Strength within

Times are tough but so is the spirit, says Vrinda Nabar

Growing older makes one no stranger to loss. We move from mourning the deaths of parents to those of contemporaries, and with time we learn that it is possible to laugh again. But the shared paralysis of the last week of November contained another dimension, leading to what is now being termed a ‘collective nervous breakdown’.

I went for a walk the evening after the nightmare began — I had to get away from the vivid horror on my TV screen. We all have tangible symbols, familiar landmarks that give us a kind of safety we hold on to especially as we grow older. For me it is my neighbourhood — a melting-pot of languages and communities, green parks, tall trees, wide streets and the ubiquitous koel. Not a plush neighbourhood but an ordinary middle-class one, a reminder of what cosmopolitanism and development once meant in my city. The wide streets were deserted, the parks empty. It drizzled at night, almost as if the heavens were mourning the dead. Over the next few days I knew I had to step outside the danse macabre, not because I had ceased caring but because I still did.  Transcending this kind of collective paralysis is never easy but I find it always helps to home in on happier memories and gain strength from them. To think of people one has known and the inner resources they drew on in difficult times. Sitting in my silent living room I smiled in spite of myself as I remembered my maternal grandmother’s no-nonsense “Hey, who’s the old woman here, you or me?” whenever she found me comatose at the end of the day. Her story was not unlike that of many recently bereaved in Mumbai. She was scarcely past her teens when she lost her husband during World War I. She and her two children had awaited his return the year the war ended but received news of his death in action. I know now what I didn’t when I was growing up — that in the thick of her trauma my grandmother had resisted her own mother’s pressure to have her head tonsured, refused to return to the family, stayed on in Mumbai and survived on her war widow’s pension. I know that in her heart she grieved all her life. But I also remember her as the most positive individual I knew, loving, compassionate, hospitable, witty, always eager to seize the day. She had taught herself four languages (Marathi, Kannada, English and Telugu) and was learning a fifth (Bengali) when she died at the age of 78. “At your age I was a widow with two young children,” she had matter-of-factly told me once. “I made myself think positive for their sake.”

I believe we all have something positive to find if we look deep enough within ourselves — love, companionship, remembered kindness, something that offers a measure of solace. Byron had remarked that a solitary flower adorned even the much-reviled Roman tyrant Nero’s coffin, suggesting that at least one person had mourned his death and that no one is ever wholly alone.

It is a point well taken because many of us have moved from our childhood or teenage haunts. Other neighbourhoods may have claimed us for their own, leading us to find new symbols, to reinvent them if need be. While there’s comfort in the familiar, the larger truth we have to hold on to is what the poet Cavafy once said — that the city with all its joys and heartbreaks is within each one of us. It is not easy to find our inner strengths after the foundations of our lives seem ripped apart, but with determination it is not impossible either.

Vrinda Nabar, 60, is a feminist writer based in Mumbai

Featured in Harmony Magazine
January 2009