Little Women might have been criticised by quite a few people as sappy and sentimental, but to me, it still remains a comfort book. I first read the abridged version when I was seven; the shock of my English teacher when I was in middle school at none of us in class having read the full book spurred me into embarrassed action. It then rapidly turned into one of my favourite books, and to this day holds its place in the list.
You don't have to be a wild, heedless girl of sixteen to identify with Jo; the very idea of harmless romps with the boy next door, the constant scribbling, the tempestuous outbursts of a fiery hot temper and the immediate need to make up are still very much me. Jo built fantastic castles in the air- so do all of us. The March family is human- and as I spent the better part of this afternoon skimming through Little Women and Good Wives, I felt my more unrealistic notions ebb away and sense close in on me.
The sense attack notwithstanding, I cannot for the life of me imagine myself in one of the roles the March sisters played- unselfish and angelic like Beth, or fretting over a baby on each arm like Meg, for instance. My imagination will need to be churned and wrung around a good deal to make it capable of conjuring up images of wifely behaviour and patient, devoted motherhood. Jealousy, for now, is my biggest weakness, and I don't see how I'm going to overcome it soon to be a model of good behaviour. I cannot, in a whole lifetime, see myself doing anything to be famous for after I'm long dead and gone. Mirages of the future don't show me responsible, dignified adults- I see my friends and me just the way we are, carefree and enjoying the guilty pleasures of minor rebelliousness.
I got myself a green-and-white copy of Little Women a few years ago at a sale- it is the book I'd bury my head in on a long, lonely night of despair, when life seems to lie ahead in endlessly bleak years. I must have shed numerous girlish tears for Jo, lamented her marriage to old Prof. Bhaer, triumphed everytime she got published, blushed whenever she wrote sensational nonsense that would sell. It is the book to up my spirits whenever the doubts start to creep in, when further anonymity seems like the only antidote to an already nondescript existence. It is like the stranger's smile that warms your soul- no compliments, just a flash of kindliness. Like the rainbow that rewards you with its pale splendour after you've trudged through pouring rain and are drenched and cold.
I know I'm slipping deeper into idealism, but for now, just let me be.
Showing posts with label Girlhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Girlhood. Show all posts
Monday, July 19, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Hair-Raising Tales
Think of birds being led to their death, crammed into coops or hung upside down on bicycle handlebars, wings flapping incessantly, feathers drifting off to lie on the dust and be crushed under an assortment of wheels.
Leaving out the exaggeration, walking to the beauty parlour, for me, is an act that requires a great deal of courage. Most of my few trips to these unearthly places have been as a source of moral support (?) or in the role of a nonchalant yes-woman to friends. In my short career as a beauty-confidante (for lack of another term), I have offended girls by not knowing that they'd gone and got their hair cut even after they carefully unravelled it and pointed the new shape out to me. Finally suspicious of my judgement when I was stupid enough not to tell a straight eyebrow from a curved one, they decided to leave me alone to loiter through dusty lanes and malls while they pampered themselves in claustrophobic rooms that smelled of sulphur and shampoo, and where the air-conditioner was almost always turned off.
Beauty parlours lack variety and scope for imagination. The shelves are invariably lined with containers of various shapes and sizes and nailpolish bottles in bizarre colours. The tables are littered with fashion/women's magazines, pouting women with outlandish hair-dos and half-closed eyes revealing coloured contact lenses looking lazily out of the glossy pages. They wear clothes that you wonder how they managed to get themselves into- were they sewn into them?
An overdressed, highly made-up woman sits at the reception, points at a brochure and asks you to choose the style you want- even if you were convinced ten minutes ago that you never could be a Gisele Bundchen, some smooth talking would turn you around with the alacrity of a suave politician. You go in to get your hair trimmed, your pimples and blackheads will be scrutinised, your feet will be commented upon, and your self-esteem will be torn into nice little shreds. Dignity, mercifully, can be bought, and you will lay your wallet down on the counter- take all you want, and give me my pride in return. How can I go about with a face pitted and cratered like the moon, the curse of puberty? Guiding angel, I've been walking around for years without knowing how ugly I looked- but for you, I'd have lived in horrifying ignorance.
So, this afternoon, when I left my hair at the mercy of the lady at the beauty parlour, my heart was in my mouth.
"What shape do you want me to cut it in?"
"What will keep the length intact and still make my hair look good?"- because, at that point, my hair rather resembled an unkempt jungle.
"I'll give you a U-cut." And that was that- a quick decision. It wasn't going to be such a big ordeal, after all; certainly not as bad as going to the dentist. I wouldn't have any fringes and layers in my hair- it would still be fit to tie back in a ponytail. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is hair flitting around in my eyes. For what joy do people have strands cut so short that they keep falling across the forehead and into the eye at inconvenient moments, only to keep pushing them back with a manicured forefinger? Oh. That must be it.
I eased myself into the large chair trusting her implicitly, my hands clasped under the big black apron, my hair never having looked as glossy, luxuriant, and make-Rapunzel-jealous-worthy as it did at that very moment, cascading down in thick waves ( a hyperactive imagination might have helped- even so). I barely stopped myself from jumping out of the chair and tearing off the apron- I thought of Jo March who had sold her hair to the wigmakers' so that her mother could have money for her father wounded in war. I didn't have any such noble intentions in mind, of course, as vanity stepped into the fray at the right moment. I began to enumerate the advantages of easy-to-manage, slightly shorter hair, even as the scissors began to snip in quiet, sinister swishes, hair dropping softly to the ground (which I imagined I heard). I dreaded having to get up and look at my only vanity strewn on the floor- I could have howled at the sight of it when I finally got off the chair. What kept the floodgates in control was my friend's encouraging smile; I had dragged her down to negotiate with the ladies at the beauty parlour who might, in a fit of perversity, have wanted to brutally chop my hair off and reduce it to a scarecrow's mop.
I still don't know clearly why I wanted my hair cut- it now looks frighteningly cared-for and orderly, has lost the unkempt attractiveness of wild growth (even if I'm the only person who thinks so), and doesn't touch the floor when I lie down on the couch. Considering that it grows reasonably fast and that wild horses will not drag me into a beauty parlour for another year at the least, I am reconciling myself to it.
Leaving out the exaggeration, walking to the beauty parlour, for me, is an act that requires a great deal of courage. Most of my few trips to these unearthly places have been as a source of moral support (?) or in the role of a nonchalant yes-woman to friends. In my short career as a beauty-confidante (for lack of another term), I have offended girls by not knowing that they'd gone and got their hair cut even after they carefully unravelled it and pointed the new shape out to me. Finally suspicious of my judgement when I was stupid enough not to tell a straight eyebrow from a curved one, they decided to leave me alone to loiter through dusty lanes and malls while they pampered themselves in claustrophobic rooms that smelled of sulphur and shampoo, and where the air-conditioner was almost always turned off.
Beauty parlours lack variety and scope for imagination. The shelves are invariably lined with containers of various shapes and sizes and nailpolish bottles in bizarre colours. The tables are littered with fashion/women's magazines, pouting women with outlandish hair-dos and half-closed eyes revealing coloured contact lenses looking lazily out of the glossy pages. They wear clothes that you wonder how they managed to get themselves into- were they sewn into them?
An overdressed, highly made-up woman sits at the reception, points at a brochure and asks you to choose the style you want- even if you were convinced ten minutes ago that you never could be a Gisele Bundchen, some smooth talking would turn you around with the alacrity of a suave politician. You go in to get your hair trimmed, your pimples and blackheads will be scrutinised, your feet will be commented upon, and your self-esteem will be torn into nice little shreds. Dignity, mercifully, can be bought, and you will lay your wallet down on the counter- take all you want, and give me my pride in return. How can I go about with a face pitted and cratered like the moon, the curse of puberty? Guiding angel, I've been walking around for years without knowing how ugly I looked- but for you, I'd have lived in horrifying ignorance.
So, this afternoon, when I left my hair at the mercy of the lady at the beauty parlour, my heart was in my mouth.
"What shape do you want me to cut it in?"
"What will keep the length intact and still make my hair look good?"- because, at that point, my hair rather resembled an unkempt jungle.
"I'll give you a U-cut." And that was that- a quick decision. It wasn't going to be such a big ordeal, after all; certainly not as bad as going to the dentist. I wouldn't have any fringes and layers in my hair- it would still be fit to tie back in a ponytail. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is hair flitting around in my eyes. For what joy do people have strands cut so short that they keep falling across the forehead and into the eye at inconvenient moments, only to keep pushing them back with a manicured forefinger? Oh. That must be it.
I eased myself into the large chair trusting her implicitly, my hands clasped under the big black apron, my hair never having looked as glossy, luxuriant, and make-Rapunzel-jealous-worthy as it did at that very moment, cascading down in thick waves ( a hyperactive imagination might have helped- even so). I barely stopped myself from jumping out of the chair and tearing off the apron- I thought of Jo March who had sold her hair to the wigmakers' so that her mother could have money for her father wounded in war. I didn't have any such noble intentions in mind, of course, as vanity stepped into the fray at the right moment. I began to enumerate the advantages of easy-to-manage, slightly shorter hair, even as the scissors began to snip in quiet, sinister swishes, hair dropping softly to the ground (which I imagined I heard). I dreaded having to get up and look at my only vanity strewn on the floor- I could have howled at the sight of it when I finally got off the chair. What kept the floodgates in control was my friend's encouraging smile; I had dragged her down to negotiate with the ladies at the beauty parlour who might, in a fit of perversity, have wanted to brutally chop my hair off and reduce it to a scarecrow's mop.
I still don't know clearly why I wanted my hair cut- it now looks frighteningly cared-for and orderly, has lost the unkempt attractiveness of wild growth (even if I'm the only person who thinks so), and doesn't touch the floor when I lie down on the couch. Considering that it grows reasonably fast and that wild horses will not drag me into a beauty parlour for another year at the least, I am reconciling myself to it.
Monday, July 20, 2009
A Slice of Normalcy
After weeks of confusion between days and nights, a semblance of normalcy returns to my life. I awake in the morning, and now, at seven in the evening, I can watch the golden folds in the sky as the sun goes home and a pale bluish white sky without character or identity takes its place. Soon enough, though, the stars will be out, and even as I write, the sky is turning a sinister grey, with a hint of pink pushing its way from goodness knows where.
The lights are coming on and the cars are jamming up at the traffic signals. Fleeing, returning home, going out to be beguiled at a mall, masquerading. Indian girls who have lived cloistered lives and been told what to wear and what to do all their lives see their first chance at 'freedom', if that is what it is to follow the pack, and do precisely what they have been forbidden to. Clothes grow skimpy, alcohol flows free, maybe even a smoke or two. The eyes betray anxiety, a keen hunger for adoration and worship, cowardly defiance, embarrassed guilt. A conscience can be a very uncomfortable thing to have, almost akin to a chronic disease. Fight it all you want, it always catches up with you. Metamorphose, and it will still remind you who you really are.
The children in the park are screaming in glee. Make-believe games and the assurance that someone else knows best (when you are too young to think for yourself or rebel, that is) keep them contented. The black dresses, holding hands on the train and nights at St. James' Power Station are still a long way off. The only outings they care for now are days on the island with their parents, flying kites on the open grass, the National Day celebrations- the age when a country is judged by its theme parks.
We hover on the bridge, trying to fit in somewhere. The cab driver is shocked at the rent we pay- it is much too high, he says- and we still splurge on bargains at the mall. Susceptible to temptations, earning our own living, doing our own cooking and cleaning, shopping for our groceries and vegetables- sometimes it's all just too hard to fathom. Where are we, now?
The sky is dark, and my body knows bedtime is approaching. My mind resists vehemently- but I try to make it see sense, because this is a hard-earned fortnight of normalcy, or a semblance of it.
The lights are coming on and the cars are jamming up at the traffic signals. Fleeing, returning home, going out to be beguiled at a mall, masquerading. Indian girls who have lived cloistered lives and been told what to wear and what to do all their lives see their first chance at 'freedom', if that is what it is to follow the pack, and do precisely what they have been forbidden to. Clothes grow skimpy, alcohol flows free, maybe even a smoke or two. The eyes betray anxiety, a keen hunger for adoration and worship, cowardly defiance, embarrassed guilt. A conscience can be a very uncomfortable thing to have, almost akin to a chronic disease. Fight it all you want, it always catches up with you. Metamorphose, and it will still remind you who you really are.
The children in the park are screaming in glee. Make-believe games and the assurance that someone else knows best (when you are too young to think for yourself or rebel, that is) keep them contented. The black dresses, holding hands on the train and nights at St. James' Power Station are still a long way off. The only outings they care for now are days on the island with their parents, flying kites on the open grass, the National Day celebrations- the age when a country is judged by its theme parks.
We hover on the bridge, trying to fit in somewhere. The cab driver is shocked at the rent we pay- it is much too high, he says- and we still splurge on bargains at the mall. Susceptible to temptations, earning our own living, doing our own cooking and cleaning, shopping for our groceries and vegetables- sometimes it's all just too hard to fathom. Where are we, now?
The sky is dark, and my body knows bedtime is approaching. My mind resists vehemently- but I try to make it see sense, because this is a hard-earned fortnight of normalcy, or a semblance of it.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Inspired!
It's three in the morning, and if you consider the age I feel, I should rightfully be in bed, but because I'm rather above the age I feel and in a pretty loquacious mood, I shall not carry myself off straightaway to my 'attic' room, but sit by this standing fan and let it blow into my damp hair. I almost put shower gel in my hair today, so absorbed was I in my thoughts; thankfully, I realised it in time (I wonder how I've been saved any cooking mishaps- does my subconscious turn its alarms on whenever I'm in the kitchen?).
The kind of writing I'm doing now is what you would equate with breathless talking. I am not too much of a talker, I can pretty much keep quiet when needed, but I've been reading Daddy-Long-Legs, a book I should have read ten years ago, perhaps, when I read Anne of Green Gables (ten whole years, reading and re-reading it!), and I feel like Jerusha Abbott at the moment. She has such a gift for writing letters, oh, and I wish I had someone to write to, just the way she does. Oh no, I wouldn't want to be her, because it isn't very nice not to have a family and belong to no one. But she writes such lovely letters to Daddy-Long-Legs Mr. John Smith (as of now- don't reveal his identity to me, because I'm just halfway through the book), and I'd give quite anything to be able to talk like she does. She finds the right words for the thoughts in her head, comes up with the most splendid questions, and kind of reminds me of Anne Shirley. However, I can't let Jerusha (okay, Judy) replace Anne, can I, whom I've loved and admired so loyally over the last ten years? Okay, Katy Carr sometimes toppled Anne off her pedestal, but that was only when I was siezed by the Katy fit while re-reading her stories. If you ask me now, this moment, it is Anne who rules. I am glad I didn't know Judy Abbott earlier.
Daddy-Long-Legs is the kind of book to be held, breathed in and read in the comfort of your bed, at a stretch if possible. Reading on my laptop after eight hours at a computer in office isn't my idea of a pleasurable reading session. This is what I look forward to all day, though, the nightcap, the dessert, the grand end to the day with a book, any book, and Judy is certainly as adorable as Heidi, Anne, Katy and all the little heroines of my girlhood. What a thing it is to be young! Judy is right, a good childhood to look back on is definitely one of the requisites of life.
Worldly matters call, tell me to put an end to the dreaming and imagining (both Judy and Anne believe in the powers of the imagination: isn't that marvellous?), so I shall force myself under the covers now.
PS: This is my hundredth post here. Do numbers matter? I don't think they do. Not even age. Okay, that's not entirely true, but I'm hoping it will seem so when I'm on the brink of (gulp) middle age.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Saturday
I like Saturday afternoons. I am supposed to jerk myself off bed and go around town, maybe enrich my knowledge with the sights and sounds (and smells) of the city; too bad, having got home from office a few hours ago and intending to prepare myself for the drastic transition from sleeping through the day to sleeping at nights, I am resisting sleep, fighting it off for some for some 'quality time' with my roommate whom I haven't seen for a week, thanks to our shifts (and who has conveniently gone back to sleep, despite having slept seven-and-a-half solid hours). Going diurnal human from nocturnal whatever-creature. I don't know, I don't have a name for it.
So this Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting up in bed, the maroon curtains are half drawn back across the windows, and the sky is close to my face, thickening with rainclouds. I feel like Heidi in her attic bedroom. I really do. All those miles away from home, amidst new people, and young. Okay, not so young.
I find myself able to participate, to a small degree, in girl talk (now I don't know if that's good news); girls aren't awful company, they can be okay at times. And it helps to have a roommate who doesn't wake up to bright lights or noise (except the sunlight streaming full into our 'attic' room, or my windchimes tinkling as the breeze whispers in through an indiscernible crack between the window-pane and the frame). Nature does know how to rouse you from untimely sleep!
My windchimes, yes. I claim possession to this one thing, the first thing I bought here and that I dearly love, the steel-coloured rods clanging against the brass sphere, and three-fourth full faces of the sun on black string with gazes that can be interpreted as sinister or impassive, depending on your day at work, or in your head.
A small tug at the curtains, and sunshine and cloud-luminosity can be obliterated in one stroke. Just a tiny push on the window-pane, and the sounds of the city, the rush and the roar, can be suppressed. To block out the world that is, is that simple. To lose yourself in the world that doesn't exist, but that you imagine and cherish and hope for. Only for a little while, though, before the world imposes on you in the shape of people within the house, hunger and thirst of the physical kind, vibrations of the cell phone, thunder, lightning, the at-once real and dreamily distant clink of the wind chimes. Oh yes, the world gets to you. It gets to you with the nagging reminders of the commonplace; with the knowledge that you're aging, that the people on the videos on MTV are hormone-charged teenagers and the people you grew up watching have probably greyed and put on a few ounces of weight around the stomach, that half the cricket team will soon be younger than you, that the job you came into, fresh and full of enthusiasm, some day would be taken over by another fresher from college. And you'd be the wise Oracle that they'd look up to. Wait. Who am I kidding?
Not today. No amount of financial wrangling or bidding, money lost or gained (it is circulated, someone has it, so why worry?), troubled girlfriends and messy kitchens will get me out of the light and ethereal dreams my mind wants to drift into. The packet of potato chips may lie ripped apart on the sofa, the kitchen might be a real mess, the laundry might pile up to mammoth proportions. Don't mention the mundane to me, not this day, when I am pretending to be Heidi amidst her soft white sheets on her hay bed, the sky on my brow.
So this Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting up in bed, the maroon curtains are half drawn back across the windows, and the sky is close to my face, thickening with rainclouds. I feel like Heidi in her attic bedroom. I really do. All those miles away from home, amidst new people, and young. Okay, not so young.
I find myself able to participate, to a small degree, in girl talk (now I don't know if that's good news); girls aren't awful company, they can be okay at times. And it helps to have a roommate who doesn't wake up to bright lights or noise (except the sunlight streaming full into our 'attic' room, or my windchimes tinkling as the breeze whispers in through an indiscernible crack between the window-pane and the frame). Nature does know how to rouse you from untimely sleep!
My windchimes, yes. I claim possession to this one thing, the first thing I bought here and that I dearly love, the steel-coloured rods clanging against the brass sphere, and three-fourth full faces of the sun on black string with gazes that can be interpreted as sinister or impassive, depending on your day at work, or in your head.
A small tug at the curtains, and sunshine and cloud-luminosity can be obliterated in one stroke. Just a tiny push on the window-pane, and the sounds of the city, the rush and the roar, can be suppressed. To block out the world that is, is that simple. To lose yourself in the world that doesn't exist, but that you imagine and cherish and hope for. Only for a little while, though, before the world imposes on you in the shape of people within the house, hunger and thirst of the physical kind, vibrations of the cell phone, thunder, lightning, the at-once real and dreamily distant clink of the wind chimes. Oh yes, the world gets to you. It gets to you with the nagging reminders of the commonplace; with the knowledge that you're aging, that the people on the videos on MTV are hormone-charged teenagers and the people you grew up watching have probably greyed and put on a few ounces of weight around the stomach, that half the cricket team will soon be younger than you, that the job you came into, fresh and full of enthusiasm, some day would be taken over by another fresher from college. And you'd be the wise Oracle that they'd look up to. Wait. Who am I kidding?
Not today. No amount of financial wrangling or bidding, money lost or gained (it is circulated, someone has it, so why worry?), troubled girlfriends and messy kitchens will get me out of the light and ethereal dreams my mind wants to drift into. The packet of potato chips may lie ripped apart on the sofa, the kitchen might be a real mess, the laundry might pile up to mammoth proportions. Don't mention the mundane to me, not this day, when I am pretending to be Heidi amidst her soft white sheets on her hay bed, the sky on my brow.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Community Life
The sombre sentimentality of the morning has worn off, the rainclouds are gathering, and it's time to go to the supermarket to stock up.
Community Living is what I call living with five other girls in one house. Five girls.
My culinary skills haven't made great headway, and the only thing I do is make noodles, which, of course, my cousin began doing when she was ten. I make decent coffee. I choose chocolate well. In fact, when my flatmates went shopping for chocolates to take home on a visit to India, they took me along for my oracular judgement.
I won't make the regular, meaningless statements about people surviving my cooking...I haven't done much cooking (potato curry and tomato curry- one disastrous, the other much-appreciated), and besides, bad-tasting food never killed anyone. I was rather apprehensive that I might be turned out for not being much of a chef, but I'm useful in other ways (say, as a 'connoisseur' of chocolate), so we're still hanging on together.
Living on your own means looking after your clothes. Washing and ironing them, to be precise. This gets a little difficult when you have more cotton clothes than anything else in your wardrobe, and the colours run, and you wait until the last scrap of clothing you own is in the unsightly heap building up in one corner of your bedroom. The casualty has been some of my favourite clothes being relegated to rough wearing at home; white ruined by the colour off someone else's clothes, purple frayed and faded from constant tumbling and wringing within the washing machine. Oh, okay, I wasn't ever too particular about the quantity of clothes I had. Sadly enough, now I have to be. My ironing is such that it drives my roommate to want to grab the iron from my hand and do my clothes for me.
My intentions are good. They know, and I do, so we somehow get on. I put the rice on in the electric cooker, and only occasionally do I forget to switch the button to 'Cook' from 'Warm'. Accidents happen. It's okay. Sometimes I spill some milk, but I've never left anything cooking on the stove and forgotten all about it, like my roommates sometimes do. (I don't expect you to say, "You never cook, so no danger of that"- you're not so predictable as that, are you?)
They like my hair, but not the way I look after it. Because I hardly do. They try to make me dress more girlishly, but frills and flounces have never been me. Sometimes it is frustrating when they'd rather watch a movie for the umpteenth time than let me watch an F1 race. Or when they wonder why I cannot be as open as the rest of them with my life. Oh come on, I tell them, I don't have anything to tell.
I'm at peace on this wonderful, work-free Saturday, only the thought that we need to go to the supermarket is gnawing at me. That, and the fact that I haven't got in enough reading the whole week. So it's bye bye laptop for now. Begone, I am off to read.
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