Skip to main content

Living Spring

My daily walk that I am still lucky I can do often takes me to an empty school yard. Often I am alone there and the only sound is that of birds chirping. The traffic has died down a great deal so it is now possible to hear the birds clearly. I feel grateful for the freedom to take a walk each day - something many of my elderly relatives in India are sorely missing. I call them often these days to cheer them up as they wait for life to resume. My aunt M is chronically ill and immuno-compromised. We are all worried about her making it to the end of this thing. She lives confined to her room with almost no human contact. 

 I remembered a few days ago a family I knew from childhood who moved from Kolkata to Flushing. We met them a couple of times after they immigrated. Yesterday, I wondered if they were still in NY and safe. This is the first time I they have come to mind in two or three decades. Maybe in the crisis of this proportion, we start to pull closer to everyone we know and love. Maybe the birds get a break from our noise and chaos and sing more freely, enjoy the bounties of springtime. The young dad forced to work from home bonding with his two little girls in the empty parking lot playing silly games with them - also a chance beneficiary of these difficult times. When those kids grow up they may remember this period of time quite fondly. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more