sun shine, according to your needs...

RETURN OF THE ANAEMIC WARRIOR

This being the year of the Horse (my year, according to the Chinese horoscope), I ought to be leaping about the place like a Disney princess, astride my dreams..

Instead, this summarises me rather neatly…

I have it on authority that I am anaemic and osteopenic - while not wildly so (not enough to be hooked up to receive a blood transfusion), it is enough to have me stapled to the bed most days. In between I write. My masters is nearly over, and I am almost done with the final 15,000 word project. But since I am only at the start of my memoir and novel, I feel as though there are great mountains yet to climb and I am sprawled at the foot of them, scrabbling about for nuts and berries to sustain myself. And green leafy vegetables… my dear Uncle Z bought me a blender and I plug into myself these nourishments. Here's hoping…

Cheers!

Illustrator of first image: Quentin Blake

Rest via google