Notes to Sparty #13

Dear Sparty, 

Today you are ONE year old! Time, my sweet little boy, has flown by. (you will probably hear this phrase a lot throughout your life and it’s true. Life can seem long but it is also maddeningly fleeting). It seems like just yesterday we were holding you in the west wing of the OLVG West hospital in the west of Amsterdam and yet, here we are, a whole 365 days since that amazing December morning. 

So much has happened in the meantime. For starters, you’ve grown taller and bigger and you’re almost talking now. A few months ago, you said your first word, and these days you have entire conversations with us using that one word. Soon, the rest of the words will come and then you can finally tell us exactly what it was you wanted on those occasions when you sat bolt upright in bed at 1 am and then refused to go back to sleep. I know it must be frustrating to have these two people just stare at you with no idea what you’re saying, but don’t worry- it’s not going to be a problem for much longer. 

What else have you been up to? Well, in the past few weeks you’ve also grown teeth which we now brush every morning and night. Please make sure you’re always doing this; teeth are really important and eating is not much fun if they’re either hurting or missing altogether (and your dad knows a little about both).  

And! you’re now crawling all over the floor at top-speed and you’ve also learned to stand on your own. You’re trying to walk too, but that’s going to take a little more practice. Then there’s the little dances you do when you play your keyboard, the clapping hands when your favourite song comes on, and the laughs and giggles that you leave in your wake as you move from one terribly important task to the next. 

We’ve also been in planes, boats, trains and cars together. We’ve climbed to the top of cathedrals and dipped your toes in the sea. All in all, it’s been an amazing year. Sure, there’s been a few little bumps in the road (and a couple on your head) but all that’s just part of growing up. There’s been some tears too, but if my rough maths is correct, the smiles have outnumbered the tears by 100-1. In this coming year, we’re going to try and improve that ratio even more. 

You’re fast asleep right now, but when you wake up we’re going to sing you ‘Happy birthday!’ and after your breakfast you’ll be off to nursery to see your friends. Your mum has made little gift bags for them, there’ll be a special crown for you to wear, and there’ll probably be more singing there too. Then once you’re home we’re going to have a little party with a few slightly more grown-up friends, all of whom can’t wait to see you. It’s going to be a lot of fun. 

You won’t remember any of it (don’t worry- we’ll have plenty of photos for you to go through when you’re older) but if there’s one thing you must remember, it is this: You have enriched our lives in more ways than you will ever know. I can’t wait for what lies ahead. 

With lots of love on this special day and always. 

Your dad.

Around 20 years ago (which is my new favourite way to introduce an event from the past without betraying my age), I was spending time with my grandparents while on holiday. I was officially staying with my uncle and aunt, but during the day or in the evenings I would make the short trip over to my grandparent's house and hang out with them before my uncle or someone else came along to pick me up. 

This worked out pretty well until one evening when it was time to leave and I started to say goodbye. I hugged my grandmother before turning around to my grandfather to let him know I was heading off. I think I said ‘see you tomorrow?’ (framed as a question) or something to that effect, at which point he looked up, considered it for a second or two, before shaking his head and making a sound that basically said ‘No’. 

It’s worth mentioning here that my grandfather, who I’ve been told was a fairly quiet man his whole life, had by this time suffered a double-stroke that had left him unable to speak altogether. And so for as long as I knew him (which was nowhere near long enough) his modes of communication were sounds, smiles and twinkles in his eyes. We knew when he was saying yes, but this was a firm No; i.e- I don’t want you to leave. 

I asked him again, thinking maybe he hadn’t heard me properly the first time, and added some extra details like the fact that it was nearly dinner time and I should really get going. But again, it was the same shake of the head plus the sound. At this point, my grandmother stepped in to inform (rather than ask) him that I was leaving. Different phrasing, but still the same reaction. After a few more minutes of trying to make a case for my departure, it was clear my grandfather had come to something of a binding decision in his mind: I was to stay the night at their house. 

‘Is that what it is?’ asked my grandmother, seemingly incredulous that this otherwise somewhat aloof man was suddenly fixated on his grandson’s sleeping arrangements. This time the answer was a vigorous shake of the head and the sound for ‘Yes’. It was done. The man had spoken, in a manner of speaking. 

All these years later, I can still remember sitting back down in my chair and looking over at him as a little smile flashed across his kind face. And I remember feeling a special sort of feeling that I’ve only felt a handful of times since. 

One of those times was a few nights ago when I walked into the room where my son lay sleeping next to his mum. I was there to pick up something and head back out, but before that I leaned in to give the little man a mini-hug. As I did that, his little hand came out from under his own head and made its way around my neck. I could tell he was fast asleep, and yet, the more I pulled away, the tighter his grip got. Finally, as I tried in the dark to pry his hand off, he made a sound that reminded of that same sound all those years ago. Softer, and not quite the same timbre, but similar nonetheless. 

My grandfather had lost his words before I was old enough to talk to him, and my little boy hasn’t found his words just yet. But to be loved and wanted even without words- is there a better feeling than that?

Right Now

Right now, I have a choice. 
I can choose to tell my nihilistic friend where to stick it. 
I can tell cynicism to get his lazy ass off my couch. And then look up my old friend hope and ask if she wants to grab a drink. 
I can stop asking whether an article is genuine, and start being the genuine article. 
Accountable. Consistent. Morally obliged. 
Right now, I can keep dissecting race, or embrace the reality that even though we might look different, we’re all in the same race against time to avoid oblivion. 
It is no longer a problem for future generations. It is a problem for my generation. 
I can keep hating against the press, or keep pressing against the hate, the prejudice and the not-so-normal normal. 
I can keep reading about the latest X, Y, Z-gate or I can instigate my own little scandal. I could call it ‘Today-I started-giving-a-shit-gate’ 
Right now, I can keep talking about ‘them’ and ‘they’ or I can shift the narrative to the first person 
that needs to change- Me. 
I can acknowledge my indifference. 
I can watch from the sidelines or get some skin in the game. 
Right now, I can choose to make my voice heard. Or zone out and go along with the herd. 
I can keep speculating, pontificating and abdicating responsibility, or I can do something. 
Even a small thing. 
Because Small Things Matter. 
And the Ripple Effect is a thing. 
Right now, I can be steered by fear into a corner, or steer clear of the naysayers, the merchants of misery and the prophets of doom. 
I can sit back and watch the livestream of bile and vitriol gush past me or I can try and dam it, goddammit. 
Preferably before it flows into that ocean of negativity, the one where the levels rise higher with Every. Passing. Day. 
Right now, I can keep counting down to some imaginary moment in some utopian future. 
Or I can make this present, actual moment count. 
Because you see, at this precise moment all I have is this precise moment. 
So I can either choose to make a choice, or keep pretending I don’t have one. 
My life depends on it.

A few weeks ago, I remember being a little down. Things were fine on the personal front, but a few things seemed to be happening in the world that brought over a particularly strong tidal wave of negativity. 

Gauri Lankesh, a well-known journalist and activist had been murdered outside her Bangalore home in gruesome fashion. ‘President’ Trump was threatening to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. North Korea was stepping up the war games. Everywhere I looked, the forces of darkness seemed to be gaining ground. 

At around the same time, I went with some work colleagues to volunteer for a day at the Movement Hotel, a project started by a group of not-for-profit organisations here in Amsterdam. Their plan was to create a pop-up hotel run by refugees and professionals together, on the site of a former prison. The goal was to empower asylum seekers through job training and give them an opportunity of a new beginning in the Netherlands. 

While painting walls (badly) and hearing more stories of the people involved, I had a niggling suspicion that the universe was sending me a message. Here I was, being part of a project that was helping to transform a place of sadness and negativity into one that was open, bright and hopeful- complete with pink walls. 

‘Fear can hold you prisoner; hope can set you free’, was the tagline of that great film, The Shawshank Redemption. Over the course of those few hours spent with some truly inspiring people, I realised this was something that I needed to tell myself more often. Every day, I could wake up and decide to stay trapped inside the Shawshank of my own mind, or I could decide to be more hopeful. And not just hopeful in a passive, lazy way, but hopeful in a get-up-and-punch-holes-into-the-darkness kind of way. 

And while it can often seem futile, in the end that beautiful verse from the Good Book puts it best. 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it'. 
I’ll take that for now.

I live in constant fear of my worst fears coming to pass. It is not just a mild paranoia or chronic anxiety; it is more like a profound existential dread. The source of this lies not so much in the natural world (though the threats there are by no means insignificant) but rather in the man-made realm. I think about trains, cars and planes, for example, and of elevators, cable-cars and subway systems. I think of bridges and flyovers and underpasses. I even think of boilers and heaters and nuclear reactors, of cranes and pulleys and mechanical levers, and when I think of all these, I mostly think of one thing: catastrophic failure. 

It is a strange obsession, one that I justify to myself as a means to constantly have my guard up- to be prepared at all times like a scout might. And yet, it is at the same time a crippling affliction; a state of mind so negative it is bordering on the macabre. Why does my mind fixate on such things? I’m not really sure. Of course, failure is an inevitability; all systems eventually fail. It is a random event that one plans to perhaps delay, but can never avoid altogether. Everything we make is, in a sense, both fragile and transient just like us, no matter whether it’s brick and mortar, or iron and steel. In the end, cracks appear in everything. 

To live in the midst of these without being at the very least slightly pre-occupied with their decay has always seemed to me a little naive; perhaps even reckless. Of course, to be obsessed to such a degree seems just as foolish, particularly since I can do nothing myself to prevent such eventuality. Still, I continue to spend my time (my fleeting, finite, precious time) seemingly at the edge of imminent destruction. 

My wife reminds me that there’s enough negativity in the world already, and that I should be spending my time spreading goodness, beauty and hope. And instead here I am, casually peddling unfettered panic, blithely tossing the seeds of future phobias into minds that might already be a little frayed just from the compounded exertions of our modern day-to-day existence. For this, I apologise. 

But I hope I have adequately explained my own state of mind. I am actively working on changing it, but I fear there is a core of permanence running through. Perhaps that too might crack eventually; but until then, every time someone tells me about efficiency and built-in redundancy, I remind them about human selfishness and indifference. 

How, I ask them, can we expect our creations to be somehow superior to their creators? No, they are at best merely replicas; at worst, cheap imitations with all our flaws and none of the self-awareness. I remind them also about the story of the King who asked his courtiers to each pour a glass of milk into a large jar over the course of the night and the next morning the jar was full of water because everyone thought everyone else would pour milk and no-one did. This is us. 

And so I think about the things we make; I think about how maybe one more person getting into that lift will cause the cables holding it up to snap, or how one more emergency brake will cause the train to slip off its rails. I imagine myself, in fact, standing and staring at some breathtakingly beautiful thing, maybe like the Eiffel Tower, and thinking just how many more people leaning, climbing, jumping can it take before it keels over. And from there it doesn’t take much for me to imagine myself watching this remarkable human creation come crashing into me and for a few seconds before I am flattened under its weight, I would feel, for maybe the first time in my adult life, complete and utter calm. 
Now that, that would be ironic.

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon; the sort of afternoon that’s hard to come by these days. It’s also warm, which makes it rarer still. The weather, blackout curtains, and a fan whirring at just the right speed, all make for a heady cocktail. I lie in bed and pretend that the flashing ‘pending’ signs in my head are little mosquitoes and I run around zapping them with one of those electric zappers. They don’t really die, of course, but it’s still a fun exercise. Sort of… 

At some point, the weather outside changes. It’s still warm, but there’s just a bit more stickiness in the air despite the breeze. Someone from a nearby house calls out to their neighbour in Malayalam (even though everyone has mobile phones, there’s nothing quite like having a conversation through the window). 

A scooter of some description is coming down our street; I track its progress by the sound of the engine. The rider honks the horn to announce his identity in advance: it’s the unmistakable sound of the mobile fisherman. If it’s a good catch, that means most likely fried fish for dinner. I can picture it now, golden brown with a dash of lemon and some fresh red onion rings. I marvel at my own capacity to get excited by the smallest things. But then again, fried fish is no small matter. 

On a tree somewhere, a crow appears to caw at nothing in particular. The curtains are still drawn, but the heat seeps in through every crevice, and tiny droplets of sweat seem to form on my arms in the time it takes for the table fan to swing towards the window and back at me. 

Somewhere else, a cow appears to moo at nothing in particular. Or maybe it is directed at the crow who decided to shift its perch from the tree to the cow. Crows are like that sometimes. 

In a couple of hours, it will be tea-time and I’ll be sitting on the porch, blowing into my tea while munching on jackfruit chips and banana fritters and all kinds of other magical, sumptuous things. The air would have cooled down a bit by then, and there’ll be the faintest scent of impending rain. 

My eyelids get a little heavier. Despite the buzzing pending mosquitoes (this imaginary swatter must be defective), I decide to give in and drift off into sun-kissed slumber…. 

When I wake up, my son is trying to clamber over my stomach. I blow into his face and he smiles. His smile has the dazzling quality of a thousand suns. His big eyes seem to look at the world with such hope and optimism, such fierce kindness, it’s almost heartbreaking. Which is not to say it induces sadness; more like a profound sense of gratitude. Such moments are always a reminder of how precious and fleeting life is: a realisation which seems to always be accompanied by a hint of melancholy. 

I lift him to on my stomach and for a few seconds he regards me with the same fascination with which I regard him. And then with another giggle he slides off again; after a brief interlude he is ready to resume his journey through the universe. I close my eyes and listen to his babbling. 

Outside, the sun sinks slowly into the canals. It’s late evening, the time when the whole of Amsterdam - beautiful, charming little Amsterdam- appears to pose for all the waiting cameras. 

Sometimes dreams seem to offer a glimpse into another reality. At other times, reality itself seems like a dream.

I came across this video about Forest Man this week and was reminded of a similar man I knew from when I was growing up in India. I don’t recall all the details, but he was essentially a security guard whose passion seemed to be gardening. And so everywhere he was placed on duty, he would use his time and whatever space was available to plant trees, grow flowers, prune bushes, etc. Every barren landscape he turned his attention to was almost magically transformed into a riot of colour, with plants of every shape and design. 

He was an old man even back then, with unkempt hair and a stubble, but whenever he was gardening he always seemed to be completely at peace with himself and the world. I didn’t know it back then, (and I haven’t quite fully experienced it since) but I guess that’s what finding your passion must look and feel like. 

What if everything we did, we did like that man, and Forest Man, and Menstrual Man, and Mountain Man? What would it do for ourselves and the small corner of the world we occupy? I am always inspired by men and women who give themselves up so completely to something they instinctively recognise as greater than themselves; people who set out not to make a living, but to make a life. 

One day, I hope, I will feel what they feel. I must; for if not, it will all have come to naught.

So if we ended up in an alternative universe where I was able to actually write songs for my son, I think this is what they would look like: 

Exhibit A 

Tether your soul to me,
I will never let go completely 
One day your hands will be 
Strong enough to hold me 
I might not be there for all your battles 
But you'll win them eventually 
I'll pray that I'm giving you all that matters 
So one day you'll say to me - 

I love my life 
I am powerful 
I am beautiful 
I am free… 

I am not my mistakes 
And God knows I've made a few 
I started to question the angels 
And the answer they gave was you 
I cannot promise there won't be sadness 
I wish I could take it from you 
But you'll find the courage to face the madness 
And sing it because it's true… 

Exhibit B 

Don't try to make them love you 
Don't answer every call 
Baby, be a giant 
Let the world be small 
Some of them are deadly 
Some don't let it show 
If they try and hurt you 
Just let your daddy know… 

Now when you go giving your heart make sure they deserve it 
If they haven't earned it, 
keep searching- it's worth it 

For all your days and nights 
I'm gonna be there 
I'm gonna be there, yes I will 
Go gentle through your life 
If you want me I'll be there 
When you need me I'll be there for you 
Go gentle to the light 
I'm gonna be there 
I'm gonna be there, yes I will 
If all your days are nights 
When you want me I'll be there 
Say my name and I'll be there for you 

Robbie Williams. Damn genius.

Conversation with a Deliveroo rider on a bench in Amsterdam Oost

He: [looks up from phone] ‘sup man? 
me: nothing much 
He: all good with you? what you up to? 
me: [wonders whether he means in life in general, or just at this point in time] just, you know, enjoying the sun. you? 
He: pondering the fragility of life. 
me: awesome 
He: not really. I’m just about to submit my coursework 
me: cool. what’s it about? 
He: particle physics 
me: um. 
He: It’s actually about the music of Frank Zappa 
me: I don’t know how to talk to you 
He: [laughs. loudly.] it’s all good man 
me: Life’s pretty fragile though. 
He: It is, man. It is. 
[pause] 
me: Well, I gotta head off.
He: Stay cool, brother. Absurdity is the only reality. 
me: [makes mental note to google that line] (It was Frank Zappa) 

The End

I thought I’d write about bliss, but I wasn’t quite happy enough.
I thought I’d write about loss, but hadn’t quite lost enough.
I thought I’d write about love, but hadn’t quite loved enough. 
I thought I’d write about life, but hadn’t quite lived enough.
I thought I’d write about pain, but it didn’t quite hurt enough. 
I thought I’d write about triumph, but hadn’t quite won enough. 
I thought I’d write about adversity, but hadn’t quite suffered enough.
I thought I’d write about faith, but I wasn’t quite trusting enough.
I thought I’d write about hope, but wasn’t quite hopeful enough.
I thought I’d write about all kinds of things, but wasn’t quite good enough, wise enough, original enough.

Some might say there’s nothing new to be said. 
And yet, there are stories all around us, waiting to be told. 
And to tell them all, one life isn’t quite enough. 
Best get started.

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

- Arundhati Roy

People have been asking me how it feels to be a dad. I am not sure how to answer. Those who have experienced it before will know already, but for others I am not sure I have the words. 

How, for example, do I describe the fact that when I look at this little person who extends only as far as my arm, my love for him seems to extend to the farthest reaches of the universe? Or verbalise the feeling when his bottom lip quivers and lonely tear drops appear in the corners of his hopeful, curious eyes? 

How can I explain that every time he exhales through his little heart-shaped nostrils, I feel like there’s a bit more love in this ravaged world? That when he smiles it’s the closest thing to pure happiness I’ve ever had the privilege to encounter? That when his eyelids slowly get heavier and eventually fall across those beautiful eyes, it’s like watching a sunset in slow motion? 

No, these things are inexplicable. They are to be merely stored and treasured in that little corner of the mind where magic resides.  

And there they will be for the rest of my life, on the top shelf where gratitude and awe jostle for space. And the cup of joy always flows over.