The windmills of our life

When I saw Eddie for the first time, he was sitting in his oversized chair. He had a wry smile, a story in mind, and eyes of delight. His son, Edward had apologised moments before on Eddie’s behalf.

“He has been trying really hard to pronounce your name right.”

Eddie showing me the little angel helper that he often had pinned up on his shirt.

My name has been mispronounced all over the world, including my own country. It is a part of my everyday that I absorb without thinking twice, yet here I was, amused that someone had really tried before my arrival.

It took me only the second afternoon in a month of afternoons that I spent time with Eddie to realise that it was no surprise that he tried. His mind was gushing with details. Details of his universe that his daughter, my companion, Jan also had a hard time placing in the memories of her childhood. Stories that became my door, my window, my every corridor that disappeared into the distance. I knew then that I had arrived in the very heart of Ireland and wanted nothing more than to follow its winding path.

Kilcooley Abbey, built in 1182. 766 years later, Eddie visits for the first time.

Eddie standing at the very front. His expression as always about to break into a wry smile.

The overgrown grass didn’t allow us to reach the steps of the house that overlooked the abbey. The place where Eddie once stood for a Sunday picnic with his family. Yet the gate that revealed the abbey transported me through its sound. In its extended groan, I could hear Irish laments of the weather through time. Their gratitude to have a glimpse of the sun, their relentless hope disguised in the realisation that things could always be worse.

Our conversations often began with him asking me if I was cold. He would be hopeful for the sun, but quick to remind himself that there is nothing any of us could do about it. The notorious sounding wind that sometimes roamed the corridors of the nursing home didn’t perturb him at the slightest. He was more concerned about the breeze that came through a window slightly left ajar. Lynn, his daughter told us that this breeze was the only chink in his armour. When he was well and Ireland had a rare heat wave, he would still call out to anyone to close any rogue open window because of the breeze. The breeze was his achilles heel.

The wind map of Ireland suggests wind, wind and more wind.

A little look into the wind and its ways revealed to me that the wind Ireland receives mostly comes from its south west coast and this wind originates from the Gulf of Mexico. The other two winds that appear not as often are a frigid wind that comes from the Arctic and a warm wind that comes from Central Russia. The moment I read this, a bridge through time and space was drawn.

This illustration of an eagle eating a snake on top of a cactus shows the legend of how an Aztec god marked the spot where these people would live. The symbol is still used on Mexico’s flag today. The painting is from Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firm by Diego Durán, 1588 AD.

On its easternmost point, the Aztec empire stretched to the Gulf of Mexico. It is where Spanish Conquistadors led by colonialist Cortez started their march in 1518 towards Tenochtitlán, the capital city of Aztecs. This fabled city fell three years later and became a prominent footnote in history’s never ending canvas. That footnote reached me through a friend who had a bookshelf of 15 odd books. A personal treasure trove in 1990s Bangalore. It was my first sighting of a book shelf. And my greedy eyes were soon comforted by my friend Jayanth’s generosity as he lent me a book that helped me frame my own childhood in real time.

The book that introduced me to the Aztec warrior. The cover that made me pay attention to shadows.

Unlike Jayanth, I had no desire to be one of the Hardy boys. I was more curious about the Aztec warrior. A man in the book who was hard to find, a man who was running across the ruins of his people, presumably fixing things back to their former glory. A man who was seen as wise and kind and fearless.

Side note - Now that I see the origins of the mystery wind through Eddie’s windows, maybe from Mexico, or the Arctic circle. Two places I travelled to as an eight year old. I wonder what my first Russian reference was. The name ‘Yuri Gagarin’ is the prompt answer. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space grew up in a small village called Klushino in Smolensk Oblast, the central Russian region where the warm wind that rarely reaches Eddie takes birth.

A commemorative Yuri Gagarin stamp in India introduced in the year 2001.

To understand the violence in my own childhood, I wrote a series of unanswered letters to the Aztec warrior. The address I wrote to was the only reference of the whereabouts of the warrior in the book. ‘Near the Tule tree, Oaxaca, Mexico’. The furthest I went out of my mother’s sight when I was a child was in pursuit of a post man on a bicycle, because I was suspicious that he was throwing the letters away, thereby explaining the warrior’s silence. It took me about three four odd years for reason to kick in and I stopped attempting to send it. This practice of writing those letters however continued as a personal canvas of reflection for a little more than a decade after that. The Aztec warrior was a man I looked upto, a man I one day wanted the approval of someday.

Árbol del Tule or the Tule tree, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Nathan Gibbs.

Local Zapotec legend holds that the tree was planted about 1,400 years ago by Pechocha, a priest of the Aztec wind god, Ehecatl.

Ehecatl is the creator of the wind that takes birth at the Gulf of Mexico.

Ehecatl, The Aztec god of wind with his traditional duck billed mask. British Museum Collection.

Eddie sang this song for us right after we made the long drive from Aranmore Island to Tipperary. Aranmore Island being the subject of our fisherfolk documentary. Each place we passed through, he had a story about. From the girl he had a crush on from Borrisokane village as a young man to the sweet family he met in Boyle town as part of his job after selling his pub and farm equipment store.

Every story started to have a common strain. It held a simplicity, an honesty, a clarity of seeing life through the eyes of a single day. There were trials and tribulations, hopes and dreams, all packaged into a way of life that renewed itself each morning. Building a contraption to hang the clothes was as important as climbing the Devil’s bit (the local hill which legend proclaimed that the Devil himself had bit into rock, leaving a gashing bite mark), playing Bridge at Thurles, to attending mass at the church in Two Mile Borris, to supporting Kilkenny in the Irish sport of Hurling. Every experience seemed to hold equal importance to him. The dignity he possessed in abundance extended to the way he consumed his time.

When the stories inspired by the places that we passed through were told, he saw the Equestrian event at the Paris Olympics on his crackling nursing room TV and told us about the story about his almost familial connection to the Mullins family who are a famous horse breeding family in the country. He spoke of how each of their grandparents came to the pub that he ran for years later on, and they tried to go back each other’s lineage to see if there was any connection. The story ran like a mystery novel, and in the end, they found nothing. He told us this story at least three times. Each time inspired by a horse that appeared either on the screen or by the window. Each time, there was a pause before he revealed the end. I found myself waiting for an alternate ending. His telling of the story was such.

I could really see how frail he was only when I helped him up to go the bathroom or back to bed and when I saw him lift his much awaited 5 pm cup of tea. Staying at his house, I could see photos of him being a strong Irish man through time, a man who fixed everything around, a man who was self sufficient till his early 80s. There was nothing in those photos that suggested that his strength would ever leave him. He hardly complained about his excruciating pain, a pain that I saw etched in a silent grimace across his face whenever we tried to put on his socks or take off his shoes. Yet he never complained about a thing barring of course that gentle westerly wind. He pushed as much as he humanly could before we had to call for help from the nurses. Nurses from my home state of Kerala who adored him and whom he adored right back. ‘Thank you darling’ came his faint voice. ‘You're welcome darling’ they replied.

Eddie in his 60s with Lynn and Jan, his two daughters. I adore this photo because they both lean on him, as he eventually did on them in the month that I spent with him.

He only showed signs of vulnerability every evening at 6 pm, for a short minute, when RTE, the state television channel would play the Angelus prayer. A prayer I had never heard before. Being raised a muslim, experimenting with Buddhism in my adolescence, finding my spirituality as a grown adult through the practice of a Hindu marital art, one would imagine that the Christian faith also would have found me somehow. But that wasn’t to be till I saw Eddie praying. I couldn’t tell why it moved me so much in the very first instance. Yet the more I heard Eddie’s stories of rural Ireland every passing day, the more powerful the prayer became. A series of bells that lingers as much as it moves, that was as joyful as it was melancholic. That was as distant as it was close. That had space for his laughter as much as it did for his pain. That had space for his singing as much as his silence.

The Angelus by Jean Francois Millet. 1857. Musée d’Orsay collection

“The idea for ‘The Angelus’ came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed”

— Jean Francois Millet, 1865.

Millet went onto mention that it wasn’t a religious painting, but a moment of pause, of reflection and as I read his description, I realise why this prayer moved me so. Eddie remembered every name, every connection, every detail from the past. The prayer itself was an act of profound remembering. He was the light that flashes through the endless shadow of time, bringing back to life the ones that brought him every sort of experience that made him the man that he became.

Eddie and Jan counting windmills

Despite Eddie’s curious relationship with the wind. He counted the windmills that he saw out of his window every day that we visited him. He gave us updates on how many were moving, how many he could see, as if they were travelling entities. Sometimes we counted along with him. As if we too expected them to be moving around.

In the first week of my 6 week visit to Ireland, I decided to shoot empty frames that could become part of the B-roll for our fisherman documentary. Thanks to a deviation close to the nursing home, the only deviation we came across on the road despite crisscrossing through the country. In that less travelled road, I caught a glimpse of a house dwarfed by windmills. The first time I saw it, all of the blades were facing me but I wasn’t carrying my camera. Everyday from then on I carried it only to see the blades facing away. In the end, on the last day of my visit I took a shot of it despite it still turning away. Now as I look at back it all, I see this frame transformed into one of profound meaning. It feels as if Eddie is sitting inside that house and the windmills are moving all around him.

I remember running to the little playground opposite my house as a child just as a monsoon storm was about to hit and the wind swirled up the dust around in dramatic fashion. I remember running towards it, being fearless because in the hardy boys novel, the clumsy best friend Chet almost gets buried under an Aztec ruin. The book describes crumbling rock, a fast enveloping darkness, a furious wind, but he survives. One part of me believed that I was the adventurous Hardy boy who would inevitably find the Aztec warrior. But a deeper part of me accepted that I was the clumsy sidekick, that it was the only way I could reach the Aztec warrior. The wind I wore on my sleeve as I turned and smiled and nurtured an excited scream in the depths of my throat. Yet when the dust settled, the sky cleared, and all that was left was a little breeze. The fear came crawling back. The breeze reminded me of my situation never changing, of it ushering me slowly back into my every slippery slope back home. A breeze that slipped through doors of which I did not want to be behind. Doors, behind which I stood for hours, wondering if I could walk through.

The last time I saw Eddie, I told him I will be back soon and he needs to give me all the gossip from the most idyllic village I have ever visited.

“I will do that so Naaaaveeed. ”

He said in the sweetest voice. Today as my heart swells in gratitude while remembering him on the day of his funeral. I realise that the strongest man I have known was also a little perturbed by the breeze. I realise that he was an Aztec warrior himself. I realise that I too will turn into an Aztec warrior one day. That is simply how life goes.

Life, Death and Everything in between.

Journeys through time and space without moving an inch.

On route to Khonoma. Photo by Naveed Mulki

I stand here transfixed, rooted to the spot, finding layer upon layer of ridges in the many shades of a vivid green and a smoky blue. Hills to me have intuitively symbolized the meeting of the end of one road and the beginning of another. The road that I have walked upon is heavy, filled with long-forgotten emotion that once rushed through my blood, finding itself in the extremities of my fingers and toes, only to harden over time and settle unseen for years, like kidney stones. The road that awaits beyond a hill is completely unknown to me, it is a clean slate, it is darkness, it is blinding light. On the farthest peak that I can see, which I always believed was a midway point between my two lives, one part of me is abandoned and the other is found, but not before an embrace of the two. Like two lovers in the Angami tradition in Khonoma, Nagaland, who find themselves together atop a peak and sing for the future.

Love take to the peak Japfu,
Transforming and sitting together like the brightest star,
Wishing and watching over the coming generation. - Angami Folk song

Indigenous cultures like the Angami Nagas have always built a better vocabulary to describe the natural world. The word ‘hill’ in English is described merely as a stationary object. Whereas in languages that are built out of civilizations not intent on destroying the wild, it turns into a living being. Perhaps it is this understanding of the hills that draws me to such vantage points. Places that don’t just spread out as far as I can see but also expand within me.

‘The word for hill, for example, in the Native American Potawatomi language is a verb, ‘kwedake’. The verb form attributes aliveness to the more-than-human world. Hills are always in the process of Hilling, they are actively being hills.’ - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Like most things in my experience now, my mind rushes back to milestones that involve hills. I quickly abandon moments that are recent, and try flip back the pages of my life to the very beginning. I rush through glimpses of the tropical humidity of Kota Kinabalu in Borneo where even a slight change in gradient feels like a profound task given to a martial artist. The threatening ridges of the Wadi Rum desert where the quickly shifting narrow shade provides an apt metaphor for the borders in this region that have appeared and dissolved in the last hundred years. The stoical dismay of the Himalayas, which don’t even register your presence despite your every grunt and heave that pushes through their lowest points. The only places where migratory birds have evolved to follow man.

Soon enough, in my mind, I see myself as a child on a lone hill in the middle of Bangalore. A hill that then was home to a new temple built for Lord Krishna. I was amongst many other children from my school, all part of an outdoor excursion. Our ties loose, our shoelaces adrift, our T-shirts slipping away from our belts. We were all moving in different directions like goats, our teachers yelled out our names like clueless shepherds. There were uneven steps all around, a little temple stood at the helm, and a grand emptiness greeted us at the end. We could see for miles around us. The rolling plateau of Bangalore unfurled in front of us. When we were told of the story of Lord Krishna lifting a hill with his little finger, to protect the cattle and villagers from a flood, our legs shivered and our minds were dizzy, for we were now at a height. We all believed that we were on the exact same hill. There was no convincing us otherwise.

Krishna lifting the Govardhan hill. Painted by Mola Ram. Circa 1790. Source - The Smithsonian

Today, one wouldn’t even recognize this hill as a hill. The elaborate, beautiful white-grey tiled temple adorns its once sharp ridges, and the temple itself is dwarfed by high-rise apartment buildings that are four times its size. My metro train passes by this temple and my eyes inadvertently find it from the elevated track. It doesn’t matter if I am being squeezed by a crowd, or have to turn my neck around, I see it. I always thought it was a mere coincidence. Today I realise that it is the hill that calls out of me, for the hill still lives and breathes under all of that concrete and prayer. Its skin right out of the Proterozoic Era from a thousand million years ago, its long torso witness to the first signs of life on earth. Life that might still exist in its deepest crevices, if one looked carefully, in the form of fungi.

It is this relentless force of life that makes me stop in front of hills. I am rooted like a tall silk cotton tree, but my being is ready to move to plant itself elsewhere. Every part of me breaks into a hundred thousand silk cotton seeds.

Garden Funeral, Auroville. Photo by Naveed Mulki.

A few years later, the same relentless force brought me to a standstill yet again, but this time it came from the opposite end of that same spectrum, from the far-reaching claws of death. In my kitchen cupboard sat a frog, calm and unperturbed. It came as no surprise in the realm of the man-made forest of Auroville. Each house has its share of amphibians and reptiles that walk and jump and slide around freely. Conflict is rare. Watching this daily interaction, one might come to the conclusion that it is only habit that can bring about any sense of equilibrium. The space I live in currently is shared with bugs, endlessly curious lizards, rumours of snakes sliding around dried leaves, a hooting owl that I am yet to see and a palm civet cat that scratches at my windows and roof every night. Seeing a frog in a kitchen cupboard did not make me think twice. Yet a few days later, I see that it is no longer alive. It feels like it has been reduced to its bare bones overnight. This too isn’t a strange sight, for an unseen world of prey and predator are stumbled upon often in this little garden universe of mine. What is curious however is that it had remained in the same place for days. We had instinctively left the cupboard door open, for it to leave, in the event that it was trapped. Yet it stayed for days in the same spot before it quietly passed away.

‘Moths, once they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out carefully, they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draught of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.’ - W.G Sebald.

Away from the fight or flight mechanism of an animal, here I was introduced to the idea of an all-consuming grief. The decision to simply stay where you are, in the awareness of approaching death. Frogs are meant to be solitary creatures that move to breed and tend to gravitate towards water bodies. I couldn’t help but wonder about the thin line between solitude and loneliness that I was introduced to as a child. The crippling depression of my grandmother came after 13 years of solitude that changed to loneliness overnight in the company of others. She too sat still in the same place till death did us part.

As Sebald suggested, I felt an uneasiness at the idea of death being swept away, especially in times such as these where there is no space for respect and ritual for death in the seemingly unending grip of the pandemic. So, in the silence that was only broken by ambulance sirens in the distance. I took the frog to the garden outside, in a quiet patch of sunlight that slipped away quickly to another hemisphere. I said a few words, like we all did as children, playing funerals for fallen butterflies. Burials that had us stealing our mother’s jasmine flowers.

The next morning I went to see the frog and it was no longer there. Nature had consumed it whole, redistributing its life in unimaginable ways. The frog that was rooted to the cupboard till its dying breath, now lived as a million little pieces. Some of it in the sky, some of it in the soil.

Moving Windows

Portraits of Movement. Of men and horizons. Of roots and trees. Of Goddesses and humans.

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I once met a man, Mr. Senthil Kumar Jacob, who had worked as a watchman at a tea estate for 45 years. I was lost and he was not. I was walking here for the first time and he had followed the exact same route a hundred thousand times. My gaze strained to see something in particular. His eyes looked around as far as he could see, one deep breath at a time. His fingers tapped the leaves that were ready to be plucked. He too would be leaving this place soon. From endless trails to a little cup. His already brimming dream trying to escape the little cup that he was going to move to. He had done all that he could do here, despite having lost his right hand in a freak machine accident.

‘I was lost in a day dream. I don’t regret them. Day dreams are all I need.’

He ended each day on a stone bench at the hilltop. He had no idea who had put it there, even though it was common knowledge that a large film crew had come and placed it there during a week-long shoot. ‘You were right here,’ said Madhi, our jeep driver, as we sipped on a pale cup of tea in the canteen, interrupted by the loud cleaning of vessels in the kitchen. I saw him many times on the trail, but only got to talk to him at the workers’ canteen. He was alert when he didn’t need to be. On the trail, he barely noticed me.

‘I would remember a film crew being here. Wouldn’t I?’

For a week, we met on the trail. Each time, I looked at him. He nodded slightly and always looked beyond me. On the last day that I was there, I stopped him in his tracks. He had trouble stopping. He looked as if he had overshot his steps and had now run into an invisible fence. I told him I was leaving. He told me he was leaving too. I told him I would come back soon. He said no such thing. He simply sighed. He was nearing retirement.

‘A few days more. No more paper in the calendar left to tear.’

He looked at my camera. I instinctively asked him if I could take his photograph. He stood stiff as he gently covered his right hand with his rain jacket. I imagined his face had grown serious, but then a little smile appeared. I asked him what he was smiling about.

‘If you can take a photo of the entire range of hills, please do.’

The range of hills. A stage for the dance of light and shadow, the racing of clouds and the bursting of rain. He wanted me to take a photo of the range and send it to him. He would frame it in his village. A flat land of paddy crop and thatched roofs. The only thing that stood up was a cracked water tank. Ten feet high with trickling water slipping through the cracks. He would go back to the plains after 45 years.

‘I would take a walk across the farms, make a cup of tea and sit in front of that photo.’

I smiled and I clicked nervously. Fully aware of how unequipped I was to capture his greatest day dream.

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The Plumeria flower, especially its cream coloured avatar, seems to find itself in moments that are dream-like to me. I saw it once in a wedding ceremony near Mysore. The bride and groom exchanged garlands made only of cream-coloured plumeria flowers. ‘God’s Plumeria’, they were called in the local dialect. I remained detached to the joy being shared. I was being reminded to witness each moment, as I was the outsider there. The same thing happened during my father’s burial. He rests under a grove of thickly packed wild plumeria trees. I saw white flowers scattered around. Muslims believe that the plumeria flower is immortal because it grows even if uprooted. It is a sign that things live on beyond their time as we understand it. I was yet again detached, thanks to my troubled relationship with my father. I was yet again constantly reminded to witness each moment, as it was my last earthly glimpse of him. These reminders felt like invisible voices in a dream, that nudge you forward. One step forward and they disappear.

I was told of another Plumeria tree, living and breathing for a hundred years, that was to be transplanted from an old compound in Pondicherry to the Botanical Garden in Auroville. The house itself, a grand old structure of more than a hundred years old, was about to be brought down. I thought of Sebald.

‘Someone needs to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in the order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size - the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper's lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden - are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in their right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old gallows hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’

This ruin was not left to fade away, but to see further humiliation in becoming a new soulless structure built in plaster and concrete. Its existence would be soon erased except for memories kept by the hundred-year-old plumeria tree. I stand at a distance from this hundred-year-old tree and look at a lone flower standing, speaking, listening. I wait for a voice to nudge me. To remind me that we are all constantly living out our day dreams.

I had a brief encounter with an artist named Gilij. He seemed to be one who was constantly in the grips of a day dream. Two men whisper to Gilij as he tries to sit still. Their quiet voices make him move ever so slightly. He closes his eyes, bites his upper lip, turns his neck, moves his hands and feet at their specific instruction. I find myself in front of him and he immediately wears a slight smile. If I knew how Gilij would transform over the course of a few hours, I might have said that I saw a careful unwrapping of Gilij as a person just as he was being adorned as a Goddess. Yet in reality, no such thing occurred. I stood mute, capturing footage like any filmmaker might, constantly on edge, afraid to miss important moments in an event I don’t know the order of, missing in the process just about anything meaningful.

Gilij spoke only when spoken to. His shyness soon disappeared in the layers of paint and ornaments placed around his neck. Yet he still didn’t possess the gravity of the Goddess whose form he was supposed to take. Soon, as dusk arrived, a fire was built from dried coconut fronds, two men held each of his arms, a priest led him to shrine of Goddess Bhagavati and a prayer was said with Gilij on his knees. Goddess Bhagavati is the most important deity in the Hindu Kalari Universe. She can be in one moment calm and in the other fierce. In the latter form she is known for her ferocious eyes. Gilij was now to take the form of the Nagakali, a snake goddess whose origins lie in the adornment around the necks of Goddess Bhagvathi and Lord Shiva. Nagakali in her avatar becomes an instrument to churn around one’s neck, from poison to nectar, from all qualities that are destructive to those that nurture life.

There is no one who can place a finger on when the transformation happens, but once it does, it is nothing short of astounding. I was surprised by every turn, jump, sprint and feat of strength that came out of this shy man. Gilij was a classical Carnatic singer by training, yet when asked to sing, his body crumbled like a dry leaf in the wind. No signs of Gilij remained in this frantic performance. Only the priest could tame him with his torch of bursting fire, yet the traditional drum beat drove him to jump up and down again. The crowd moved around him in circles that grew bigger. At the very end, he carried a wooden structure about 15 feet high on top of his head, and he danced as if it were only a turban that was tied tightly around his temples.

The performance ended as suddenly as it began. His head gear was quickly removed, metres away from the heart of the performance. Suddenly Gilij appeared again and nobody recognised him. They walked around him like strangers in silhouettes. Gilij simply stood, his shoulders bent, his eyes looking down at his feet. His lips might have been shivering or singing in a whisper, I could not quite tell.

‘Every movement of a true artist is a unique bhava or feeling’ - Kalari Gurukkal Govindakutty Nayar

As Gilij appeared more clearly and disappeared from the sight of everyone around him, I couldn’t help but think how the Divine is always constructed as one that is belligerent. Or maybe it is only so because the Divine feels imprisoned in a form so contained, so constricted by thought and worry, finding itself in a place where notions of time and space are linear. It is as if it were a moving window placed in the middle of four mostly immovable walls. I wonder if we too are constrained in our perceived notions of our body, and we must try not to define it further, but to make it lose all of its definition. To turn it into a fluid instrument whereby each movement and each stillness is transformed into a unique feeling.