Have You Asked the Maximum of Yourself?

reminder: reading is fundamental

I’ve plopped myself onto a chair in my - I should say parents - what I should really say is my Amma’s - lovely backyard. It’s a Monday evening, and I’ve finally found the gumption to write something for consumption after a grueling 10 months. I have Dostovesky’s Crime and Punishment next to me, something I (embarrassingly enough) only started reading recently. I’m grateful to have the privilege of scouring through my parents’ home library. Not that books are only in one room in our home, they’re merely on every surface, every shelf, in different bags, in different languages, in different styles. I’m (now) grateful to have been taught to ask “can I watch something?” sheepishly on weeknights, rather than being given an iPad so my young mouth would stop running - not that it ran very much, back in the day. Perhaps the reading helped, I was often in my own world. As I admittedly am now. “Your daughter is so shy, no?” My young brain questioned that, knowing that I never was without an opinion. I chose not to share, quite opposite of who I am today.

I’m grateful to have grown up in a time, not too long ago, but compared to the times now feels eons ago, where books being circulated in the libraries and schools taught me about life and the world we live in. About the meaning of life, and the evils that man is capable of - racism, sexism, casteism, torture, genocide, sexual violence. These books taught me to question man, to question what we were taught in school, to question government, to question borders, to question authority, to question those in power, to even, I would say, question God. I continue to question it all, and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. I hope it doesn’t stop anytime soon. In the same vein, books have taught me the capacity of our humanity. Our ability to love one another so deeply that it gives us a reason to go on. The gentle and tender power we can have on each other, if we allow power to be good. But it can’t be good, can it? Power. The word itself instills a sense of hierarchy. See, this thought, this question, wouldn’t be posed as I’m typing if I hadn’t read about the inevitable harms of power, as we’re evidently living through now.

We all struggle with these age old questions - what is the purpose of life? Who am I? What is my reason for being in the small time I have here? Is there more out there? What happens during death? What happens in the afterlife? Books have given me space to sit in my parents’ backyard, lost in thought while looking at the Pacific Northwest Sunlight softly hitting the leaves of my amma’s plants. Soft, tender, and somehow piercing like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. It comes, lingers, and sometimes leaves us at the right time, or leaves us craving for more. If love is held with care, it comes back day after day. It will always be there. We know, deeply, that it will always be there, in all its forms.

Our neighbor’s adorable child is playing piano right now, for some reason reminding me of The Great Gatsby, as many of us read in high school. While we rolled our eyes at the repetition (just as this child is practicing the same few notes, incorrectly) of the meaning of the “green light”, my young teenage self learned the lengths of madness love can drive us to. It frightened me, likely in all the right ways at the age of 16. How could someone give themselves to another so wholly?

The fuchsia pink roses staring at me across the lawn are strikingly bold, hard hitting, like the story of God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Unforgettable. Gut-wrenching, a constant reminder to a privileged reader of how much colonialism/post-colonialism, casteism, social inequality, and education is weaved into all social fabrics. I stared at my wall in my room after finishing the book at 1:00 AM. I read Roy’s The Doctor and The Saint towards the end of college, while attempting to unlearn and dissect casteism as I knew it in my own ignorant ways. I understand more, but there is always more to learn and unlearn. It hits me, just like the unavoidable gaze of the bright pink, how much of what I learned about “culture” is through one particular lens. I can’t look away now, I can’t stop noticing it.

The green, the soft green of the grass, the banana leaves (which always make me ever so nostalgic for Chennai), the trees, that makes my itchy allergies every spring worth it. So lush, abundant, that I’ll never get tired of it. My mind is filled with song lyrics, constantly, so Pachai Nirame from Alaiypayuthey starts playing (if you don’t speak Tamil, look it up. You don’t always need to understand song lyrics to feel its sentiment...) and I remember how the song flows through the hero (a young Madhavan, ugh, heartthrob) comparing the love of his life to colors found in nature. Beautiful. So many of the songs we love, films we find comfort in, pop culture we indulge in must be rooted in perfectly strung together words, paragraphs, that pulled the creator apart just the right amount. On the flip side, a life lived so deeply and ferociously, observations made so acutely, and lessons learned harshly have inspired writers and artists from around the world to find strength in vulnerability for us to learn from. Is that not enough for us to pick up a book and get lost in its world?

Green, this green reminds me of a book I just finished reading, An Apprenticeship or Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector. There are shades to this book, layers to peel back, just like the shades of green my eyes are eating up as the evening sun goes down. I felt seen by the main character, Lóri, and her ravenous desire to understand herself and the world around her with the gentle help of her lover, Ulisses. We need to belong to ourselves, but we need more to belong to others, just as nothing would exist in my Amma’s garden without the soil giving itself to the plants, without the sun’s rays beating down, without water to quench the thirst, without my Amma’s nurturing touch. It’s impossible. We need it all, and must give it all to one another.

One line in An Apprenticeship or Book of Pleasures (amongst many) that I cannot stop thinking about -

Ulisses asks, “Do you know how to pray?”
“What? She asked with a start.”
“Not pray the Lord’s Prayer, but ask something of yourself, ask the maximum of yourself?”

It’s now a quiet but hot Saturday morning. I turned to the last page of Lispector’s book a week ago. If I had not read that line more than a week ago, I would not still be thinking about it now. I wouldn’t be itching for a pivot, accepting that once again, it might be time to learn to breathe outside of my comfort zone.

No, I don’t think I personally have ever asked the maximum of myself.

Have you?

With love,

Nivita