Lately, of course, it has become equally important to ask “Do you read?’  before asking ‘What do you read?’. More and more people seem to think, reading the daily newspaper qualifies as reading. One bright spark even thought ‘I can read your face’ was an ingratiating answer. Other genius replies include ‘warnings on pesticide bottles’ and ‘road maps’.

I pity the literate that has never felt obligated to finish a book. I visibly cringe when some dolt says ‘that’s too long to read’. You may agree or disagree with the views of an author – but it’s really pathetic when you discuss size in public and not even be embarrassed about it!

See, just like the food you put into your body can come out as pimples or peaches and cream, the books you put into your mind (or don’t) can come out of the mouth like sunshine or sludge. 

Sadly, sludge spreads on its own while sunshine needs to be absorbed. And how many people in today’s busy world would rather make the effort than not?

People who get on a treadmill and keep going. Going, going, going. Not going anywhere. Personally I find it impossible to even do a full circle. When I walk, I need to be going somewhere. When I run, there had better be a mad dog chasing me. So, who are these people who huff and puff and sweat and keep going on that strip of a stretch and what do they find at the end of that rainbow that motivates them so?

Mind you - that’s no criticism of those who want to be fit. In fact I whole heartedly support those in pursuit of good health. As long as the pursuit involves going somewhere other than a odiferous gym shower. 

Speeding down the highway at 120 kmph, almost 20kmph over the speed limit, I often brake to wonder who are these people, driving exactly 5 cm away from the back of my car? Hoping some form of mental-kinetic energy will swoosh my car into the next lane. Persistently tick tocking away their lights at me, slowing themselves down, refusing to move into the next lane - even after noticing that the only change I will make to my life is an evil smile and a foot on the brake.

I wonder who are these people, that expect charm will disguise mediocrity and a liberal use of the word ‘team-work’ will disguise laziness.

And who are these people who will spend good money to buy disposable fingernails but will only read a book if it can be downloaded?

Who are these people, I wonder, who replaced networking with gossip and friendship with ‘user-friendly’

And I am sure there are lots of people out there who wonder, who are these people who would rather have pets instead of friends and read a book instead of going to a party.

Of these boys, one was particularly charming. Since it is always flattering for any woman in a committed relationship to know there is at least one single man who still desires her, I could not bring myself to be brusque with him. However, I did the usual carrying-around-the-beloved’s- photo and dropping his name in every conversation to make clear to all where my interests lay. With the foolish certainty of youth, I was sure that the one I had selected was the only one for me and conveyed that with equal conviction.

Knowing that I would leave town in a few months, in the twilight zone that is ‘pre-marriage’ I continued to be there and not be all-there. So we all had working lunches on weekdays and went dancing on weekends. Indulged in some harmless flirting and life carried on. Until on my birthday, the afore-mentioned boy gave me a pair of solitaire earrings. We were a group of some 12 odd boys and girls, in a very public club, making as much noise as possible. Not wanting to make a fuss, after an initial round of hemming and hawing, I accepted the earrings. I was asked to put them on for all to see. They looked beautiful. They were the right size, the right cut, the right colour and they could not have been more perfect. So again, after a mild protest, I accepted them. Safely saving them for special occasions.

A few days later my wedding invitations arrived. I happily trotted off to invite all my friends. This boy took one look at the invitation and crumpled it. He went on to say that he would not come to the wedding and would in fact stay on in town and keep hoping there would not be one.

I was shocked into disillusionment. Suddenly, I could see the invisible price tag that the earrings still had on them. All along I had thought, beneath the mild flirting, we were still friends. Still well wishers.

The next day I returned the solitaire earrings via another friend and never communicated with this person again.

Those were a really gorgeous pair of earrings and I have never found another pair quite like those. Often, when my dear husband of the last fifteen odd years, gifts me a blender or an oven for my birthday I wonder if I acted in haste. A twang of ‘you, dumb one, with silly scruples’ shoots through me. But alone with myself, I wonder if the value of those earrings would ever begin to compare with the value of that blender with six attachments. And a spatula, for extra convenience.

My eyes grow weary
My lips go quiet.
 
Sweet dreams offer no respite
From a childhood lost looking for fairies,
And youth lost looking for love.
Maturity says, even romance will come at a price.
 
The heart grows weary everyday,
Alas, the soul endures many lifetimes

I then held the phone away and looked at the name in disbelief.

How often we put phone numbers into our contact lists and never call them. How many times we add ‘friends’ to our Facebook page and just let them become a part of the list?

So here was a voice that I knew when I was just a girl. Only me. Not a wife, not a mother, not an employee, not even a full-grown adult. From a time when I was going to save all the orphans in the world single-handedly. From a time when it was more important to get home before curfew than to not drive at 120 kmph on a narrow, curvy road. When the sandwiches from the local vendor were better than the five-star that we were forced to eat at after a late night at the disco. When dancing together was intimacy and a kiss was a scandal.

And the voice was asking me if it was really me.

A few choice bad words later, it was confirmed that we both were really who we said we were. Something that a flashing name on a phone could not have done.

I was asking if he still had that haircut (read as: did your father’s genes catch up with you and are you now balding). He was saying…I don’t remember, but I know it made me smile.

I was asking if he still went to the gym (read as: I hope to God you have put on at least as much weight as I have, or then I scream out ”I HAD A BABY!” and “MEN DONT MENOPAUSE!”)

He was saying you sound exactly the same. Except for the ‘hello’. And I was saying come to town on the weekend, weekdays are really busy.

But what I really wanted to say was ” Why the hell do you keep re-appearing as regularly as a seven-year itch?”

The conversation lasted all of fifteen minutes. However, for those fifteen minutes I was back to being the girl who had her entire life before her. The girl for whom every doubt was a certainty. The girl who could fit into clothes without having to try them on. The girl who could do it all without knowing what the ‘all’ was.

And the girl, who was just a girl, before she became so many other things.

I grieved momentarily for all that was lost, all that could never be.

But pseudo-youth like youth, is fickle. And where is the time to grieve when there is so much fun to be had?

So here’s wishing you all a happy new year and a voice from the past…

First they all get him gifts. Him! What did he do. All he did was be born. Yeah, yeah, that’s not grammatically correct. Do you really want me to repeat the sentence with the pushing etc?

So there’s all these nice baskets of clothes and toys and other dreamy stuff – and its all for the baby! All you get are some flowers and maybe some chocolates that you know you shouldnt eat.

Soon its feeding time. Not yours dummy. The baby’s. Nobody cares if you’ve been fed or not. Just get that bawling bundle to stop wailing and feed the baby! What kind of a mother are you anyway? you want to do things like sleep and eat and rest??? Reaallly!!

The pain of labour is one of the most quickly forgotten pains of life. If you need proof of that just look around and see how many mothers continue to procreate, sometimes not even giving it a gap of one year. Babies spilling out of them annually like ketchup from a bottle of Heinz. And once you are a mommy, you are a mommy forever.

My mother, at 68, still clicks pictures of me when I’m wearing new clothes at 38!

She worries about my brother’s meals when he has an entourage of servants at his command.

And both of us still quiver when she gets that particular look in her eyes. She doesn’t even need to follow it up with “If you do that again…!”

And that’s what being a mommy is about. It’s free. It’s forever.

And sometimes, if you are worth a mother’s salt, it’s about forgetting the pain and letting go,  just standing there and watching them as they fly and soar!

“Next time I’m in town…”

“Next time you go to the dentist…”

“Next time you come to work late…”

It’s as if the person making the promise has not yet figured out how much to inflict on you this time, so they are going to up the stakes and let the sword of ‘next time’ dangle precariously over your head along with a promise of unmentionable, unimaginable horrors.

Then there is the smoking-marriage promise, also sometimes known as the smoking-baby promise. When one to-be-spouse promises the other to-be-spouse that they will give up smoking as soon as they get married. It’s too late when you find out they weren’t planning on keeping that one, isn’t it?

Same with the smoking-baby promise. Baby come, smoking go. Baby come, no smoking go – what you gonna do? Reverse the baby?

Some empty promises you can make out as easily as a chinese Versace hand bag. They usually start with a liberal smattering of adjectives like the biggest, largest, one and only, yours forever…

Then the daily promises: Let me call you back in a minute. I’ll email it to you right now, and the especially succinct one: Done!!!. The more exclamation marks follow that one, the more surely you know in your gut it’s not happening.

Fathers who promise they won’t be working on the next weekend, mothers that promise a play date ‘soon’, employees that promise a high performance and governments that promise low fuel prices. End of the week promises and end of the year promises. Promises that never should have been made and promises that were made to be broken. Promises that were made with the best of intentions but the lousiest of foresight.

A promise, when part of the future, becomes a hope. As part of an unfulfilled past, becomes a gnawing burden.

We make them. And we break them. And we try to keep at least some of them. And sometimes just one promise delivered can mean hope for the entire human race.

Those, however, are called religions.

Love can hit you at first sight, with a complete stranger. Or love can gently dawn while you are curled up on the couch in your favourite pyjamas with someone who you have done that with a million times before.

Love can be a quiet glance in a public place, a single intimate word of concern or love can be a passionate firework display for two, blurring out the entire world.

Love means something individual to each one of us, and all of us have one favourite love story.

Mine is not a syrupy Mills & Boon, nor is it a gut wrenching Erich Segal. In fact, it has so much more head than heart, that often motivational speakers use it as an example while starting off corporate training sessions!

However, it was firmly engraved in my mind years ago when I read it in Reader’s Digest.

A love story that encompasses every aspect of love even before it starts. About a wonderful man who thinks of his beloved even before she becomes that. About a wonderful woman, who recognises the gift she has received for what it truly is and about how they both make life better for each other in the most simple manner.

The story of Johnny Lingo and his eight cow wife…

When I sailed to Kiniwata, an island in the Pacific, I took along a notebook. After I got back it was filled with descriptions of flora and fauna, native customs and costume. But the only note that still interests me is the one that says: “Johnny Lingo gave eight cows to Sarita’s father.” And I don’t need to have it in writing. I’m reminded of it every time I see a woman belittling her husband or a wife withering under her husband’s scorn. I want to say to them, “You should know why Johnny Lingo paid eight cows for his wife.”

Johnny Lingo wasn’t exactly his name. But that’s what Shenkin, the manager of the guest house on Kiniwata, called him. Shenkin was from Chicago and had a habit of Americanizing the names of the islanders. But Johnny was mentioned by many people in many connections. If I wanted to spend a few days on the neighboring island of Nurabandi, Johnny Lingo would put me up. If I wanted to fish he could show me where the biting was best. If it was pearls I sought, he would bring the best buys. The people of Kiniwata all spoke highly of Johnny Lingo. Yet when they spoke they smiled, and the smiles were slightly mocking.

“Get Johnny Lingo to help you find what you want and let him do the bargaining,” advised Shenkin. “Johnny knows how to make a deal.”
“Johnny Lingo! A boy seated nearby hooted the name and rocked with laughter.
“What goes on?” I demanded. “everybody tells me to get in touch with Johnny Lingo and then breaks up. Let me in on the joke.”
“Oh, the people like to laugh,” Shenkin said, shruggingly. “Johnny’s the brightest, the strongest young man in the islands, And for his age, the richest.”
“But if he’s all you say, what is there to laugh about?”
“Only one thing. Five months ago, at fall festival, Johnny came to Kiniwata and found himself a wife. He paid her father eight cows!

I knew enough about island customs to be impressed. Two or three cows would buy a fair-to-middling wife, four or five a highly satisfactory one. “Good Lord!” I said, “Eight cows! She must have beauty that takes your breath away.” “She’s not ugly,” he conceded, and smiled a little. “But the kindest could only call Sarita plain. Sam Karoo, her father, was afraid she’d be left on his hands.”
“But then he got eight cows for her? Isn’t that extraordinary?”
“Never been paid before.”
“Yet you call Johnny’s wife plain?”
“I said it would be kindness to call her plain. She was skinny. She walked with her shoulders hunched and her head ducked. She was scared of her own shadow.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess there’s just no accounting for love.”
“True enough,” agreed the man. “And that’s why the villagers grin when they talk about Johnny. They get special satisfaction from the fact that the sharpest trader in the islands was bested by dull old Sam Karoo.”
“But how?”
“No one knows and everyone wonders. All the cousins were urging Sam to ask for three cows and hold out for two until he was sure Johnny’d pay only one. Then Johnny came to Sam Karoo and said, ‘Father of Sarita, I offer eight cows for your daughter.’”
“Eight cows,” I murmured. “I’d like to meet this Johnny Lingo.”
“And I wanted fish. I wanted pearls. So the next afternoon I beached my boat at Nurabandi. And I noticed as I asked directions to Johnny’s house that his name brought no sly smile to the lips of his fellow Nurabandians. And when I met the slim, serious young man, when he welcomed me with grace to his home, I was glad that from his own people he had respect unmingled with mockery. We sat in his house and talked. Then he asked, “You come here from Kiniwata?”
“Yes.”
“They speak of me on that island?”
“They say there’s nothing I might want they you can’t help me get.”
He smiled gently. “My wife is from Kiniwata.”
“Yes, I know.”
“They speak of her?”
“A little.”
“What do they say?”
“Why, just…” The question caught me off balance. “They told me you were married at festival time.”
“Nothing more?” The curve of his eyebrows told me he knew there had to be more.
They also say the marriage settlement was eight cows.” I paused.
“They wonder why.”
“They ask that?” His eyes lightened with pleasure. “Everyone in Kiniwata knows about the eight cows?”
I nodded.
“And in Nurabandi everyone knows it too.” His chest expanded with satisfaction. “Always and forever, when they speak of marriage settlements, it will be remembered that Johnny Lingo paid eight cows for Sarita.”
So that’s the answer, I thought: vanity.

And then I saw her. I watched her enter the room to place flowers on the table. She stood still a moment to smile at the young man beside me. Then she went swiftly out again. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. The lift of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin the sparkle of her eyes all spelled a pride to which no one could deny her the right. I turned back to Johnny Lingo and found him looking at me. “You admire her?” he murmured. “She…she’s glorious. But she’s not Sarita from Kiniwata,” I said.

“There’s only one Sarita. Perhaps she does not look the way they say she looked in Kiniwata.” “She doesn’t. I heard she was homely. They all make fun of you because you let yourself be cheated by Sam Karoo.”
“You think eight cows were too many?” A smile slid over his lips. “No. But how can she be so different?”
“Do you ever think,” he asked, “what it must mean to a woman to know that her husband has settled on the lowest price for which she can be bought? And then later, when the women talk, they boast of what their husbands paid for them. One says four cows, another maybe six. How does she feel, the woman who was sold for one or two?” This could not happen to my Sarita.”
“Then you did this just to make your wife happy?”
“I wanted Sarita to be happy, yes. But I wanted more than that. You say she is different This is true. Many things can change a woman. Things that happen inside, things that happen outside. But the thing that matters most is what she thinks about herself. In Kiniwata, Sarita believed she was worth nothing. Now she knows she is worth more than any other woman in the islands.” “Then you wanted -”
“I wanted to marry Sarita. I loved her and no other woman.”
“But —” I was close to understanding.
“But,” he finished softly, “I wanted an eight-cow wife.”

How proudly we had made our home together, nearly a decade ago, investing so much in it, forgetting that nothing lasts forever.

 The signs had been there for a long time. Tiny cracks in the privacy of the bedroom. I pretended not to see them. Silences that became loud, complaining groans, spreading through the house. I pretended not to hear them. And then it just gave way. Coming apart at every joint. It hurt my son too. Splinters that he saw, but did not understand. However, children recover much more easily than old, tired parents don’t they?

It wasnt easy. And yet it wasn’t difficult. Fickle as we human beings are, I admit I had a replacement even before I actually changed anything. My heart and mind had already set themselves on something new, something dark and strong, something that made me feel on top of the world when I was on top. And even when I wasn’t.

I had changed, my needs had changed and now it was time to change things to meet my needs. So I said good-bye. It was old and familiar and sinking. And now I have something young and exciting and firm. And that is why I know I will sleep better tonite. Warm and unafraid of being let down on the floor.

 Good-bye, my dear, sweet, old bed and mattress, welcome my beautiful, new, bedroom furniture.

Having been educated in an all girls convent school where boys were considered aliens but teenaged girls dancing with other teenaged girls at the christmas party was normal, my idea of ‘normal’, ‘different’, ‘weird’ and ‘unique’ has always been at best, blurred. Having the nuns tell you one semester how bad boys are and the next semester tut tutting at girls who get too ‘happy’ with each other can leave quite an impact on an impressionable mind.

Nature has made each one of us different and we keep trying to classify ourselves into recognizable, manageable broad categories. Distinct fingerprints we may well have, but heaven forbid if we have a laugh that sounds like a bird. Or an eye that won’t comply with its companion. Or teeth that are not set in a perfect, pearly row. Women that don’t like kids and men that don’t like women, even now, can pause a conversation.

I personally revel in these distinctions. So this post is dedicated to all those distinct people I know.

People who talk to themselves – yes, I understand how much better the conversation is and the boredom you feel when forced to talk to about earthly, unimaginative things with straitlaced, pseudo intellectuals

People who laugh out loud  – I envy you and I’m sure you’ll still be laughing when most others will be dealing with ulcers

People who eat their dessert before the main course – you’ve changed my life in the sweetest way possible!

People who love airline food, people who do all their laundry when they are stressed, people who love their shoes like their children, people who spend their entire holidays cleaning their cupboards, people who sms other people at odd hours asking ‘Are you awake?”, people who read the end of a book right after the beginning, skipping the middle…life would be one monotonous drone without you.