Seasons. The inescapability, the surprises, the soothing regularity. Seasons of my life have much the same features. Each year, I spend roughly the first half springing about, picking up new ideas & shoots and generating spaces of learning. In the second half, I find myself shedding the old, hunkering down and try out the new things in solitude, in the bareness of winter. Then, I legitimately end the year feeling proud of how much change I have effected. Every seven years or so I affect those changes with some operating system level changes and sweep out the old, hand wave in the new. Seasons of life. Inescapable. Soothing in its regularity.
The rhythm of the seasons, it shows up like a small skittish animal moving along a hedgerow. When I am still, give it safe distance and a lot of time to get comfortable, it reveals itself. To be still for me has required giving up on a lot of doing: Going to the nicest / newest places in town, cultivating connections with various people, being there for others, expecting others to be there, the need to talk about the big occurrences with groups of people. While these have been difficult to do, they have also felt like the right thing for myself. Most times, I would be six months into a path before I realise the changes I have made. Not great to be my friends, when they see me changing without warning or a by your leave, but that’s what the investment in friendships is for. They pick up where we left off, and meet me where I need them to be.
Each year, I cast the net wide, to figure out what I want to learn. In the past Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Late Bloomer, Terri Cole’s Boundary Bootcamp, Madhu Shukla and Viji Chari‘s Magic Shop (for over-giving caregivers to recognise that there are choices), have all heralded big change. This year, it was Aruna’s life script workshop in march that whispered a trip that kicked everything off (here in my travelogue).
The one that opened a door I didn’t know was there to be opened, was Myth and Memoir, a workshop by Aruna Gopakumar and Samhita Arni. The idea was to explore myths from a personal perspective. While I also saw how the elements of our stories colour the stories we are engaging with (Or is that happening the other way around?), another unlock for me was just the grinding need to write stories. And I have been, in the month since, to a world of jumpy joy and bittersweet surprise.
This post is about the stories that emerged from the prompts at the workshop. They told me a story about myself that I hadn’t yet articulated. A good starting point is the stories themselves, for flavour:
An element of my favourite myth
The plot device of resurrection has always spoken to me.
Rebirthing myself. Rewiring and transforming myself to suit my needs and unapologetically stop being the old me. Like Gandalf the Grey turning into Gandalf the White. I have the permission to change myself like a character disappearing for a few pages and reappearing having changed clothes, names or features.
The idea of returning home to a different reality
Sita’s story
(This picks up where Sita is left alone in the forest where she gives birth to and raises her twin sons)
The trees of Dandaka forest had a summit meeting.
“Trouble is coming. We’ve got to tell our girl”
They send a spry young sapling over in the dead of night. He called Sita to come out to the clearing. She roused herself, and checking on her sleeping babies, she went
The trees began without preamble.
“Remember five years ago, you came to us. We found you a hermitage where you could live with your twins? Where they – are they not our boys also – could receive nourishment? Where you could all be safe in the lap of nature?
“Yes”
“How often since have you yearned for the feathered beds of your palace?”
“I can’t remember”
“How often have you missed your silks and jewels?”
“I… I don’t’
“O daughter of the earth, how often have you wept in powerlessness, in these last few months?”
“Errr. Not as much as I did as a young bride, begging to follow my partner into his duty and challenges. Not as much as I did in that forest in Lanka, waiting to be rescued. Not as much as I cried at the treachery of my kinsmen, abandoning me like a week old bag of spoilt food”
“In fact, I don’t remember crying at all, in recent times. My boys are thriving. I answer to nobody’s morality but my own. I live my the laws of civil society here in the hermitage. We all forage, eat, read, learn, rest.
Wait a minute. This must be contentment. This not taking time for granted. This not tying oneself up in knots for duty. This slower pace. This smelling the suryakanti flowers. This self-reliance. This is new. I like this”
“So you are saying that we have served you better than the dwellers of your city with their talk of dharma, their riches, their judgment and their rigidity?
“Yes. I am finally myself. You have given me the time, space, safety and respect to make all that happen”
“What are you willing to do to keep this inner quiet and peace, Sita?”
“Anything”
“In that case, listen. Your kinsmen are gathering at the edge of the forest for a hunt. They will chance upon you and your rather well-grown heirs to the throne.
“Are they, now?” “Perhaps it’s time to pull off another disappearing act. And really live, away from the prying eyes and judgements of this society of the ideal man. Let the drama begin”
The element of gender
Incursions come in various forms. At work, the physical sorts don’t happen if you have powerful supporters and I did. You do get minimised – often because of your gender. Through the process of listening to an excerpt from the Mahabharata about Shikhandi and writing what stuck with me, this emerged:
“The girl was taught the skills of men” “She thought like a man, was a woman” “Born a woman, you’ll always be a woman”
I used to joke that “I speak fluent man” by which I mean that at work, I can sound like men and get my work done. I get along swimmingly with my male colleagues and they often forget that I am a woman and that makes my work easier.
I stand like them, hang out with them, often wear mens clothes. Men’s shorts, jeans, t-shirts even, because they are formless. This is me buying into the social pressure of taking ownership of men’s bad behaviour “You have to dress ‘carefully’ to avoid male attention”. So I dress like men do. What a trick!
I am hiding in plain sight. Having internalised early on that the world is an unsafe place for a lone woman, I now wear the garb of men and become them and they give me a one-armed male hug and forget that I am actually different from them.
I am feeling seething resentment and anger that I had to put so much effort for just safety and survival.
Retelling a myth from my perspective
Kannagi’s story is one of the power of a righteous woman. I thought it was the story of a woman who is holding back on anger because she has her duty to consider.
Today, I am that woman, re-telling that story.
The OG Cilappadikaram starts with Kannagi and Kovalan, a wealthy married couple. My myth begins when Kannagi was younger.
Her people brought her up for the marriage market, though she had no inkling that the love showered on her was conditional. She believed that her personhood was received and appreciated. In reality, (their narrow one, that is), they were preparing her for the marriage market. When that happened, their beliefs about how human society and women within should behave would be validated yet again. After all, good marriages were good business.
The stories they always told her were about how she would meet and marry a wonderful guy. “You begin to live then, once you are part of a whole, a coupledom, a holy union. The most perfect thing of all”
Brought up on a diet of Happily Ever Afters, Kannagi the teenager drinks that Kool-Aid. Unfortunately for everyone else, she has some sensible grown ups whose counsel she listens to. She also usually has her nose burrowed in a book. She learnt that the story does not end at marriage. In some books, the happy ever after was the beginning. In other stories, she sees marriages as flawed as humans are, often with rancour and power games and struggles and feeling trapped. She starts to really observe the marriages of her family. Her parents always fight. Their superpower seems to be to hurt the other. Her relatives marriages were mostly stuck together with tradition, “What will others say” and “Just be quiet and deal with it for the sake of the children” She had heard of wealthy men with alternate families and an expectation of peaceful co-existence because their wealth accorded then that comfort. “Wealth trumps your family values?” She asked them in her head. So, harmony does not mean peace.
Kannagi is now a cynic, who also wishes for a good old-fashioned HEA. She is not masquerading as a biddable young prospective bride. She is both a cynic and a romantic.
Her good looks and capabilities in household management (For that is the order in which these things are measured in the marriage market) brings out the worst possible sort of marriage alliances. The rich man, who is emotionally but a child. She will have to carry him on her shoulders while to outward appearances, he is the hero.
Belonging as she did in the second century, she married the best of the lot and got on with it. She might even have been in love.
They lived well. Happily Ever After. For a while. Then he met someone very different from her: More flash and dash as opposed to her domestic goddess vibe. He’d be gone for days. He’d be seen floating around town with this woman, spending his wealth setting her up and buying her bling. Sugar daddy pro max. They went on a Chola version of an open mic poetry night, had an epic fight and split up.
Kannagi was chastely waiting around for her lord and master to return. Luckily for her, that is not all that she did. She also ran a covert business from home, squirrelling up money. She was good at business, except she was of the wrong gender to “Go out and work”. So she pretended to be a man, wearing mens clothes, getting things done through intermediary men, and built up enough corpus to take care of herself. After his breakup with his girlfriend, when Kovalan did, she took him back. In her mind, though, there were boundaries, for the first time in her life.
Her promises were not conditional but his had been. He could slash with his words but if she did, the entire system descended on her. A whole family and traditions and culture and “How things are done.” A barrage of well-used instruments of torture. Applied with the intention of truly getting her to accept him back – not just into the house but also into the hearth and her heart. That too, she did.
For the second time, against her better judgment, though every instinct told her to run away and start afresh, she allowed “duty towards family” to triumph over “duty to oneself”
They shift locations and hope for a new beginning. This time, since he is on bootstrap mode, having lived out his sugar daddy ambitions and spending his trust fund money, she gives him her anklet to liquidate for money. This gold anklet is filled with emeralds.
“Plan B, I still have the other set of this anklet. I still have more jewellery squirrelled away from the work I do on the side, disguised as a man. I will be safe”
With nightfall, comes news that Kovalan, who had one job: to sell the anklet and get liquidity: somehow managed to be confused for the thief of the queen’s missing anklet, and got hanged for a thief.
“Widowhood” The carrions of the family appear. They will lock her away from view and take control of all her resources.
Something primal in her spirit uncoils at the base of her spine.
The wastefulness of it all hits her. She gets out of home and starts to walk. Grief will come later. So will other complex emotions. For now, she and her numbness go walking. She has always walked to make sense of life.
“Maybe I will walk to the king’s court. Show him the twin of my anklet. Tear off a breast in seething anger that I have “not been allowed” to feel because well brought up young ladies don’t feel anger.”
Despite her looks, and her youthfulness, she realizes suddenly that she is young no more. Not old, either. Somewhere in that liminal space. “Look ma, a middle-aged woman is about to throw an epic tantrum”, she thinks. She starts to walk towards the palace. Ready to turn the whole stupid city to ashes with her vitriol. The temper sizzled on her skin and it felt hot and good.
She strides past a woman. An older one. She glances at her. Without her volition, her footsteps slow. Through the building haze, she feels a sort of recognition. She stops and stares. “Who are you? Do I know you?” she asks.
“Like you, my name is Kannagi” says the older woman.
“How do you know my name?”
“I don’t. I recognise the type. Woman bottling impotent rage for ages and about to let the cork go on that bottle and set things alight.”
“Why do I want to kill this whole city?”
“Because you have not had the chance to express just anger. It lashes out and takes everyone in its path. Don’t Vesuvius. Sit down. Drink some tea. Let’s talk.”
They talked for a season.
Kannagi gets up. “Thanks Amma. I’ll get going. I’ve got to go and fight with some people, let go of others, and a business to run, finally, with no pretenses, in my own name. The king, the queen, the anklet and Kovalan are all plot devices. What is important here, is me”
“I’ll be off. Miles to go. Promises to keep – for the first time – to myself”
Writing chops
And so I came to acknowledging my own need to write, write made up stories, write them in a way that makes them mine. Sita might not have dreamt of escaping but I have and successfully executed a few disappearing acts. It felt to me the most natural thing to do. And so I freshly realised, in my middle age, how liberating it is to tell stories, but tell them from the position of being me in all my glory.
So, gratefully, I return to an old and abandoned love, writing fiction. I want to do this for myself. Write stories that I can read and make sense of in the recesses of my own head. All other outcomes are secondary.
Monica Pillai 