All relations eventually mature, if at all, into friendship

And that is what we keep working at, if we are not regressing or stagnating into ruts of roles carved out by some faceless society.

Today is a day when back home sisters tie a thread of cotton on the wrist of their brothers. This custom keeps alive a faith that a woman’s prayers will keep a man alive in the battlefield. In return, the brother safeguards the sister from the evils of the society – ironic, isn’t it? Are our societies more treacherous than the war-fields?? Think of it.

I have a lot of time to think today because the brothers to whom I would tie rakhi are not in my town. Then my sons do not have a ‘real’ sister either, so I was tying rakhi to them as well – but this year both of them are also away from home. I am now also thinking of a couple of wonderful men whom I met either as a classmate or as my husband’s friends but eventually came to wish well for them just as I do for my brothers or sons.

Well, just as one can start from any relation – brother, cousin, son, friend – and travel to a juncture where one wants to push one’s energies to blow the powerful winds of destiny in their favor, I feel the ultimate test of the strength of the bond is not in documenting the success of your wish or his. It is in the knowledge that whatever point of relating we started with, we evolved and grew to be friends.

When this realization welled up in my heart, I also noted some kind of light lurking around.

First – for many relations, we have no choice – like brothers and sisters can’t choose each other, or son and mother can’t. But since we started out of a biological or social reality or inevitability, do we have to forever be confined to it?

If I am older by 7 or 9 years than my brother, do I have to have that gap haunt me for ever? And forever so with my sons? They grow and evolve and so do I. If we cannot tie the threads that safeguard the relationship, will it not be weak? The thread that will renew the bonds would be the possibility, opportunity and openness that can allow that brother, son or friend to grow our of that label, be a full-fledged human that he is and then relate to me as a full human I am.

And I would want to do the same towards him. I might be his sister, mother or whatever, but when I relate to him, I want to relate as a person. Whole, thinking, feeling, expressing and sharing person.

Such a pleasure that it can be, and yet such a daunting task! Can I take my relation with my son to a level where he and I can be friends without forgetting that we are mother-and-son? If I succeed, my life indeed will be a rainbow where the light of friendship falls on various relationships and they shine in their own way, with their own hues given by the substance they have.

This can be extended to all relationships.. I think that some never make it, some die an infantile death, some freeze as monuments from the past. Only some relations make it to living maturity in the present where the people relating are friends..

Sometimes the mess is not as messy as it seems :)

I have been trying to focus and write , because I have a deadline tomorrow on one of my flash assignments. I should have been writing non-stop — my ideas are in my head, my partners agree and I have done my homework.

But every few seconds, my eyes stumble upon and get stuck to the mess that appears to me as overwhelming. As such over the years my penchant for organized meticulousness and speck-less surfaces has been on the decline and I have made great strides in developing tolerance for the general disorder that pervades in my home, which is like any place where men are in majority.

But this scene really tests my progress in that direction, and every now and then I feel tempted to get up and do something about it. If I really started cleaning up, it would take twice as much time as it took in the making.

And what is it that can keep me immersed? There are heaps of clothes everywhere. If that was not enough, the Dhobi (launderer) has heaped a pile of pressed clothes. Those he had given two days back are also awaiting their turn to get sorted.

Then there are laptops. Three are scattered luxuriantly in a single room in which all of us prefer to work. Correspondingly there are mice, and getting knotted with them are average two portable drives per computer, the respective power cords notwithstanding. Bags and backpacks are posing as booby-traps – and there are books, notes, fliers, pens, and tapes and balls.. I fail to connect the dots – what are these balls doing here? Who is that age here? I realize that I can only ask the question. I have no license to get them answered.

Oh, and someone, while searching for a disk to burn, has taken out my sewing box, perilously slanted and perched only at a mercy of a wrist-watch box on a table which is itself slanting towards the wall. photo albums are everywhere (If I spoke about it, I am dead sure I would be silenced even before I completed my lines for having taken them out in the first place)..

And three black mobile phones – if I want to make a call, it would be easier to first receive a call so that I can make out which one is NOT mine. And those two chairs?? I am sitting on the bed, one son is on the floor and the other is on the bean-bag: OMG, now a single more object in this room and it will have to be stacked vertically!

But why am I so cool about it, and why am I writing this for friends?

That’s the big thing for me, something I have understood gradually as babies grew into kids grew into boys and one already left home for the hostel.

Now that he is back, his things here and there, he mingling around with us again, our stuff and his stuff together as if nothing ever changed.. seems heavenly.

That is why I bless the mess. In my current life it represents the routine thrown to winds, the order not bothered about. Rather, it stands for the cool acceptance of who we are AND who we CAN be at the most disorganized of our selves.

Blessed be those homes where there are boys and girls roaming free in spirit, taking not the things but you as their own, being who they are rather than trying to look falsely what they are not, and where there are things constantly in use, in circulation – because stillness is death.

Blessed be the homes the precincts of which are filled with the laughter, arguments, leg-pulling, pokes, mock-attacks, affirmations and reaffirmations, occasional short-formed swearwords, plans, fresh plans, comments and what not, because silence laden with the feeling that ‘i-know-all-about-you-there-is-to-know’ is death.

Blessed be the homes where the awareness that one is a parent and the other is a child does not impede candidness and where openness does not repeal respectfulness.

Blessed be the mess, if it comes as a part of this package, I will work tonight and finish the writing