Kashmir's Shak

Thy Golden Time

As many of my friends in their “golden time” share the pain of the passing of their parents, it brought to mind when my grandfather passed away the how the wisdom of my grandmother became engrained in my soul.

1. Parents are first our ‘air’, as babies we are completely dependant on them from minute-to-minute for food, shelter, love and safety.

2. Parents become our ‘water’ in our youth as our needs are present but not as immediate. Their practical wisdom and emotional sustenance helps us to meander through our youth and into early adulthood.

3. Parents are our "fire" when we reach the stage of adolescence. The dawn of adult life forces a radical change in our relationship with them. Some never make it through the fire, others come through with life scars, for others the relationship is reborn.

4. For those who emerge out of the fire, parents become the ‘earth'. Our more reliable friends in our middle age. As time wears on they increasingly depend on us for as much physical and emotional support as they have given.

5. When our parents pass on they become our 'sky' -- eternally present, untouchable. Our ‘heaven’, they are in every sunrise and every sunset. Enrich us with light and rain. The heaven that sits above us, a constant reminder of our destination, where (if we made it through the fire) our children will find us one day, an ever present canopy of truth and grace.

My life tilts between stages 4 and 5 as my parents age… it is the cycle… painful as it is inevitable, it is thus.

"Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remembered not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee".

Sonnet III

This England

"Ol' Blighty" is an affectionate term for "Britain". As I pack and get ready to head back to Ol' Blighty, i recall my fondness for the word blighty. Although it sounds very much like an infection a plant would get, Blighty has a much richer meaning than a rotting veg.

Long before the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and songs of World War I popularized "Old Blighty" -- its roots derive from British India, from the Urdu/Hindi term "Bilayati" which means "foreigner".

For the first 30 years of my life in England i was treated as outsider, a foreigner in the country of my birth. When i first went to India all my relatives kept referring to me as "bilayatia" (30 years later they still do). I continue to be a "bilayati" in the past 20 years I have resided in America and Canada.

The Australians added the "Ol" to Ol Blighty to bear witness to the old country from whence they came. Perhaps if we all stop to uncover our ancestry far back enough we would discover that we are all foreigners and that there is nothing wrong with being foreign, that perhaps it is a necessary human (natural) condition?

As Walt Whitman once said "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable".

Birds and beasts are not bound by national boundaries, why should we be so constrained and fathomable? As Whitman says further "I exist as I am, and that is enough."

Perhaps being a bilayati is our noblest blessing? Free to be ourselves, naked, unadorned, unburdened of the emotional shackles of nationalism. A calling to be who we are is perhaps something far more vast and essential than merely being defined by where or to whom we "belong"?

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England".
King Richard II
Act II Scene i