The Choice

Was lying in draft box for quite sometime, watching it echoed in Up in The Air inspired me to put it up.


Once in your life come close to killing yourself,
When death is but a moment away,
When you are way beyond the thought of fear and pain.
Beyond the thought of all the strings you have tied yourself to,
Beyond the liabilities and compromises you have piled on top of yourself,
Beyond everything.
And at that moment, choose.
Realise that living is not about being true to the weights you trouble yourself with
Life is the choice you make every moment, to live.

Do not be concerned, not depressed and never really tried killing myself, just a thought experiment.

One thing about my mom's sisters that never stops, come misfortune or high weather is the telling of a good tale. Having them as siblings more than aunts to me during my growing years, I owe a lot of this blog, my skills as a raconteur and the habit of using humour as a stress relieving mechanism to them. This trip home was one in difficult circumstances but I was cheered up at every moment by their stories, all true, all slightly irreverent and all fun in a charming Malgudi Days kind of way. Three of this times best were:

1. The Vote

2. The Dancing Instructor

3. The Peeping Tom

I shall recount the first one here the other two are for my own memory. I beg pardon if the humor doesn't translate into English, for the true flavour of these stories is to be found listening to them being enacted while you have a cup of tea with bara-piyaji waiting on the paan your grandmother is trying to make in between fits of laughter that punctuate every tale.

The Vote

Around 25 years ago, in a tiny village separated from Cuttack by 23 kilometers of paddy fields and the river Mahanadi, the great Indian election process is underway and my grandfather, the bastion of literacy and lover of world history in this little post colonial serfdom, has registered all his eligible children to vote. And one by one they come back from the voting booth and prance around, proudly displaying the mark of the indelible ink like it was something from the Nizam's treasury. One of their cousins didn't have a constitutionally inclined parent and watched around sulking as her compatriots discussed the importance of a ideology in choosing your representative or some such topic. My youngest aunt, lets call her Aunt M. saw her and decided to do something about it. 

Now, in those days you didn't have the election voter ID, what you had was a tiny chit with your name, the polling booth's name and the date printed on it. This was like a voting ticket that you carried to the polling booth. Of all my aunts one had recently got married and her ticket lay unused. Aunt M. stepped up to her cousin and asked her, "You want to vote?" Watching the vigorous nodding of two blue ribboned pigtails melted her heart. Now, the one telling me this story is Aunt M. herself and drops her voice into a most conspiratorial whisper and tells me, "But no one in the whole village could know about this." So the cousin and my aunt walk over to the polling booth. The cousin goes in casts her vote and has all but come out when one 20 something old election volunteer stops her just outside, "Hey! I am in your class, this is not your name on the chit!"

Now imagine two 21 year old village girls ganging up to this guy holding his collar and going, "Listen kid! If anyone gets to hear this, be very afraid passing by the pond with all the eels in them, you can swim can't you?"

The guy has better sense and lets them go. 

That single vote might not have changed the course of history but I love this story, because I have spent many vacations in the setting, I have walked frightened beside the pool with all the eels, I have played hide and seek in the now ramshackle building that served as the polling booth and have seen my aunt and her cousin as older responsible women. This tale reminds me that everyone was a kid once and Voting ID cards were little chits. Sort of gives a sense of history to a part of my childhood. This is possibly one of my longer posts. And I know reading such a long post is too much to ask of a reader and if you have lasted this far with me, thank you very much!