If (only a love song)

If I dreamed a dream
and that dream was you
I would pray that I dreamed again.

If I schemed a scheme
of incomparable lies
Would you recognise the truth within them?

If I am the bow
that loosens the arrow
Are you the shield or the cushion?

If I am the sugar
in your cup of tea
Would we need a stirrer to sweeten?

If I write the song
and you play the music
Would the words need to be spoken?

If I was a stream
and you were the sea
Forever I'd flow to you unbroken.

- Shaista

This poem marks my 200th blog post. Everyday, somewhere, marks a day of auspicious happenings. Today, one of my oldest childhood friends is donning her red sari as I write, and with her hennaed hands, she will accept a ring, and with her hennaed feet she will walk seven times around fire, and pray.
May their sentiments be auspicious. May they live a graceful life that is full of mutual love and warmth. May they be able to see for a hundred years, live a healthy life for a hundred years and listen to the music of spring for a hundred years.

The Bell That Sounds Aung, Aung, Aung....

Getting angry at each other
in the ultimate dimension
I close my eyes
and look into the future.

Three hundred years from now
Where will you be my dear,
where shall I be?

- Gatha for the Beloved One,

from a Vietnamese poem

"If you can suffer, you can gain. What is valuable cannot be obtained without effort."
"Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure."

(Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate).

In my 2006 poetry journal, I have a picture of Daw Aung San, sitting outside in her small garden, reading. Her back is erect, softened only by the flowers tucked prettily into the nape of her neck. I refer to this picture in my mind many times, when I feel the weight of my own various exiles begin to push down on me. Grace under pressure, grace even as I suffer, these are the bells that sound Aung, Aung, Aung.... and I remember to breathe, straighten my shoulders and smile.

Outside, Inside

A sad love curls around me

like a cat with no name,

I knit on into the darkness.

When the wind howls without,
and my feet stay within,

I bow low into the darkness.

Just a quiet prayer

on a winter breeze

to the homeless body and soul;

Just a merciful thanks
on nights like these

for the warmth of a roof
and the snug of a bed;
while over by the River Cam,
just the evening star lies ahead.

Lamp lit, soul lit,

still the sad love persists,

so I bow deeper

into the darkness.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2010

I dedicate this poem to my friend Jonny Butterworth, who is a Human Rights campaigner, and has just set up an NGO called Just Fair, promoting justice and fairness through economic, social and cultural rights for everyone in the UK. ESCR are relatively new to the UK, and Jonny is campaigning for their direct incorporation into UK law.

poem participating in One Stop Poetry
image: 'Down and Out in Cambridge', John Glover, Cambridge Drawing Society Exhibition

Friend, don't forget

Friend, don't forget, I am always in your footsteps,

I, won't forget, I am always in your footsteps

 

Sunset, where English trains

roll slowly by like

patient caterpillars

on country soil,

I am travelling forward.

Here, where the winds

howl low

through patient conifers

that wave at me,

I see beyond the leaden sky

to the green spires of Prague

to watery whispers of Venice

to flowers tended carefully

on window sills in Graz.

 And I am walking, toes between sand,

red rust sand, and open fence

through curlicues of Cambodian dreams

crossing borders, homes and streams
to remind you

Friend, don't forget, I am always in your footsteps,

I, won't forget, I am always in your footsteps.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2010

My first picture is of a child whose name I do not know, whose life I do not know, whose eyes I cannot see, but who already inspires my poetry. Happy Diwali to the little lights that are our children everywhere.

photograph by Rizwan

The Good Doctor

Last night the Little Shelford annual bookclub meeting was held at the Olde Post Office. We rang the bell (like Pooh does outside Owl's), and sat down in a circle beside the authoress of A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Family's Journey of Love and Loss in Nepal. The book had circled the members last year while I was in hospital, and one of the lovely ladies had mentioned that perhaps Mum might find it difficult to read at the time, so it had simply passed us by.

Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth is charming and self-effacing, the kind of doctor a patient is fortunate to encounter. She is author of several books in different genres, but this, her autobiographical work, delves into the heart of a painful dilemma - to submit to the admonitions and gloomy prognostications of her fellow Cambridge doctors, or abandon the Western view and offer her son David a cheerful and dignified chance at life.  Here is an excerpt in Dr Jane's words... 

The one sympathetic hospital doctor in Cambridge had advised us to treat David normally and we took this as a licence to take him on his first trek; at the age of four months, we packed up David’s heart medicines and tubes and headed up over precipitous drops and wobbly rope bridges to explore drippy forests and medieval hill-forts. The mountains were spectacular and healing. Strangely David’s heart disease protected him from the effects of high altitude. Our arrival in each mountain village was heralded by choruses of, ‘Children have come!’ We’d be surrounded and David taken from his carrying basket to be handed around for all to cuddle. He glowed in all this attention. He smiled and burbled appreciatively at all his admirers. Nepalis helped us see David’s qualities and talent for laughter.

It was interesting as you can imagine, thinking about my long journeys down the very same corridors of this very Cambridge hospital. I told Dr Jane that I don't write about my experiences with doctors (well, except the blue-eyed surgeon of course). She wondered why not. Perhaps I might, now. Particularly the good doctors. They deserve to be honoured, as human beings more than anything else.

Winterstone

Listening to October rain
prepare Winter's stones
for the coming festival of cold
And the stripping away of gold
and green,

I see trees denude themselves
in a demystification of old -
the ritual celebration of bones.

Above the silent dates of tombs,
the sky hovers, blue and unsure
of beauty's welcome here -

but this is the time
for the colour change;

Not quite black yet,
these are the shades of grey.







- Shaista Tayabali, 2010
(illustration from Magpie Tales, online creative writing group)

Ideal Diaspora

Recently I wrote on my blog about the changing shifting states of my bedroom, a space that continually provides me with some measure of physical artistic freedom. And yet, a few days ago I was having a little moan about the constraint of living within the sphere of four walls, imagining myself one of Michelangelo's unfinished works of captives within marble, attempting freedom, never to be freed. Or like Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern; a vast carpet of porcelain replica seeds, each hand painted and hand fired by inhabitants of Jingdezhen, free to be stepped upon by the public, but none to be opened, none to bear fruit.


That same day, the Telegraph magazine arrived, with James Mollison's photographs of children's bedrooms all over the world. From Ciudade de Deus in Brazil to the Yunnan province in China, a Palestinian refugee camp in Hebron to the Rendille tribe in northern Kenya, the gulf of inequalities and the bridges of similarity are all here - from the guns (for fun, Kentucky) and the axes (for work, Senegal and Kathmandu) to the dolls, the beauty pageant queens and future rabbis (Tokyo, Kentucky and Beitar Illit). This here on the left is Roathy, who is eight and lives on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. His home sits on a huge rubbish dump and his mattress is made from old tyres. He shares the space with five thousand others.

The final picture is of my elder brother, who is at this very moment in Phnom Penh, where Roathy is. They probably will not encounter one another. But then again, life is strange and powerful encounters await us at every turn and on every journey. Rizwan's globo-social projects include just such encounters. I am not sure what he remembers of his bedroom in Bombay. It was a multi-purpose room for most of our childhood. I had torn out posters of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa from a Hello magazine above my bed, I think he had his own drawing of Bruce Lee for a while. What we shared was the light pouring in from the windows and rain from the balcony, love from our parents and friends and books and games and lullabies and prayers bookending our days and beginning our nights. I love this picture. It contains everything. The ancient stone carvings of Angkor Wat, a book, a travelling rucksack, light and his smile.

Knitting Pearls

Knit three, wool over needle, lace

Knit three, wool over needle, lace

Yarn yawns and stretches
beneath my touch

Taking shape in lines of faith

one by one by one,

I knit in hope

and dream of names

of future daughters and sons.

I make mistakes,

I drop a stitch

and pick it up too late

But always, a steady hand awaits,

My grandmother's,

My mother's,

My own.

Life is a course in miracles

And I am knitting a calendar

for when I am old

and there are stories to be told

yarn will hold them for me.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2010

Wicked Little Angel

There was an elderly pigeon walking along Finchley Road today. When he tired, he paused to contemplate a few sodden autumn leaves. London in the rain, he shrugged morosely. His glum little figure became a thing of memory as traffic moved and our taxi driver apologised profusely for his squeaky shoes. It's the rubber soles, he offered politely. Yesterday's taximan swore blue murder at an intrepid pedestrian, words that shocked my mother! But surprisingly, even he apologised at the end of the drive, with a somewhat complex tale about a cousin who wound up in prison because of... there are seven million detailed biographies entwined on these streets and no one is what they seem.


We have been swanning around in taxis in rainy London because Mum tumbled down a few mossy stone steps and a golf ball sized swelling bloomed around her ankle. But ice and my reiki righted the pain and we have travelled down Rotten Row where the horses canter, and past the Serpentine, spent hours in the National Portrait Gallery where the newly acquired bronze bust of Nelson Mandela resides beside portraits of Amartya Sen and Dorothy Hodgkin. This time Mum didn't return home determined to tear up her portraits as she is dramatically wont to do...

We are in London for my childhood friend's wedding at Langhams Hotel. A swanky affair! I wore a floaty sort of green ensemble, empire line, very Regency. Byron would have approved. And Father danced with far too many women. And almost no one knew I had just emerged from Rituximab infusions less than two weeks ago. And none of that matters anyway when I stand in awe of the magnificent exhibition of Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, surrounded by the living art of Karsavina and Nijinsky, Stravinsky and Massine, Leon Bakst, Jean Cocteau and a huge drop curtain detailing Picasso's Women Running on the Beach for Le Train Bleu.


Most moving was the performance of the Little Angels, an all-female children's folk ballet troupe from Korea. Sadler's Wells theatre was full of Korean war veterans, for whom the troupe was created in gratitude, in 1963, for laying down their lives in a faraway country in civil strife.


So there has been sculpture and sketches, ballet and marriage vows, but when I shut my exhausted eyes, what I hear... is singing. Have you seen Wicked, the musical? It is... well, wicked, really! Witches before they were witches, and why the monkeys became winged, and why Elphiba flings Dorothy into the cellar, and there's a man, (there's always a man), who first loves Glinda the Good and then decides it is the green Wicked Witch of the West he truly loves and suddenly everything changes... and I know, as Elphiba does...

"It's time to trust my instincts

Close my eyes and leap...

It's time to try defying gravity!

I think I'll try defying gravity!"

... and perhaps the return to a bed on the floor of a room in Cambridge, will not seem quite so dull after all.

First two images:

Nobel prize winning chemist and crystallographer
Dorothy Hodgkins, by Maggi Hambling, oil on canvas,
1985

Opera singer Adelina Patti, by Camille Silvy,
photograph, 1869

View from a Window

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

Every evening when the sun sets, the rust brick of the roof outside my window changes from dull flat dust to a bright living glow. What is that called? Is there a name for that particular reflected light on stone and slate and brick that turns the inanimate world to life? Turner believed that light was the emanation of God’s spirit and in his later years his work focused almost exclusively on the effects of light. On his deathbed they say he uttered the words, “The sun is God.” My father painted this light. I love this light. In a country like England, this light is not a sure thing. Summer days have faded and autumn will sweep by soon. So my eyes drink deeply when the light is here.

In between hospital visits, my room is a mess. A mess of Things. Papers, books, shoes, postcards, medicines, a guitar, hot water bottles, promises, letters, presents. I receive many presents! It is not always this way - but creative energy is like a small undefined tornado. Sometimes I make this body, this room, the gentlest of hermitages; peace and wisdom radiate neatly from the correct feng shui corners. At other times, some whirling daemon is at play and when the damage is done, I wish I could sleep on the ceiling - the tidiest space in the room.

I wish I could borrow another body for a while. One that escapes infections and antibodies and cataracts and steers effectively around the petty weaknesses of physical frailty. A body that thinks a thing and it is done. A body touched by the light that makes stones glow.

I attended a wedding on my birthday two weeks ago. It was in Nottingham at the University, where just a few days earlier, Thich Nhat Hanh had walked and smiled with the monks and nuns of the engaged Buddhism order. I missed the retreat but my feet did not. If I am touching the same earth as others who do wondrous things, like giving birth and teaching freedom, does their magic enter me too? I like to think so. I have to think so.
It is the only way I can survive.


first painting: JMW Turner's 'Sunrise with Sea Monsters';
second painting: W Blake's 'Pegasus'