Discovering the Extraordinary in an Ordinary Day

 
 

 

Housekeeping has become the focus of my life, for a while now. Its taken precedence over almost everything else. I did manage to make it to Couture Week and also do research and write a couple of articles. And I'm currently engrossed in discovering the story of Muslin, whenever I get time after the housekeeping chores. But work isn't happening in quite the same way as I've been used to. The mundane act of drinking tea, which inspired an enormous body of textile art, has now been overtaken by much more mundane tasks necessary for everyday living. The ordinary is demanding my attention.  I am finding creative ways to tackle this facet of being, but not without my fair share of griping and bitching, yelling and crying too. But it's got to be done, there's no-one else, so I've got to do it and relegate needle and thread to another life-time, it seems.

 

What I find the hardest to handle, is the staff. The thing I've discovered is that no-one listens. If you give instructions, the attention is clearly someplace else and things never get done as specified, which is soooo annoying!  It’s not really a workable solution, but I now insist they look at me while I speak and then make them repeat my instructions back to me. In doing so, whenever I remember to do it this way, I have found some reprieve. I'm reassured that I've been understood and black will be black and white, white.  I've been used to writing down what needed doing but at this point none of my staff are literate and it is getting very difficult. But, having said that, there are also some fun moments in the midst of all the frustration. 

 

This evening, I needed to get some packing tape. I was expecting someone to come see my work, which had recently returned from my exhibition in Kolkata. I would need the tape to repack the art-works, once I had shown them. I'm not a frequent visitor to the local market, so I wasn't sure where to go to get this. There is a Vyapar Kendra close by but it  is very strangely built and on the odd occasion that I have gone and discovered a shop that's useful, I've not been able to locate it on my next trip. And, I almost always get lost on my way out. Not wanting to go on a wild goose chase when my energy is not quite up to speed, I looked up Google for a shop I'd been to with a neighbour and knew that they stocked stationery items. There was a number to call, which I did. Thankfully, they had what I needed and kindly said they'd send someone to the outer gate once I got to Palam Vyapar Kendra. My neck and shoulder had been playing up and daily physio was helping but I was advised to cut down the swimming. I hadn't felt like swimming this evening, in any case, so I decided to cycle to PVK, as the market is commonly called. It's about a 12 - 15 minute walk, so it didn't take me any time at all cycling there.

 

When I called the shop, as planned, the call wasn't answered. I tried four times and eventually got a female voice who said it was the wrong number. Strange, I thought abhi toh meri baat issi number se toh hui thi. I walked into the only shop I know in this market and asked for directions for Memory Point, the stationery store. They very kindly sent someone to escort me there, which was gratifying.

 

I got my tape, clarified the phone conundrum, got their card for future reference and was heading out, when I spied a fruit and veg store. I didn't have my wallet with me, but there was some change left over from paying for the tape. It was enough to get 6 peaches, 1 kg Mussambi's for juice, a large beetroot to make a cold soup, some inspiringly aromatic pudina, ½  Kg pumpkin to make a delicious roast pumpkin salad with, some kundru for lunch tomorrow and drumsticks for sambhar. I just love drumsticks and the rest of the sambhar is incidental. I picked up an ample bunch, paid my bill and headed out with my bhajji shopping to my cycle which was parked outside Suraj Store where I generally buy the electronic stuff I need. I stuffed up the painted pink basket that my cycle has upfront, it was packed tight. The long drumsticks sticking out quite awkwardly.

As I hopped on the seat and began to pedal, I giggled to myself, imaging what I probably looked like to passersby. I mean it isn't exactly your everyday sight is it, to see a curly grey-haired  woman in culottes, cycling down the streets of Gurgaon, her pink cycle-basket stuffed to the brim with veggies, is it?

 

It was dark but even though the white culottes must have been clearly visible, sleepy Palam Vihar didn't seem to blink an eye. Or if they did, I didn't notice.

 

I've been feeling quite frustrated at having to give so much attention to things I hadn't done for over a decade. In order to function with some measure of equanimity, I've been telling myself : " I love housekeeping!" Repeating it over and over, allowing myself to feel a sense of pleasure doing the chores as I meditate each morning. Sometimes, like this evening, I surprise myself by doing things I haven't done for decades - and bhajji shopping is one such, where I've either ordered over the phone since the 1990's or someone's been around to do it. Today, I picked each peach myself, making sure they were just right to eat. I savoured the aroma of the mint leaves as I lifted a bunch off the shelf and realised that in telling oneself that you enjoy doing things you don't relish in the normal course of living, and you do end up doing just that! I had enjoyed the veggie shopping and loved cycling back home with my basket, full to the brim.

 

An ordinary became extraordinary, not just because I've not done bhajji shopping for a while and thus savoured it. But for being reminded just how one can work successfully towards mastering the mind in small but significant ways. It was this which made an otherwise uneventful, ordinary day, into a memorable one.

मैंने तो इसे use ही नहीं किया

Laxmi is pint sized, not even four feet tall and is thin as a stick. She barely speaks. She's very shy and nervous and yet, paradoxically, she works in a quietly self-assured sort of way.  She came to work for me about two years ago and I wasn't sure she was old enough to be working but was told that she was 18 years old and that everyone in her family was extra petite. The man who brought her to me was her cousin brother-in-law and he said she'd done a stint at the Ansal's club, here, in Palam Vihar. I figured they must have got their paper work in order to put her on their rolls, so it was all right to take her on. Not having been to school there was no way to verify and I don’t think that in the villages they bother with things like a birth certificate, so I had no choice but to just take his word for it. .She was raw from the point of experience of working in a home. Training her was Mahipal's job because she was really green and I couldn't have done it. She basically cleans the apartment and other chores like washing clothes and dishes that don't really require her to be educated.

For the better part of two years, I have really had very little to say to her and vice versa. Gradually, I noted, every time Mahipal was on leave, she had really picked up quite a lot of other chores and was doing them quite adequately. She's learned to make the beds, dust and even lay the table for lunch. She doesn't speak much, not even in response to questions. She has this terrified posture all the time that I've often wanted to (but I don't) take hold of her tiny frame and shake her up - everything is so tightly held within that she just can't speak.

She's a decent enough worker. Although sometimes a bit of a shirker, quite unpredictable and she does things is a maddening way without using her brain. A shelf was wobbling in my meditation room so the music player had been left on the bed. A carpenter willing to undo and re-install the shelf took a while to find as Ansal's, the builders, have built very kaccha walls. So it sat on the bed for over a year. Last month the shelf was repaired and I put the music player back on it. For a week, I found that when she went to clean the room each morning, she'd remove it from the shelf to put it back on the bed. I'd put it on the shelf in the evening and she'd do it again the next day. It went on for a full week because each day I'd forget until I saw it removed from the shelf in the eveing, and by then she had left for the day. I had to make special note tell her that its rightful place was on the shelf and not on the bed! It's something I took for granted that she'd have understood, since the shelf was repaired in her presence; common sense? But she didn't figure that out.  That's how limited is her capacity to think. And adding to this, her lack of communication skills also really irks. She's totally illiterate. She cannot read numbers or even count change accurately.

These past two months Mahipal has been away so I have been very short staffed and had to do a lot of housekeeping chores I would not otherwise deal with. The persistent doorbells with delivery of stores and supplies are very disturbing, not to mention the numerous phone calls that I have to make to order them. So, each day I make an effort to teach her to a to tell the vendors who do the deliveries at home that she cannot read and ask them to show her what they have brought - “क्या लाये हो”  and where is the item mentioned in the bill and how much do they have to be paid – “बिल में कहाँ लिखा है और  कितने पैसे देने है” and somehow we've come to a point that she has understood the merit of doing this and tells them she's अन्पड़ [illiterate] so please do the needful. They don't really have a choice, so when she does ask, they take her through each item in the bag and thankfully we've figured it out such that I don't have to open the front door with every doorbell and she's now learning to take on this responsibility - more relevant is that in talking to the vendors, she's more confident about dealing with them. It's quite sweet how they oblige and show her. I actually watched the sabziwala [vegetable vendor] do it the other day, taking out one thing at a time and pointing it out to her on the bill. Today, she actually came with a vitamin I normally take, to check if it was the right one, because the packaging was different and she didn’t recognise it.  So, it works. I am not certain that she does follow this process of checking all the time, but at least some of the time I have proof of her conscientiousness in this regard.

But, despite all the strides we've taken, the lack of language skills and her innate reservation about speaking is intimidating. I'm scared to leave her alone in the apartment because if there's a mishap she cannot even call the guard on the intercom as she doesn't know how to use the phone and can't read numbers. And I don't like her leaving the front door open when no-one else's around because however safe the condominium may be, she's still a young girl who just can't stand up for herself well enough.

However, there are times when this near-mute, unlettered, intense, well-intentioned girl surprises me. She'll remember to make my tea on time every afternoon and bring it on the dot at 4 pm sharp, on a tray that's perfectly laid.  She'll show the new staff the ropes even when I'm not reassured that she knows them herself. And yesterday was the icing on the cake.

I like my morning tea light and it needs precisely four minutes to brew. When she looks at the clock in the kitchen, each day, it ends up an approximation of the necessary 4 minutes, so it's a different shade of brew with too much flavour or too little. So, I got her, what I thought would be, a foolproof kitchen timer. You had to turn it anti-clockwise to wind it up and then clockwise to 4, and it would ring an alarm in 4 minutes. On Sunday, I'd taken to using it myself. A pale blue, plastic teddy bear shape with a nice round tummy it was a cute toy in the kitchen and I always smiled when I set it up. This Sunday, the one just gone by, I found something was not quite right with the timer. The alarm didn't go off.  The next day I asked Laxmi what had happened why the timer wasn't working. Had she broken it? She said something in her usual muffled incomprehensible nothingness. I got a bit stern and repeated myself. Sometimes that's the only way to get her to open her mouth and get the words out coherently. What I heard stopped me in my tracks.

This unlettered, village girl, who frustrated me with her unfathomable ways, confounded me with her irrational fear and more said to me: “मैंने तो इसे use ही नहीं कियाI” I was stunned. I wasn't sure I'd heard right, so I asked her to repeat what she had said. And she said it again: “मैंने तो इसे use ही नहीं कियाI” [I haven’t even used it] Uneducated as she was she’d somehow picked up and used an English word, constructing a sentence using two languages, perfectly. How was that possible?  I was flabbergasted. It really made me think about the idea of intelligence versus education.

How does it work that someone so unlettered, who didn’t know the meaning of words could use them with such accuracy?  And then, what causes her to feel so much fear despite this innate intelligence that enables language skills in the absence of any formal education? It says a lot for our capacity to be present and channel the flow of our natural intelligence. Of how, when we want to learn things we pick them up with ease and when the same things become a chore, then we plod and make the stupidest of mistakes. I’ve observed this even with myself that when something comes from the heart, where there is passion, it not only flows but comes forth in the most brilliant ways, which I know that I could not have managed had I used my mind and its limited knowing.

I do realise the value of education in whatever field one pursues for this engenders confidence to enable the higher intelligence to come into play, especially in challenging scenarios. I find it particularly true with spiritual principles which most of us do not study and where most of it is innate. But when you hear people talk about it, because you may not have analysed it for yourself in quite the same way, confusion reigns and the urge to study and figure it out through observation of oneself and correlation with what the masters say becomes a must, just to enable a conscious understanding of what actually comes very naturally to all us. There are other benefits, but this facility to correlate is crucial to one’s confidence levels, even though the actual process is innate. And illiterate Laxmi with her competent usage of language in saying “मैंने तो इसे use ही नहीं किया”, provides a perfect example of how the absence of formal learning does not preclude intelligent comprehension and use of complex dual language skills through observation and application.

How she learned to use this word in this way, where and when, is something that I will probably never know because asking her would be expecting the impossible – because even if, even if she understood my question, which was highly unlikely, but even if she did understand, she would, more than likely, silently walk away because articulating was always such an effort.Soon after she'd joined, I found she that was an अँगूठा छाप। So I asked her if she'd like to learn to sign/write her name. In her predictably unpredictable way, she'd hesitated and then agreed and so I requested Mahipal to teach her. The next month, when it came to pay day, instead of the stamp pad to put her thumbprint on the receipt, Laxmi came with a ballpoint pen in her hand. I was impressed. I waited patiently - she took aeons to sign. I finally left her alone to do it as she was shaking with nervousness. When I got back to my desk, I found that she'd signed LAXMI in bold capitals, in English, across the page. Trembling letters that didn't stand up straight in a line. And, some two years later, they shake and wobble as much, even though she's more confident about signing and does it as quick or slow as anyone else.

But “मैंने तो इसे use ही नहीं किया” is something else, isn't it? I still cannot fathom how she manages to get some things right and sometimes does the craziest things that defy the possibility that she can use her mind intelligently. Not unlike the rest of us who may be highly educated and lettered, this seems a perfect reminder that education does not necessarily facilitate intelligence and neither is a degree in any subject a prerequisite for intelligent enquiry into it. It’s innate; if only we have the confidence to channel it.

 

 

 

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