Footsteps

If I should die tomorrow
there would be many sorrows
but the deeper print
of my name
would carry you through
the pain

And if you should hear me laugh
I am only playing a game
Hold on, hold on, to the centre
until I find my way again.




I posted part of this poem before, in May last year while I was still battling it out in hospital. I am re-posting it with a new verse, for my blogfriend Renee, whose battle with Stage 4 Inflammatory Breast Cancer, has been described by the doctors as the beginning of the end. Awful phrase. Renee would scoff at it, if she felt more like herself. It is an extraordinary experience to have one's life touched so deeply by a stranger impossible to meet in this lifetime. But she has left her print upon me, the deepest imprint of her name. Renee. Find your way, Renee.

Deye mon gen mon

Beyond mountains, there are mountains
Haitian proverb

In 2003, Tracy Kidder published a book titled 'Mountains Beyond Mountains': the Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World'. Despite my years of prolific reading, I rarely recommend books. I am one of those who believes that books find us through some alchemy of their own. I am making an exception here. Read 'Mountains beyond Mountains'! It is the challenging and moving biography of Dr Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist and compassion incarnate, as told by Kidder, who travelled with, observed, argued tentatively and finally deeply admired and felt blessed by 'the fates that allowed my paths to cross his.' Farmer found himself in Haiti in 1983, still pre-med, and has never really left. The poverty, human rights abuse, relentless political and structural violence, the horror of multi-drug resistant TB and the HIV-AIDS epidemiology, are extraodinarily lit with humanity - that gift that is spectacularly our own.

This is a picture of Dr Paul Farmer attending to one of his patients in Cange, central Haiti. I love the challenging, almost mutinous look on the little girl's face. She seems to be saying, "Ah oui? So you think you can save me?" And I like the corresponding seriousness of Paul Farmer's expression. "I'm trying cherie." But, despite her pretty lacy top, and the silver hoops in her ears, she looks tired, a little dejected. Does she have TB? More than likely. HIV-AIDS as well?

Kidder writes:

'In Haiti, we'd had a conversation about his daughter. A month after she was born, a woman had come to Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health) suffering from eclampsia. It is a disease of pregnancy, of mysterious origin, found preponderantly among poor women. It leads to protein in the urine, hypertension, seizures, and sometimes death, for both mother and child. The treatment is magnesium sulfate and delivery of the child. The clinic was very busy. Farmer was rushing around trying to get the treatment started. He could hear the heartbeat. He later recalled, "The mother was seizing. I said, Hurry!" Everything was going okay. Then the baby was born, and it was dead. A full-term, beautiful baby, and I started to weep. I had to excuse myself and go outside. I wondered, What's going on? Then I realised I was crying because of Catherine." He had imagined her in the place of the still-born child. "So you love your own child more than these kids?" he asked himself. He answered himself, "Look, all the great religious traditions of the world say, Love thy neighbour as thyself. My answer is, I'm sorry, I can't, but I'm gonna keep on trying." (p212-3)
These are the last lines of the book:
'Haiti was still bleeding away, like its topsoil. But there were some spots of hope. The Red Cross had announced plans to establish a transfusion post at Zanmi Lasante. Nearly twenty years since Farmer had watched a woman die in Leogane for lack of a transfusion, and he finally had a blood bank that could serve the central plateau, a source of blood that patients wouldn't have to pay for. "No more weeping over blood," he wrote to me.' (p301)

Just as Kidder felt all those years ago, so do I thank the fates that brought this inspiring being into my field of awareness. I am blessed with my own medical opthalmologist and glaucoma surgeon who save my sight, my consultants and registrars who make the latest monoclonal infusions available to me; but it is the pioneering work of doctors like Paul Farmer that gives me a kind of inner radiance, a faith beyond faith to believe that mountains beyond mountains can and will be healed.

Inukshuk

Dreams are made of these
sights on the Waterfront

The Vancouver Sun

is setting

on Canada Place

and the sea

looks rained on.

China and Japan are

microcosms

in a city of happenings

and lights are aglow

on Grouse Mountain.

Winding past the Maple Leaf Store

the smell of blueberries

and Douglas firs

brings me home.

Today is Valentine's Day, and a love poem is due; mine is to the healing spirits of the city of Vancouver. I visited in 2002 and my impression from arrival at the airport to discovering Frida Kahlo at the Van Art Gallery and Zora Neale Hurston at the Van Public Library, to the oldest trees on botanic walks in Stanley Park, the city simply enveloped me in a halo of perfection, a presence that I can only long to experience again. Winter Olympics are in full swing now, despite tragedies and from across the waters my friend Jo at A Majority of Two has delightfully sent me a parcel of Olympic 2010 souvenirs. A beautiful glass/ceramic Inukshuk, a pen carved in the shape of a Canadian Mounty, and a silver keyring. Jo, thankyou so so much for your thoughtful gifts. The Inukshuk sits on my highest shelf far from its Arctic home, where once it would have marked the threshold of the spiritual landscape of the Inummariit, 'the people who knew how to survive on the land living in a traditional way'. Some inuksuit were built to serve as message centres. They could indicate, for example, dangerous places, the depth of snow, the direction of the mainland from an island where seals or fish could be taken. These inuksuit were designed to be messages fixed in time and space. Others were personal notes left on the landscape -- perhaps for a wife to follow her husband at a later date, or as an expression of grief marking the place where a loved one perished.

The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is 'Someone was here' or 'You are on the right path'.
What could be more romantic on Valentine's Day, than these timeless messages of fidelity, faith and hope?

Images of Inukshuk via flickr, travelblog and lodestar

Girl with a Red Balloon

Late served food
for a single
girl about town
welcomes you
with open arms
Bursts on your tongue
in an explosion
of red chilli love
and wasabi charms;

Tempura thrills,
and the space
opposite
finds itself easily
and metaphorically
filled.

I wrote this at the Dojo noodle bar in town. Sometimes a girl needs to eat alone, and know the smiling face in the front glass window is her own. I am always passing by the weavings of others' lives, but from time to time I slide myself in to the picture, and taste the tastes through the looking glass. Back in hospital after the weekend for part two of the monoclonals, and I know I will be thinking of that sweet chilli dip and hot horseradish that are exploding on someone else's tongue.

Image: Stencil graffiti by Banksy

The Fullest Moon

I am here
Watching you from afar
Trailing in the dust
of my memories
Awaiting your command.

I was bound to you
Time before Time
And will be true
for Eternity.

Judge not my actions harshly,
I am but a simple handmaiden.

Will He deem me fit
to be your bride?
Do you notice I am missing
from your side?

The earth you crush
beneath your feet
is nearer to you than me
but the dust of your presence
rains on my heart
And love is not forsaken.

- Shaista

Tattoo

(Rituximab, Open Infusion Bay, James Ward)

The first drop

takes a long time to fall

down the endless tube

that feeds into me.

I glance sideways

at the man

in the adjacent chair

Lucky he does not

see me stare

at the Medusa

tattoed on his arm

His needle penetrates

her charms.

What would they say

if I suddenly stood

and burst into song?

Would they applaud
and encore for more?

Or bury deeper in despair?

What if the pious stood

and offered up a prayer?

It takes a long

time to heal

As long as the

slow drip
that slips down

me

to steal

my free B cells

The anatomy

of a human disease

has no real

language

Just a careful

steal

of medical

and military rhymes

While the heart's

beats

fight

for more time.

Images: fotobank.ru

Jodha Akbar

These images are taken from a film called Jodha Akbar starring Hritik Roshan as Akbar, the great Mughal Emperor of 1555-1605, and Aishwarya Rai Bachhan as his wife Jodha, a Hindu Rajput princess. The marriage was allianced for the sake of a peace treaty between Hindustan and her Mughal rulers, but the Princess, in true Rajput style, had two pre-nuptual conditions. The first was that she must never, under any circumstances be made to convert, and secondly, that a temple housing her idol of Lord Krishna be built within her chambers. Akbar, a little stunned, and very impressed, acquiesced. The mutual respect, trust and devotion between Conqueror and Consort sowed seeds of racial and religious tolerance all over India.

Today, 25th of January, is my parents' 34th wedding anniversary. Theirs is a Jodha Akbar story for our times. Marriage with a Muslim, no matter how handsome and splendid a doctor, was no easier for my mother, a true Zoroastrian, to agree to, than it was for the Rajput princess five centuries ago. It was a leap of faith that I for one, am very glad she made!

Today, inspite of the media hungrily devouring stories of racial and religious intolerance, I breathe deeply into time, and remember love that conquers all.

Happy Anniversary Perveen and Chotu!!

Bombay Dreams

For reasons I have not yet fathomed, there has been some sort of 'Indian Winter' season on UK television... further promotion of Slumdog Millionaire perhaps? However, I am not complaining! My favourite programme has been an entertaining documentary following a three week cooking extravaganza, from Delhi to Kerala, by chef Gordon Ramsay. He travelled to parts of India I have never been, and despite his colourful language, seemed to draw friendliness and compassionate curiosity from every person he met. It was such a joy to see Indians just being themselves, with no focus or emphasis or slant on religion or poverty, just on the joy and bliss and skill of cooking food. Whether it be ant chutney in tribal areas, slow cooked meals in the desert, or the unexpected inclusion of papaya and coconuts. Or whether its origins be Syrian Christian, Malabari Muslim or vegetarian Brahmin. Ramsay's distaste for vegetarian food underwent an incredible change and he was scolded and teased by eminent chefs from Lucknow to the slums of Dharavi. I did love watching it!

My little collection of photographs for this post are all thieved from my brothers' visits to India. I know they are thinking of me when they take these vibrant, evocative pictures. And I try not to bite my lower lip in envy, but it is hard. Fourteen years away from India and it seems everyone, including Gordon Ramsay, considers it their second home!
I shall return soon, I hope, but in the meantime, it is back into hospital for more Rituximab, and I can only carry these Bombay dreams with me.

Continuation Day

How does a part of the world leave the world?

How can wetness leave water?
- Rumi

The passing on of family and close friends is an acute loss none but ourselves can experience. The passing on of strangers, at all moments, in welcome and unwelcome places, requires a more ephemeral and amorphous understanding. Some of us are more aware of death than others, some of us find it easier to pray. Buddha taught that the death of the human body is but a manifestation and that on the day a person dies, we wish them Happy Continuation Day, for surely they will manifest elsewhere, if only in our hearts. I wrote this poem many years ago in memory of David, a dear family friend who passed away, and today, on hearing the news of another passing, I decided to post it.

A memory tugged at me
weeding in the garden
I looked up
to hear your laugh
reach the furthest branches


reminding me
though the light may dim
the birds sing on
enchanted.








Painting by Kahlil Gibran

Breaking (news)

Haiti hit by earthquake

Stones thrown to Malaysia

Glass splinters off

the gurdwara

and shards

find their way

to the dungeons, the brothels

of Cambodia.

There, if the earth quakes

and a million sighs escape

Death equates

to freedom.

Image from cbc.news, Port-au-Prince