Indira Ganesan, Lodhi Gardens, 2014

As my third assignment in the zero to hero blog course, I look at what made me create a blog in the first place. I had just returned from my first trip back to Chennai, India from the USA after an absence of several decades. I decided to join Facebook and get a blog. It was a way of re-declaring my profession, of making the private public, and a step towards finishing my third novel. That was in january, 2010 and now it is four years later. I have become so familiar with FB that I use the acronym. I completed the novel, and saw it published.  I moved from the mountains to the Atlantic Coast. My third blog post in 2010 reminisced about once being a DJ on Community Radio, and I have since picked back my headphones, though on an academic break for now.

I am once again in India, and it is for a memorial, a look back at a dear friend’s passing by a hundred or so mourners in Delhi, the second such function where several hundreds gathered. Rosemary Marangoly George gave so generously of herself, so spiritedly, so honestly that one can almost forget the brilliancy and importance of her academic work in Post-Colonial and Queer Studies. She leaves behind a vast vacuum, but as one of her nephews noted, not an ugly one, because her spirit was so deeply beautiful, a word that is inadequate to measure the depth of her being. She has touched so many lives, family, friends, colleagues, students, readers. To gather collectively to grieve and mourn and celebrate is an important passage. The young might wonder why does a party take place to remember a passing? A party is a gathering, a collective hug, a reaching from to the levels of suffering in the crowd to the deep suffering of family and close friends. It is a chance to remember, and in this case, to tell stories; stories of all kinds, that might have us weeping or laughing, something to cling to in what really is a numbing truth: a dear one has been taken away far to quickly, too young. Rosie had triple negative breast cancer, a disease my brother specializes in, and a disease about which I know so little. Why did I not immediately scour the internet for information? I could say it was because I did not want to face up to the reality. Was it because I thought there was more time, that Rosie was far too precious and powerful for this disease to have a chance?

It is light outside, and winter in Delhi is chilly. My life is made of such tactile facts, spaces to live. What can one do with life except try to live it better?  Live it better for my friend, live it better for others. Compassion to mind and body, compassion extended to others.

When I write, I am aware of both content and audience, of effect, and that makes the practice tiring and trying, for I don’t want to dress up reality, and yet I do. Joy Harjo believes words themselves have power, and one can release some words: fear, hate, for instance. Can one fully release sorrow and regret? Grief will burnish some things, so what remains is easier to hold.

Writing does that, too. It creates space to walk.