MEMOIRS
Coming home
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`You cannot help but admire Uma, who decided to live life on her own terms and reject all that was seen as `the right thing' for girls of her education and background to do, back in the 1970s.'
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UMA RANGANATHAN has spent her life trying to find herself and understand her psyche — and has now decided to put her journey down in a 10-point perpetua font. Writing memoirs is, by default, a journey of self-discovery. Analysing and exploring the ups and downs of a life, any memoir-writer distils experiences into an essence that can be a mantra for living. Uma's book, Mumbai to Eternity: Memoirs of a Laidback Rebel, chronicles the truths discovered during a lifetime of journeys to seek the meaning of existence.
New-age guide?
It seesaws between being a new-age guide to peace of mind, or POM as Uma and friends refer to it, and just being another person's memoirs. The city of Mumbai, where she was born and brought up, is one she keeps returning to for all the familiar constants of home and friends, but its contrariness also drives her crazy. Over the years in Mumbai, she spends time as an advertising copywriter, a freelance journalist and a publications officer for the World Wildlife Fund. After a brief stint in Europe, living off jobs that come her way, she returns to Mumbai to run a school for the deaf. The money for the school and her interest eventually run out, but the journey is just beginning. She realises she needs to travel inwards, and though the sessions with her psychotherapist have helped, she's still seeking answers. She heads back to Europe, where an encounter with Mario and a mind-altering drug takes her into places of her mind she's never encountered before. She returns to India, a little wiser but still wondering. Next stop: Simon Widmer, a Swiss psychiatrist, who has been given permission to use banned consciousness-expanding substances to conduct experiments in psychotherapy. With Dr. Widmer, she finally manages to understand herself and come to terms with her years of suppressed anger. She realises that the world is a rather indifferent place and that we create barriers of different kinds to shield ourselves from looking at the barriers that already exist and that letting go is the beginning to find peace of mind.
Though at times the book seems rather pointless, throughout the reading, you cannot help but admire Uma, who decided to live life on her own terms and reject all that was seen as "the right thing" for girls of her education and background to do, back in the 1970s. She is a single woman fighting to be independent of the traditional roles women, however educated or progressive, ultimately succumb to.
Fear of relationships
Casting aside years of conditioning is not easy, and her doubts continue well after she is on the POM path — "I wonder why I fight... The feeling of being a mother at all... maybe I was fighting too hard. Running away from my confusion in an attempt to save my soul. Running from all that might have done me good, in fact. Not knowing that salvation really lies in giving up the fight and acknowledging your own humanness, somehow. If I had known the things I know now, I thought, maybe I would have lived differently." But she also acknowledges that, at some level, it was as if she had no other option. To give into the fear of being alone would have meant to lose her freedom. And, this fear of getting close to people, whether in friendships or relationships, is reflected throughout the book.
She floats through the past and into the present, picking stories out of nowhere, slotting them in place, linking them to situations she finds herself in, trying to find the ever-elusive POM. It is stream of consciousness writing that doesn't jar; doesn't get rough at the edges. At times it sounds like the ranting and raving of a somewhat unhinged mind, but then it takes a certain amount of guts to let people into your mind, into what seems to be a morass of obsessive paranoia.
Endearing, at times
Sometimes the book seems completely out of sync with life as we know it, but then some parts are so endearing, like the time she floats back to a fourth standard memory of trying to dig a hole to Australia with a friend. At the most basic level, it is a book about the loneliness and restlessness that are a constant in a city slicker's life. Most of us choose to accept and acknowledge and carry on. Uma chooses to fight and to spend a lifetime seeking a greater meaning to existence.
Bombay to Eternity: Memories of a Laid-back Rebel, Uma Ranganathan, Penguin India, 2004, p.289, Rs. 295.
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN
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