Falling Water, Rising Mist: Reflections on Life in Essays and Poems

By Nilima Krishna Jayaraman MD

In Falling Water, Rising Mist, author Dr. Nilima Krishna Jayaraman offers a collection of a lifetime of gleanings as she straddles two cultures and keeps a balance between her roles as a physician and a home maker. She journeys through decades of experiences, seamlessly weaving a rich tapestry of personal values and light, playful flippancy, interspersed with spiritual insights, universal love, appreciation, and sensitivity toward all of nature. Jayaraman’s musings feature a variety of topics including her parents, husband, children, family, friends, plants, pets, patients, and the planet. Words that have filtered through deep consciousness have been faithfully transcribed here to encourage all to think deeply, live fully, and tread lightly and joyfully through this journey of life. Spiritually uplifting and thought provoking with a touch of humor, the poems and essays have the ability to tickle the funny bone and touch a chord in the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483482286

Book preview

MD

Copyright © 2018 Nilima Krishna Jayaraman MD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8229-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8228-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907599

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/08/2018

01jpg.jpg

Dedicated to my Guru, Mother Meera

Whose Grace fuels all my endeavors.

And

Isolde Izzy Hunter,

My dear friend and mentor, whose beautiful poetry has inspired me and whose incessant appreciation and gentle, persuasive insistence to publish, has given me the impetus to create this book.

                                  Life gushing forward

                                  As falling water, with

                                  Rising mists of reflections

                                  Refracted in rainbow colors

                                  For misty eyes to focus

                                  And find dew drops, as pearls

                                  On the ocean-floor of mind.

A compilation of my writings of the past few years. My parents, partner (dearest hubby), progeny, peerless peers (aka family and friends), plants, pets, patients and our precious planet provide pearls which I offer to you, my readers, in the hope that they tickle your funny bone and touch a chord in your heart.

An Ode to Baby Boomers

A time to rest, a time to think

To reflect, to forgive and forget

To remember and re-learn

Gleaning knowledge from mistakes,

Perfecting skills learned in youth,

Bidding adieu to hurry and haste.

On to new adventures, and

Forays into creative pursuits.

Sit back and watch the world go by,

Or plunge into the mainstream.

Action or inaction, both at your fingertips,

Slaves to your bidding.

Confining, conforming norms,

Now subdued like putty in your hands

To mold and shape, overrule

And override, accept or discard.

Freedom to rise as the real you!

New sensitivities, new insights,

Gentle guidance from the soul,

A loving acceptance of others.

Looking beyond differences

To the common core that

Connects All, is All!

Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be

A journey from silly antics to priceless antiques

My friends have been after me to write my memoirs. This makes me muse and smile to myself….hmmm, have I reached the age to acquire historic license plates? The age where the carelessly scattered junk in my attic suddenly becomes collectible, valuable antiques?

For now, I want to focus just on my forays into the realm of showbiz back in the days of yore.

There is a black and white picture in my parents’ family album of me as a little girl dressed in a ghagra choli (festive Indian skirt and blouse), my body sinuously tilted in the tri-bhanga pose, (an S-shaped curve). I was a very graceful three-year-old.

02jpg.jpg

A couple of years later, I performed the lead role of Sita from the Hindu epic, The Ramayana. It was a pantomime where we all acted our roles while jumping in sets of three little jumps, sort of like sparrows. My school principal was so proud of me because I remembered all the steps of my own role as well as those of all the other participants.

Then came a series of folk dances at school concerts. I generally had the lead role; whether it was because of my academic brilliance or my dad’s reputation in town was something that perturbed me back then. With the maturity of age, I now see it as a creditable situation in either scenario.

I was the princess in Princess and the Pea. I was Cinderella in Cinderella, in which I was supposed to walk backstage and reenter at the stroke of midnight minus my finery. And guess what? I was just as sparkly after midnight! Anyway, I survived and lived to do many such roles.

A few years after that (about age eleven, I think) a Bharata Natyam (Indian classical dance) teacher was employed by the paper mills–the economic engine of our village– to hold a dance class for their employees. My parents coaxed him to give me private lessons at our home.

Ah, my childhood home…a beautiful bungalow, custom-built by my parents with the best local teakwood for doors and windows. It was surrounded by flower gardens and fruit orchards where I spent most of my free daylight hours holding my cat in my arms. If the cat stiffened, it was my cue to look down and avoid the snake near my feet. These were mostly harmless rat snakes, but cobras were not rare. There was this one time when a cobra came into my dad’s medicine dispensary in our home and hid in the second shelf from the bottom. Luckily, someone spotted it as it slithered in. Otherwise, any of us could have been its hapless victim. I remember getting nightmares of cobras all through that night.

Another fearful memory is when I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was twelve. We had a guava tree right outside my bedroom window. As a consequence, bats were plentiful, their wings fluttering in the night light and casting shadows on the window drapes. Need I say more? But other than these two isolated instances, I was pretty fearless, completely comfortable walking outdoors in pitch dark. I still am.

Now we dig a bit further into this fear/fearlessness of the elements.

My mother was brought up in a very conservative, scholarly milieu. Her father, a rotund man barely five feet tall but with a personality twice as high, was an eminent lawyer in Goa. He had this beautiful sprawling house with a wraparound porch; many windows opened on to the porch. In my early childhood, the windows had no metal railing, just beautiful shutters with overlapping mother-of-pearl tiles between strips of wood. We, the grandchildren, had fun getting in and out of the house through these windows, but come nightfall, heavy bi-fold, solid-wood doors set behind these windows were closed tightly and barricaded with a heavy beam called Adamo, which slid from the wall on one side of the window to the other. This lovely, open, welcoming house would, in essence, change to a veritable prison by night, a stifling prison at that, on hot summer nights.

My father, on the other hand, lost his mother when he was very young. The absence of this immediate layer of protection, though a tragedy, afforded him the luxury of free range. As a youth, he and his buddies went on overnight hunting trips through thick jungles on foot, swam in the river, and went fishing and crabbing in escapades akin to a Huck Finn.

I was caught in the middle, having inherited my father’s instinct for the outdoors but held captive in my mother’s protective vigil. Every single night she came into my room and drew the curtains. Luckily, my house did not have the buttressed windows of my grandfather’s home. When my friends in school who hailed from Northern India reminisced about sleeping on the open terrace of their grandparents’ homes, I just let out a silent sigh and longed for even a single night outside. That wish came true after we moved to Southern Maryland. Charged with all my pent-up longing, I took sleeping bags and bedding to our open deck and tried sleeping outdoors with hubby and the little ones in tow. Guess what? My romanticized fantasy had to welcome unexpected guests from reality. Mosquitoes and dampness quickly drove us back into the house!

Having peddled some unrelated antique memories, let me now come back to the topic at hand: the dance teacher.

He came to my home once a week to teach me Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form of southern India. In preparation for his arrival, our drawing (living) room was opened, and the large tiger skin that served as an area rug was rolled up and the coffee table moved aside to provide the space for dancing. Did I say tiger skin? I think another digression is called for. This was a full-grown tiger who had killed cattle from a neighboring village. The villagers got him by putting poison on a carcass he had left behind because it was too heavy to carry away. They laced it with rat poison. What ignominy for such a majestic animal to die such a measly death. When the pelt was presented to my dad it still had claws and teeth in place. It was so beautiful and yet so poignant to have it on our floor as an area rug.

The dance teacher was very good. He taught me under my mother’s watchful but undiscerning eye (dancing, singing, or carrying a tune were nowhere in her nature or nurture, having been trained instead in other arts such as gourmet cooking, sewing, embroidery, and stringing flowers in many different ways). The teacher drilled the dance steps into my head and my feet by sheer rote. There was a time when the beat of the dance steps went on in my head all day long. Once the steps were mastered, he taught me hand movements. Finally, a classical song replaced the calling out of the beats.

This went on for several months until the dance teacher abruptly ceased to appear, and the endeavor fizzled out. That was the end of my classical dance training, no big loss to humanity because I was mediocre at best. And yet I had a chip on my shoulder when taking part in folk dances at school because of my classical training. After one such performance I was still basking in the afterglow, my beautiful white saree with red border draped around me for a folk dance, making me feel like popular film star. A stray comment reached my ears from the audience, a remark that my face had been completely expressionless throughout the performance. This instantly deflated my ballooning ego! Soon after that, while practicing for another dance at school, I overheard a comment that someone could not keep up with the beat. I thought I was a smug eavesdropper, but when I realized the comment was about me, it was the final nail in the coffin.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, Dracula lay dormant, waiting for decades, until a beautiful young lady came along and slowly lifted the lid. With her sparkling personality, irrepressible humor and amazing talent, she gently coaxed this phoenix to rise from the ashes. (The transition from Dracula to phoenix and coffin to ashes is intentional and transcendental, not a slip of senility!)

Hubby and I do a dance at a friend’s daughter’s wedding. The performance is a riot. Hubby has always been a crowd pleaser but the little dance steps are a huge leap for his womankind!

The beauty of getting old is that applause bows down to meet you. As standards are graciously lowered, you suddenly move from pitiful to adorable!

17769.png

So, my friends young and old, shake off the shackles of criticism as you shake your booty to the beat of your own drummer, and sway to the rhythm of the universe that courses through each and every one of us.