Skip to main content

Swiping Cobwebs

 Read this poem about spider webs and the concept of home the day I was clearing cobwebs that festoon my front door. Earlier while at the gym the same day I was reading Tagore's Glimpses of Bengal where he says this of nature and man:

Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!

A home is not a monument for posterity. It is ephemeral as the spider-web just a little different time-scale. My grand-aunt used to live in a beautiful home as part of a joint family. Her husband and his three brothers had contributed to building it. A widowed sister had arrived at some point and found shelter for herself and her two children. The home overlooked a pond and had plenty of natural light. Everything was clean and polished to a high-gloss - wood, granite, brass and marble. Over the years,  her husband, his brothers, their wives and the widowed sister all died. 

There was a point when my grand-aunt lived their alone - everyone else had either left to other cities and countries or deceased. She was no longer able to upkeep the place even with a lot of help. Her daughter decided this way of life was not viable and took the mother to live with her. My grand-aunt's dying wish was for the house to be taken care of - not abandoned. A few years ago it was demolished to make may for an apartment building. So much like a spider-web I swiped away from my door - like it never existed. It had been a monument in its own way - a testament to the grit of four refugee brothers who did what it took to give their families a decent life, a home to call their own.  But as Tagore says, the fate of monuments is to crumble - and not everyone is kind like the little girl who did not touch the cobweb in her bicycle.



Comments

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...

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...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...