Poornima Manco

Author

Poornima Manco

Open-ended

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Why am I so drawn to ambiguity?

Endings with multiple interpretations can be perceived as unsatisfactory. After all, we all want to walk away from a book, a movie or a television show with the feeling of having completed a journey and reached a destination. What could be more annoying than to stop at a fork in the road? Or never really find out what happened, or worse still, have to sift through the many choices the end presented us with, expecting us to arrive at our own conclusions?! No tidy little bows at the end, no ‘happily ever after’? Why would the writer/director/producer of the content do that?

For someone who gravitates towards such inconclusiveness, here’s why I think endings such as these are far more effective in the long run.

Think back to ‘Gone with the Wind’. After many years of being in love with Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler decides to leave her at the very same instance that she discovers that she truly loves him. He walks away, leaving her heartbroken. But we have been witness to her stubbornness, her wilfulness and her tenacity for an entire book. When she vows to win him back, secretly we are rooting for her. There is no definite ‘happily ever after’ here. She may win him back, she may not, but that depends on the reader’s estimation of her character. That is not an ending you are likely to forget in a hurry.

Haruki Murakami, the famous Japanese author, has often employed the technique of an uncertain ending. His off-kilter characters regularly find themselves at crossroads and many a time, you have no idea which way they’ll head. Which makes the entire experience doubly surreal and unforgettable.

Christopher Nolan’s movies often end in a riddle. Take the example of ‘Inception’. Dreams layer upon dreams until it becomes impossible for the protagonist to distinguish between reality and a dreamscape. At the very end, the viewer is left wondering whether they have witnessed his return to the real world or is the entire segment just another fabrication of his mind?

I can see how incredibly frustrating this can be to someone who just wants a linear narrative, a satisfactory end and entertainment for the sake of entertainment.

But for those who want a little bit more, the lure of an ambiguous finish is almost impossible, to sum up. Think of the many permutations incertitude offers us. The multiple paths that may be explored, the multiple ways that the story reached this conclusion. Mind-boggling? Yes! But that is the whole point, you see.

An Indian film by the name of ‘Andhadhun’ was a big commercial and critical success in 2018. The premise was a simple one – a young musician pretending to be blind unwittingly witnesses a murder. His life goes into free fall from that moment onwards, even as he scrambles to keep it all together. The resolution when it arrives is unexpected and once again, open to many and varied interpretations. Is he really blind? Did he succumb to the evil that had dogged him? Accident or murder? Uhhh, no clear cut answers for you, my friend. Read into it what you will.

And that is exactly my jam!

For those who have read my books and stories, they are often confounded by an ending they did not foresee; that little unanticipated twist in the tale. It’s a tactic I enjoy because I want the reader to think, to wonder and then to arrive at whichever conclusion works best for them. This isn’t the lazy writer’s guide to uncertain endings. It is a very deliberate modus operandi to shock and excite, but also leave a lingering vacillation as to whether their interpretation was correct or not.

Tell me that you don’t end up debating those ambiguous, open-ended denouements far more than any others! Yes? Thought so. Mission accomplished.

Parasite

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Last night I sat and watched ‘Parasite’ again. Yes, the same Korean film that won the Oscar this year and what a fitting winner it was too. The first time I’d seen this movie on a plane headed to India, and been shaken to the core by it. This multi-genre marvel with themes that intersected and overlapped, left me awed by its sheer complexity, by how black humour segued seamlessly into social commentary and the inevitable tragedy at the end. How, at the very heart of it and despite all indications to the contrary, Bong Joon-ho’s film was about hope. Hope itself being a double-edged sword with its capacity to wound and destroy.

Before you proceed any further, please be warned that this blog post contains many spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want any details revealed in advance, go ahead and surf away.

As a writer, I am an avid consumer of content from various media. It enriches and informs my own work in many many ways. However, a particular quirk of mine is the inability to shut off the analytical side of my brain which sifts through everything to understand themes and patterns, their usage towards building a story and achieving the desired climax. Bong’s extraordinary talent lies in the layering of multiple ideas with a single motif as the objective.

Layers of society are portrayed in the three families depicted in the film. The Parks are representative of the wealthy upper classes, living in airy open-space mansions with chauffeurs and housekeepers at their disposal, the ability to hire tutors or buy foreign goods and toys for their children and organise picnics and parties on a whim. They are the aspirational top tier of society. Nice and naive – both because of the advantages that wealth affords them.

The Kim family, on the other hand, live in a small semi-basement apartment typical of the poorer sections of the Korean suburbs. They drift from job to job, subsisting on minimum wage, eager to grasp at any opportunity that comes their way. It is no wonder then that they have no compunctions about worming their way into the employment of the Parks, using underhand means, replacing the previous employees through a combination of lies, fraud and deceit.

Bong’s treatment of the two families is even-handed. Each is a victim of their circumstances, each believes themselves to be functioning in exactly the way they should be given their station in life.

It’s when a third family is added to the mix that things begin to get muddier. If it is at all possible, there is a tier that lies even below that of the poverty inhabited by the Kims. It is that of the previous housekeeper Moon-gwang’s husband, Geun-sae, who has lived in an underground bunker beneath the Parks’ house, not having seen sunlight in four years.

When the bottom two tiers clash, there is no honour amongst thieves. Each is capable and more than willing to destroy the other in a race for survival, while the top tier remains oblivious to the internecine wars beneath them. This fundamental disconnect is once again underlined in the conversation that Mrs Park has with a friend inviting her over for an impromptu party on their lawns, commenting on how lush and green it is after a night of unprecedented rainfall that (unknown to her) has flooded the Kims’ semi-basement with sewage, making it completely uninhabitable.

The differences are little and large, setting each group apart from the other. From housing to food to body odour, each signifies a societal placement several rungs afar. Can these distances be traversed? Can the scholar’s rock presented to the Kim family bring them the wealth it promises?

Hope drives the film to its conclusion, even as tragedy unfolds on the lawns of the beautiful Parks’ home. In an unexpected twist, Mr Kim drives a knife into Mr Park, a knee-jerk reaction to the lack of respect that has underscored every perfectly civil interaction of theirs. A fundamental disrespect for those that lie below, even while they serve, accommodate and aim to please. Mr Kim’s escape into the bunker previously inhabited by Geun-sae is his falling even deeper into the squalor and ignominy that he has tried so hard to climb out of. His son, Ki-woo’s dreams of being wealthy enough to someday buy the same house and rescue his father from its depths, are a painful reminder that while hope can fuel a fantasy, the daily grind of poverty will irrevocably douse those flames.

The ultimate question is: who is the parasite? Geun-sae who survives on the food secreted to him by his housekeeper wife, the Kim family who aspire to a larger share of the proverbial pie, or the Parks who cannot live without the labours of those who wait upon them?

In the end, we are all parasites in one way or another. But hope is the largest parasite of all, for it feeds upon so much, offering so little in return.

Watch this wonderful film, if you haven’t already! If you have, let me know what you thought in the comments below.

Memory book

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Sifting through old photographs and paperwork in an attempt to tidy, retain or discard stuff that had been sitting unopened for far too long, I came upon certificates from my school and university days. Two years ago when I had made my annual visit to Delhi to see my dad, he’d given me two file folders stuffed with papers from my past. At the time I had skimmed through them quickly, promising myself that I would organise it all when I returned to the UK. Of course, that never happened because once back I was swallowed up by the minutiae of daily life and those folders sat unopened in a box in our coat closet.

Well, COVID-19 has had us trapped at home and revisiting the chores we’d been procrastinating on for far too long. Even as my husband worked his way through the mountains of paperwork he’d inherited from his parents, I sat next to him going through my own little pile.

Isn’t it funny how our minds are so very selective about the memories we decide to cling to, while others just seem to dissipate with time? Even the memories we do retain are often covered with a patina of our own choosing, time and history imbuing them with the simplicity or complexity that our minds bestow upon them.

This retention of the various certificates, newspaper articles, competitions I’d participated in, won or lost, had developed a distant sheen in my mind. I’d always known I loved writing, but seeing my name in a long-defunct newspaper supplement brought back just how much. Reading through those old stories that I had crafted made me blush at the awkwardness of the writing, the clumsiness of the plots, the gauche ineptitude of a writer still finding her feet. But they also ignited an awareness of the fearlessness that I had approached life with, the unshakeable belief that I could write and I would write. Life eroded that confidence and it is only thirty years later that I once again, tremulously, presented my work to the world.

If age gives us wisdom, then it takes away confidence. If youth gives us confidence, it doesn’t yet have all the years of experience to percolate into writing something valuable or worthwhile. But each step of the way, each stage of our lives make us who we are today. Our memories aren’t just chapters of a book long forgotten. They are a map to where life has led us and where we may find ourselves walking to next.

“Your memory is the glue that binds your life together; everything you are today is because of your amazing memory. You are a data collecting being, and your memory is where your life is lived.” – Kevin Horsley, Unlimited Memory

What?

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What is it about me that scares you so?

Is it the ebony of my skin

my obsidian eyes

my gaze that defies your strictures?

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

Is it my history

defiled by your forefathers

the shackles that you bound mine with

the ones we broke free from?

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

That I’m just as human

just as deserving

just as capable of thought, action, love and pain

as you?

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

That when I kneel in protest

it is wrong

but when you kneel on my neck

it is somehow right?

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

that you are unwilling to share

the land that you live on

the food that you eat

the clothes that you wear

the air that you breathe?

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

Aren’t we all flesh and bone

Muscle and sinew

the only difference being

the colour of our skin?

 

Is that what scares you so?

Is that what scares you so?

Is that what scares you so …

 

So,

 

you suppress,

you deny,

you imprison,

you kill?

 

***

 

Is my life worth so little?

My every move

a threat

to your freedom, your ways, your beliefs

 

When my brothers protest

you see it as a riot

our voices are dismissed

our anger ignored

 

But all that you do

is justified

by laws

made by you, for you, amongst you

 

If we have nothing

we are faceless

voiceless

powerless

 

If our very lives are yours

to take

to crush

to destroy

 

What are we then?

What am I then?

A little bit of nothing

a whole lot of … what?

 

Then,

 

What is it about me that scares you so?

What is it?

What?

 

 

 

Families

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What constitutes a family?

Is it the one we are born into, the one we create for ourselves or the people we choose to surround ourselves with?

In the course of a lifetime, one person can have several families. There is, of course, the birth family – mother, father and siblings. Then the extended family from both sides of the parents – grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. In modern lives, there are also the possibilities of step-parents and half-siblings. While there may well be a blood tie with many of these people, how strong one’s connection to them is depends on various factors. For instance, has that family feeling been fostered from the very beginning? Or, has it been a distant relationship, more in name than in deed?

In my case, being an only child, I was always extremely close to my parents. In fact, it was a wrench to move away and start living independently. However, sadly and due to circumstances, I never developed a close bond with much of the extended family, save a few people. In the absence of siblings, my friends became that extended family. I invested time and energy in a family that I chose to create, or so I thought.

Lately though, in these lockdown days, I am starting to understand that in many, many ways, blood is thicker than water. I have my own nuclear family around me – safe and healthy, thank goodness! However, unaccountably, I am feeling the need to reach out to members of the family that I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. Perhaps it’s the knowledge, particularly at this time, of how ephemeral our lives really are … how fleeting and transitory. Soon, an entire generation of people who came before me, people who were connected by blood to my mother and father, will no longer exist. And although, I will carry that bloodline forward as will my children, in time that gene pool will dilute, taking with it times, places, languages and memories.

How one views oneself or one’s place in society often comes from cues accumulated over a lifetime. For instance, I am Indian because I was born in India. I am also lucky enough to have been a well educated and well-heeled Indian, affording me opportunities that weren’t available to the majority of my countrymen. Through a fortuitous mix of North and South, a marriage between my father and mother, I was able to straddle two cultures as well. Growing up in the North, the balance always tilted heavily in that favour, but my south Indian genes could never be denied in my complexion, hair or features. Annual summer holidays spent in the homes of aunts and uncles reinforced the fact that one half belonged to a culture and language I had yet to explore fully. However, age, migration and my own inability to invest time left those relationships and that side of me, unfinished and to a large extent, unfulfilled.

Any one person has only a certain amount of time and energy to harvest, and chances are, they put those towards aspects of life that they deem to be more significant than others. My little family, my job, my passion (writing), my hobbies and my friends have taken up the bulk of my lifetime. Yet strangely, now I feel that perhaps I should have taken some of that time and put it towards the people I have a history with; familial ties, after all, cannot be denied. However, this strange pull aside, I also recognise the fact that some of my hesitance to reach out was rooted in a deep antipathy towards the politics that permeated the extended family dynamics. The ‘he said, she said’ toxicity of my childhood that I had vowed internally to never be a participant in. The long stretches of angry silences, the holding on to grudges long past their sell-by dates, the misunderstandings, the slights, the judgement calls of adults functioning like toddlers in the throes of a tantrum. My deep-seated dislike of drama such as this had put a continent of disapproval between us. One that I am trying to make rapid strides over, to reach across and say, “I’m still here and I still care.”

Maybe it’s all too little, too late. But I cannot leave it as it is. For it is in this bizarre, surreal time that I have truly appreciated those who have reached out and asked, “How are you?” It’s shown me how certain relationships that I felt were strong were in actual fact, very weak indeed. Whereas others, the ones I hadn’t paid much attention to at all, were the ones that were unbreakable. In my belated reaching out, I hope I am able to convey some of my own love and bonding to the family that I, in some ways wilfully and in others, unwittingly, neglected. Yes, families are social constructs, but they are also instinctual ones created from blood, genes, memories and love.

“So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty.” – Haniel Long

Balance, patience, perspective

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Lately, I’ve been unable to begin any blog post without referring to the Coronavirus that’s affecting our daily living. Who amongst us remains untouched by it in some form or the other? Unprecedented times see us hunkered down in our homes, our only weapon against this insidious virus being social distancing, and no one knows how long this will last and what sort of world we will encounter as and when this is finally over.

But I’m only telling you what you know already!

Today I want to talk about something different, but really related to this time as well. For years, I’d been wanting to return to yoga. The last time I’d practised yoga was in 1998 and that too for a very short while. I remember my yoga teacher being a lovely redhead, perhaps in her 50’s, quite large, but incredibly flexible and very patient with newbies like me. As a twenty-something, I’d come to yoga out of curiosity. In my heart I prized other forms of exercise over it, believing it to be too slow for my young body and wanting the challenge of something more aerobic, something that made me sweat and strain and transformed me visibly. For the seven months that I went to my Thursday yoga classes, I didn’t not enjoy them, but maybe, didn’t take away quite what I was supposed to. When my mother died, overcome by grief, I dropped everything including yoga. And then, inexplicably, I never went back to it.

Well, twenty-two years later, I have returned. In all those years of living and growing, pounding pavements in marathons, jumping up and down in various classes, somewhere within me there started to emerge a yearning for something more soothing, more nurturing for my body and soul. With the lockdown in place, this was an opportune time to return to the yoga I had abandoned all those years ago. This time, all I have is an iPad, a youtube channel and a determination to practise as often as I can. You see, this time I’m no twenty-something limber young woman chomping at the bit. Not only am I older and wiser, but I am also far less flexible and far more life and weather-beaten than before. Yoga is the cradle of comfort I take this rather battered body to as often as I can.

People far more articulate than me have elucidated the benefits of yoga, so I won’t do that here. I will, however, tell you about the little discoveries that I have made. Never the most patient of people, yoga has taught me that nothing can be rushed. There is a time and place for everything. My wanting to plant my heels on the ground in my downward facing dog didn’t happen overnight, my calves were not flexible enough, to begin with. With time, regular practice and patience, I have improved incrementally enough to have miraculously done it yesterday! A tiny, tiny improvement but one that I am immensely proud of, because it has taught me not just what my body is capable of, but also that I must apply this lesson to my life too. I cannot expect instantaneous results, I have to work my way towards them.

Similarly, balance is something we all strive for, whether it is a work-life one or whether it is in our temperament and our response to what life flings at us. I struggle with my tree pose, unable to plant my foot sufficiently high up on my opposing thigh. Yet, yoga teaches me that it is finding the balance between the opposing forces, setting my eyes upon one spot and breathing deeply that can help me stand rooted, tall and firm as a tree. Tell me that isn’t a lesson we can apply to our daily living too?

Finally, even as I struggle with the more advanced positions in yoga, I can’t help but look back and see how far I have come from those early days. If I put in the work, where might I be in a month, a year, ten years? Perspective, after all, is a point of view, and a point of view is determined by where you are standing at any given point in time. 

For those of us who are struggling with the uncertainty of our lives and futures, take a deep breath, find the patience to get through this time and remember, nothing lasts forever. Not even a ruddy virus!