Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after!

It’s the song my mother sings to me every morning. I don’t like it much; it gave me an eerie feeling. I used to joke that she needs to update her song list. She just smiled and replied “it’s a special song; it reminds me of my greatest victory.”

Grandmother has been living with us for the past few weeks, I asked her about mother’s obsession with the rhyme, it seemed to distress grandma, and she said she wasn’t sure, mother had been singing it since she was a child.

A few days later I was watching a movie based on the tragic separation of twins- a brother and sister, the beginning was quite happy but I saw my grandma’s eyes widen at the screen and leave quietly. I followed her out and asked her about what had happened. She looked at me and seemed to make up her mind about something, “I’m assuming your mother has never told you about your Uncle Sam?” I shook my head in surprise. “He is, or rather he was your mother’s twin, he passed away in an accident when they were just twelve years old” I wanted to know everything about him and she also must have wanted to talk about him because for the next one hour she spoke about her beloved lost son. He and my mother had been very close; she was very protective of him. He was at his happiest at the time, he was going to boarding school, his life was just beginning but then the accident happened. I couldn’t get Grandma to talk about his death; I guess it was too painful.

I couldn’t help but wonder why mother had never told me about him. I finally asked her one night, she looked shaken; she simply got up and walked off. I think I heard her have an argument with Grandma later that night. I was hurt. What about this did she feel she needed to keep a secret from me? Mother and I were always close but after father’s death five years ago she has become my best friend. She was my greatest confidante so why did I suddenly feel like she was hiding things from me?

I am leaving for University in a few days; I think this is why grandma has come to live with us. I’m so grateful to her. I used to worry about how mother would get by without me. She is so protective of me, she worries all day long, and I don’t think she’s very comfortable with the idea of me leaving. I know grandma will help mother adjust to our new situation. Last night mother and I started bridging all these gaps that had appeared in our relationship. We went to our favourite Mexican restaurant and over quesadillas and nachos mother finally opened up to me about everything. She was scared I was leaving but she had accepted it. She told me that I will never ever leave her heart, just like Uncle Sam never has.  He used to love to hear her sing, just like me! She sings for him every day, maybe she would sing for me too! I couldn’t help but thinking that my mother is the best!

Tomorrow my life beings anew, University, new classes and friends I can barely contain my excitement. Grandma has gone to my aunt’s house and tonight, one last time, I’m alone with mother. She’s singing “Jack and Jill…” again.
“Mama, what is this victory you always talk about?”

“Oh! I sing this song for your Uncle Sam”
She has been talking more and more about him these days, maybe she is finally being able to think of him with some happiness.
“Was the victory you won…something over Uncle Sam?”
“Yes it was, and now he can never leave my side and this song has everything to do with it!”
I’m getting excited “What song will you sing for me when I go away?”
“Ring around the roses, pocketful of poses, ashes ashes we all fall down, Baby you loved playing to this rhyme when you were young. You will always be a baby for me. I will never let you leave me, my thoughts I mean”.
I beam at her; no one will love me like my mother does.
“Come Baby, put your head in my lap, and let me put you to sleep, one last time.”
I go gladly, and as she fusses over me and tucks me in, I can’t help but stare at her. I remember dad’s words- her heart is as big as her. He loved teasing her about her big frame. I’ve always thought she loves with all her heart. I can feel her love tonight!
She’s singing “Ring around the roses” to me, I’m drifting to sleep, I don’t even realise when her hands creep onto my neck and start pressing too hard. I struggle. My eyes are imploring her to stop. “Baby I can’t let you leave me. You will be at peace after this; just like your Uncle Sam was, after I pushed him down the hill. We would not have been able to bear being apart, this way he never had to go to that horrid boarding school, don’t you see? Even you needn't go to college. You can stay with mama forever”.

By Radha Agarwal

Take me to Vienna

8811 kms.

          If I drive without stopping even once, Google maps assures me that I will reach Vienna in 4 days and 20 hours. This is one trip I’d go on in a heartbeat because Vienna is the city that holds the key to my heart.

          I started thinking of Vienna as more than just another of the many cities that populate the world when I started reading Eva Ibbotson. My love for her writing translated into a bigger love for a city I’d never seen, such was the power of her words and love for the city. Back when I first read about it, visiting Vienna was just a far away dream, out of reach for me, maybe because it isn’t on the “must see” lists of most people, it just made a place for itself on my bucket list.

          Then about 2 years ago when I decided to go on exchange and looked at a list of all the places we’d be visiting on the Eurotour, my dream of visiting this Hapsburg capital, this city of love and music did not seem as far fetched and without it, I began counting the days till I’d be there.

          Was it the rushing back of the knowledge of places I’d read about as memories from a distant life? Or was it the pure joy of actually realizing a wish or dream come true? Or was it our wonderful tour guide whose narrations about the places we saw bringing them back to life? I don’t know what it was but any of them or all of them combined to present before me a golden day, the kind of whose memories when thought back on later in life make you sigh contentedly.

          Looking up at the statue of Maria Theresa, the empress “who made Austria great”, on either side of which the Museum of Art History and Museum of Natural history respectively are situated, I could almost see Ruth from “A Morning Gift” visiting both of them throughout her childhood and returning to the Museum of Natural History when years later to seek asylum from the Nazis. I saw her again when we were shown a typical Viennese house built around a courtyard with a tree in the centre just as hers was and imagined it having been hers.

          I saw Ellen from “A Song for Summer” when we went to Demel’s famous Kaffeehaus where she’d enjoyed Vienna’s best coffee and éclairs. I saw her going to watch a Rosenkavalier gala at the State Opera or the Staatsoper when I was at the same place, going to watch La Boheme.

          Nearby I imagined Tessa from “Magic Flutes” at the Klostern theatre working for the International Opera Company without pay simply because she wanted to serve music.

          My Vienna special moments were mostly an amalgamation of what I remembered from the lives of Ruth, Ellen and Tessa. Maybe that’s because knowing them, having reading them over 15 times each I’ve started carrying parts of them inside me and in this incredible city I became a part of them as they of me and learnt what they knew all their lives living there. Maybe now it’s hard to tell where their memories end and where mine start.

          The one special discovery that I have a claim over in this city is of a little side street called Blutgasse or Blood alley which I immediately stored away for melodramatic moments in future stories.

          Even after all this there is still so much that I have to go back to this city to see and to do- see the Spanish Riding school with the Lippizaner horses, sit on the Prater Giant wheel in the Prater park, take a walk along the Danube, catch a glimpse of the river Wien after which the city is named.

So Vienna my love, take me to Vienna

-Nirmitee Mehta

An ark for the future

Whenever people give advice on writing, be it in books, movies or real life, one thing always said is “write what you know”. One woman according to what I read adhered to it to the extent of making her husband gag, blindfold and tie her up just so she could write about a kidnapped person’s thoughts and experiences more realistically.
Looking at it differently, if everyone just stuck to writing about what they know, boundaries would never be pushed, the science fiction and fantasy genres would lie empty other than the pieces written by magical beings themselves (they exist. DO NOT try to convince me otherwise). Part of what I think a writer’s job is, is to think and imagine the what’s and how’s the rest of us cannot.
Maybe the secret is writer and reader journeying together into realms unknown. Maybe that’s what authors do when they don’t have many actual experiences in that field….the writer learning of and living in the world he has created and reader being patient with his thoughts and believing the writers words. So lets the two of us try that and go on a voyage looking for what might happen if the Noah’s ark situation occurs once again in the future, say in 2012 since so many doomsday theories surround it.
It is October 2012 and due to global warming, the threat of polar icecaps melting is imminent. The world is witnessing fights in every single communication forum-louder and more forceful than ever before among presidents, celebrities, businessmen, neighbors each trying to justify why they need a place on the ark group of spaceships more than the others.
One hears of a fan buying his favorite actor a seat on it (with 5 star luxury available of course!) and being promptly berated by his family for wasting money that could have bought every one of them places at that price. The omnipresent subject of discrimination[racial or otherwise] makes its way into this controversy as well, making way for more people coming onto the ark. There has to be a couple of people not just from every ethnicity, country and religion, but also especially in the case of India someone from every state and caste on it.
The question of taking 2 of every animal species does not rise, what with so many people clamoring to get a seat. Instead genes of every species will be taken along and once optimum living conditions are obtained they’ll all be cloned. This makes the animal activists indignant and they plan to remain behind to share the fate of their fellow earthlings-in the nude.
Come November and most of the small islands are submerged and have completely disappeared. The larger ones like Sri Lanka and Madagascar partially so with their inhabitants fleeing to landlocked countries.
As December 21 approaches….things get more chaotic and the future murkier making it harder for me to predict what happens next. Maybe since it is doomsday and nothing will work according to plan, right after taking off, the spaceships will malfunction and hence all signs of life on earth will disappear. Or maybe…...there will be enough ark spaceships for every one of the 7 billion people on the planet. And even if that does not happen, we’ll start a completely new colony in space like the Jetsons [loved that show!].
Take that world politics! You can’t have wars when you don’t have countries anymore.
But for what really will happen…..we’ll just have to wait and watch won’t we?

By Nirmitee Mehta

{Disclaimer-The writer of this piece has not seen the movie 2012 and does not plan to either. Hence any probable references to the plot of the movie can by accounted for by the simple explanation that the makers had gone into the future and stolen ideas from her brain.}