A lament about lost love: K R Meera's novella Meera Sadhu

Love is like milk, with the passage of time,it sours, splits and becomes poison.

The novel portrays the tragic life of Tulsi torn between duty and love and she chooses to run away with Madhavan instead of marrying her classmate Vinayan. She finds that though she loves Vinayan, she gets carried off her feet by the kind of love that Madhavan gives her.

She runs away with Madhavan on the eve of her wedding though she knows from his own mouth that she is his 27th girlfriend. Soon, she recognises that she does not have a role in his life and the story is a lament about lost love.

Through lyrical passages that describe the desire that Madhavan arouses in Tulsi, the author captures the beauty of love buy equally descriptive are her details about his treachery in love, the countless women that he has relations with. This wounds her and she grieves how she sacrificed her career and her life for the sake of the man she chose to be with in life.

The novel details the transformation of Tulsi from a loving wife to Meera Sadhu grieving her life and serving others in the ghats of Varanasi. The frequent shifts in time cleverly portray her memories about her marital life including the good times and the bad times.

Time

The ancient coils of time stretch endlessly, 
With its various names that are held sacred,  
While we go by the measures of the calendar,
Amidst the changing trends and the seasons. 

Good memories that flood your mind, 
Your thoughts fly to the innocent days
Spent near the River Green's placid waters
And the days of youth bring back life. 

You learn how to treasure the moments of joy
And meditate over them in times of strife
And you learn the art of distancing yourself 
From thoughts that destroy your happiness. 

You learn to lose yourself in the secrets, 
Whispered by the unending coils of time. 

My Dream Book

I have a dream book inside me named Journal of a Female Quixote. I want to record the daily thoughts and habits of an eccentric idealistic female and want to give it the form of a journal. I want to look at a few models and give it form by starting to write. I have carried this dream for a long time and published some posts in my blog as well but I haven't made much progress. 

But I don’t know when I will write this book and even if I don’t write the book, I want to say this dream aloud to somebody so that I might feel the need to put the dream in the form of words. So, my aim is to compile some posts I have written and start working on this project named Journal of a Female Quixote. 

honour

Comfy

Happy

mushroom cottage

Dear Diary

self love

life

choice

Fairies

A Summer Vacation

A Summer Vacation

The first thing I did when the vacation began was to make a list. I have this habit of making to do lists that tend to be useful at times. There is always a list at hand. Urgent tasks, pending work, small details that might slip away especially since the time I crossed thirty-five and seem to have acquired a talent for forgetting. It runs in the family. I remember my aunt who, in the pre-mobile era, carefully wrote down every important phone number in a notebook—only to forget where she had kept the notebook itself.

This vacation, I told myself, would be different. I thought of making healthy changes in my diet and starting to exercise. My body resisted, my mind wandered, but something in me wanted to persist. There were also reminders of limitations such as high blood pressure, thyroid issues, fatigue, the discomfort of summer heat, a lingering sense of mental unrest. I thought of becoming a fitter person by the end of this summer vacation.

Instead, I found myself immersed in four seasons of Never Have I Ever, caught up in the chaos of Devi Vishwakumar’s life. It may be a show meant for teenagers, but it stirred memories—how confusing those years had been, how uncertain I had felt. Some emotions do not age; they simply wait for the right story to awaken them. Around me,the TBR pile kept on accumlating: Young Forever, It’s Easy to Be Healthy, The 5 AM Club. I read about discipline, about transformation, about becoming a better version of oneself. The ideas were inspiring, but inspiration, I realised, is fleeting. Still, I tried.

Then my sleep cycles became disturbed with afternoon sleep. Sleep became erratic. The afternoons stretched long and drowsy, the nights restless. I thought about waking early, about the idea of brahmamuhurtham, that sacred quiet before dawn. I have always been an evening person, but I wondered if mornings might hold a different kind of clarity. One day, I managed it. I woke early, walked, read, and felt, briefly, a return of something I had once known—a sense of purpose, of alignment. It reminded me of another time, years ago, when I had first read The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Back then, life had seemed full of promise.

There were interruptions such as travel, hospital visits, health concerns, unfinished work waiting quietly in the background. There were days of complete inertia, when even getting out of bed felt like an effort. Days when the question arose, uninvited: What for? Sometimes it is just a dull heaviness, a lack of direction, a quiet erosion of meaning.

My sole refuge was journaling and I tried looking at the empty page with a new understanding. It  became a habit and refuge by being a new way to make sense of inner turbulence. A way to remind myself that my story, however small it may seem, belongs to a larger human pattern. The days had blurred into monotony—sleep, heat, small attempts at discipline, small failures. I walked a little, ate a little better, tried to bring order into my surroundings. I thought about writing a book—The Diary of a Female Quixote—a collection of reflections shaped into something meaningful.

The desire to write comes in bursts and there are moments when you feel that you want to record every passing moment and narrate stories about your existence. In those moments, I am certain that I will write something worth reading, something that will endure. By morning, the certainty fades, replaced by doubt, by routine, by the ordinary weight of life.

I am half way through my vacation and I walk occasionally and try to eat healthy. This vacation did not transform me in any dramatic way. I did not complete my lists. I did not become disciplined overnight. I did not solve the deeper questions that trouble me. But I have made an attempt to write a summer journal and tried in small ways to care for myself. I hope that I continue journaling though not daily but at least whenever the burst of creativity reaches me.

 

 

anger

feel

good things

Nature

reading

rich

Us

I have a self that knows years of sense and more nonsense. I stand alone in crowds yet walk with you in green fields at the same time. I run in many new paths sitting at my armchair though I never leave my  world but for fresh signs or old paths. 

You are my other self, whom I do not know for I have never seen you as you really are, for I was struck blind by your light. and love was something that naturally followed. You were not with me in the physical sense yet I know you were with me in each and every circle round the holy fire and will find you near me in every dream.  

You are my favourite daydream that I return to time and again just to hold your hand in an unreal realm where rules don't matter and hearts speak only the truth. In another world, in a different circle of life, you and I will win our eternal game of love and may understand each other perfectly well. For us, time and space have never been important concerns for both of us and all that remains is the sense of unconditional love for the self and the other.