My friend A is terminally ill with a disease that is working on her with a quiet determination. Having been acquainted with near-death for so long she has no fear of it anymore, instead she lives in the present with a passion I have rarely seen. When she first found out about her condition, A had a professional photographer shoot a portfolio for her.
She could have made it to a Vogue cover with those pictures. It was her way to arrest the atrophy of her body. In her mind she sees herself perfectly beautiful like those airbrushed pictures. "I see the most perfect physical form that I could ever have. It makes me want to strive for other forms of perfection that are still attainable" A explained to me once.
Recently another friend who is a professional photographer told me about an interesting assignment. A couple wanted faces of a celebrity couple on the cover of a popular magazine replaced with theirs. This was their tenth wedding anniversary gift to each other. We were talking about the rather unusual idea and wondered what may have sparked it.
For very different reasons maybe, but like A they were seeking perfection in life, acting out the culmination of all other dream and desire. Connecting a joyous celebration of life and togetherness with impending death left an upleasant after taste in the mind.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
Comments
but there are very few people who can take death and disease in the right perspective and make the best of the remaining time.. good luck to your friend..
btw, I want to get some good airbrushed pics taken.. I know this place where they take these amazing ones.. I saw a whole album of beautiful looking women taken by the photographer.. really professional.. a little zany.. just as I was signing up for a photoshoot session I was told that all the women in the pics were in fact men.. I walked out of the transvestite studio and never looked back..