Flench Flies

I was reading Judges 12:5&6 and I snorted loudly over my Kindle. The Gileadites were being jerks to the Ephramites. To test if they were Ephramites, they made people say “Shibboleth” and because the Ephramites could not pronounce it right and said “Sibboleth” instead, they would know and they’d kill them. They killed 42,000 Ephramites this way.

42. I don’t care that Douglas Adams just sat on his desk, stared into the garden and thought, “42 will do… end of story”. 42 appears too many times in life to not care. In the Bible too. If I’m not wrong, usually associated with deaths. I should reflect more on this.

Moving on. Shibboleth. Sibboleth. These little pronunciation fault-lines appear when one is speaking a language one is not fluent in or perhaps not used to it. There are just some sounds that you don’t get right simply because the same sound doesn’t occur naturally in your language. Like Shibboleth and Sibboleth.

Or take for example, in Mizo language, there is no naturally sounding ‘J’. We have it in our alphabet because we use a modified, phonetic version of the Roman alphabet designed by Christian missionaries and I suppose we needed the J for a lot of names in the Bible that require a J. Like Jerusalem or Jordan or Joseph; kind of important names in Christianity. Even so, it clashes with the other sounds in Mizo. So these names are always pronounced with a ‘Z’ sound. Of course today, people take pains to get it right and use the actual J but it disturbs the flow of an otherwise lyrical language. Something’s gotta give, and all that.

But what the Shibboleth-Sibboleth story forced in my memory are all the jokes and even actual instances where Lusei-speaking Mizo folk make Burmese-Mizo folk pronounce the word for chicken. Ar. I don’t speak Burmese but maybe there’s no distinction between R and L in the language; maybe like in Japanese where the letter for R and L is the same. So instead of saying “Ar”, they’d say “Al”. It is an endless source of perhaps un-witty and unimaginative running jokes in Mizo. Embarrassing if it happens to you IRL. Once, owing to a slip of tongue, I ordered "Flench Flies" at a McD's in Priya Mkt, Vasant Vihar. The boy who took my order clearly wanted to laugh and I just kept the straightest face I could muster till he accepted defeat and just processed my French Fries order. Mortifying. Anyhoo. I was amused to note the same instance in the Bible. Maybe we’re not all that different, people all over the world, even dispersed through time.

To make my point, take Plato, the famous philosopher. I was reading this article by Aakar Patel. He mentions that Plato’s name in Greek is actually Platon, meaning wide. But in English it is spelled through Latin which drops the N. India got the name from Muslims speaking Arabic which has no P in the language so they exchanged the P with an F, but kept the N at the end. There is however no natural sounding F in Arabic so the A is inserted before the F, easing the speaker into the word by separating F from L. Hence, Af-latoon. Plato. Aflatoon. What do you know?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a sound? No?

Of course the next Christian who calls me Easter deserves one solid round of Octopus slaps. With a catfish attached to the end of each tentacle, thank you.

*Esther: titular character of the 17th book of the Bible.

**Easter: a day marked for celebration named after the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring/Fertility Eostre, and does not appear in the Bible.

Am I Good?

She was a good girl. She was my neighbour and she was also my one friend. We attended Sunday School and kindergarten together. She was an extrovert and made friends easily. She talked amiably and easily got in and out of arguments with people. Quite unlike me who was painfully shy. She also cried easily because she often fought with people over silly things and would run back home. I never consoled her which was a failing on my part. 

We played with her Tea Sets constantly either in her house or mine. Sometimes she ran home crying because one of my cousins bullied her. Once she was done crying, she’d come back and we’d play house again. We didn’t talk about it and she never asked me to pick sides. It was always her fight with my cousins and I acted like I was not involved but she was there only because of me. I suppose I failed her there as well.

We were kids then. And we grew up apart. I moved around a lot because of my dad’s job and then later for my education. She stayed home, met a boy and got married to him. She miscarried one time and never got pregnant again. She got divorced and didn’t move back home to our neighbourhood. I started hearing stories about her. They were not good stories. They talked about alcohol and drug abuse and walking the streets. I never reached out because I didn’t think we were still friends. I know I failed her again.

We met only once as adults. She came to my house. She was mostly skeleton at that point. I was horrified at the sight of her. I hope the horror didn't show in my face at least. She told me that remand home was breaking her and that the people running the home were torturing her. She asked me for just enough money to go to her father’s house in another village. She rambled on about delusional things that made no sense and stories I knew were lies. I listened in ever-growing horror and as always, since we were kids, I never said anything. Her grandmother told me if I gave her money, she was going to buy drugs. So we ate food together and I gave her my sweater that she liked, but not money. That was the last time we talked. I didn’t – still don’t – know what she needed from me but I think I didn’t give her it. I definitely failed her.

The last time I saw her, she was banging on the door of her family’s house and although I would later hear unsavoury stories about that scene that plays in my head often, I will not repeat it. She died in a police station holding cell, overdosed on some hard drugs, I'm told. I was in Champhai at the time and my sister laid down flowers on my behalf on her coffin. Her grandmother gave me one of the mourning shrouds. The puan is untouched and sits in the bottom of my trunk because it makes me feel all the weight of the times I have failed her.

I don’t know a lot of people who have died. She is too young for me to talk about her in the past tense. She was a girl who talked about Calvanism and the first person in my life who talked about predestination, as she had heard her grandmother tell her. She often told me about how there were people who were destined to go to heaven and those for hell. That there was not a lot we could do about it. My parents aren’t denomination-minded and never talked about Calvinistic teachings. I'd thought it was fascinating. My cousins, of course, said that was bull. I never defended her. Me failing her and her still showing up was a tenet of our friendship, it seems.

I guess I never had her back. And every time I remember her, I still don’t know how good a person I really am. She remains today the mirror I hold up to myself when I start to think I am a good person. Am I good? I will never know.

How I Loved An Aloe Plant To Death

I am not the worst anymore. Which is not much to brag about. It simply means I don’t kill all plants in my immediate vicinity anymore. I even grew and harvested strawberries and about 5 tiny potatoes and really hardy, stringy broccoli at one point on my own. Largely on my own, that is. I actually even harvested way too many string beans at one point and I gave all of them away because I don’t even like string beans all that much. I don’t know what possessed me to invest so much of my land to beans. Beans for brains I have, honestly.

But the first plant I started with as an amateur gardener was an aloe plant. My mother who knew about my black thumb was horrified at the thought of me tending to a plant. She also didn’t want me to fail. So she racked her brain for the easiest, lowest maintenance plant she knew that wouldn’t offend me. In the end, she told me to buy one of those small pots of succulents. I chose an aloe. I said: it is medicinal too, and it will come in handy.

I loved that aloe plant, god rest its soul. I didn’t know the first thing about gardening and plant care. I refused to Google. What I knew was that people often fed plants fertilizers, killed pests with insecticides, weeded it and watered it, and often re-potted them. I took great delight in feeding it manure and fertilizers. I watered it daily without fail. Every few days, I re-potted it. We had goldfish at the time which is to say we bought a lot of goldfish because they kept dying. Every time a goldfish died, I would take its dead body, carefully lift my aloe plant out of its pot, dumped the corpse in the soil and then replanted the aloe. For bio-manure, you see. Over time, the green started to fade into a dull colour. I took this to mean more zealous love – feed it more manure and transplant to bigger pots every other day (more soil, more nutrients?) and water and lots of direct sunlight. For chlorophyll.

It is a testament to how strong an aloe is that it lasted my gentle, loving care for multiple weeks. But of course, no plant is strong enough to last that many re-pottings that frequently, and no desert plant needs water that much that its pot was often waterlogged. I don’t know about the fish manure and the other store-bought manure but probably they couldn’t do their job with my constant helicopter parent interference. When my aloe plant died, the green had faded into a somewhat sickly brown and it was sticky and sort of fungal from all the rotting from all the water I lovingly poured into the pot every day.

It is a good reminder of how incredibly stupid I am on my own. Which is one reason why I ask a lot of questions these days now to avoid more metaphorical aloe deaths in my care. Also, I just buy plastic flowers now. They are easy to maintain. They don’t need to be watered or fed anything. If they get dirty, I just wash them with laundry detergent. Perfect.

I still kill all wall clocks in every home I stay in. I can’t explain. They just die.

Ramhuai Worship

I take immense offence at anyone who dismiss pre-Christian Mizo religious life as just ramhuai bia or, more dismissively, thing bul, lung bul bia. Demon worship, for one. The second being just nature worshipping in essence, yes, which is in itself not even offensive but it is always delivered with a tone of superiority, looking down at it from a higher angle. Just random worshiping of spirits and tree stumps and boulders because they were scared of everything because they didn’t know anything because they were so simple. Offensive, definitely.

I am a Christian. I was born a Christian and I am a born-again Christian. However, I take Christianity at the social level with a pinch of salt, always. I do not agree with anyone who need to praise Christianity by belittling people who do not follow the same faith. It is enough to just profess the faith, I’ve always thought. Christianity can stand on its own without its followers spitting on others of other faiths. I agree with Mahatma Gandhi when he said if all Christians behaved like Christ, the world would be Christian. Perhaps it is oxymoronic that the religion whose God specifically told his followers to not judge others would do it with such righteous gusto but here we are.

I do agree with my mother when she says perhaps old Mizo religious sacrifices were probably mostly appeasement to demons the humans did not want to cross. On the other hand, a lot of Christians are Christians because they have been righteously traumatized and groomed to be terrified of Hell. It’s the same thing, at the level of the abstract. In this, I have no issues.

I could go into a whole soliloquy over elementary forms of religious life, tribal gods and deities, totems and idols and even impersonal forces that you can bargain with. But that might fall on deaf ears for the uninterested and honestly, I don’t want to bore or offend anyone. So let’s wrap it up with this thought that yes, I think from a Christian standpoint, we could have been seen as worshipping demons and even the big bad – Satan hissssself – honestly, anyone else who isn’t Jehovah God. But also, I think in essence, to be fair and just to the old Mizo, it wasn't random ramhuai worship. We had just been worshipping other gods.

I think it really is just as simple as that.

Work And Wealth: A Cynic's View?

I quote Dolly Parton here: "I would never retire. I’ll just hopefully drop dead in the middle of a song on stage someday."

I suppose I’m happy for her because it’s like that whole Soft Skills HR class thing where your mentor tells you to find something you like doing and then you “never have to work a day in your life”. Unfortunately, I might be the opposite of that. Well, not quite. But getting close.

My gripe is that while I don’t hate my job, and I truly and definitely enjoy a huge chunk of it, I think it would be so much more “fun” if I didn’t have to worry about money. I know for a fact I would enjoy my work a 100% more if I had the option to quit. I think the security of knowing that you can quit anytime makes everything so much more tolerable. Even work. If it is not about the money then you can be all: oh I'm learning so much from this and shit like that.

Plus if it's not about the money, you can actually work at different kinds of jobs. It really boils down to the option of it all. Because there are a ton of really low paying shit that’s fun. Like try your hand out at home baking for 3 months – do home delivery yourself and go out in a pretty scooter, wear flowey pastels and flowers and hand out your freshly baked food with cutesy hand written notes. Run a loss, who cares? Huge loss? Just quit, without having suffered financial pain. Or run a bookshop filled with the kind of books you like for the sheer aesthetic of it all – with dramatic cozy lighting, a coffee table set with cushy leather chairs, and a huge ass window. You could even be picky with the people who go home with your books, which you maybe wrap up in nice brown paper and ribbons. Why wouldn’t I want to go work at my bookshop every day if I wasn’t worried about money? Or you could wander the Amazon searching for a rare poppy or an orchid or an anaconda I don't know. Or sit at a table by the window overlooking a Shire-like countryside, with kitschy furniture, a pot of coffee or tea by your side, working on a book, spinning a tall tale, weaving magic with the written word, perhaps fighting or befriending dragons on paper. Or run a flower shop, filled to the brim with flowers and ribbons, and play Jewel all day. Law of Diminishing Returns? Pfft.

These are all very different from say, if I were a sales person in a shop and actually needed the money. Then it all becomes super stressful. If you have to worry about if there are enough customers, or if you will still have your job if the shop runs on losses…

So yes, Dolly aside, who has benefitted from her economy and capitalism and Hollywood, I guess it’s easy for people who don’t really need the money to say that they are all about the job and being passionate. How lovely, no? Us plebs who are poorer than church mice in a backwater economy look at jobs a little differently.

I lowkey want to write about ‘ancestral wealth’ in Mizoram too. I have my firm opinions on how ancestral wealth can be for people who probably only even found out there were people with white skin less than two hundred years back. Less. Than. Two centuries. That's a very short timeframe to talk about non-monetary economy to ancestral wealth. But I think it might be a bit of a touchy subject.

Meanwhile, I dream of windfall gains.

Japanese Cat Stories: An Appreciation

The Japanese tell the best, most convincing cat stories. I think it is in parts because of how much they seem to know cat behaviour from observation and obvious adoration. 

I also like how with Japanese stories, it’s never black and white. Not even black OR white. When they tell a story it is just... a story. You think people have agendas that are good or evil. But sometimes they’re just agendas. Like in real life too. It’s all about how hunger can look like evil from the wrong end of the fork. Sometimes people just are. And it’s just timing that reveals them to be good or bad in our eyes and in our lives. Barring psychopaths, perhaps.

Fiction usually makes sense. Fiction usually ties up loose ends. But Japanese fiction isn’t always, or even often, structured that way. They make sense in parts but then you move the story along and then you get to the end of it and you get asked what it was about and all you can say is: well, it’s about this person. If they ask, what about this person? Sometimes the most you can say is, well things happened to the person. It’s weird, you think to yourself, because at a point, their story had made so much sense to me but now I can’t really recall anything specific. 

Just like in real life.

Memories work that way often. At one point life made so much sense. But then time flows and life moves along. After you cross a certain amount of checkpoints, that clarity starts to blur. You start to wonder: what was that epiphany? Sometimes you can recall a faint trace of that dazzling, magnificent pellucidity. But it’s not the same. You are different now and your memory is all you have; if you’re lucky, you might turn into a story. But that really is about It.

The Japanese seem to understand how this works. Their stories often start not at the beginning but more like the middle. If a backstory is important, it is added later, almost as an afterthought. You are simply immersed in the story from the first scene. And the funny part is, the story never really moves very much. The climax is often less than orgasmic. But you’re left with how the story made you feel – loss, warmth, love, pain, whatever it was about. And the story often doesn’t even end. The Story-Teller just stops telling the story. 

Like a memory.

Perhaps that’s why they write such brilliant cat stories, after all. Cats have their own logic. They operate on their own schedules and their own business. The Japanese don’t fit cats to the stories. They just tell the story around the cat. So while Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman cat was amazing, it was very much an anthropomorphic cat, despite it never taking human shape. Madara/Nyanko Sensei from Natsume Yujinchou, the Mask Seller from A Whisker Away, all the cats from The Cat Returns, the black cat from Kafka By The Shore... very decidedly cats, even when some of them took on human forms at one point or the other.

The morals of a cat aren't built on the same standards as the human's. Which makes it amusing but also makes sense in a weird way.

So yes, the Japs tell the most brilliant cat stories. Although why is the fat male cat always a calico?