Small Remedies

Finished the novel "Small Remedies" by Shashi Deshpande yesterday night. It was a slow paced novel, and quite realistic and modest, one of those which make me think that anyone could actually write a readable and interesting novel out of their life!

Here are a few quotations or phrases that i specially liked in the book...am writing them in the context in which they are given:

• The Tower of Babel syndrome- I heard a pediatrician use the phrase to explain the late speaking of a child. I went to the dictionary then and from there to the Bible and read the story. That it was God who created many languages in order to bring about chaos- and this to stop men from building the tower that would reach heaven!... The Lord got it all wrong. Its not different languages that bring about chaos, for you can disperse with words altogether. I think of Joe and Leela, his terrible Marathi, her English almost ono-existent. Yet communication between them was perfect. But, of course, the best communication is always wordless.

• The Ganeshas in niches, the decorated thresholds, the mango leaf torans, the Oms, the Swastikas, the charms and amulets- all to keep disaster at bay, to stave off the nemesis of a jealous god.

It doesn't help; nothing does. It's always a losing battle. Such small remedies, these, to counter the terrible disease of being human, of being mortal and vulnerable. Like concocting a poultice on the kitchen fire to fight a raging gangrene. The only remedy is to believe that tragedies, disasters and sorrows are a part of the scheme- if it can be called that. To understand that it's a package deal: you get the happiness, you've got to accept the sorrow and the pain as well. You can't get one and escape the other. But what's new about this thought? We all know the philosophy of duality- life and death, day and night, sorrow and happiness. It sounds good, it sounds right and when we speak of it, we nod our heads and agree that this is the truth of life. But when we're in the process of living, when the going is good, can we really make ourselves believe this? Will we concede, even to ourselves, that the sinister other of happiness is waiting for us round the corner? Basking in the bliss of family life, would I have let myself think: this is not forever, this happiness is ephermal, it is illusory? No, I could not. How could I when, at that moment of experience, the happiness was so real, so substantial?

• Indifference is, after all, the best armour you can wear. If i don't care, I can't be hurt.

• "God called the dry land earth and the gathering of the waters he called the sea." which shows, Tony said to me, after quoting this line, that naming things is part of the act of creation. Without words there canbe no ideas, no emotions. We need words, not only to speak, but to live out our lives as well. Wordless, we are blank. Vacant.

• I knew none of these things when my father and I were together. It was enough for me to have him home with me. We were always comfortable and easy with one another. The space between us was not crowded with demands, doubts, assertions or questions. There was enough air for us to breathe easily. Ours was a relationship built, not on information, but on trust.

Munni tried to dislodge me from this paradise by offering me the knowledge of my father's mistress. But I thrust this knowledge away from me. It had no place in our life together. Child though I was, I had the wisdom to know that you don't need to know everything about a person.

• It is from those who love us that we need to be protected, it is with them that we put down our arms and become vulnerable and defenseless.

• "It hasn't gone anywhere, your life with your father is still there, it'll never go away."

Joe's words. It was just a few days after my father's death. "Come," Joe said to me, coming home unexpectedly in the middle of the day. He took me for a drive and he drove on until we came to the sea. He stopped the car then and we stood in silence, watching the monsoon waves swell and surge towards us in an unending rhythm of thunderous sound. The rain had let up for a while, but the sky was brooding, heavy with more rain, and the sea, its thirst unappeased as yet, seemed to be reaching up for it. A silent figure was walking along the shore, looking steadliy down, as if searching intently for something, uncaring of the waves which dashed against his legs and climbed up to his knees. All three of us, inhabiting the same solitude, linked by the same silence. Joe suddenly spoke then, saying to me, "It hasn't gone anywhere, your life with your father is still there, it'll never go away."

Some kind of an understanding came to me then, an understanding that came to me from the glory of the sea and the clouds, from Joe's presence beside me, even from the silent man absorbed in his own solitude. And I, sore with the pain of my father's death, with the disruption of my entire life, had felt a kind of healing in the words.

How could I have ever longed for amnesia? Memory, capricious and unreliable though it is, ultimately carries its own truth within it. As long as there is memory, there's always the possibility of retrieval, as long as there is memory, loss is never total.