This week, too, went by fast, as I counted the days according to how many wonderful sunsets and morning walks I could pack into the week. Walking by the Marina Del Rey beach in the morning, doing yoga and meditation, along with seeing the amazing Cali birds fill my heart with wonder and, then evenings, when the sun sets in fiery tones keep me mindful throughout the week. Spending time with my daughter and granddaughter is always the paramount wonder, as I cannot get over the fact that I am indeed a grandmother now. In all these activities, I got a bit of writing in, especially about my grandfather Meher Singh (born around 1872) and my grandmother Laaj Kaur. They both migrated to Burma during the British colonial era as young people--grandfather at 17 and grandmother at 13--from the district of Peeyan in Chakwal District, Punjab, in what is now Pakistan but was then British India. Farming was going poorly due to the arid location that they were living in with taxes being so high, so the promises and lures of faraway land of rice and plentiful produce was calling to them. Meher went to Burma with his uncles to work with them as a young boy; when he was old enough and could save a bit of money, he came back to Punjab and married a young girl named Lajwanti, who he then renamed Laaj Kaur. Lajwanti was from a Hindu family and after she married Meher, a Sikh, she took the new name bestowed upon her by her new family--a Sikh name. They worked and lived in the interior of Shan States with hardly any other Indian people when they moved there, but as their children grew up, they moved to the city of Taunggyi. They were petty traders in the beginning but by the time of independence from colonial rule, when their first son, my father, Prab Joth, was in his early twenties, they opened a shop on the main road of Taunggyi. This was a simple affair of a wooden building with tin roofs, but a real improvement from their little place in the village. My family went through multiple migrations, as they left Burma in 1946 to return to Punjab due to the Japanese occupation of Burma and due to the incessant bombing of their home and the cities by the Allied Armies during WWII. Weeks of being on the road, first in a truck, then rail, then ship, then rail, then truck, they made it back to Punjab. My mother was pregnant with her second child. Then, after mere months in Punjab, when another daughter was born to my parents, they had to leave in the middle of the night during the Partition of India with two small children due to the partition violence and returned back to Burma with only their clothes on their backs and a few items of value. It took father 5 to 6 years (after I was born in 195i, their fourth child and a third daughter), to get a new shop with glass counters and new shelves in the new and modern Mya Tu Kha building in Taunggyi. They started all over again with barely anything to only have all of it taken away from them due to the military coup of 1962 when their shop was nationalized and became the property of the "people." When I look back at their lives and attempt to write stories of their odyssey, I feel a sense of inadequacy to really capture the momentousness of their existence. Therefore, I try to write short vignettes to only capture certain moment. In the meantime, here is an essay--"Uncomfortable Truths"--I recently wrote and published with the Journal, Philosophies and Global Affairs, which, I hope you like. https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/pga_2021_0001_0001_0046_0060 Also, a few photos from the weekend around town. Thank you for taking time to read, comment and share my post.
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It was not an ordinary weekend for me, as my nephew and my late younger sister's son, Nik, was visiting me in Marina Del Rey. We all, my daughter Gina, my granddaughter Karina, and my son-in-law Ken decided to take Nik to the beach for a swim in the ocean. I love to swim in the Pacific as well, as the cool water reminds me of Lake Superior's water's temperature. I used to swim in it every summer until late in the Fall. We drove to Laguna; we walked by the beach. We attempted to swim but the waves were pretty rough, so just waded in the cool water. The hot sun and the cool waves were just wonderful! We stayed the night in Laguna Beach and had dinner at Salerno; the food was divine, although I found my gnocchi a bit too rich, but Gina's scampi ravioli was beyond compare. Walking around the town at night and window shopping was fun; Nik bought me three pairs of Frieda Kahlo's socks. I had been looking for them for years, so it really pleased me to have them. The day turned out to be perfect. Next morning, we had brunch at The Cliff restaurant overlooking the bay in Laguna. I took a few pictures, which I will share here with you. The view was, of course, breath-taking! We then drove to the Thousand Steps Beach. None of us had been there before, so when we got there, we did indeed have to walk down thousand steep steps to reach the beach! For some reasons, I thought maybe it was a tiny beach--a mere thousand steps! The beach was a gem! But the water again was rough with huge waves. Nik and I attempted to swim. I kept getting knocked down, so I stayed close to the beach, but Nik, who is only a 33 years old strong young man, made it over the waves and swam for a good hour or so. There were so many family enjoying the beach and the waves. I though how a few months ago all these beaches were shut down due to Covid and felt a tug in my heart, as Covid cases are going up again in California. We really are only sure about today and the now. The color of the ocean seemed bluer and the feelings of the waves on my body felt extra healing today! Tomorrow?--we shall see. On the way back in the car, we talked about my sister's passing at the age of 61 due to lung cancer four years ago. Nik was just 28 when we all found out about her lung cancer which was already stage four or what was considered terminal. She had been sick for almost a year--pneumonia and then diagnosed as walking pneumonia. We (my siblings and Bina with her husband) had all gone to India, Burma and Thailand in 2014 and she had been ill, but everyone thought she was sick from traveling. She went back to India in the fall of 2015 for a month. She was still feeling unwell. She called me on the phone and left a message, saying, no one cares! Why are you not visiting me? So, when my friend from South Africa came to visit, we went to Pittsburgh to see her. She know my friend Rajendra, as she has met him when she visited South Africa in 2009. Nik was doing an internship in Engineering there. I was at a conference in Cape Town. We travelled to Zambia and went white water rafting in the Zambezi; we sat by Victoria Falls and meditated. It was a week of bliss. So, when in 2015 she was diagnosed with lung cancer, we were beyond shocked! Now, we have just a few months with her, we thought; but she fought hard and lived for almost two more years. The first year, she remained strong even after every chemo knocked her down and she kept getting up, but the second year she got weaker and her indomitable spirits couldn't keep her going. I miss her every single day, as we were inseparable companions as young girls and women, first in Burma, then in India and after we moved to the US, we made sure to visit each other a few times a year. Nik's face and eyes remind me so much of Bina, so gentle with an underlying strength in their demeanor. When we were little in Burma, Bina and I and our siblings used to pile up in my father's Zephyr car and go to Hopong Ye Thwet, a spring about an hour or so away from our home in Taunggyi. Ma would pack groceries to make chicken curry and rice at the Spring and sweet tea and pakoras after the swim in the Spring. We would spend hours drifting in the water while father would swim in the deep, sometimes disappearing under water to suddenly reappear by our bodies, pulling our legs, and we would scream and laugh and splash in the cool water. Sometimes, father and my uncles would forage for fresh mangoes, sometime sweet and sometimes sour from around the Spring. We would sun ourselves on the boulders until our long uncut hair would dry and our brown bodies would be warm again. The food then tasted so good! Ma's fresh mango pickle which she would have brought from home would add another awesome layer to the curries! Bina, so little at that time, was my shadow, always sitting by my side, always getting attention from everyone around due to her beauty--her round pick cheeks and her dark eyes surrounded by her Lucious curly hair! I was the skinny one by then, a bean-pole, they used to call me! But we were inseparable. Through the school years in Burma, through college years in Delhi--we were tight! Her friends were mine and mine her's throughout our lives. When I moved to the US, I lived in her home in Pittsburgh for six months and only her oldest, Tash, was born then. I came to the US with two children, a six year old daughter, Gina, and my fifteen month old son, Gautam. She taught me America. I miss her. Below are a few photos from this weekend's adventure at The Thousand Steps Beach. Have a wonderful Sunday, dear readers! Jaspal Why write poems? Why read? If you can see a flower and see the poetry in it, do you have to write a poem about it, or can you simply take the beauty of it in your heart and relish the moments in quiet times? Why write? If writing is a solitary experience, is it also not solitary to relish the beauty of the flower all by yourself, or does it enhance the experience if you share it with someone you love or someone who loves the images, the poetry, the art of it? I don't know. All I know is I am moved to write about the experience or the memory of the experience or the rememory of it, so that later--months, maybe years--I can still look at the piece of writing and feel the immediacy of the moment, relive it, re-relish it and smile (or cry, as they case may be) at the thought of writing about it--maybe I will share the poem, maybe it will be read by someone else, maybe they may experience similar feelings or maybe they will feel something totally different, but as Jeannine Hall Gailey says, after you have taken such efforts to write the poem, your goal should be to share it with others, to make an impact with your writing (PR for Poets 2018). After all, art must be shared, no?
So, as a beginning blogger (in many ways, a beginner, as I don't consider my forays into it about ten years ago serious blogging), I will share one of my published poem for today. It was written decades after the moment occurred. Some moments and their effects can last lifetimes, and this was just one such moment. It occurred in Burma during the times I lived there in the 60s after the military coup of 1962. I was nine years old. Within a few years, our lives had been turned upside down. My parents were born in Burma--father in Linkho and mother in Taunggyi. My grandparents had gone to Burma from India during the British colonial era to eke out a living as petty traders, as their land, Punjab, and their livelihood as farmer, were impacted by colonialism in adverse ways. After the coup, my father's general store was nationalized, as were out schools, banks and all other businesses in all part of Burma. For months and years, we didn't have enough to eat, as we were an extended family of 18. Father took to selling contraband goods--watches, makeup, etc.--at the night market under the very noses of the military, who kept a blind eye as they benefited from the sales in various ways. But for reasons we all know, Indians and Chinese people were targeted for special treatment by them. This poem came a short time ago after the second military coup of 2021. My memories and rememories of trauma are shared here with you in the recently published poem. The poem was published in Harbor Review, Issue 7, in June 2021 titled "1966: Burma Bureau of Special Investigations." Here is a link to it; scroll down to Jaspal Kaur Singh. And thank you for taking time to read it: https://www.harbor-review.com/page7?fbclid=IwAR1oGFgDml81FPyKwK2aDp-DEnu3KzO7qAh2pZ0YzvDwdo5Mtqnrlj4j7OY And here is a copy of it: 1966: BURMA’S BUREAU OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS (BSI) 1. Glowing from dark skies the night’s lips parted. The night’s eyes kohl colored half closed after the coup as rifles pointed at our collective faces buried thousands in shallow graves. Murmuring at the spectacle, the night’s lips whispered— don’t let them find your treasures under the tamarind tree. 2. They marched upstairs and downstairs of our Taunggyi home. BSI: Looking for contraband goods in our home. Father smuggled imported merchandise and sold it under their noses on the night market to feed us. Collaborators and adversaries. They knew.
and places it in Ma’s hands. Her storytelling power sheds light on terror in Burma. Her few pieces of jewelry sold to feed the family. 3. The world’s gaze is averted and rests on Mao’s face. Ne Win, the eternal shining sun of Burma, crushes Aung San Su Kyi’s voice. The moon picks up a pen and writes everything on a monk’s body floating in the Irrawaddy. JASPAL KAUR SINGH If you wish, please leave a comment; if not, I hope the poem made you think of the Burmese people on this day. Happy writing and have a safe and lovely day! Jaspal |
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