FRAGMENTS OF MUSIC

A bright red tractor just rolled by across the field at the bottom of our garden. A bright yellow butterfly just floated by the window of my little writing room in the garden. Bright, bright day today, the first of the summer to come, and the cherry is finally in bloom. Father is the only one tall enough to detect that fine sakura scent...

I have, as you may know, another major eye operation coming up soon, and as is my wont, I have been packing in SIGHTS. After Ireland, I scuttled off to visit my beloved friends Mary and John in Chichester, and filled my eyes with swans at Bosham, and caught the beginning of lambing season at West Dean College...

I have known Mary since I was 15 years old, and newly arrived on English soil. She was a soulmate of my Father's long before I was born and one of the great joys of our lives has been to hear Mary play Bach, Mozart, Beethoven on the piano (even though she denies any extraordinary talent - "Hang it all, I do have judgment you know!"). I cannot play the piano, so to me it is a magical, wizardish gift.
Last week at the hospital, someone presented me with more magic. A doctor, who recently read my blog, felt moved enough to compose a piece of music - a beautiful, haunting piece, which she permitted me to listen to on the ward. She says I inspire her. She is presenting my case to the British Society of Rhuematologists tomorrow and is going to weave in some of my poems - fame, my beloveds, fame! No longer a number, they will know my NAME! :)

THE GATHERING: A COLLECTION OF IRISH BEAUTIES

Give me peat fires
and candles lit
at the Church of Mercy

Give me soft haze of blue
mountains and sharp edges of ice
on our way to The Connor Pass

Give me Dingle
and Slea Head
and blue butterflies on Inch Strand Beach

Stop at Fermoyle
after kissing the Stone,
then touch the sands of Dun Chaoin

Time is a dandelion
but not the land
She is constant -

Waiting, waiting,
for the gathering
of the poet and her clan.

IT'S (NOT) A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY!

So, apparently...

I'm not sure I need any more gift of blarney, having been blessed with a naturally chatty tongue, BUT who could say no to kissing the famous stone?!
Am only slightly (very) terrified about visiting Ireland at a time described by my Irish friends as Baltic, but I have dreamed of setting foot in Ireland since I first read Yeats, curled up in the heat of an ordinary Indian summer... Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths... I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree... and most of all, listening to my grandfather and great-great grandmother singing 'It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go...', which of course it was, from Bombay...

I was chattering to a Polish taxi driver today, spilling over with excitement about my trip to Ireland; he asked me where, in Ireland... Tipperary, says I, smiling. Never heard of that one, sez he... So naturally I had to sing him The Song. Clearly he didn't have ancient relatives crooning Irish tunes through his childhood. It was something to do with the war, I think... my grandfather was seconded to the British army (a captain), my great uncle (Brigadier Jim) led the Gurkhas, and music somehow passed through the allied nations, like a gentle daisy chain, unsuspected by the enemies. Who notices the passing on of daisy chains?
Here's my mother's portrait of her father... handsome, wasn't he? And the sweetest, gentlest grandfather a girl could hope for... can't wait to make him smile wherever he is when I set foot in (jump up and down like a crazy leprechaun in) Tipperary!!

THE GREAT PRETENDER

Say smile 

and I do 

Say light 

and I open 

my eyes. 

Say dark 

and I close, 

staying close 

to the guides, 

all the while 

remembering light.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2013

There are still swathes of snowdrops around, so Spring hasn't sprung yet. Meanwhile March has taken on a martial air. The Blue Eyed Surgeon has determined that the time has come for a Second Tube in my eye. 
A SECOND TUBE!! 
I contemplated leaping out of the window but there were all sorts of ophthalmic instruments in the way.
And anyway, Blue Eyes is about to get his Black Belt in Karate... I could probably take him (I know my Kata Fukyu Ichi and jodan tsuki) but I opted for the demure approach, pretending to accept my fate.
Seven years ago was the darkest year of my life, so a piece of me feels crumbly inside. It won't be as bad - I know it won't because... well, it just can't. I won't let it. 
But to help me pretend to myself, I employed London - the brilliance and grace of the sublime art of Federico Barocci at the National Gallery helped...

The Virgin Mary, the Angel and the sleeping cat soothed, but not enough, so I went to a concert in St Martin-in-the-Fields (the Church with the Ever Open Door). The Mozart was fine but by the end of Beethoven's Serenade I was swiping away tears by candlelight. At the interval, my companions turned to me and said, "Wasn't that a wonderfully light and airy piece? Lovely! Delightful!" Er... Right. Stop thinking about The Tube, I admonished self sternly.
I gathered myself with Haydn and Schubert and by the second Mozart Flute quartet I was all smiles - the cellist, one Christopher Suckling, was the most expressive musician I have ever seen, second only to Lang Lang - and anyone with that level of enthusiasm deserves a smiling enchanted audience.
So there you have it - the darkness and the light. My friends Liv and Niamh have been worrying about me, so this post is to comfort and amuse them, as is this picture I took at the bottom of the garden - I see two hearts in the centre - do you see leaves or hearts?

MY FUNNY VALENTINE

There was a mix up with the hospital booking today, and so, instead of being hooked up to an IV drip for my Valentine, I had a day all to myself to make as magical as I wished. On my younger sister's clever advice, I went to the Fitz and drank in Quentin Blake's exhibition of pen and inks, and then next door to glazed Jingdezhen Porcelain, exquisitely crafted.

Continuing with sisterly advice, I stopped by Kings and sampled some (ok, fine, bought some) fudge from the Fudge Kitchen...

then visited the Haunted Bookstore where I ignored the ominous bat, offered the shop owner some fudge (she said No thanks, I'm a cheese woman)...

and went in search of Cicely Mary Barker's Heart's Ease fairy instead... you know the song? Come away and seek me when the year is young, Through the open ploughlands, beyond the garden wall...

While waiting for the ward manager to sort out the mix up, my companion in the waiting room shared both grisly and endearing details of her life. The operation, the cancer, her Bucket List and her cat. Her cat, who was abandoned on Valentine's Day by her previous owners. The cat, who responds to Darling now, and has the power to turn her new owner's cheeks blush pink with joy. Who needs a boy, anyway?

GONG XI FA CAI ON A BIRTHDAY!

Was it only yesterday, that mysterious period of time, when I was a butterfly in Bali, my toes hot pink, and my soul snuggled into the villa lounger, glad of shelter from the late morning sun?

And did I really travel from sun to snow to see the last of the winter flowers?

So ends the dramatic Year of the Dragon and heralds the Year of the Black Water Snake...

Ancient wisdom tells us to be careful, cautious, slow and methodical this year... and that Monday is the lucky day of the week for Snakes... Ha! Monday! The world's least loved day!
But never mind Monday. This Sunday is a double celebration day - as paper snakes and red lanterns are twisted around doorways and set off into night skies, we celebrate my mother's birthday. My talented and conscientious mother, who doesn't need this to be the Year of the Snake to be thoughtful and particular about her actions and words. Beautiful is as beautiful does was never truer.

One of the most invaluable lessons my mother taught us was how to learn to share. Everything was shared as equally as possible between my brothers and myself. Across the globe, the nephew, decked in red, is learning to exchange oranges and share school life celebrations of Chinese New Year

and having spent many hours of fake cooking with me, is clearly able to take on a real birthday cake now!

 GONG XI FA CAI my beloveds, and a Happy Happy Birthday to my beautiful Mother!!

A BUTTERFLY IN BALI

BAS
We make an accidental stop
to taste coffee expelled
by the Luwak monkey
'Most Expensive In The World':
a tray of coffees and teas to tempt
the palate and the wallet;

But here, at this height,
we feel wealthy enough,
and soon heady drunk enough
on Arabica and Robusta,
for anything.

TEGALALANG
My heart gives out
on the way down to the paddy fields
and I return.

Dragonflies like birds
circle the rice
and visit me
in my bamboo cave;
What can be heard
but not seen -
the song of mosquitoes
enjoying me.

THE PLACE WHERE THE LOTUS LEAVES FALL

We take a different route 

you and I

when we pass through archways

or slip inside doorways

but we always meet

on the other side.

My sister-in-law asked me, oh so casually, if I wanted to join her in a family reunion in Bali. I booked that ticket so fast I can't decide if she was impressed or in shock since I normally live my life at the pace of a snail :) These excerpts are from my Bali journal, but the last image is of a butterfly I met in Kuala Lumpur. 

ICARUS

Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1560s

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The old Masters: how well they understood 
Its human position: how it takes place 
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along... 

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

- W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts 

Twice, in one week, I have come across this poem by Auden. First, it was quoted in the book I am reading - The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, and then today, in an interview with the newly appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, Natasha Trethewey. The poem, she says, helped illuminate her own reality of enduring the grief of her mother's death (shot by her stepfather); an invisible grief, because 'The world was going on about its way while I was over there, this tiny individual suffering what seemed to me a huge loss, what was to me a huge loss. That poem showed me that I wasn't alone in feeling that way'.

For twelve years before starting my blog, I lived an invisible life with lupus. Intense suffering on the wards took place unbeknownst to anyone other than the family stalwarts. So I understand the ploughman's inability to see the 'boy falling out of the sky'. But I understand Icarus too. Last year I was determined would be the year I published my poetry. This year I make no promises. I long to touch the sun but some protective instinct keeps warning me about the fall. Published writers sometimes speak nostalgically about the days when they were anonymous mice, writing for a faceless imaginary reader. The perks of being a wallflower. I may have been a mouse for long enough, but I do love being able to write without pressure or commitment. It is quite delicious.

As are these days unwinding in Singapore and Malaysia with my beautiful sisters. (Of course, being with the brothers is not bad, either :))

Cheong Soo Pieng, Bridging Worlds Exhibition, 1981

PAPER MOON POME FOR NEW YEAR'S DAY

Paper Moon, Paper Moon,
Wishes made of these:

'I will see you in the trees,' he croons,
'And in every breeze.

I will see you when the lotus blooms 
And even at her death -

For you will never die,' he says,
'As long as I have breath.'

With two brothers close in age married and settled into the rhythm of loving and being loved, it is inevitable that I get asked about my 'status'. For example, at the hairdressers yesterday, very succinctly: 'Single? Married? Single-ah? Ah, single.' I suppose I ought to be flattered that people think there is some possibility that I may be dusted off the shelf someday.
While the moon gets to work on possibilities, I listen to the koyal crooning afternoon love songs, and measure the full weight of my contented heart...

Dad has found ways to connect with his grandson involving food, high fives and a shared fascination with the white stick, while I have found ways to touch starfish and place my hand fearlessly in an alligator's mouth...

I enjoy the wonder of spending time with women I love... the pomes and poems of my life...

So the Paper Moon can search for me. Or not. Either way, it is a Happy New Year's Day for me :) And I wish the same for you.

NIRBHAYA, THE FEARLESS ONE

I am not here today
for I was never born
and I can never die

I am not here today
in this ordinary form

I am particle
and consciousness
in someone else's sky -

I am wings
I am flight
and this body
will surely die.

 © Shaista Tayabali, Singapore, 2012.

My dearest younger sister,
You travelled from Delhi to arrive here in Singapore. I was at Mount Elizabeth Hospital myself, a few days ago, filled with my usual combination of terror at the state of my scarred eyes and the immense joy of being loved. They say you 'passed away peacefully' this morning. Who chose those words, I wonder? I know so little about you. Only three things. You were a physiotherapist, you loved movies and you had a good friend who tried to protect you. Not knowing your name, we have named you Nirbhaya, the Fearless One.
Did you know that when she was 18, Frida Kahlo had an accident on a bus? An iron rod entered her left hip and exited between her legs. In later life, her gangrenous feet were amputated. But someone was carrying powdered gold on that bus and the glitter speckled her body, turning dark into light. She spent the rest of her life in excoriating pain, but through her art, purified that pain. There was no one to blame. It was an accident.
You drew out poison on a bus thirteen days ago. It was no accident. Was it the medical teams who battled to keep you here until today? I would not choose for you to stay. Not with that particular poison in your veins. Growing up in India, most of us experience some measure of that poison. I am no exception. It informs the way we move, the choices we make, for the rest of our lives. We become tortoises with lionhearts, instead of lions. We become elephants who never forget. We never forget.

Your sister, Shaista.