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Revisions… seven years later

January 15, 2010 by anjalimd

I started a new folder on my hard drive today: FPR2010. (FPR stands for Faint Promise of Rain, the title of my novel.) It was a bit of a downer to do so, as I started working on the manuscript seven years ago, in 2003. It might even have been earlier; July 2003 was the date of the first notes I jotted down in a dedicated notebook. Seven years, and here I am starting a new round of revisions. And yet, I am looking forward to the process. After closing the document last September and feeling I could never look at it again without wanting to throw it out the window, I am making friends with it again, and I am seeing myriad places and ways in which to improve it. So here we go again. (On the subject of revisions, writer Natalie Whipple shares some great guidelines for the revision process over on her blog.)

One part I have not changed, however, throughout what must now be at least eight rounds of revisions, is the prologue, the very first words I ever wrote to this manuscript, before I even knew I was writing a book:

In Rajasthan, a five year old child is likely never to have seen rain. Five hundred years ago, like today, the monsoons were elusive. In the royal palaces, the walls of the children’s rooms were trimmed with black and blue cloud designs, so that when it finally did rain, the little ones would not be afraid. Less fortunate children, those who had grown up looking up at thatched roofs and endlessly blue skies, would remember all their lives the fear and hope they felt the day of their first rain.

I leave you with that image.

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Putting out a shingle

January 13, 2010 by anjalimd

Chhandika signed a lease for office space today. More specifically, I signed the lease on behalf of Chhandika, and local Indian fashion maven Shelley Chhabra. We went ahead and did it, after mulling it over for quite a while. A good opportunity came up, at an unbeatable price given the convenient location and square footage, and I decided that if we could not make this work, we’d never get an office.

It feels like a big step for our organization. Those who have started up a non-profit will recognize this. The next day, I was sitting in a café working on my manuscript when three fresh-faced twenty-somethings arrived, set up their computers, and started working/talking. It quickly became apparent that they were the founding members of an organization involved in something relating to providing facilities and medical supplies, and maybe logistics, for developing countries, and they were discussing, of course, the situation in Haiti, and how to tie their work into relief efforts quickly. At one point, one of them sat back and piped up: “When we have our own office, can we have lots of cushions everywhere?” And I wanted to tell her: hey! I’m involved in running a non-profit and we finally got an office! But of course, why would she care? Still, the excitement was hard to contain.

Now comes the difficult part: raising the funds to cover the costs. (If you are moved to help support us, donations can be made securely online here.) But also the fun part: planning the furnishings, the painting of the walls, the decorating, and daydreaming about all the wonderful and centralized organization we will be able to establish. A place for volunteers to work! A meeting place for administrators and instructors! A lending library of books, videos and music! A storage place for our materials! And, dare I say it… a place for a possible intern to work! There is only so far that Google Docs and conference calls can take us. Let’s see what comes of pinning ourselves to a physical location.

Posted in Administrating, Dance/Arts | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Charlotte

September 29, 2009 by anjalimd

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the inauguration of a garden at the Acton Memorial Library (in Massachusetts) in memory of my grandmother, Charlotte Sagoff.  Two years ago, at her memorial, I read a piece I wrote on the theme of a garden; how lovely that my very last sentence should have come to be true:

Charlotte and I joined the family the same year. In 1973, she married my grandfather, Maury Sagoff, and I was born.

My earliest memories of my US grandparents (my father’s family is from India) were predominantly of my grandfather. He was someone towards whom children gravitated. He was the one who was silly with me, who took me to his mysterious garage full of treasures, who deliberately left green beans hanging on the vines for me to pick after him so that I could tease him about what a bad green bean picker he was. He was the one with peanuts and M&Ms in his pockets, with stickers and made-up stories. He was the the one who splashed around in Walden Pond with me and my friend Sarah from across the street.

But in 1986, the summer that I turned 13, I began to understand what an important force Charlotte was. I had just spent a year living in India with my parents. Upon our return (to France, where were were based) my parents shipped me off to Acton, MA for a month while they tended to the practical business of finding us a new home. For six weeks I stayed with Grandpa and Charlotte, enjoying the peace and plentifulness of an American suburb after the chaos of a year in Bombay. And during that month, sleeping, waking, eating and going through the motions of day to day life in the same house as Charlotte, I came to realize that she was the voice of reason behind my grandfather’s follies, the practical counterweight to his impossibly impractical, if fun, ideas.

She was the one who had sat in the garden, on her little stool, planting the green beans for him to leave on the vine for me. She was the one who made the healthy meals to which the peanuts and M&Ms could be fun complements. She was the one who arranged for me to meet Sarah so that I could have someone my age to accompany us on our trips to Walden Pond. She was the one who made it all work: wise, reliable, down to earth.

And I mean down to earth quite literally. Many of my childhood and even more recent memories of Charlotte somehow involve earth, in one form or another. There was, for example, the somewhat frightening compost bowl on the kitchen counter in Acton, into which I was instructed to deposit any shred of leftover organic material. I remember the trepidation with which I would approach the bowl and scrape in the bits from my plate to join the fruit flies, decomposing peels, pits, and organic waste from the bottom of the sink.

There was the even more distressing compost heap behind the garage, where I had to confront a waist-high pile of who knows what, teeming with bees and crawling things.

There was Fort Pond, on which some friends of Charlotte and Grandpa’s had a house, and where they would take me swimming. My memories of that pond are mostly of the squishy bottom, murky and muddy, from which long grasses reached up to tickle my legs and turtles emerged, bug-eyed and bubbly.

There were Charlotte’s soups, wonderful creations of leftovers and leftovers of leftovers, cooked together into earthy, primordial melanges that were somehow delicious, as long as you didn’t think too much about what exactly was in there.

And of course there was her own vegetable garden: the planting, watering and harvesting; the delicious smell of fresh tomatoes in the sun; the green length of zucchini, crusted in some areas with a layer of dry dirt, lying quietly in the cool shade of their own leaves; the perilous picking of plump raspberries in the tumble of prickly bushes at the end of the garden.

In that garden, many things happened. I played away hours of childhood summers. I pressed apples into cider. I sat surrounded by close friends and relatives at a picnic the day before my wedding. I sat surrounded by close friends and relatives the day of Grandpa’s memorial.

When Charlotte moved into town, just a few blocks from where I live, she no longer had a garden. But she still cultivated people, made new friends in the neighborhood, connected people to each other. Even in the midst of her own transitions, she helped others make theirs. She helped people spread their roots when necessary, and lift them when necessary. During this time, I was able to visit often, much more often than when she’d lived in Acton. And I was able to bring my daughter to see her, and to bring her things from the farmer’s market. We continued this routine when she moved to a nearby rehab center. She was even more removed from any garden at that point, but she never stopped creating a nurturing environment. I believe everyone in this room is, in some way, a product of that. Charlotte may have left us, but we remain, all of us, in her garden.

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Can one be the people at age five?

September 16, 2009 by anjalimd

There’s no one quite like a five year old to showcase the potential of escalation. Take the following case:

Five year old K has started kindergarten. She likes her class; the head teacher is a “boy teacher” who is “cool and rides a motorcycle” and K has already made friends. With three years of preschool under her tiny belt, she is adept at saying goodby to Mom and Dad (already long gone are the days of Mommy and Daddy) and functioning in a social milieu on her own. But the after school program poses more of a problem. It is no longer the coddling environment of four and five year olds with a 1:3 adult to child ratio, where clear and rehearsed rules govern every form of interaction and activity. The after school program, for all the compliments about it that I heard from other parents, is more of a free for all. Children from kindergarten through sixth grade spend the afternoon from school dismissal, at 2:25, until their parent/sitter/guardian can pick them up. There are some structured activities, there are some adults, and there are two rooms—one for grades K through 2, and one for the older kids—but there’s also an atmosphere of rough and tumble, a long recess at the playground with all the children at once, and indoor “free play” which causes the decibel level to rise far beyond what is comfortable to the normal human ear. A pack of 6-7 year old boys and a bin of Transformers; need I say more?

K does not do rough and tumble. To my chagrin and concern, she’s the kid who gets knocked down by a bigger kid, usually a boy, usually unintentionally, and sits there and cries. And so on the third day of school, during outdoor play in the afternoon, she tripped/was knocked down (the reports are varied) while running and fell flat on her head, nose, hands and knees. And she howled. And howled. And howled. At 3:00 pm I receive the dreaded call from after school: please come pick up your child. When I get there, three minutes later because we live around the corner and I had been working from home, she is a complete mess. Wailing, covered in bandaids, inconsolable.

“I can’t walk” she cries hysterically when I take her by the hand to get her to stand up.

“Of course you can,” I say calmly. “Your legs are still there. You just got some scrapes.”

“Noooooo! I can’t!”

And so begins a litany of “I can’ts” and “I’m scareds.” I can’t bend my leg, I can’t go up the stairs, I’m afraid it will hurt, I’m afraid the bandaids will come off in the bath, I wish this had happened to someone else, I should have been wearing knee pads (seriously, she said this), I can’t get onto my bed, the blanket will hurt my knee, I can’t lie down, I won’t be able to sleep, I don’t like after school, I need to stay home, I don’t want to be five, and on and on. And I feel bad for her, but a large part of me wants to shake her by the shoulders and say Kid, take a breath, take control, be strong, dare to bend your leg and you’ll see it’s not that bad. I want to tell her, Be The People! Because that’s what it is. Don’t let the bigger kid who happened to tumble into you and knock you down get to decide, even unbeknownst to him, whether you like school or not. Don’t let a relatively minor booboo determine whether you are going to have a good day or not. She is so independent in other ways, so resilient to change and new things, and yet so easily knocked off balance by little things that hurt. Is this something I can teach her? Is this something that can be taught at all? I hope so.

Posted in Being the people, Parenting | 1 Comment »

And now for some complete silliness

September 6, 2009 by anjalimd

I like to rhyme. It’s in my genes. My grandfather was a poet, always ready with a witty couplet which made his children and grandchildren, and all those young and old who flocked to him, cringe and groan and ache with laughter all at once. To him my family traces the urge to compose a limerick upon hearing a silly name, to write an ode on the occasion of a birthday, to turn a simple request into a playful verse. As a child, at the dining table with my grandparents, I quickly learned to recognize the kinds of words or topics in conversation which would elicit a rhyme from my grandfather, and I would look toward him and watch the twinkle in his blue eyes and imagine I could hear the whir of his mind and I would await the parting of his lips and the delivery of the silly poem–for it was invariably silly–with such eagerness I would forget to eat. Luckily, my grandfather’s mind worked with lightning speed, so I never had to wait for long.

So the other day, as I procrastinated by poking around Facebook, I noticed that my cousin Jared had the following status update: “Full of fried clams!” (He was on Martha’s Vineyard at the time.) To which another cousin Curtis, Chair of an English Department, responded “Fax me some.” Well. The image of a faxed fried clam was too much to resist. I dropped what I was doing (probably working on my novel) and in a few minutes posted my own comment:

The junior professor
Knocked on Curtis’ door:
“First sheet of a fax–
I think there is more,
But the paper has jammed
And I’m told you’re the one
Who can solve any problem
Before it’s begun.
I checked on the toner
And Tray 1 and Tray 2
Can you think of anything
Else we can do?”
Said Curtis, who wished
For a moment of peace:
“Just call the technician
And what’s all that grease?”
“Oh that, on my fingers?”
Said the blundering prof,
“That came from the fax
And I can’t get it off!”
“From the fax? That’s for me?”
Asked Curtis, now keen
To walk down the hall
To the pesky machine.
He poked in his head
And peered around in it,
Saw the stain and then said
“Now wait just a minute!
Good thing that you called me,
For this isn’t a jam:
Someone has sent me-
My God! A fried clam!”

I post this not because I think it is a fine piece of poetry, but because of the joy I felt in writing it. How fun and liberating it was to spend fifteen minutes being silly and creative. I thought of the clam and the fax, and of course there had to be a paper jam, and I giggled, sitting in the café writing this, at the thought of an actual fried clam in a fax machine. And the comment had the added benefit of being the start to a string of comments in which the grandchildren reminisced about our grandfather and our childhoods punctuated with his verse. I felt nostalgic but light and peaceful after the whole exchange. And that was an excellent way to turn back to my work.

My grandfather was Maurice Sagoff, by the way. I highly recommend his book, Shrinklits. Seventy distillations of the classics, rendered in hilarious verse. If he were alive today, he would no doubt be writing the Twitter version.

Posted in Writing | 4 Comments »

Loss of control

August 27, 2009 by anjalimd

My first thought was that he must be very hot. Black jeans, black denim jacket, black baseball cap. And sitting in a black wheelchair, in full sun. The whiteness of his big sneakers and of the T-shirt visible through the open front of his jacket was dazzling. There was no one with him. Despite the location—near the intersection of two busy streets in the heart of Boston’s hospital district—there was a pool of emptiness on the sidewalk around him.

It was something about the motions of his arms, the tilt of his head that caught my attention as I sat in traffic across the road, headed the opposite way. It was the sudden shift from determination to angry frustration. He threw up his arms in a gesture of defeat, his hands shot out of his sleeves, and it was then that I realized he had been using the thick material to protect his palms as he grasped the inner, metal rim of the wheels. Now he tried again, this time applying his bare hands to coax the wheelchair to move forward. It resisted. I noticed that one of the smaller front wheels had somehow swiveled to be perpendicular to his desired trajectory, no doubt pushed out of place by the uneven brickwork of the sidewalk.

The light was still red, but I was two lanes of traffic in. I could not get out to help him. There was nowhere for my car to go, nowhere to park it. I looked around to see if there was anyone nearby to whom I could call out. Still no one. This quiet moment of despair was taking place in a near vacuum. Only I was witnessing it. A man pushed open a door to a storefront just a few feet away from the wheelchair, then quickly retreated as though he had forgotten something. The man in the chair gently placed one of his feet on the ground, tried to exert some force, then grimaced. He folded his arms and sat back. What the fuck am I supposed to do? his body asked.

The light turned, the cars in front of me moved ahead. I drove slowly through the intersection, scanning the pedestrians gathered at the corner, hoping to find one who would hear me if I shouted “Could you help the guy in the chair back there, please?” A young couple embraced. A doctor in scrubs pulled out his beeper. A woman gesticulated and spoke loudly into her phone. A frazzled mother pulled her toddler from the edge of the sidewalk. The car behind me honked, and then I was a hundred feet past the wheelchair. I considered pulling over in the no-stopping-anytime zone, but the urgent siren of an ambulance sounded, and I was swept into the motion of the cars hurrying forward and to the side to avoid it.

I continued on my way, flooded with memories of personal moments of helpless, angry frustration. I wished that, if nothing else, the man had at least known that someone saw his predicament, someone wanted to help. I wondered if this was a temporary confinement, or the beginning of a long journey. I figured he was in his thirties. Later, driving up a street in Cambridge, I sat at another light. Two slim adolescent girls in short shorts and T-shirts walked past me in the sunshine, laughing, their shiny straight hair dancing on their backs. The pedestrian signal started its countdown from ten and they pranced across the street in front of me like fillies.

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The perils of being the people

August 18, 2009 by anjalimd

I’ve come to the conclusion that if I have not settled down to the day’s major activity by 9:30 am, I’m doomed. The day is destined to fritter away and disappear through my fingers. Nine thirty may seem to many like still early in the day, but no, really, it isn’t. You see, it’s half way between nine and ten. (I know, Earth-shattering, no? Bear with me.) At nine, there are still so many opportunities for the day. It is the start of the proverbial “nine to five” measure of time. Four full hours until lunch time, in theory. But by 10 am, everything has changed. It is mid-morning. Lunchtime, really, is more like noon when one has breakfast at 7:30. Suddenly, at 10 am, it feels like one has to rush to get something done by lunchtime. At least, I do. So 9:30 is the breaking point, the point of no return.

Take this morning, for example. I came home from dropping K off at preschool, and decided I would get straight to work, but then I realized I really needed to water the porch plants because we’re having scorching weather, and the only convenient way to fill up the large watering can is to place it in in the sink, but of course the sink was full of breakfast dishes, so they needed to be moved into the dishwasher, but the dishwasher was full of clean dishes (again) so first I had to empty it. Familiar scenario. Then once the plants were watered I came back in and got annoyed that the back door was being semi-blocked by two bags of trash that needed to be taken down. So I took them downstairs, and got agitated by the over-grownness of the “garden.” Just to get around to the trash bins and pull them out, I had to to hack through a thick tangle of thorny weeds and dried, pokey lily stalks and overly tall, thin plants which happily released their spores as I brushed by, and pungent-smelling vines dripping with ominous pods. So I came back upstairs and got some gardening gloves and a clipper and ruthlessly trimmed the whole walk-way, which took half an hour, and because it was already extremely hot and muggy I got very sweaty, and so decided I needed to shower before I could get to work. Then I decided that perhaps I should first check in with my friend Amanda with whom I am supposed to get together with K after school, because if we end up doing something out of doors, I might as well wait until the evening to shower. So I called her, and got involved in a chat with her. When we hung up, I did shower, and by the time I sat down at my computer it was 10:15. And then I fell into the trap of checking the news (just until 10:30, ok?) and of course became side-tracked. And here we are at 11:35, and I teeter on the edge of throwing in the towel and setting about to attack one of the many and much needed house-reorganizing tasks, but NO! I will not. I can accomplish something in the next hour before lunch. Here I go. Whee!  (Wait, what are all these crumbs doing under the table? Don’t they need to be swept up?) But tomorrow, I’m at work at 9:00. For sure.

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Me me me

August 12, 2009 by anjalimd

A few weeks ago, there was an article in the New York times about a new book that irked me. A Caucasian woman who spent some time in India and studied Hindi has written about her experiences. I’ve no problem with that, of course. I am, I’ll admit, jealous to some extent. Of the publication part. I’ll admit it freely. It’s petty, but there it is. But the real problem to me, the larger one, is that this is part of a genre, and it’s the popularity of the whole genre that confounds me.

Take, for example, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Big sensation, right? Woman in her thirties leaves a troubled marriage and goes to find herself and the answers to her questions in India, Italy and Indonesia. A coincidence that they all start with the letter “I?” My mother looked at a page at random and counted 35 instances of the words “I,” “me” and “my.” Me me me me! Read all about me! Her book is a bestseller. This new one, about the Hindi learner, is on Oprah’s summer reading list.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this is fantastic for them. They took the initiative, put in a lot of work, had some good luck, and are, I hope, happy. Most impressively, they knew how to peg the market, and what niche to target. But I ask myself, and you: why am I bothering to research and write a series that will bring to light kathak dance, a 2,000 year old classical artistic tradition—its beauty and richness and complexity and historical, political and social significance?

Why don’t I write about being a half-white, half-Asian American raised in Paris? I could riff on the multi-culti theme. Why don’t I write about the year I spent in the posh, ultra-strict, Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, where by some strange alignment of circumstances I found myself one of the small handful of white-looking kids, and the only non-rich one, amidst a sea of Indian elite who had their hot tiffin lunches brought to them by their servants while I munched on soggy cheese sandwiches? I could wax eloquent on isolation, misunderstanding, teen-age angst in a (semi-) foreign land. But I find myself returning to the same question: who cares? I mean, really, who cares? And if someone does, then why? Maybe if I can figure these things out, I’ll get that call, the one for which I have my fingers crossed. In the meantime, my manuscript languishes, in bits and pieces—two chapters here, a query and synopsis there—Out There.

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What is a vacation when you’re a writer?

July 31, 2009 by anjalimd

We booked a house for a much-needed weeklong vacation, and we’ll be heading there soon. A house on the coast, with a private beach, a lovely-looking deck, and more bedrooms than we need. We’ll be with friends, with a 4:2 adult to child ratio, which in my opinion is perfect. And so… I could have some time to write! And yet. I wonder if I should be thinking this way. Part of me has visions of sitting outdoors, looking out at the ocean, scrunching my bare toes in the grass, sipping a Caipirinha, jotting down notes or outlining chapters while the kids nap or play on the beach, and it looks perfect to me. We’ve had a trying last few weeks, and mental escape to a place in which I can create the realities is appealing. (Albeit within the context of 19th century India.) But part of me (and a large part of my dear husband J) feels that if I consider writing my work, or one of my works, and if the point of this trip is vacation, then I should vacate. As in, not write. Not bring my computer. Not attempt to accomplish anything. Which, as a good friend with similar tendencies to mine points out, is an accomplishment in itself, and therefore should be satisfying.

Is it silly even to be worrying about this? My friend’s husband brings his computer with him when he’s on vacation. A few months ago, when we were sharing a vacation house for a few days, I asked him what he was doing. “Coding,” came the answer. “You’re doing work?” I asked. “Well, not really. I’m coding something the way I think it should be done. But it’s a way they wouldn’t let me do it at work.” So. Take that, J. I’m not completely insane. Or at least, there are others worse than me. He was doing something for work that would never actually be used, simply for the integrity of it. Maybe I’ll bring my writing after all.

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Non-profit challenge, part 259

July 14, 2009 by anjalimd

I went to see some office space for Chhandika a couple of days ago. I dream of having an office for the organization. Not only to get the boxes of papers, brochures, flyers, video footage and other stuff out from under my bed and my scant storage space, but because I feel the organization will never be able to make it to the next level without a space to call its own, a space in which to greet visitors and possible donors, in which to welcome volunteers, in which to centralize our books, our video, our marketing materials, our production materials. We are too physically scattered now to be as efficient as we’d like.

So I have been looking at office space. One place, for rent last year at the end of my street, and conveniently located just a block from where we hold many of our kathak dance classes, looked perfect. A storefront space, large enough to house a couple of desks, a round meeting table with chairs, some bookshelves, a comfortable armchair, a rug or two, some wall hangings from India, a display of photos and quotes from our events, with storage space for costumes, dance bells, instruments. It was so easy for my mind to fill it, to furnish it, to turn it into a warm, inviting, practical, useful space. I could hear the strains of a sarod, smell the masala chai. But the rent was too high. (And yet. The group that did sign a lease is some esoteric, avant garde art group of sorts, which draws the curtains across the storefront and periodically opens them to allow passers by a view of a pyramid of unlabeled tin cans, or an abstract design of cotton balls strewn across the white floor. Right now there is a gilded television set displaying static. How this group has the money to pay $850 per month in rent, while Chhandika, with over 70 dance students, would struggle to pay half as much, is beyond me.)

Then I looked at a different space, in a residential area, two blocks off of a main avenue. There were three empty offices available within an architecturally interesting ground floor suite which included a kitchen and a circular meeting room with plush carpeting. An aura of hushed tranquility hung over the whole place. The manager of the property showed me around. She spoke in the sparse, quiet way of someone who spends much of her time meditating and cannot be bothered with practical details. I could again picture us using the space, perhaps sharing an office with another group, but it felt too removed from the world. Too quiet, too invisible from the street. Kathak is colorful, dynamic, percussive, full of stories. I wondered what kind of story we could tell there.

The search continues. But my husband brings up some good points: does it make sense for a non-profit organization to be looking for office space, when that will drastically increase our overhead costs? Shouldn’t the goal be to reduce them? In an era of wireless this and off-grid that, is it old fashioned to seek a physical place in which to gather people and stuff? Should we instead be putting the money into streamlining our systems to function more efficiently in a spread-out fashion? How does one reconcile the new ways of doing business with the need for face-to-face contact? Dance is physical, emotional, spatial. We can upload files to Google Documents to access them from anywhere, and we can hold administrative meetings via conference call, but how do we create a space of our own to cultivate human connection when we do not have an office or studio of our own? (All our classes are held in studio spaces that we rent from other organizations.)

Posted in Administrating, Dance/Arts | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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