This weekend I taught J to love water enough to float in the pool. She took to it like the proverbial duck and was soon flapping her way around with ease. She looked cute in her yolk yellow swim suit - almost like a duckling. And her smile was more radiant than the summer sun. I am skipping to mention that there was an awful lot of protesting and resistance before I shoved her into the pool. But then is always resistant to change and swears by the routine and rote- nirvana to her is the daily grind. I wonder if there is a scientific term for that..
Anyways I was toying with a pharse "attic for/of memories" and upon googling stumbled on this. We all dip into the same pool of universal consciousness and knowledge.. Copenhagen to the little grey minutiae in my brain.
I was intending to say that my memory will be an attic for all such days that J made more beautiful just by being. Days that may not mean a lot to her. But if ever she wanted to find one it would always be there for her to find.
J asked that the loofah and the mug stay together on the rim of the bath-tub. Infact she wailed when I was about to change that. She says "They will feel sad if you seperate them". I ask her "How do you know ? Do they talk to you ?" She said with conviction that scares "Yes, they do". Knowing J I would believe that..
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
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As always....good writing!!