SCHERAZADE

SCHEHERAZADE”S FINAL STORY

Under the arcane of paraffin lamps
Scheherazade began her thousand oneth story

When I came a thousand nights ago
I was a child woman
After stories merged into stories
And characters left the cocoon of my memories
I am no more a child

Before I came
I sat on the lap of my lover
Beneath the almond tree
Which shed its leaves
Into the stream
As narrow and silvery as my anklets
And my weight had filled us with light

After this final story
That I shall keep half untold
I shall return
To find strangers on every face
That dwells in those huts
Which grow like cysts beneath the steppes

Oh Sultan
I return as a strange woman
After three and a half years
With not a lap to call my own
………………………………..

CHANDINI SANTOSH

STEM CELL THERAPY

STEM CELL THERAPY


CHANDINI SANTOSH


A few months back, Lisa Ray, top Canadian model of Indian origin, resurfaced on the covers of many news magazines with the stunning revelation about her rare cancer affliction and the cutting edge stem cell regenerative procedures she was undergoing for the same in the US with encouraging results. Having been a fan of Lisa ray’s unusually magnetic looks and personality I sat glued to the reads.

Regenerative procedures using stem cells has quietly taken over all other modern procedures in medical as well as surgical sections. Though the terminology may sound alien, the system itself is simple. As we know all cells are derived from stem cells. In an adult human, these cells lie dormant inside the bone marrow, in the cavities of the eyes, under the epidermis and inside one’s stomach. They can divide and that too very rapidly into cells to regenerate almost any part of our body and brain. I know: This sounds like magic or at the most a miracle. But that is what any advanced technology looks like in the beginning. It is indistinguishable from magic.

When antibiotics emerged to combat bacterial diseases, it had an aura of miracle to it. Penicillin was hailed as a wonder drug. With just one shot of Penicillin doctors could cure sexually transmitted diseases like Gonorrhea and syphilis. The same shot could heal infected wounds, pneumococcal infections, skin lesions and many other diseases which could not have been controlled otherwise. With the discovery of radium the medical fraternity achieved near miracle status as x-rays could ‘see’ through human body. With the advent of MRI scans each and every part human anatomy could be visualized, including even the bones and the marrow lying underneath it.

Stem Cell regenerative procedures are the latest entrant in a long line of modern medical discoveries. If a decade ago, nobody knew much about these nano cells, today we realize that there is almost nothing that cannot be tackled with stem cells. Take cardiomegaly for instance. This is a condition where the heart has enlarged to such an extent that normal pumping of blood to all parts of the body become impossible. One of the symptoms of this cardiac disorder is a rapid pulse rate, almost double than normal. Till now the only option available to a cardiac patient was to get a transplant done. There is renewed hope for such patients. AIIMS began clinical trials using adult stem cells on cardiomyopathic patients with encouraging results. Even in patients with tissue damage following acute heart attacks, where even bypass surgery seemed to do no good, and stem cells have begun to show their magic, though doctors caution that it is not magic yet.

When it comes to liver disorders, stem cell therapy gas attained magical status. Even earlier we know that much could be achieved in the liver as it is one of the most regenerative friendly organ in the human body. With the latest techniques involving cell rejuvenation, even heavily cirrhotic liver could be made ebullient.

There is not a single area of medical process that stem cell therapy cannot be deployed. India is in the forefront of such advancement, primarily due to the Union Government’s proactive measures. If traditionally scientists could only do research work in science but could not translate it into clinical use, much could be achieved. In the coming decade regenerative treatment is said to take off into brilliant possibilities. Fortunately for India stem cell research has not been derailed over ethical issues concerning embryonic stem cells as it had been in the US. Former US President George Bush had stopped all government funding for embryonic stem cell research as conservative religious groups argued that life cannot be destroyed to save other lives. Barrack Obama has overturned this law with the argument that embryonic stem cells hardly constitute lives and also many lives were saved. Embryonic cells are the most powerful cells in the lineup of other stem cells. The cells in an ovum are harvested within less than a week after fertilization takes place. They have the ability to develop into any of the two hundred odd types of cells needed by the body. The promise of possibilities is too large to be posted.

At one point I began wondering as to why this advanced technology has had few detractors. In my view this is so because, ironically enough the terminology of Regenerative Therapy sounds dangerously similar to what pseudo sciences and its practitioners use. It is the ‘follow the heart’ kind of verbiage that strikes a chord in people. Or else people have not sufficiently understood its implications as well as its moral or ethical complications. It is better so.

………………..

MALAYALA MANORAMA

The Metro Manorama featured me yesterday. This was a better write up, I feel. Not much of senti stuff.

WOMEN IN LOVE

WOMEN IN LOVE

You have strewn gold and coral beads
All over the floor
My mind slips and wavers over them

You throw words at me
At point blank range
You thump your delicate chest
With long flute like fingers
He loves me: You say
Me

What can I say
Except that those are dangerous words
That he has said to you
Not even a handful
But irrefutably dangerous

Like a desert tree
In a tobacco brown landscape
I stand at the tip of this sandstorm
My bones breaking

Yes, soft words do all that
They break your bones

……………………………

ORIGINAL SKETCH

ORIGINAL SKETCH

BY

CHANDINI SANTOSH



At present
I have just a simple sketch
Not the original
It’s a bit hazy
With layers of time on them

I sit on these broken laterite steps
Of an ancestral pond
With my legs on creeping waters
Recounting
The seven weapons in my armory,
Reconsidering the eighth:
The one about retracting,
Withdrawing from the battlefield

As dust rises over this grotesque battle
And your voice fades
With each syllable
My uncouth hair spreading
On the mossy green
As my face dissolves in water
To retrieve the original sketch

……………..

LOVE IN THE TIMES OF RAIN

LOVE IN THE TIMES OF RAIN

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH

We married in the rains,
The pitter patter of rain
Constant and tireless

I came in from the rains
While you smoked a beedi
You had a caught in the act smile

We were young thighed
Yours long and muscular
Mine just opened fruit
Avocado like,
Hard on the outside
Deep and glowing inside

Time is a never ending Neanderthal river
Slow where it begins
Picking up momentum
Where it falls from precipice to precipice
Down to the ocean
In a relentless downpour

……………………………..

This pix was clicked when Santosh was very ill. Inspite of all that, he saw patients. A part of the clinic can be seen.

UNDER THE POMEGRANATE TREE

UNDER THE POMEGRANATE TREE

BY

CHANDINI SANTOSH


In the faint light of dusk
We sat under the pomegranate tree
In our backyard
Me and my friend,
Our mouths reddened with its seeds
Comparing our fruity breasts
While television screens flickered
In our homes

……………………………..

STRANGER THAN FICTION

STRANGER THAN FICTION

One Mr. Rehman went into a medical shop and strangely felt elated when the workers stood around respectfully. He had never experienced recognition like this ever before. He presumed it could have been his natty way of dressing that did the trick. He was vacationing in his hometown. He worked in Dubai.

Wherever he went, people showed concern and respect. One morning while he walked down the congested roads of Mahe, his wife’s hometown, he was accosted by a drunk.
This early doctor? If you had told me I would have delivered a pint bottle home. All hope of being nattily dressed drained from Rehman’s handsome face.
But I do not drink. He replied quite miffed by the drunk.
Oh come on, doctor, as if we don’t know!
But I am not a doctor.
Oh ok ok. The man chuckled.

Thinking that he hadn’t heard right, Rehman stood dazed on the footpath looking distastefully at the receding back of the offending man. He decided then and there that this matter had to be looked into before he returned to Dubai.
Rehman hastened to his schoolmate to air his woes and unlock the puzzle that seemed to follow him around.
His classmate looked at him in wonder and piped up.
You know, you resemble a famous doctor over here.
Tell me, Rehman said, all ears, his antenna up.
You resemble Dr. Santosh.
Who?
Dr. Santosh.

On a cold November evening in 2004, Rehman came to our clinic. Few patients remained. As soon as he walked across, my heart pounded. Am I seeing doubles, I asked myself? Of course this couldn’t be true. I kept my head down. Our young pharmacist felt the same thoughts coursing through her mind, but unlike me she voiced her doubt.
Somebody resembling Sir, just walked past, madam, she said.
You noticed, I spoke gingerly.
In fact the man who accompanies him is my father’s friend, she said, with hope spreading over her face.

Both of us were still in shock when Mr. Rehman came in shyly and asked to see the doctor. I made as if to write out a chit for him before he entered the clinic. I remember I clumsily held my head down and pretended to write busily though my mind raced against all manner of possibilities.

I am not sick, he blurted out. I just want to see the doctor, Rehman said. Without waiting for my reply he barged into the clinic and what do you know, Rehman and Santosh stood looking at each other for a second before both of them broke into laughter.
I have been wanting to see you since long, he said.
Last time I came during my holidays I was aware people were scrutinizing me, but this time I was most sure that something most strange was happening in my life. That is when my friend here told me about you.
They had the same build, complexion, features and most importantly the same lustrous and full head of hair. They were the same age as well. Though Santosh was ill at the time, he had not yet lost his looks or hair, even after the twelve cycles of chemotherapy that had traumatized his body.

Mr. Rehman had brought with him several photographs where the resemblance was most striking. He took some photographs of Santosh with him.

The most enjoyable and hilarious part came later. We asked him into our living room and as he walked in my mother stared at him happily and exclaimed.
See you are now walking as if nothing has happened. I had told you there was nothing wrong with your legs.
Mr. Rehman smiled. But as soon as he opened his mouth and started talking, my mother became flustered. It was not Santosh, her son-in-law speaking.

I accompanied Mr. Rehman to the gate while Santosh watched us from his clinic. By then people had crowded around the clinic to see ‘doctor’ walking with abandon. The local ‘cowboy’ who grazed his cows wherever he pleased came down the road. He saw Rehman walking beside me and shouted to the shopkeeper.
I knew it, I knew doctor would walk someday.
That’s not the doctor, but someone who resembles him.
He threw an unprintable abuse at the shopkeeper. While went after the cows, he bowed to Rehman who could only look down in disbelief.

Dear readers, none of you could even trace any difference. Though to be honest, in reality they looked even more similar, if that could be possible. But their voices were different and they were two entirely different people. Mr. Rehman kept in touch till Santosh died.

He lives in Dubai.

…………………………….

In the second pix, it is Rehman you see, with his wife and only daughter. The black and white pix show Santosh with his first wife. The third one shows Santosh and me. Now tell me whether you have ever heard such a galvanizing fact which is stranger than most fiction? I am sure you haven’t. If at all you have experienced anything similar, do narrate.

THE STORY BEHIND PHOTOGRAPHS

THE STORY BEHIND PHOTOGRAPHS

If photographs could tell a story, this one would grab you by the neck. It has drama, pathos and the essence of life. As I have often told you that life itself is amazing at all times. There is nothing more miraculous than life. And nothing more poignant too!

I am most sure that some of you can recognize Santosh and me in these photographs. The others in those momentous photographs are - Santosh with his first wife, (Do not be alarmed, they were legally divorced, and we in turn had a legal arranged marriage), with first wife and daughter, with his friend, with his classmates, both doctors, wearing the first shirt I bought for him and alone among palms.

I remember that I was most agitated when I first saw the photographs featuring his ex wife, though I could hardly say I was not aware of the fact, though some crucial facts were not revealed to me. I came to know of these later, in fact as soon as we were married, on our first night itself. A daughter, I remember thinking, so what am I doing here!

I did not show my agitation dear friends, I have been prepared by nature for all emergencies. I was unimaginably raw, docile and melodrama – free. I believe, at the time I must have been fatalistic as well, which thankfully I am not at present. So when Santosh showed no signs of taking me for a honeymoon, I reassured myself that since he had one, there was no point in having another. What does it matter?

I would have made him feel guilty if I had harangued him with honeymoon woes. How does it matter that I was robbed off these exquisitely happy days in life? When I see newly married couples walking around parks hand in hand, I look happily at them. I smile back when they do.

So it was that we came to be buddies more and a married couple less. He spoke to me as he would to his close friend, inasmuch as sharing his intimate details. For example, he told me all about his girlfriends, in fact I met up with two of them, who in turn were nonplussed at my carefree smile and chatter. Yes, we sized up each other all the same. To be honest, they had their share of glamorous looks and love, and I had immense confidence, which in turn made up for my lack of good looks. I would even joke with Santosh that if he had deigned to marry any of them, I would have been spared this entire trauma.

But a wife is a different proposition altogether. First, second, third or whatever. It was most painful for both of us when we met under unique circumstances. (She is married and leads a life of her own.) I am caught up in this frenzy of remembering. She carried her son in her arms while I gaped at them bewildered.

No this is my son, said she.
And my son lies buried in a small hole beneath peepal trees.

……………………

This, My Land...

This, My Land...

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH


This, my land,
He said:
His city hands inside jeans pocket,
Where my grandfather’s bones
Have been laid to rest

As the stone crusher moved in
With yellow arms
Scouring red earth,
Mixing blood and yearning
Death and salvation

The trees have been felled
And taken care off
The avuncular contractor
Rubs his stubby hands together
Now being chiseled into carved doors
And wide windowsills
(This in an aside)

Those majestic teak trees
With brush drop of flowers
The cashews with grating leaves
The pepper vines encircling the jackfruit trees
And the avocados that made you diabetic for life
I don’t go near them, Sir
Health hazard
The coconut palms
In their circular biblical bed
The arecanut trees
Mating in the wind
Not much produce, Sir
(Aloud, tongue in cheek)
They are mowing down the guava Sir
With succulent yellow fruits
Hanging beside the stone quarry

The laterite stone quarry, Sir?
It has been leveled
With all those yellow temple stones
Made good use of them, the little bastards!
(Another aside)

He knelt to pick
A blood red pebble of earth
With a wiry calcium deposit around it
(Some cheap sentiments)
And superstitions, no doubt

He smiled
As pickaxes bounced back
From fossilized bones
Dozens of them
Bones upon bones
The dead upon dead

You planted your story on them
And history shot up

………………….


The painting that you see above has been stolen. So be it!

THE MATHRUBHUMI WRITE UP

MATHRUBHUMI WRITE UP

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Today an article on me appeared on Page 3 of The Mathrubhumi Daily along with a sensitive pix in place. It has made my day, though my friends have not liked the sentimental slant of the article. As you know, I am neither sentimental (well, not too much!) nor pessimistic. I would not have reached here with these negative tags on my shoulders. I am a chronic optimist, living life to the full, as much as is possible, given the milieu I live in. I do not dare to be different, my writing does it for me. Bringing in all the difference that there is.

I am also not pensive by nature. I cannot sit solemnly for long. I enjoy life's vagaries. My family and friends would tell you how strong a person I am. I do not give up easily. And why would I?

But yes, lots of solitude does rain in through my windows, pigeons make neighborly sounds on the windowsill, the wind moans in as the sights and smells of life seep up to me. After all if life is not lived, how could you possibly write?

MY FATHER

MY FATHER

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH



My father was the eldest of ten children. He was soft spoken, mild mannered and well educated. All these qualities made him stand out amongst his siblings.

After Matriculation he pursued his studies at Mysore from where he received a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering. After an unfruitful stint in the Indian Navy, he joined the National Physical laboratories, New Delhi as a Mechanical Draughtsman. He would tell me hilarious stories of his naval days. It seems one could not sport a moustache without growing a beard. Or else, one had to be clean shaven. Being a Keralite, where a premium is put on a moustache, my father could not forgo his moustache and also could not comply with the beard issue. He walked out with his moustache intact but without a job. He was thirty years old and had twelve people to look after. None of his brothers or sisters was good at academics. All of them were school dropouts.

My father had an uncanny knack of knowing where vacancies lay, which placed him at an advantage. He traveled to New Delhi much before Independence to take up his post at the NPL, from where he retired in the seventies.

He was as different from his siblings as he was different from other men of his time. He treated his wife with respect and affection. They are the most companionable couple I have ever seen in my lifetime. Though mild men tend to be labeled as hen pecked, my father was far from being so. It could also have been due to my mother who was milder than him.

I firmly believe that this difference arose from his education and travel. As you can see from the photograph clicked at one of his numerous nephews, he looks different, mainly because he has a confident smile on his face, which is absent on the faces of his younger siblings, some of whom, you will notice look much older than him. Except for the voluptuous aunt in the middle, all of them sport a nonchalant tired-of-life expression. The aunt in the middle, to whom I am told I closely resemble, is a most ordinary woman and most unlike me, physical resemblances apart, though we resemble in some other ways as well. Both of us are childless, though we had delivered a baby boy each, who died even before we left hospital.






















My father inculcated in us a strong sense of rationality and yearning for scientific temperament. No religious sentiments were forced on us, in fact we were brought up in a world totally devoid of any religious symbols. As far as I can remember, we did not frequent temples except as a tourist or as an onlooker. My father did not allow gods and goddesses in his house. He placed a premium on rationale. I remember reading E. M. Kovoor at a young age under my father's influence and being hypnotised by new thoughts. Ironically enough, my father had his idiosyncracies, which were not in concurrence with his rational approach to life. He avidly read the Stars Foretell column and practised Homoeopathy, which according to me subjugates everything about reason.

Though I am much like him, I make sure I do not fall into idiosyncratic beliefs that are which take me away from being a rational person and is also anathema to me. I also learn from mistakes.

.......................

LAKE

LAKE

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH

This frozen lake
And the leafless trees spread around,
This winter:

Let me turn my back
On this picture post card
As a musty wind flutters
Over breaking waters
…………..

APRICOT TREES

APRICOT TREES

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH


Where are those apricot trees
Breaking into flowers,
Beneath which
We had walked hand in hand,

Rows and rows of trees
With musk settling on them,
These eternal flowers
Rain down on me
While you pass by.

Only fools have nine lives
My love,
We have just this one,
With murmorous shades in between.

...........................................

LEAVING

LEAVING

When we left our house
We left sad oblongs on the walls,
Lightened in time
Where our photographs hung

Golden lizards
Had laid transparent eggs,
Our echoes had grown
More than our voices
And memories lay hunched
In dark cavities

………………..

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN"S CANCER WARD

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN’s CANCER WARD


CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s

CANCER WARD

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been called the only Russian classic by many, repudiated by none. His works come out of the depths the soul, from the bone marrow, to buoyantly fight every human indignity, tyranny and oppression of freedom. If his epoch making novel, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was a massive historic account of the Soviet secret Police, and a shattering account of the Soviet Penal system, his earlier semi autobiographical work, ‘Cancer Ward’ is the celebrated novel of life in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s Purge, when millions were killed, thrown into labor camps or exiled.

Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, served for eleven years in a concentration camp for speaking against the tyranny of Stalin – an experience which provided the raw material for his magnum opus, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’. He was a cancer patient in the mid – 1950’s, from which sprung forth the cataclysmic parable of ‘Cancer Ward.’

As Soren Kierkegaard observed that the union of a great artist and a great theme constitutes ‘the fortunate in the historical process, the divine conjunction of its forces, the high tide of historic time.’ The union of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the theme of the concentration camps produced the masterpiece of the twentieth century, while the unfreedom suffered by the artists of the Stalinist Soviet Era produced what Albert Camus deemed impossible, the compulsion of the human imagination to participate in the agony and the murders of millions that has been the distinguishing feature of 20th century.

‘Cancer Ward’ can be read purely as a literary work, without the reader ever knowing the circumstances in which it was written, without recognizing the larger picture that the book rounds up, of the excruciatingly totalitarian regime under which Russian writers, intellectuals and artists worked, and were finally silenced if they raised their voices against oppression. It is the enclosed world of the damned. The Purge by Stalin was a systematic removal of all dissenting voices, which left the rest of the citizens, deathly silent. Solzhenitsyn metaphorized cancer to the lack of freedom in the Russia of his times. But it is the sheer magic of Solzhenitsyn’s writing that catches the reader by the throat in a vice like grip. There is not a single question about life that remains unanswered, not a single human situation that remains unfulfilled. What unfolds is the tragic – comedy of life. There is a timeless quality of ‘Cancer Ward’ is that the allegory has the agility of reality to cover up its tracks of metaphor.

The story unfolds in a Cancer Hospital in Uzbekistan in 1955 in the Stalinist Soviet union. The three months that the main character Kostoglotov spends in the men’s ward of a cancer hospital forms the background of the story. Each patient in the ward has a tumor at different parts of his body, the tumor itself symbolizing the malady that has gripped the society. It explores the moral responsibility – symbolized by the patients’ malignant tumors – of those unfortunate men and women implicated in the suffering of their fellow citizens during Stalin’s Great Purge. The patients in the men’s ward are also a cross section of the existing Russia which has numbed the citizens with the oppressive nature of a totalitarian society. There is Rusanov, the government employee, ‘the insider’ who believes that no other means could be employed to rule a country other than complete subjugation. In his pontific manner, he reiterates that a civilized society can only survive through a rule by the gun, allowing no dissent, no individual freedom to its citizens, though there is a clear demarcation between the freedom of the ruled and freedom of those who rule. The voices against the system are brought out, at times through ruminations by the main characters as well as through conversations between them. It is a literary diagnosis of a problem.

‘Cancer Ward’ is also the story of men who are tortured by the vicissitudes of the disease and of the women who treat them. The doctors are almost entirely made up of women, for the male population has been reduced to a minority, the tangent after effects of the Second World War and the ensuing Communist Regime which further brought down the axe on all unsuspecting males, either through exiling them or herding a vast number of humanity into concentration camps, where people endured inhuman conditions. Especially touching is the teenage lovers caught up in the frenzy of cancer and the prospect of death around the corner, but like all young lovers, they believe in the potency of love over death. The young girl suffering from breast cancer and about to undergo mastectomy pleads to her teen lover to savor the beauty of her breasts before the knife of the surgeon carves it out of her body.

The rulers took liberties for granted. A telling scene is where Rusanov’s wife empties garbage right in the middle of the road, even while Kostoglotov yelps back at them in impotent rage.

Shulubin tells Kostoglotov:

"At least you lied less, do you understand. At least you changed less. . . You were jailed. But we were forced to stand and applaud the sentences that had been pronounced. Not just to applaud, but to demand execution, to demand it."


Towards the end of the novel, Kostoglotov, like Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile under Article 58 which dealt with the so called counter revolutionaries, realizes that the damage done to him and Russia was too great and that there will be no healing no normal life even after Stalin has gone.

Kostoglotov undergoes two potential romances in the hospital, one with Zoya, the nurse, the attraction mainly physical, and a more serous one with Vera Gangart, a doctor who is bent on saving his life, even to the extent of using hormone therapy on him which would render him impotent for life. Vera Gangart whom Kostoglotov fondly calls Vega, a name given to her by her fiancée who was killed in the Second World War, and who has never married. He imagines that he might ask Vega to be his wife. His feelings for Vega are strong and seem to be reciprocated.
In the last chapter, when he is discharged from the hospital, Kostoglotov wanders about the city. He visits the zoo, where he witnesses the Macaque Rhesus monkey who has been blinded by an evil man who threw tobacco dust into the animal’s eyes. Kostoglotov proceeds write to his young friend at the cancer ward.
‘Even supposing I took their side and had the power, I would still not want to break into the cage and liberate them…Deprived of their home surroundings they had lost the power of rational freedom. It would only make things harder for them, suddenly set free.’ Telling lines these. Solzhenitsyn’s work is a broad and all encompassing literary diagnosis of the diseased system, a tumor that grows under tyranny.

In the end he decides to against going to see either woman. His cancer treatment has left him impotent just as imprisonment and exile have taken the life out of him. He feels that he has nothing to offer a woman and decides to face life alone.

He writes to Vega:

You may disagree, but I have a prediction to make: even before you drift into the indifference of old age, you will come to bless this day, the day you did not commit yourself to share my life ... Now that I am going away ... I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectual conversations and I honestly thought and believed everything I said, I still wanted all the time, all the time, to pick you up and kiss you on the lips.
So try to work that out.
And now, without your permission, I kiss them.


‘ A literary event of the first magnitude…by Russia’s greatest living prose writer’ TIME

>……………………………………………………………………………………………….


Read Solzhenitsyn' works and be mesmerised by the power of great literature. read in this century or the coming centuries, these works and words will remain etched on the pages of history, as human situations does not change though time drops down from every sphere of life.

DEATH OF AN INFANT

DEATH OF AN INFANT

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH


On a cold November night I gave birth to a baby boy at a private hospital in Mangalore. The child was the first grandchild of my parents. I was under the care of Santosh's Professor of Gynaecology, an eminent name in South India.

Do not let nobody tell you that labour pain is a casual matter, it is not. Not that I had a difficult delivery, I did not. It was most normal, no two ways on that.

From the room I was in, I could view the sea and the rows of cedar trees with wind in their leaves. They would bend from waist onwards, all at the same time. I remember that the nights were cold and prussian blue. I also remember that I was not ready for the child. My son too was not ready for me. He could have sensed me. Perhaps. Just perhaps.

We struggled to adjust to each other. Clearly my mind was not with him, though to give where credit is due, I could say that he tried his best to draw his lifeline from me.

He died on the fifth day in his tiny crib, his nose bled. It was certified as cot death.

Since I am not ruled by perhapses, I cannot think up any number of thoughts on the same. It happened, that is all.

But I was not prepared by Santosh's reaction. His sorrow could not be assuaged. He wept like a child on my lap, we howled like sloppy children who were facing the biggest loss of their lives. But we were not to know all this while it happened.

Perhaps the tiny death brought us together like nothing else did.

....................

MEMORY FLOOD

MEMORY FLOOD

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH

I have torn away
Your memories
Llike an old muslin cloth
And carried them to the sea last evening
To be thrown into the sea
Where endless sand
And slanting palms
Get wet in the rains.

Between a hysteric sea
And a hypnotic devil
The muslin shreds
Have stuck to my mouth
And peripatetic soul.

...........


This poem is from my latest anthology, I ME MYSELF.
copyright @ Unisun Publications, Bangalore

FORGOTTEN NAME

FORGOTTEN NAME

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH

The last time
We visited the sea,
I remember
It was swollen with gray water:
Afraid to lash at the shores

You called me
By a forgotten name from the past
As time peeled in layers
All round us

I sit at this hollow beach
While decades shed their snake skins,
And wisps of memories
Land in my lap,
As the sea withdraws below my feet

……………………

AYAAN HIRSI ALI's INFIDEL

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

AYAAN HIRSI ALI’s

INFIDEL


INFIDEL is a pellucid memoir of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born and brought up in Somalia in a traditional Muslim family. Her story is astonishing even while being profound.

Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female circumcision involving genital mutilation, brutal beatings, an adolescence as a devout believer, the rise of Muslim brotherhood, and life in four countries under dictatorships. She escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in Holland, where she fought for the rights of Muslim women and the reform of Islam, earning her the enmity of reactionary Muslims all over the world. The journey from being an orthodox believer to a champion of Women’s empowerment and a staunch atheist – it is one of the most memorable account of a person’s life story. She lives under constant threat from Islamists, yet refuses to be silenced.

Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali’s story tells how a bright, curious, dutiful little girl evolves into a pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious fanaticism, especially in the wake of 9/11, no other book could be more timely or significant. She worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women, fleeing from domestic violence. After earning her college degree in political science, she worked for the Labor Party in Holland. She denounced Islam after September 11 terrorist attacks and now champions the cause of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam and security in the West.

A riveting read, INFIDEL should be read by every woman and yes, all men.

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PS: I sketched the arresting face of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as soon as I finished reading her book. I believe I have captured the determination in her eyes.