Soap Suds for the Soul

Source:A fantabulous article
End of the year. I am sitting alongside of Janus, staring at the Ghost of the Christmas Past. The future won't begin until two days go by, where I stare from. Lessons from the previous year, whispers the apparition, so tell me. Ghosts are hard to exorcise. Ask
anyone who was ever in love. So I am forced to reflect.

Let us start with Madeleines. Yeah, the sweet, sea-shelled concoctions eternalized by Marcel Proust in his Remembrance of Things Past. Not that I have ever dared to read Proust. I get by happily with the essays on him. But first, the Madeleines. I encountered the existential version in reality and simply fell in love. Got to hand it over to the French, I say. From Chanel to chic, from cooking to cuckolding, no one beats the French. (Pardon, but wasn't Madame Bovary French after all?) Yes, Ghostie, I discovered the sweet bliss of biting into a milk soaked-fifteen seconds microwaved-and melting in the mouth-ambrosia. Amen for that.

It was Sarah Ban Breathnach who showcased that rare gem of a poem. A poet, obviously a woman, had discovered God in soap suds. The writer had been washing plates, as her soul traversed into its own heaven. So did I, this passing year. I discovered God in not just soap suds, but also in changing diapers. God just happens to be a kind Domestic Goddess for ordinary mothers like me. She understands how impossible it is to tune in to the intellectual proclivities of a higher order when there is that stubborn tomato sauce sticking onto the wash basin. Orhan Pamuk can wait a bit - I am Red - with exasperation; now that the stain has gone, what about Istanbul, sir?

Ah, Ghostie. After French cookies and domestic bliss, comes essays. Now, that is fodder for the craving heart and soul. Never judge an author by his novels, I say, but by his essays. Orhan Pamuk is a sheer joy to read. Brevity, he knows, is the soul of wit and wisdom. Besides, that earns him fans like me, who cannot afford to sit and read calmly for fifteen minutes at a stretch. In between two toddler nap times, three Pamuk essays (Other Colours) can be comfortably consumed.

Not so with Coetzee (Inner Workings). I struggled with his erudite essays and concluded that Disgrace had been a better read. I am just not into dense intellectual matter now. But still I tried Fuentes (This I believe). That man has charm and wit. If I cannot understand his metaphysics, I make do with what he writes of Women and Amor! After all, he finishes his essays in two pages. I am going to quote a line from one of his essays, which I have taken to heart. "Aun a pesar de las tinieblas, bella/Aun a pesar de las estrellas, clara." (Even in the face of darkness, lovely/Even in the face of stars, luminous.)

I also encountered a terrific writer called Judith Thurman, who introduced me to 39 forms of desire in a brilliant collection of her New York Times articles called 'Cleopatra's Nose'. And a slim volume called 'Learning to Drive', by Kathy Pollitt.
Humour gets to me any day. But really, Jorge Borges is wonderful in his non-fiction. I had to reprogram my brain which had only the name of Umberto Eco as the Intellectual It! It really sounds so cool and superior, Ghostie mine, to spout those famous names.

By the way, I did read a novel by Paul Auster - the first of his New York Trilogy. I grabbed it because his photograph was as handsome as that of the young Arthur Miller. Haunting, it certainly is - the face and the novel. But not for me the Code of Babel and abuse of innocence - even in the name of intellectual sublimation. However, I enjoyed Paulo Coelho's Zahir. For lilting poetry in prose, try him any day. Now, apart from Little Lulu and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which my elder daughter sometimes allows me to share, I don't much remember anything else.

My Ghost looks disapprovingly at me. Arre bhai, I am not old Scrooge by the way. I need not pack a whole life time into one year, need I? Films, murmurs the apparition. Psheeew, man Ghostie, you got me this time. So after madeleines, domesticity and essays, comes films. Lord, what burns in Sidney Poitiers' eyes? Any person who loves the magic of films should watch "In the Heat of the Night" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". If screen presence can be equated to a single actor, Hallelujah! And when one gets time, it is worthwhile to watch Gregory Peck enact Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mocking Bird".

Ghostie is doing his calculations. That leaves an unaccounted 362 days, he coughs. Very boring existence, you seem to lead, my dear. Oh, but one lives intensely only on some days, I counter. And what we remember of those good times will help us plod on the rest of the year. Take it or leave it, Friend Casper.

Didn't a philosopher once define happiness as the feeling of being comfortable wherever you are, doing whatever you are doing, at the moment? I wish that feeling to all of you this new year. May all things bright and beautiful come your way, I pray. May our ordinary lives be blessed with the extraordinary gifts that are scattered abundantly around us. May we have the eyes to see and ears to listen to the whisperings of the soul. They came to me in soap suds, essays, Poitier films and madeleines the past year. And I am as thankful as can be.

Be blessed, the new year.