Nobody told me there’d be days like these

Poorva Paksha

There I am reluctantly seated on the edge of a sidewalk with my dying cat, being pelted by the hail of a sudden icy storm. There are no cabs available due to the weather, and I can’t walk home, because the feeble cat wouldn’t survive the sleet and cold. So I sit there, shivering, and trying to figure out how to get little Sparkles and myself out of this mess.

Even if I reach home, there’s no electricity, no water, no heat – the contractor we’ve hired for house renovations breaks as much as he fixes, and he refuses to take responsibility and repair the damage that his workers have wrought.

As I remorsefully reflected on both my current location and the nearly-equal misery of my longed-for home, I received a text message from my 18-year-old daughter who was supposed to be coming home from college in London for her sister’s 16th birthday, that she had missed her flight connection in Frankfurt and that there were no more flights available that day. She would have to stay overnight there, but she had no place to stay, no onward ticket, and no money for either of them.

‘Nobody told me there’d be days like these/ Nobody told me there’d be days like these/ Nobody told me there’d be days like these/ Strange days indeed/ Strange days indeed’.

That was yesterday, and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself then, just as I continue to today. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and instead of wishing her this morning, I yelled at her for being late to school. Later, I realised that I had neglected to wish her altogether. With the extreme stress from constant calamities, my nerves are frazzled. I could list everything going wrong right now, personal disasters everywhere and all at once, but there’s nowhere near the space for it here and you, dear reader, definitely wouldn’t have the patience.

‘Nobody told me there’d be days like these’…

John Lennon’s Nobody told me was recorded in 1980 shortly before his assassination. Yoko Ono released the chart-topping song on an album a few years later, with her own experimental song, O’Sanity, featured on the B side. Ono’s bizarre lyrics, I must admit, also pretty squarely reflect what I’m feeling right now:

‘It’s only sane to be insane/ Psychotic builds a castle, and neurotic lives in it/ I don’t know what to do with my sanity/ When the world’s at the verge of calamity’.

We’ve just moved to a new country, and things are not settling well.

‘Everybody’s runnin’ and no one makes a move/ Everyone’s a winner and nothing left to lose.../ Everybody’s crying and no one makes a sound.../ Everybody’s smoking and no one’s getting high’.

I am playing John Lennon on repeat. Contemplating his lyrics and his life. And I’m meditating, trying to destress and decompress before I really do lose my sanity and explode. Shanti, shanti, shanti.

‘There’s a little yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu’…

One of the wisest things that Lennon ever said was that ‘time wounds all heels’. It’s very true. None of us gets out of this alive. It’s not time that heals our wounds, it’s perspective. Listening to Lennon, meditating, helps change one’s perspective. I realise that there’s another way to view my sorrows:

I’m so lucky to have shared nine years with this cuddly kitty, to have given the creature shelter, when most of their species suffer, starve and die horrible deaths. Maybe my house is currently inhospitable, but unlike billions of people around the world, I have a home, and have for my entire life lived in relative safety and comfort. My daughters can be irresponsible and a nuisance, but they are healthy, happy, and have infinitely enriched my life – how lucky we are to have merely the travel problems, birthday or school problems of the petty bourgeoisie, rather than what most of the world has suffered for millennia. Time wounds all heels. Lennon got four bullets to the back of his head.

Dear readers, what I’m trying to say is this. Our lives are blessed. In moments of clarity, despite everything going wrong, I know mine is. Sure, it’s an unjust world, profoundly so. But self-pity does nothing to correct that. Perspective does. Music helps.

‘Strange days indeed/ Most peculiar, mama, roll’.