Reflections of a restless eccentric

It has been three years since that fateful evening in 2021 when my father had a stroke. It is not the stroke itself that I struggled with, but all that it unearthed. It felt like a churning of the seas, and so much good and bad came out of it. Things I had never known, things I had never been aware of, things I had taken for granted, and so much more. As more and more stuff surfaced, I felt overwhelmed by the furor. It was almost as if I couldn't breathe, as if I was drowning in the turbulence. I felt an intense need to work on myself, to understand who I really was, and what I was meant to do in this world. It has been three years since I embarked on that quest, and it has changed how I look at the world in so many ways. As one of my favorite poets T. S. Eliot says:  We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. Today, I write about one of the things I have struggled with the most i...

December happens to be my birth month, and I take this time to reflect on all that life has brought my way. This year, like so many recent ones, has felt like a total roller-coaster. I have been through the lowest of the lows, and the highest of the highs. This post is my attempt at chronicling my experiences and perspective. The first thing I am grateful for is always my family. I spent an entire summer abroad, away from family for the first time in my life this year, and this made me realize how lucky and blessed I am to have these people around and so close by. My husband is the first person I think of in this inner circle, and his presence in my life has transformed it in so many ways over the past six years. He makes me want to be the best version of myself, and at the end of the day, he is what adds meaning to my life and all its struggles. My parents have always been there for me in their own way, and I owe my strength, independence, and resilience in large part to their very un...

 I met Ginger and Pepper 6 years ago in November on my first visit to my in-laws' place in Mysore. I'd always loved dogs but had never had any of my own, and these two instantly won over my heart. Ginger was in the prime of her life, a brown indie with soulful eyes and an insatiable need for belly rubs. I was initially skittish around her, but gradually I let my guard down. She would excitedly pounce on me the moment I stepped in, and after a couple of minutes of running and jumping, would promptly plonk down at my feet asking for a belly rub. I delighted in petting her, in the deep rumbling noises of contentment she made, and the happy licks she gave me. Pepper was around the same age, a border collie mix with the softest fur and the sweetest temperament, and she greeted me with the same enthusiasm. Spending time with these two dogs was always the highlight of my visit to Mysore, and I always thought of them as part of my family. Although I did not know then, my time with Pepp...

 The past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. I've been navigating a demanding PhD program with an entire universe of ups and downs, watching my dad go through a stroke, sink into being paralyzed and bedridden, and then inhabit the universe of chronic pain and illness. Last year, my grandfather joined him in the chronically ill world, and I look back and see a blur of health scares, hospital admissions and grief. My parental home resembled a hospital, with sick people (two) outnumbering the healthy (one), and my Mom as the primary caregiver to both her husband and her father. We lost my grandfather a few months ago, and now my father seems to be teetering on the edge of sanity. I won't even get into all the other things that have been going on in the family. This alone is enough to shake and uproot a person and drive them insane. If I am here today, still continuing my PhD and holding on to my sanity and health, I have primarily one person to thank. My am...

Over these past three years, anxiousness has been my almost constant but unacknowledged companion. It never felt too severe to hamper my functioning, and I always brushed it off. It's been a stressful week. Maybe I've had too much caffeine, it's just jitters. I have had too little sleep for a while now, my nervous system is shot. Given my schedule and life, all these are very plausible and likely explanations for how I felt. And so, I continued on, finding coping mechanisms to deal with the bad days - no caffeine, meditation and breathing exercises, long walks.  A few months back, in May, I was preparing to leave for a summer in Amherst. This would be my first time living alone abroad for a few months, and I was definitely nervous about it. My husband had to travel ahead of me, which meant that I also had the responsibility of cleaning and winding up the house before I left. Added to this, I had a paper deadline a few hours before I left, which meant I would get little to n...

 Grief is a very non-linear journey, and I have known this for a very long time. Yet, each time I inhabit one of those black holes of loss, sorrow, worry and gloom, I forget this fact. Today is one such day, and I am writing this to remind myself and anyone else who may need this.  I woke up today, feeling an intense sorrow. It took me completely by surprise, because nothing had "happened". I'd gone to bed last night feeling pretty normal, and yet I woke up feeling utterly sad. I racked my brain. Did I eat too much sugar? Was I having a delayed reaction to something that happened a while ago? I couldn't find a logical reason for my sadness, except that everything that had been going on suddenly added up and descended upon me today. I sighed and sat down. I thought about my grandfather's death, my dad's continued illness for almost three years now, and so many other tragedies before that. The tears started rolling down.  This has been a very familiar experience...

 I am woken up at 4.25am by a phone call. Initially, I think that it is someone from India who is not aware that I'm in a different timezone. I groggily take a look at my phone. It is my husband. My heart skips a beat because I know too well what it likely means when a loved one calls you in the wee hours of the morning. He says Thatha is no more. I'm driving over to your parents' . I am numb, still waking up, and only shock registers. So many questions come to mind. When? How? Why? The answers reach me from a distance. He passed away in his sleep in the morning. Around 11am. And thus begins the horror of losing another loved one. The last grandparent I had. The one I knew the most. And the one I shared a house with for more than 20 years. And then the aftershocks hit me. I am continents away, and the logistical issues in traveling back home are too many. I will not go, and I will never get to see him again. I will never get to say goodbye. And so, I turn to writing, hopin...

 This is a rather late post (my 5th wedding anniversary was on Feb 7), but better late than never, right? I write this as I reflect on the past five years and how my marriage has evolved over this period. There was so much that I could talk about, and I wasn't sure what to focus on. So I asked myself this: What is the most important and meaningful thing that marriage has given me? And to my surprise, the answer was this. Me. More precisely, a new and improved me. Before you conclude that I've lost my marbles, let me explain. 6 years ago, in 2018, I was just finishing my Masters and starting a new job. It was then that I met my to-be husband. In our very first meeting, I felt that he was a very cheerful, positive and grounding presence. As someone who was very influenced by the energy of people around me, I realized that it was very important to surround myself with uplifting people. And so, I went with my instincts and decided that he was exactly what I needed in a partner. Six...

 For more than 2.5 decades, I have been an animal lover. I find joy in being around animals and watching their behavior. Strangely, my interest never included birds, and I never wondered why. In 2020, my husband bought a camera with 100x zoom, and I felt like this new world of birds opened up to me. It was then that I came to this startling realization - I hadn't been interested in birds because I had never been able to see them clearly. Thanks to my short-sighted vision, I had always seen them as tiny dots in the sky. Other than a crow, pigeon and sparrow, I hadn't seen any birds at close quarters, clearly enough to see their features and identify them. But now, all that had changed. I saw colorful kingfishers, vibrant parrots, an alert owl and so much more.  My husband became an avid bird enthusiast, and I initially just tagged along as company, but later genuinely developed an interest in them. I became good at spotting birds, and the number of birds I could identify went u...

Many of my friends who moved abroad have told me how much they missed the sun. I have empathized with them, but never fully understood what they meant. When I decided to go to Massachusetts for an internship, I said a prayer of thanks that it would be during summer. I love the sun and bright sunny days. What I did not know, and naively did not look into, was that summer came with abundant rain in Amherst. So I packed my summer clothes, leaving most of my rainy and winter clothes at home. The first day I came to Amherst was a cold, rainy afternoon. The skies were dark, and a cold wind threatened to freeze my limbs. My poor fragile umbrella struggled to hold up. It rained incessantly all afternoon and evening, and a feeling of gloom and foreboding set in. Was this how my summer was going to be!? The next day dawned bright and sunny though, and I once again felt cheered up and uplifted. The very next day, as I was walking to work, the skies suddenly opened up without warning, drenching me...

 Loss comes in different colors. It may be that something tangible we possess is taken from us. It could be something or someone we always imagined as a part of our lives leaving. It could be relationships that sour over time. But the hardest part is finding acceptance. Not just of what happened, but all the voids created in our present and perceived future as a result of this event. When my Dad had a stroke, I looked at it as a transient event. That he would get better in a few months, maybe a year. After that, things would go back to how they were. Over time, gradually, I realized that this was not going to happen. He got worse, and all the negative traits he had became magnified. I saw depression take hold of him with a vengeance, and his anxiety ratcheted to the highest I'd ever seen it. He lives every day in agony, screaming continuously for the most part. Every other week, a physical ailment crops up, adding to all our burdens. Sometimes I look at him in disbelief. I can no l...