Reincarnations

It has been cold in Gandhinagar, and for the past week I have been dreaming of a childhood favourite, seviyan-sabudana kheer. I don’t know if the combination is really a thing, but it was in our home; the warm, creamy milk sticking to your tongue, while the slippery seviyan and tiny, slimy sabudana slithered down. I can’t tell what brought it on, but on it was, and so this morning all preparation was in place. The full-fat milk was procured, the sabudana soaked and boiled to speed things up.

At breakfast I opened one of my favourite companions of silence, The Marginalian and before I could start the article I wanted to read, I got the gift of this poignant poem, which speaks of the liberation of believing that one deserves and accepting love and happiness.

“so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.”

Perhaps the first thing we need to do to move in the direction of accepting love is to know, accept and love ourselves and Rilke speaks about this when he argues for the importance of solitude, juxtaposing solitude and love, as Maria Papova quotes in her essay,

“Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.”

As I reflected on this interplay between solitude, love and creativity, the article pointed me to another one of my companions of silence, On Being and a conversation on Rilke that Krista Tippett had with the translators of his book, Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. Perfect, I thought, I would listen to it while cooking my kheer.

So the pot of milk went on the fire, and Krista Tippett’s warm voice filled my kitchen. The conversation began with a discussion on Rilke’s perspective on “loving the questions themselves” and being comfortable with the mystery that is this life and world. The speakers brought the perspective of interacting with life and the world, and I imagine it as being in a “game” of sorts, playing with life and the world, and the point was to keep playing. It moved on to Rilke’s thoughts on the genders as being counterparts, a position which according to Joanna Macy the world has still not reached. I am inspired by the clarity and simplicity of this idea and makes one wonder why people find it so hard to accept this equivalence.

As the conversation proceeded, the milk thickened and the seviyan roasted in ghee. The aroma was exciting and familiar, the sweetness of milk and the earthiness of wheat and ghee. When the milk was ready I put in the seviyan and the almost cooked sabudana to allow them to soften and convert to slimy deliciousness. The sweetener would go in at the end. Usually it is sugar, but it is winter and I decided to use jaggery because of its bold cane flavours. I knew I was taking a risk because jaggery is acidic and can cause milk to split, but I thought I could control it by putting it in at the end.

Krista, Joanna and Anita moved on to solitude and love that I had read about earlier. The milk thickened further, the seviyan softened, the sabudana blended in, and I put in the pieces of jaggery. It melted quickly and the milk turned brown. The smells were inviting and things seemed to be almost there, when the milk became grainy – Mr. Murphy had invited himself in. I should have been disappointed, but I didn’t have the energy. I knew what I had to do – keep cooking it down until it thickened and became like halwa. It would take another hour, and I accepted that there was no more kheer in the offing, turned the fire down, made myself some coffee and sat in the sun with it, as I listened to Krista and Anita speaking of how Rilke’s ideas on solitude and love had helped them through their respective divorces.

Rilke speaks of love not as a merging, but as about being oneself fully when he says “For love is not about merging. It’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.” He urges the young man he is writing to, to know himself, become himself, before merging with anyone else. Joanna spoke of how in a 56 year long marriage, she held a world within herself and was in some ways a stranger to her partner. How difficult I thought to myself and yet how liberating an idea.

As the conversation proceeded to how the speakers saw the relevance of Rilke’s ideas in the current world – which was at the middle of the pandemic – my thoughts stayed behind on solitude. I stirred the pot as the split milk thickened, and became like a mix of chana and khoa. I watched and waited and thought about whether one becomes oneself or someone else in solitude. And how does one find the “world within oneself”; are the elements which constitute this world always present within and we unearth them, or do we create them anew in solitude? What is this world? Is this merely what we think and feel and like and dislike, and what is our purpose?

The kheer became halwa, with a wonderfully grainy, yet creamy mouth feel and the rich flavours and textures of milk, jaggery, sabudana and seviyan brought me comfort. One can’t go wrong with certain combinations of ingredients – like flour and fat, and milk and jaggery; they always combine to create taste and comfort. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the final product isn’t what you planned it to become – milk, jaggery, seviyan and sabudana would together always be delicious. But you have to have milk, jaggery, seviyan and sabudana.