When It Is Father's Day Everyday.

Dad,

I don't believe in Father’s day, Mother’s day or any other day that has been created by advertisers like me to sell candy and greeting cards. However, last Sunday my timeline on Facebook was cluttered with Father’s day messages. Everyone had a new profile picture that was promptly changed to the original on Monday.

I wished you ‘Happy Father’s Day’ on our regular Sunday call and both of us laughed.

Was that enough? Should I have sent you a card or at least changed my profile picture like my entire friend list was doing?

The truth is that even though we are both extremely sensitive people, we rarely find the right words or actions to show our emotions. I took a long time to understand this about us.

We don't share the relationship I see my friends share with their fathers. We don't praise or shower each other with gifts and overly expressive gestures. We don't sit and have long conversations on things that are happening in our everyday lives. That job is allocated to mom who diligently passes the information around. On the contrary, we discuss finances, investments, travel details, office troubles and life decisions.

After hanging up the call and a little guilty about not expressing my love on Facebook, I got thinking about our relationship and how you have influenced my personality. Even though your presence in my everyday life has always been  a bit passive as compared to mom’s, I know that I wouldn't be the fiercely independent and successful woman I am today if it weren’t for you. Perhaps, it’s not too late to tell you now – Thank you Dad.

Thank you for giving me an infinite thirst for discovery.

When we were growing up, we didn’t have fancy toys and expensive clothes but we always had a holiday to look forward to. Thank you for teaching me that roughing it out in a tent was as important as relaxing in a fancy resort. For pulling up outside school with packed suitcases in the car trunk for an impromptu holiday just because the weather demanded it.

You showed me the value of history, the grandeur of nature and the essence of spontaneity. Thank you for introducing me to the joys of exploration and for always reminding me that there is an endless world to discover.

Thank you for showing me that I should never fear change.

At the age of fifty, you decided to start a new life in a city where you hardly knew anyone. When I wonder where my life is headed these days, I think about you and mom starting from scratch with nothing but your confidence to take you through. Suddenly, it all seems so easy and achievable. Thank you for teaching me that it is never to late to take control and change the course of your life, make new friends, get a new career and start again.

Thank you for giving me a thirst for adventure.

You often tell people that I inspired you to sky dive on your sixtieth birthday. The truth is you inspired me to take the rock-climbing course, to hike, to paraglide and to sky dive. Every Sunday, as a kid, when I would sit with the big trunk of old photographs, I would go through your mountaineering pictures and wonder if I would ever climb a glacier like you did. Dad, I I have done a few things that would classify as adventurous but that one hasn’t been ticked off my bucket list yet. Maybe we could do it together someday?

Thank you for letting me be.

Thank you Dad for never imposing your views on me. For letting me choose and make my own decisions. Thank you for being a true feminist and for always giving me the confidence that whatever happens, you will always stand by me.

I look at you today and am flooded with memories of our years together. Our evenings of singing songs for hours, ice cream Saturdays, swimming lessons, birthdays, holidays, the first slap, the hug right after, the fun and the laughter. All this and so much more that has flown past in a flash. Time slips through our hands quicker than we can imagine. As we grow old, roles reverse. Perhaps I worry a lot more about you now than you worry about me. I just don’t say it enough.

I will always be your little girl. Even though you don’t have the strength to carry me to the hospital in your arms like you did when I was thirteen, I know that however old that shoulder gets, I will always be able to lean on it and walk ahead.

I love you dad.

Happy Father’s Day, everyday!

Writer's Block And Then Some....

One of the worst things that can ever happen to a writer is being trapped in the box called the writer's block.

As each day passes the guilt of not writing grows cavernous roots until it engulfs the writer's entire being.

The soul fights for freedom so that it can vomit words on paper but the roots keep getting deeper and deeper.

A week ago over a pitcher of Sangria in a fancy Spanish restaurant I burst out crying and told my mother, “My writing is gone and for that one thing, I can’t forgive myself.”

It’s been months that I wrote something worth publishing on this blog. Most of the time I don’t feel like writing and when I do, I write gibberish as a sort of punishment to myself.

My mother, the eternal cheerleader, smiled and told me, “Like everything else, this will also pass.”

When life shakes the ground under your feet, after the surroundings have crumbled into tiny bits and the world has stopped spinning, you slowly start to build again.

Brick by brick you reshape the walls, crooked and not perfect, to make a new design. You restructure the foundation and sow new seeds.

You stand in the middle of it all and marvel at the beauty of life to survive and come alive again in the middle of destruction like the tiny shoots of grass that sprout underneath a frozen ground hoping that the sun will shine and melt away the sleet.

Eventually spring comes, the seeds grow and new flowers bloom.

It was only whilst sipping sangria with tears rolling down my cheeks and watching the sun go down that I realized that my mom, as usual, was right.

Everything eventually passes. Time moves along and memories become flickers of dust that merge into space, omnipresent, but never visited, touched or felt again.

It is the hardest task to forgive yourself– to let go of things that you wish you had done differently, break the layers of darkness, let the sun inside shine through and emerge as a more loving and giving human being.

My garden, with seeds desperate to grow, hadn’t bloomed yet.

As the final drop of sangria finished and the North Star flickered brightly I decided it was time to take the key out of my pocket, open the box and fly.

Home

Whispering breeze

A slight ruffle of leaves

Fleets of birds swim home

In an ocean of blue scattered with white cotton

Cobbled streets hide stories untold

Lovers in nooks steal kisses that remain unforgotten

Blocks of red, yellow and blue placed in haphazard proportion

Springing tiny balconies adorned with the days washing

As the sun melts into grey

The church bells count to nine

And like a lover forgone, a lazy nightfall approaches slowly 

I look around the sea of twinkling eyes

Strangers that might become friends or pass by

I breathe the chill and raise my glass,

There is no other place I’d rather be

After all this while, I’m home, finally.  

Keep CALM Y Habla Español :)

After 20 hours of studying Spanish over the past month and a half, it took me 35 minutes and a lot of brain time to write the below paragraph. This would usually would take me 35 seconds in English.

‘Mi llamo Aanchal. Soy de India y vivo en Dubai. Yo trabajo en la publicidad. Mi familia es pequeña - madre, padre, un hermano y un sobrino. 

Yo soy bajita, delgada y muy bonita. :) Mi pelo es castaño, largo y liso. Tengo la piel es clara y mi ojos es castaño. 

Yo soy optimista, simpática y algunas veces comunicativa. 

Mi hobby es - escuchar música, para mirar películas de comedia, escribir mi blog, yoga, viajar a países exóticos y leer libros. 

Mi gusta el vino tinto, comer en restaurantes y pasar tiempo con los amigos. 

Estudio español porque algún día me quiero retirar en España.’

When I was in the sixth standard, Sanskrit was introduced as a compulsory subject. For some odd reason the government insisted we cramped up a dead language for three precious years of our life. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best Sanskrit teacher. We both had a subtle hatred towards each other. I could not stand the smell of her coconut oil laden hair and the permanent frown lines that adorned her forehead and she clearly didn’t like me because my mum allowed me to speak with the ‘boys’.

Uninterested in teaching and certainly oblivious to us, she asked us to blindly learn the lessons without explanation or logic. I hated it. In the eighth standard final exam, I just about managed to scrape through after days of cramming up. My teacher attested it with a B minus and as I collected my report card, I knew that I was hopeless when it came to languages.

Over the years that followed, despite moving to different Indian states and visiting countries where English was not the first language, I continued to let myself to believe that along with driving (there will be another blog post on this one!) there was one thing I would NEVER achieve  – learn/speak another language.

Then something changed when I visited Spain for the first time in 2012. Perhaps it was the welcoming sunshine after a week in freezing Paris, the sangria or as I really like to believe a past life connection with the country….

When locals in Barcelona spoke to me in Spanish, I couldn’t help but blush. Even at the speed in which they were spoken, the words stirred something in me. 'Was I actually making an effort to understand?' I tried to brush the thought away as the after effects of sangria and flirty smiles from tanned waiters.

The second time I visited Spain in 2014, it happened again. I felt I was drowning in words. I tried to read, I tried to listen and suddenly I wanted to swim in this enormous sea of sounds that was all around me.

However, every time I tried to say the few phrases I knew in Spanish, something slapped me on the inside – “You can’t do this! You will make a fool of yourself! Language is not your thing.”

I listened to the voice and shut up.

Months later as the year drew to a close and I listed my resolutions for 2015 (here), I knew in order to get some magic in my life I had to surprise myself before the universe did. So I mustered up the courage, told the voice inside me to calm down and enrolled in a Spanish language class.

When one learns basic forms of communication as an adult, it just doesn’t open up a whole new world but also transforms them inherently. This is what sitting in a classroom and feeling like a two-year-old child trying to pronounce and understand words has done to me.

I have learned to unlearn in order to learn.

The adjective comes after the noun. I still don’t get it. I have had to change the way I think and communicate. I have shed layers of my preconceived notions and beliefs to let my mind stand naked in order to adorn new thoughts.

I have learned to follow rules.

Spanish has rules and then it has exceptions to the rules. What I love about it is that it keeps me in check. For a change I am coloring inside the lines and yet there is so much to discover.

I have learned to be humble.

Before I started class, the geek in me wanted to stand out so I learned the alphabet and I practiced the greetings. When I reached class – I couldn’t utter a word. Other students knew more than me and when I tried to converse with my teacher – I was the foreigner. I had to take a step back and respect the language. I had to literally eat my words and pride so that I could let the language rule me.

I have learned to be patient with myself.

One of the perils of being an adult in this day an age is to want everything instantly - including learning an entire language! Initially I would get angry with myself for not remembering words or on forming wrong sentences. The voice in my head would come back mocking at these little failures. It has been a long process but I have learned to be calmer and way more understanding with myself.

I have learned to be a child again.

When was the last time you looked at something with child like wonder? Or marveled in silence at the beauty of something only you understood the importance of?

I have learned to do this everyday since I started class. Everything amazes and amuses me and I just can’t get enough of it. I can stare at a word for hours tracking it back to its uses, its origin and the stories it might have told. I can’t get enough of pronouncing the A’s and the J’s… each time I read/speak in Spanish its playtime.

My ultimate goal with Spanish (other than to live in Spain one day) is to read ‘Love in the time of cholera’ in its purest form – just as Marquez wrote it. As a fellow Spanish student said to me the other day, “Marquez has the best translator in the world so just imagine reading him in Spanish.”

I know it’s not happening anytime soon because I am still trying to get the hang of articles, the different forms of verbs and figuring out whether I need to use SER, ESTAR OR TENER in a sentence. But soon.....

As it happens, the voice in my head is very dim and hardly wakes up anymore. When it does, I just have to hush it and gently tell her…. “Yes, you will fall several times but at least you are finally on the road and now, there is no looking back.”

And until this blog has its Spanish version …. Hasta luego amigos!

A Year That Was A Dream

31^st December 2013 – As the clock struck 12 and I welcomed the New Year with fireworks on the television, I wished and prayed for love. I hoped for change.

12 months down the line I sit on the same couch looking through the photos on my phone. A space where memories are captured in enthusiasm and never looked at again. I see fragments of the year gone by - Travels, wats app forwards, Instagram pictures – over the year a lot has been deleted a little added.

2014 was a dream split into two clear halves. In one I was riding high and in the other I was falling deep.

A few weeks ago in a strange city, I woke up from this dream in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a sudden jolt of realization. I was tired and for the first time in months, I wanted it to end.

So I don’t want to write about the year that was. I don’t want to reflect on its lessons. I want to believe that it truly was a dream and everything I felt – love, joy, pain, confusion, health concerns were in fact a dream too.

I want to write about 8 promises that I am making to myself in the coming year. A small bucket list of what I want to accomplish – none of these can be bought by my monthly salary. If I can get through 2015 fulfilling them – I will applaud my self the same time next year.

1) I promise to learn to forgive sooner.

2) I promise to stop waiting for apologies and answers – accepting that true ones might never ever come.

3) I promise not to justify pain to anyone even if its not the way I would normally react to a situation.

4) I promise to give myself time to heal and not be hard on myself.

5) I promise to accept that versions of me and how I was with some people might be lost forever and there is nothing I can do about it. It is the hardest part but I need to let go of those parts of myself too.

6) I promise to remember that love never goes away and can never be replaced by anything negative. It just settles somewhere in little corners of the mind that aren’t visited often or ever again.

7) I promise to do more of what makes me happy – write, travel, paint, visit the park, spend time on the beach, read, and sing in the shower.

But most importantly –

8) I promise to still believe in magic even when it feels like it’s the last thing that could happen because that’s exactly when it will.

Happy New Year!

To old friends and so many new - Thank you for making my life better in your own little way this year.