RESCUED

Merciful doing, merciful method, merciful material. When I awake in the middle of the night, go into my mother’s room, hear her labored breathing, coughing, congestion -- though she has been nebulized and suctioned by the nurse several times during the night -- go into a spasm of sorrow and helplessness from her perhaps not imminent but inevitable death, unable to fall asleep again, it is doing, method and material that save me. And, of course, hukum.

The thought of merciful activity, even at 2 a.m., propels me out of bed. I go into the kitchen with my by now cool hot water bottle, fill the kettle from the tap, turn it on, put some water to boil for warm lemon water to drink, look at the hexagonal patchwork cozy -- in uplifting cotton prints -- of my hot water bottle, and am rescued. What a word: rescued. I turn to the dictionary – another rescue aid. Saved, freed, delivered. To shake out, or off. Yes, of course, when one spasms in sorrow and begins to sink, in Guru Nanak’s words, in the steaming, hot pool of attachment, one wants above all to be rescued; to shake off the scalding water and be free.

One step, and then another. Squeeze the lemon into the cup, drop the peel into it, too, pour hot water, fill up the hot water bottle, return to my recently ‘remodeled’ room, place the cup on my new Gujarati table, put the hot water bottle under the quilt, take out my computer from the drawer of my new secretary desk, sit down on my little chair upholstered fondly by my mother in a deep maroon material with self-print flowers (is that the phrase?).

I have never thought of the material world as something that could rescue, though I have always endeavored as much as possible to surround myself with beautiful things. Perhaps I have wanted to be rescued all along. Beauty rescues. Design, the lovely prints and pattern of my patchwork cozy, rescues. And of course – and I have always known this – words rescue.

This has been the longest time I have been without word: extreme busyness from mid-September that took me to the brink of a breakdown, and then, without respite, my mother’s stroke at 2 a.m. on October 22^nd. Almost two months without word, merciful word, to which I return through the material world.  

The material world, beauty, method have, in retrospect, saved me all along. Buying, stocking supplies for my mother’s ‘new’ life in which the old order and life has disintegrated, rearranging, re-ordering, re-patterning, has been my thrust since we brought her home from the hospital on the 24^th of Oct (and several trips to the Emergency). And then, I have been shopping! Yes, shopping has rescued me, too. I realized that if I am going to stay with her long term, I must have a congenial room to retreat to. I have lived in her house, in a room arranged by her all my life every time I visited, and now I wanted a little corner that would be my space; hence, the Gujarati cabinet, table, secretary, a little bamboo lamp whose light I adore. I have, in the midst of my sorrow, had a bit of fun, too. Life, undying life, rescues.

This is as far as word will take me today. I tire and must meditate. More, if word is merciful once more.