Skip to main content

Autumn’s Spring


My beloved writer Albert Camus said, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” I have almost completed a book titled Autumn Shadows. It is my own story, a sort of autobiography. Forgive the presumptuousness of a very ordinary person who dares to write a memoir. Every person has a story to tell, I’m sure. I don’t know how interesting my story is. I had to tell it for my own reasons. Let me give a short extract from that book here. The memoir will be published soon as an e-book soon at Amazon. This is a hype that I’m trying to create in the autumn of my life when every leaf is turning out to be a flower, a beautiful flower. 

Here’s the extract from the first chapter.

Insects come to die in my living room. Every morning I sweep them into the dustpan from beneath the fluorescent lamp where they lie dead in a heap of atomic dark spots while Maggie prepares the morning’s red tea flavoured with a leaf or two of tulsi or mint picked freshly from our little kitchen garden.
Life and death.  Both come from the garden.  The insects breed there somewhere beyond my purview.  The tulsi and the mint are nurtured by Maggie and me. 
We live in a rather small village named Arikuzha in Kerala.  Our life has been a long and absorbing journey from our respective villages through Shillong and Delhi before returning to the relatively pristine charms of Arikuzha.
“I came here to die,” I told my friend in the village.  It was just a year after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India.  Maggie and I were teaching in Sawan Public School, Delhi.  The school was killed rather mercilessly and much eventfully by a cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).  More about that later.  The death of Sawan threw me into a bout of depression which fostered in me a profound revulsion towards life.  I wished to give Maggie a sheltered place which she eminently deserved.  Arikuzha became the final choice.
“You will find peace and happiness here,” my friend predicted.  I found a job immediately.  Carmel Public School at Vazhakulam where I started teaching in the senior secondary section instilled in me a renewed enthusiasm for life. I struck a unique rapport with the students.
One of the first things I did after settling down in Kerala was to go through Albert Camus once again.  Camus’s Sisyphus was my faithful companion from the time I read the eponymous book in my twenties. 
Sisyphus is a Greek mythological figure who was condemned by the mighty gods to roll a rock up to the zenith of a mountain for his sin of bringing immortality to human beings.  The gods ensured that the rock would never reach the zenith.  Just before Sisyphus reached the top of the mountain, the gods would push the boulder downhill.  That is quite typical of gods. 
I read Camus for the first time when I was grappling with my religion.  The first book of his that I read was not The Myth of Sisyphus, however.  It was The Stranger (also translated as The Outsider), a novel about a man who is an outsider to the society because of his sheer lack of conventional morality.  I read the book at the age of 21 when I was a student of religion and philosophy.  A companion brought my attention to the book because he thought – I presume – that I was not very unlike Meursault, the protagonist of the novel.



Comments

  1. True, every person has a story to tell. The first chapter sounds inviting.
    All the best for Autumns Shadows.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for the wishes. The extract is just the 1st page only, the chapter continues.

      Delete
  2. The story begins well drawing interest of the reader. Wishing you all the best!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Congratulations for your creative efforts. The extract seems to be very interesting. Good luck!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. The book has been published, Available at Amazon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...