Josna Rege

Archive for the ‘reflections’ Category

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634. Representing Grief

In Childhood, Inter/Transnational, Media, parenting, Politics, reflections, Stories, storytelling, United States on February 8, 2026 at 6:09 pm

My book group read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, in the fall of 2021, at a time when we were emerging, shellshocked, from the COVID-19 pandemic. We loved it, even though the central fact of the novel is the unmitigated tragedy of the death of a child. Perhaps we all needed a way to weep over the world’s collective losses. When I heard that the novel had been made into a movie, my first instinct was to stay well away. I had already plumbed its depths and didn’t have the heart to go through it again. But when my friend Shoba invited me to watch it with her at our local independent cinema, I said yes.

Hamnet the novel is a work of fiction, at whose center is the historical fact that, in 1596, the playwright William Shakespeare lost his 11-year son, Hamnet. Between 1599 and 1601, Shakespeare completed the tragedy of Hamlet, choosing a name which was apparently used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time. O’Farrell’s novel focuses on Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway and the family’s life in Stratford-on-Avon, with her husband away in London most of the time. In it, Hamnet’s life is taken by the bubonic plague, although it is not known how the historical Hamnet died.

Hamnet the movie was beautifully made. When the dreaded, pivotal moment came, my friend reached out and squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers right back. I empathized, through my tears, with each of the very different ways in which the boy’s mother and father became strangers to each other for a time as they dealt alone with their terrible grief and the way in which the mother eventually came to understand how her (unnamed-but-illustrious) spouse had turned his own grief into art.

Of course, as with my first experience of Hamnet in the time of COVID, the way one responds to a book or film is shaped at least in part by the historical moment in which you read or watch it. Watching Hamnet the movie in December, 2025, there was one critical moment for me that was so jarring that it colored the whole experience—the scene of the mother bending over the dead body of her child. While no one can witness such a scene without their heart being wrenched out of their chest, what struck me in that moment was the fact I had seen thousands upon thousands of such scenes in the past two years, in Gaza, as thousands upon thousands of parents keened over the tiny, white-shrouded corpses of their children. When I told this to Shoba afterwards, she said that this was exactly what she had felt.

It felt almost obscene to be weeping over this one child, knowing that similar images had become daily fare on our screens. Where was the empathy, the outrage, the outcry? Was this one child who had died in an epidemic more than 400 years ago more worthy of our tears than the thousands of Palestinian children over the past two years who had been and were still being killed by the Israeli military, armed with U.S. weapons, paid for with our tax dollars? Were the tears I shed as I watched that one mother’s racking grief and guilt, also the tears I had not yet shed for all the innocents whose lives were as nothing to their murderers?

The theater was packed and the atmosphere electric the night Shoba and I went to see Hamnet, which has now been nominated for eight Oscars in the upcoming Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and 11 nominations for the BAFTA Awards, including Best Film and Outstanding British Film. What a contrast with our next outing to Amherst Cinema just two days ago, this time to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab.

The whole world had heard of the killing of this six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza in January, 2024. The car that she had been riding in with six members of her family was targeted by the IDF. They were all shot dead around her, leaving her alone in the car. After hours of waiting, during which Palestinian emergency workers had stayed on the phone with her, helpless to get help to her as she called upon them again and again to come and get her. Later, much later, the car was found riddled with bullet holes—335 in all—along with the ambulance that had been sent to rescue her. Everyone in both vehicles was dead, including little Hind.

When Shoba called to ask me to attend the screening with her, I agreed immediately; I wouldn’t have had the heart to go alone. Neither of our husbands could bear it, so again it was just the two of us. I went early, to save seats, but need not have worried—there were fewer than five people in the cinema’s smallest screening room. Halfway through, one person left—we will never know why. At the end, Shoba and I clapped fervently, as is the tradition at our cinema, which regularly airs films that don’t get shown in the big chains. But nobody joined us.

I was wrong to have been afraid to see the film. Rather than focusing voyeuristically on the body of a defenseless child, it represented Hind through a few still photos, a short home videoclip but mostly through recordings of her brave little voice, as the title suggests. It underscored her helplessness by focusing on the desperation of the office staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent, who had to operate out of Ramallah in the West Bank because their facility in the Gaza strip had been shut down, and who had to navigate through Kafkaesque layers of bureaucracy to get their ambulance clearance from the Israel Defense Forces. The film also spared the grief of Hind’s mother, again by focusing on the effects of the extended and, as the audience knew, doomed rescue operation on the well-trained staffers, each of whom broke down in their own way.

The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Grand Jury Prize at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and has received one Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and one nomination for a BAFTA Film Award in the Film Not in the English Language category. Neither Hamnet or Hind Rajab—both of whom have female directors, Chloé Zhao and Kaouther Ben Hania, respectively—is favored by the bookies to win. But when a child dies, nobody wins.

Some Statistics:

 According to UNICEF, in the two years between October 7, 2023 and October 8, 2025, more than 20,000 Palestinian children have reportedly been killed across the Gaza Strip, including at least 1,000 babies, and another 44,000 maimed. We may never know how many more have died due to preventable illnesses or are buried under the rubble. 

As of mid-January, 2026, since the so-called ceasefire deal brokered by the United States in October 2025, more than 100 more Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza. And the addition to deaths from bombing and gunfire, children are continuing to die from starvation, hypothermia, disease, and delayed medical care. All entirely preventable.

All children are our children. How can the Palestinian people bear this terrible grief? How can we shoulder this terrible guilt?

To the United States Government I say:


STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE!

Symbolic shrouds of Gaza children in Tehran protest (Majid Asgaripour, West Asia News Agency)

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632. A Sense of Proportion

In Food, reflections, retirement, Stories on January 13, 2026 at 4:29 pm

Small everyday rituals help me maintain my balance in these chaotic times. Of course, as I age, literally staying on my feet is essential, but I am talking here about inner balance. It is easy to wake up in panic mode, triggered by the ever-lengthening To Do list (which must of course be done) and the crises in the nation and around the world. But the To Do list and the crises can only be tackled one item at a time, and will always be there. It serves no purpose to start getting worked up about them before even having had one’s first cup of tea.

Two of my friends have recently mentioned the world being in some kind of destabilizing astrological configuration. My first—and, to be honest, my second, and third—inclination is to dismiss such suggestions out of hand, but this time a tiny part of me actually gave them some credence. Everything everywhere seems to be out of joint. Of course, this is nothing new—people have been feeling these things from time immemorial. But whether or not there are unseen forces at work misaligning everything from the earth beneath our feet to the relationships within families, there are things we can do to find and keep our own sense of proportion. What a wonderful phrase! My dear friend Hayat used it today in reference to what her father would say to his children when they lost their tempers with each other: “Has everyone lost their sense of proportion?!” In times like these, stress levels are high, sleep is disturbed, tempers are frayed, and self-righteous outrage—often entirely understandable—blinds us to all other perspectives but our own. We can indeed lose all sense of proportion.

As long as I can remember I have been slow to mobilize in the morning. In retirement, despite my best intentions, there are far too many mornings when I sleep in and take an inordinate amount of time to get going on the day’s work. I know that these winter days have only so many hours of daylight; that I ought to break the vicious cycle of too-late nights followed by too-late mornings; that my time is short and only getting shorter. Nevertheless, my morning rituals remain a must for my equanimity.

First, tea in bed, two cups (whole-leaf, half Assam-half Darjeeling), preceded only by teeth-cleaning. Andrew and I take it in turns to do the honors—venturing down the cold corridor from the bedroom, turning up the heat in the living room, filling and turning on the kettle, warming the pot and the mugs, and after the requisite 5-minute steep, pouring and adding the milk (almond for him, 2% cow’s milk for me) and bearing a tray into the bedroom for us both. We have our first cups, then—in my case—a second, over the New York Times Spelling Bee and the news headlines of Democracy Now!. Between the first and second cup of tea, I have a slice of lightly buttered toast with Marmite, cut into quarters. If Andrew is lucky I let him have a couple of bites out of one of the quarters, but both of us know that this ritual is strictly mine. (There is a paean to Marmite in TMA #41, Eating for Four.) In the summer, when we have our own tomatoes coming in from the garden, Andrew would put a slice of tomato, heaven-fresh, on each quarter. Nowadays, it is just plain, with a slice of cucumber on occasion. But each bite, followed by a sip or two of piping-hot tea, is just what the doctor ordered. Now I’m ready. Despite the fresh horrors in the day’s headlines, despite the long shadow of the To Do list, it is a new day and I can face it with a smile.

Although I normally limit my consumption of Marmite-on-toast to the morning, I was up late the other night writing a particularly tedious article and losing my concentration. Naturally, Marmite came right to mind (by the way, don’t get me started about that infuriating marketing term, top of mind), and I decided to make myself a quick pick-me-up—a late-night slice, topped, in the absence of fresh tomato, with slivers of fresh green chili and a quartered pearl onion. Slipping the bread into the toaster, I screwed open the cap of the jar. What a surprise to see the image looking up at me—a Marmite smiley face!

My face immediately broke into a corresponding grin. Returning to my work with a will, and with toast and a reheated mug of tea in hand, I wrapped it up in short order, without any further procrastination.

Such small rituals help me maintain my sense of proportion, despite everything.

Note: the corporate giant that owns the Marmite brand did not pay me to write this.

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631. Mind Cleanup, January 2026

In Family, Inter/Transnational, memories, people, places, reading, reflections, Stories, travel on January 5, 2026 at 4:51 pm
The White Rabbit: "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date"
The White Rabbit: “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”

Always and inevitably, it seems, I am running late. This mind cleanup is long overdue, and ought to have been conducted before the end of 2025. I hope it will serve a two-fold purpose, as a review of the past year and an exercise in re-ordering and de-cluttering this scattered and wayward mind.

My last such exercise was back in October, 2019, more than six years ago and before the pandemic put paid to all my plans for the following year. Reviewing it now, I see that, far from decluttering, it ballooned into a long list of my activities and preoccupations, divided into 10 categories. It was all over the place. There was a lot on my mind, and I didn’t have any idea how to clear it up. The only thing that’s clear to me now is that I still don’t, which may be why I have been postponing this effort for so long.

But the hour is late, so here goes:

In 2025, Andrew and I traveled both to India (5 weeks in Jan-Feb) and to England (nearly 4 weeks in June-July). In India we attended reunions in Delhi and Dehradun of my high school in the foothills of the Himalayas, Class of 1969. After the larger reunion with my classmates, some of whom I had not met for nearly 60 years, a small group of us from four continents and five time zones who had been corresponding regularly by email for several years managed to actually spend a few days together in person. This accomplishment was so amazing that it felt almost unreal.

On the way to Mussoorie
On the way up to Mussoorie

After the reunion, we traveled from the north down to my father’s home state of Maharashtra to visit family in Mumbai and Pune, then further down the West Coast to Karwar, in Northern Karnataka, then back up to Goa for a few short days by the Arabian Sea before returning to Mumbai for the flight back home. Five weeks in India is too short a time.

Karwar

The three months between our trips to India and England were busy ones. We had mini-split heat pumps installed in our house and removed our oil furnace and tank. That was a big job and although it got us off fossil fuels, it left us entirely dependent on electricity for home heating. We had the house insulated and are conserving like crazy this winter, wearing hats and jackets in the house, but bracing ourselves for skyrocketing electricity bills. I worked with Massachusetts Peace Action to organize a timely webinar, A New Generation of Nuclear Lies: Small Modular Reactors and Nuclear Plant Reopenings/ Relicensing, featuring M.V. Ramana and Linda Pentz Gunther. We cleared our back yard of debris after some very messy tree work, and planted a vegetable garden, which a dear friend watered for us while we were away.

Sunset walk on Hampstead Heath

Traveling to England in June, we both came down with COVID soon after we arrived, and so had to cancel or postpone most of our plans to meet friends and family. Interestingly, this forced us to slow down and carry on as if we weren’t on holiday, but were just living there—in the part of North London where my mother was born and raised, where my parents met, and where I was born. We went on long walks, read in bed, made endless cups of tea, watched The Change and Eastenders, took the bus to supermarkets and charity shops, got take-out fish and chips. That time of enforced everydayness was really rather wonderful.

For the rest of the year we stayed home, but between June and October three generations of family from India and England came to visit us. We tended the vegetable garden on the terraces out back and split a share in the UMass Student Farm’s CSA. Lots and lots of fresh vegetables to eat, give away, and preserve for the winter, some of which we are still eating.

Butternut squash

In 2025, I kept up to speed on local affairs by joining the copyediting team for our town’s independent, progressive online weekly, The Amherst Indy. After the family visits, after the garden was put to bed, we supported the campaigns of intrepid friends running for our town council. They won!

I did a lot of reading last year, reading and re-reading. In the month of April, participating again in the annual A-Z Blogging Challenge, I discussed a book a day, discovering anew books I thought I had read decades before. But apart from that one month of daily blogging, I did very little writing. That’s something I want to change in 2026.

2025 was a year of losses. In England, the last of my mother’s generation, Auntie Angy, passed away in March. And in India, the last of my father’s eight siblings, Mandatya, in November. I have found these deaths of my elders destabilizing, along with the deaths of two elderly neighbors and the departures of two more to assisted living facilities. Also in the U.S. we lost Janice, a dear friend who died much too young and before we could say goodbye. And Jimmy Cliff, without whom I might never have fallen in love with Reggae music.


So here I am in the first week of 2026, here we all are:

. . . as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

Free Palestine march and rally, Camden Town

Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela. Ignorance is not acceptable when one’s own nation is deeply complicit in the killings of thousands upon thousands, in daily violations of national sovereignty and international law. Closer to home, masked immigration enforcement personnel raid and round up hapless immigrants, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes at their schools and workplaces, whisking them off to distant detention centers where they are humiliated, terrified, abused, and separated from their families. People are being told to self-deport or face deportation, in which case they will never be able to return. People are being arrested based on their accents and the color of their skin. It is hard not to take all these ongoing assaults personally.

No Kings Day

It is hard not to be overwhelmed by sadness. I take refuge in the love of my dear partner, of family, friends, and community; in nature; in books, memories, home-cooked food. Sometimes, especially in these dark days of winter, curled up in my warm bed, I cannot seem to rouse myself. But it must be done. There is no time, no place to hide away.

Small, comforting rituals

Amidst the chaos, I seek comfort in small daily rituals. But in 2026, there is work to be done, there are rifts to be healed. More is required of me—more creative energy, more concentration, more optimism of the will. More music and singing, more fellowship and joy. Joy, despite everything.

And now, off to bed. Tomorrow is another day.

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629. Too Late?

In clothing, Family, memories, places, reflections, seasons, Stories, travel, women & gender on November 3, 2025 at 1:28 am


Way back in 1985, when my son was an infant, my parents went on a holiday to Ireland with my Uncle Ted and his wife Mary, who hailed from County Tipperary. It was a golden trip for them, and you can tell by the photographs in which, despite the almost incessant rain and sheep repeatedly crossing the road in front of their car, they looked ten years younger. Of course, Mum spent too much of the time looking for presents to bring back to all of us and infuriating her dear brother, who was terribly impatient and hated anyone spending money. For Baby Nikhil, she brought a foam-filled knitted little person whom we named Sweet William from Fort William. For my sister and me, there were two beautiful hand-worked Donegal tweed capes. Uncharacteristically, she bought something for herself as well—a camel-colored woolen coat that looked cosy enough to wrap oneself in day and night. But funnily enough, apart from Sweet William, the woolens languished in our cupboards for more than forty years, utterly unworn.

Mum’s coat seemed to be a perfect fit, and I’m not entirely sure why she never wore it, but perhaps there was something wrong with the cut of it and it just wasn’t flattering. I’m sure that was a bit of a disappointment to her, because I know it was expensive and Mum had borne it home in triumph. Once or twice over the years I tried it on myself, but returned it to its hanger after deciding that it wasn’t for me, either. Again, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Unsurprisingly at some point, finding it uninhabited, someone else made themselves at home in it: an army of moths. At first there were only a few little nibbles, so I tried wearing it as a dressing gown; that didn’t work, either; back in the cupboard it went. Years passed, and Mum had long forgotten, but I was too sentimental to do the needful and simply dispense with it. After she passed away I found it difficult to touch anything of hers for a time. Again, the moths had no such qualms; they moved in with a vengeance. Last week, when Andrew was going through our old winter coats and jackets, I opened the plastic bag where I’d put Mum’s coat for safekeeping, and found it in shreds.

I feared that the Donegal capes had met the same fate. After all, they too had been relegated to one cupboard or another ever since 1985. Why? Somehow neither my sister nor I had taken to them—too short, too scratchy, somehow out of sync with the times? But they were the real thing, real wool, handmade, and bought for us with love; we could not bring ourselves to pass them on. Thus they remained in limbo for years, until last week.

Donegal tweed cape

Steeling myself, I unzipped the plastic bag and lifted out first one, then the other, dreading to find the telltale silken webbing, shell casings, random unraveling, gaping holes that had damaged Mum’s coat beyond repair. But miracle of miracles, both capes were both totally untouched. I drew out the rust-brown-and-green speckled tweed and tried it on. Why, it was beautiful! How had I not recognized this before?! All day today I have been wearing it, and trying to imagine outfits and accessories that would top it off to perfection.

Looking up these elegant garments, I find that they are called walking capes. I like that. Forty years after Mum brought them home for us, and seven years after she passed away, at last I can truly thank her. For the rest of this fall and next spring, I will go out walking, wrapped in one of them. It’s never too late to wrap yourself in your mother’s love.

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626. Losing My Grip?

In Aging, reflections, Stories on June 22, 2025 at 12:48 pm

The summer solstice has come and gone, and the first of the season’s smoldering heatwaves is about to engulf us. There will be more of them, that is for sure. War, too, looms, and it may or may not be possible for us to avert it. In this miasma, I try to maintain some sort of internal balance, some sort of imaginary through line to help me maintain clarity and a sense of purpose. Otherwise, all that is left is muddling through each day, putting out the ever-more-frequent fires.

Several times in the past few weeks I have woken from sleep trying to remember something important. I think I have grasped it, or am on the verge of grasping it, and lie in bed trying to piece together the main points so that I can write them up. But once I am up, they slip out of reach, leaving me lost and fearful. Fearful of losing my grip.

In the day-to-day scrabble of existence, my greatest fear is that of forgetting the most important things, the things I must do, the promises I must fulfill, the losses I must somehow recuperate. Correction: the urgency of my recurrent waking dream is singular: I am in imminent danger of losing the single most important thing. But it slips away again and again.

During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jon Kabat-Zinn held daily guided meditation sessions over Zoom and YouTube, joined by thousands of people around the world. In them, he encouraged us to simply fall awake every morning, wakening to oneself, rather than jolting awake to the never-ending To Do list.

Nearly three years into retirement, I find myself too busy. Not a bad thing in itself, but a bad thing when the demands of the world leave no space for contemplation. In my case, the easiest way forward, the path of least resistance, is to keep busy. The path of least resistance is the one most trodden, which, through repetition, becomes the easiest. But the harder path to tread is what Kabat-Zinn calls radical non-doing, giving oneself the space for coming wholly awake. 


Rather than grasping for that ever-elusive thing, I need to create the space for it to come to me. That may sound easy, but it requires breaking the habits of a lifetime. 

Last month, I attended the graduate commencement ceremony at UMass Amherst, where the title of the student speaker’s address was “Hard Things.” Her message: “[S]top, take a breath, and solidify a core memory . . . you can do hard things.”

Because my mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease, I have a fear of developing it too, and my recurrent dream of forgetting reinforces that fear. But instead, the urgency of the dream can remind me of life’s deepest purpose, becoming fully oneself. Something that is already there, but is obscured by the detritus of everyday life. I may be getting old, but I can still do hard things. Rather than letting fear control me, rather than grasping for that ever-elusive thing, I can trust myself to let go, to let myself fall. Fall awake.

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625. Mrs. Dalloway at 100

In Books, Britain, Inter/Transnational, reading, reflections, Stories on May 14, 2025 at 6:30 pm
from the Times Literary Supplement. May 16, 2025

May the 14th, 2025: the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). I’m re-reading it now in her honor. To think that when I first read it, in the spring of 1972, it was only 47 years old (and I, seventeen)! In 2025, that would be the equivalent of a book that was first published in 1978. Not very old at all.

On that June day in London, the War not long over, Clarissa Dalloway was fifty-one and her daughter Elizabeth seventeen—the same age I was when I first encountered them on that Spring day in 1972. Not that I paid any attention to Elizabeth; I had eyes only for her mother. Yes, she was—as accused by Peter, her old love at age eighteen, her old girlfriend Sally—a mere lightweight, a society hostess who threw parties. But no, that wasn’t fair, neither was it right. Clarissa had rare qualities that as a teenager I could only intuit, but not express. Self-deprecating as she was, she thought to herself early on that June morning, “Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct” (11). Yes, that was one of her gifts; but there were many more.

In honor of this 100th anniversary I had wanted to host a live reading of the opening pages of the novel; but, although intrigued, no one had time to participate. So here I am, two decades older now than Clarissa Dalloway was then, but still living simultaneously in my present and past as she lived, fully immersed in the present moment, but continually flashing back to that golden time at Bourton 33 years before, around the turn of the century, when she and her friends were unmarried, and endless possibilities lay all around and before them. And yet, “standing there at the open window,” she remembers feeling “that something awful was about to happen” (3), just as she also felt—knew—that although the War was officially over, there were many, many people for whom it would never be over. War veteran Septimus Warren Smith, shell-shocked, is one of those people. Both he and Clarissa feel the violence that is all around them; as they also feel the pulsing of life, that both exhilarates and terrifies.

Continually flashing as I do upon high and low moments of being—as Virginia Woolf called them—across seven decades of memories, I can attest to the power of the stream-of-consciousness writing style that she pioneered and perfected as she sought to capture, or at least to approximate, the effervescent, evanescent spirit of a living human being, of groups of living, changing human beings interacting with each other over time. Waves in the ocean—again, as she saw our individual and collective human lives.

Periodicals around the world are marking this anniversary. Here are a smattering of them, in The Independent (UK), Diva Magazine UK), the Times Literary Supplement (UK), Literary Hub, The Conversation here and here, Scroll (India), The Times (India), The Express Tribune (Pakistan). There are a number of commemorative programs and events being organized. In her London—and many see this novel as Woolf’s love letter to London— a walk this very day; a Centenary of Mrs. Dalloway Through the Eyes of Twelve Artists, on June 18th, A Century of Mrs. Dalloway at the British Library, organized by the Royal Society of Literature. 
In the U.S., a marathon reading on June 14th, at the 92nd St. Y (New York City), in Japan, a Centennial Conference at Tsuru University.

If you haven’t read this novel, or haven’t returned to it for years, do yourself a favor. There are too many quotable passages for me to set down here; and in any case, the ones I would choose would impose my reading upon yours. Online, you can listen to Mrs. Dalloway here, or read it here. Or you can pick up Penguin’s centenary edition or find it in any self-respecting library. If you are moved to read it, do let me know what you think. 



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598. “nature is never spent”

In Inter/Transnational, Music, Nature, poetry, reflections, seasons, Stories on March 25, 2025 at 1:57 pm

Last Sunday, March 23rd, dawned cold, windy, and raw. All the ice and snow had melted after a week that had awakened in us the false hope that Spring was actually here. But today, icy gusts raked over and through us and the land, exposed after a bitter winter, looked like an abandoned construction site. The bleak landscape called to mind lines from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I had tried to memorize back in my graduate-school days:



    . . . all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

My friend Anna, always intrepid, called to say that she was going out for a walk, and against every instinct—I would far rather have stayed in my PJs all day, reading desultorily and drinking tea until I was well and truly soused—I agreed to join her, but only after having bundled up in two of everything—hoodie and down coat, hat and hood, gloves and mittens, socks, fur-lined boots.

Even after we had set out, I was inclined to think it had been a mistake. After crossing the street into and through the fields, I took a wrong turn and our feet sank into inches-deep muddy water. Finally finding a dry path and proceeding uphill through pale sunlight, we took in a wide view of the blue-grey hills to our north and west and my spirits rose just a little. Turning back into the woods and down the hill again, I was afraid that I had made another false move and that we would end up in a parking lot. But Anna, always game, said that she didn’t mind dealing with a parking lot, so we marched on.

The ground was bare—not a speck of life to be seen. Until, right by the path, in a tangle of rotting branches at the base of a tree, we came upon the biggest clump of snowdrops we had ever seen. Now the next lines of the poem murmured to me:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

“The dearest freshness deep down things.” Thank you, Poet. Thank you, Nature.


In the words of another favorite, Now the Green Blade Riseth, to



Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been,
Love is come again, like wheat from buried grain.

But with war and trumpeters of war everywhere, I can’t end here. Waking every morning to news of another rocket or drone attack killing more innocents in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Yemen, and yes, in Russia too, I think of the deep-down contamination in the soil, of the unsprung landmines and the depleted uranium armor-piecing shells littering devastated landscapes all over our world. Here in the Northern hemisphere, Spring is arriving. But is it already poisoned at its very roots?

I can’t allow these invading thoughts to poison my mind any further.

Palestinians and supporters participate in the start of the Faz3a (pronounced Faz’a), a Palestinian-led campaign to support Palestinian farmers in reaching their land during the olive harvest, al-Janiya. Mongabay, Nov. 2023. Image: Anne Paq

Preparing our dinner later on that bleak Sunday, Andrew used the first of the newly pressed olive oil that we had bought to support a Palestinian farmer. It had traveled a long way from home, passed carefully through several loving hands until it had come to us. Andrew beckoned me over to breathe in that wonderful aroma all its own, reminding us that despite all the destruction in the West Bank and Gaza, there still “lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Deep admiration for and solidarity with the multiply displaced Palestinian people, returning again and again to their dear, devastated homelands, determined to stay, determined to re-build. Their fortitude and persistence inspire us and renew in us the resolve to get up each day and continue working together for peace, with love in our hearts.


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597. “Jolted Out of Chronology”

In Books, Family, India, Inter/Transnational, people, poetry, reading, reflections, Stories, travel on March 5, 2025 at 1:36 pm

Although I’ve been back in the USA for four, going on five, days now, I’m still not fully here. Part of me is still in India. As Nadine Gordimer put it so well in the opening pages of her 1981 novel July’s People, I’ve been “jolted out of chronology” and “the furniture of life” has not yet “fallen into place.” I feel this the most strongly in the pre-dawn hours, as I emerge slowly out of sleep.

In my hypnopompic haze, I’m wondering whether Abhay is still doing his morning yoga or whether it’s time for our first cup of tea, which he himself lovingly prepares; whether I can slip quietly into the washroom for my morning bath without disrupting the order of the household; whether we are going to be on the move again later today and need to re-pack, confirm bookings, order an Uber. I’m accompanying Shubhatai as the morning water supply is turned on and she goes downstairs to water the garden and turn on the pump that will fill the rooftop tank. My mind free-associates: in this garden, Pradeep tells me, he nurtured thirteen varieties of hibiscus only to have a herd of marauding wild pigs thunder in and devour them all. It’s getting hotter already; if we are to do anything outdoors before the early evening, we need to get a move on.

Emerging, blinking, into the here and now, I wonder how many days have passed since my return. Reaching for my phone, I check messages from India, England, the United States. WhatsApp, texts, email. Yesterday morning, my first message was from Cousin Lesley, with the sad news that her dear mother had just died. Aunty Angy has been a loving presence in my life as long as I can remember—never missing a birthday, her Christmas card, sent by sea mail, always the first to arrive no matter in the world where we are living at the time.

Two days before that, in a message that came through as our plane touched ground in Abu Dhabi, I learned that Janice, our dear friend of thirty years, had died and we would miss the funeral service. More jolts to the system: Janice came from North Carolina, but Andrew and I met her in London back in 1996 and were immediately fast friends. Our relationship was perforce a long-distance one, but the few times that we met in person were all the more precious. I took out the four of her books on my shelves, lovingly inscribed, and began to read them. What comfort can I possibly offer to her children and grandchildren?

A large part of the joy of returning from a trip to India or England came from recounting everything to my delighted parents, as I told them of my conversations with their brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, old family friends. Since they have been gone, I can still lay out all the tea and spices and snacks and ayurvedic soaps and tell stories to appreciative friends, but it’s not the same.

I think of my mother’s questions upon our return from our first trip to India after our marriage, as I was projecting the whole experience through rose-colored glasses. Where is your outrage?, she asked. What about the horrendous poverty? The grotesque disparities between rich and poor? I hastened to rationalize my omissions, replying that while those disparities were certainly troubling, what had struck me the most on that trip was the amazing resourcefulness of ordinary people. But Mum was right.

Even though she is no longer here to confront me, I hear Mum’s questions in my own head, and see all over again through the windows of my air-conditioned Uber ride the pitiful shacks with tarps and corrugated metal for roofs and cloth and plastic sheeting for doors, in the shadows of the Metro overpasses and shiny new skyscrapers blocking out the sky and the hills beyond. With 200 billionaires in December 2024, India ranked third in the world, second only to the United States (813) and China (406). In 2023, India ranked #7 in the list of countries with the worst wealth inequality, right after the United States, which ranked #6. Insulated from the outside world by its heavily guarded shopping malls and its gated housing societies, the Indian middle classes do their best to avert their eyes from these glaring disparities. But it is understandable that people who have struggled to get to a place of relative security would like to think that they have achieved that security solely on the basis of their own merit. In this respect, they are no different from the middle classes in the United States, who find it more convenient to blame the country’s woes on its “illegal” immigrants and “undeserving” poor than to recognize the system of privilege that has allowed them to gain higher positions and accumulate greater wealth than so many others.

I open my friend Janice’s third poetry collection, Séance (2007). In it, her inscription reads,

For Josna and Andrew—May the voices of our dead always give us the wisdom we need to hear. Much love, Janice

I don’t want the furniture of life to fall back into place; I need to be continually jolted out of chronology. And in fact, this is the legacy that my dear parents, who were continually on the move themselves, have bequeathed me.


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594. My Brilliant Mum

In Books, Education, Family, parenting, reflections, Stories, women & gender on May 13, 2024 at 4:09 am

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and mine was on my mind all day. Although it has now been more than six years since she passed away, I still have not been able to sit with my memories of her and write anything that does her justice. In the evening I pulled out two manila folders of her writing, mostly essays she wrote when she was taking courses toward her B.A. at Harvard Extension School—while working at a full-time day job, mind you. What I found in them was humbling. 



I hadn’t always realized how seriously Mum took her learning—from independent reading, courses, lectures—and retirement made no difference to that seriousness. For a few years she was a member of a reading group in which the participants took it in turns to choose the book of the month. When it was Mum’s turn she took copious notes, read interviews with the author and on the historical setting, pored over critical essays on the book, and anxiously prepared—no, over-prepared—an introductory presentation. Invariably she chose an author her group were unlikely to be familiar with—Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie were two that I remember—and felt that it was her responsibility to help the group understand and appreciate their work. But she was invariably disappointed. She would come home telling me that the host had been more interested in showing off her best china tea set than in discussing the book or that several people hadn’t even finished reading it.

Mum’s other disappointments with the book group came from the fact that many of the participants were academics or had advanced degrees and would discuss the text at hand using obscure academic jargon that effectively excluded and humiliated her, as someone who was wonderfully well-read and worldly wise but not a literary scholar. Eventually the combination of the lack of seriousness and the academic snobbery led her to quit the group altogether.

Besides her participation in the book group Mum volunteered as an ESL teacher to wives of international graduate students, volunteered as an aide in an ESL after-school program, was an active member of a group called the Third Age, and took several Learning in Retirement courses taught by retired college professors that were as rigorous as any college course. I regret now that I was so preoccupied with my own work that I didn’t take the time to appreciate hers, thereby reproducing the behavior in others that hurt her the most.

As a brilliant girl from a working-class background, Mum was in love with learning and with life. She aced the eleven-plus exam and won a scholarship to grammar school, but her secondary school experience was badly disrupted by the Second World War when she and her school, Parliament Hill School, were evacuated out of London and she had to live with a series of foster families who were neglectful at best. After school she went out to work and while she went out dancing and to the movies with her best girlfriend, she also furthered her education with night classes.

There was no opportunity for Mum to further her formal studies in Greece and India while we were growing up, but she continued to teach English to children—in India, to Dalit children who lived on the outskirts of the campus—and to learn languages herself. It was only when my sister was in college and I at work that Mum started taking night classes again, two every semester until she earned first her Associate’s and then her Bachelor’s degree. Looking now at the piles of term papers she wrote over the years, I am overwhelmed. How has it taken me so long to read them?

Knowing Mum, the topics above make perfect sense. She had always been an advocate for loving, child-centered models of education that fostered creativity. With her working-class background and strong sense of justice, she had always been interested in the effects of class and caste in society. And working as she did for a psychiatrist who had taken a leading role in studying treatments for depression and schizophrenia, she was interested in how treatments for depression had evolved, developing drugs that both held considerable promise and had serious limitations.

But what humbled me the most were these two papers:

It was only relatively recently, through reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015) and his non-fictional Smoke and Ashes (2024), that I became acquainted with the Opium Wars and what drove them. And here was Mum, back in 1986, before I even started my graduate studies, taking a course on India Under the British with the eminent historian of South Asia David Washbrook and writing a paper on the causes and effects of the opium trade.

Mum was so intelligent, passionate about learning, socially committed. As a mother, she built me up. Listened to me patiently, even as I talked incessantly. Was full of admiration for my work, my intellect. Said nothing about her own. I still find slips of paper in books she borrowed from me or read because I had recommended them, with her own thoughts on them. Did we sit down and discuss them afterwards? Probably not, because when I went to Mum and Dad’s house, she would insist that I put my feet up and relax while she simultaneously brought me tea, played with Baby Nikhil, and prepared dinner.

Oh, how I long to listen to her now! All I have is her papers. But I will read them with deep gratitude and remember my brilliant mum.

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591. X is for X Factor

In blogs and blogging, reflections, singing, Stories, Words & phrases on April 29, 2024 at 2:37 pm

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

Looking back at my recent musings on the state of the world and our local relationship to it, I find myself wondering, in each case, whether there is an X factor that points the way to a solution.

The X factor is defined as “a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome.” (Here it is in a sentence: “the youth vote may turn out to be the X factor in the upcoming election.”) For example, in my piece on the importance of global literacy, I recall the student who had identified the Aha! moment when she really understood the concept of a global perspective, and wonder how we might encourage that perspective in our own town. Re-reading my piece on human rights, I wonder about the role and efficacy of the Human Rights Commission in my own small town, and what it would take to infuse a greater sense of urgency into our community regarding violations of human rights beyond its borders. Revisiting my posts on languages and on Queequeg in Moby Dick, I wonder what might overcome the resistance of so many Americans to accepting the multilingual and multiracial nature of U.S. society. Going back to my piece on empathy, I recall the 2015 photograph of the drowned toddler that turned the tide of European public opinion in favor of Syrian refugees—for a time, at least—and wonder why the viral photograph of the Salvadoran father and two-year-old daughter drowned while crossing the Rio Grande did not have the same humanizing effect on U.S. public opinion. Our local poet Martín Espada eulogized their deaths so powerfully in his devastating poem Floaters, the title poem in the collection that won the 2021 National Book Award. If only one could identify the X factor in each of these situations, and then duplicate it elsewhere! But perhaps I am thinking about the problem all wrong.

In every situation there are numerous interwoven factors that drive it. It is important, in every personal struggle or public campaign, to reflect on these factors, in order to determine what went wrong and how it might be better handled or set to rights. Perhaps it is true that there is sometimes one factor that holds the secret to its successful resolution, an element that turns the tide of public opinion or breaks through a stubborn resistance to open up new possibilities. But in doing an internet search for more definitions of X factor, I found a different one that, upon reflection, is more accurate than my first: “ a circumstance, quality, or person that has a strong but unpredictable influence” (Merriam-Webster). As much as we might like to find one silver bullet—that simple and seemingly magical solution to a complicated problem—we are engaging in magical thinking: in the vast majority of cases there is no single solution.

I personally have found that, in any endeavor, the success lies in giving it my all. If it’s important to me, then it demands no less. I must not be under any illusion that I can solve the problem at hand single-handedly, but merely toying about at the edges of the problem will never do anything to shift it. Sometimes I must push everything else aside and tackle it. But solving every complex problem, especially intractable global problems—requires the concerted efforts, physical, mental, and creative—of many people from different interdisciplinary perspectives.

  Intelligent and concerted effort (Green Mountain Club, VT)

What does it take to bring urgent attention to a seemingly distant global problem? Five, ten, a dozen people, bringing different perspectives to the problem and giving it their all can work wonders. There’s no substitute for hard work, but hard work in a diverse group with a shared purpose—now perhaps that gets as close as I can get to the X factor.

Here’s Pete Seeger putting it better that I could ever do, in Step by Step.

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