The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, published 1937

(Not going out at all, except into the garden, on the rare days when the sun peeps out. Not today. So, too much time to do some unnecessary thinking:

Random thoughts about my antecedents.)

 I believe this book by Lin Yutang spoke to an impulse already in me –interestingly, it came from the shelves of a man who was a declared hedonist. I was nineteen years old when I read it, going through an ascetic phase. I had suddenly come alive to the fact of the poverty and misery in India. I had fallen in love for the first time (for all of three weeks) with a young man who had no time for me. Deep contemplation and life-choices were in order.

  The refugees from newly-born Pakistan were fleeing into India still (this was 1954); they had trickled through to Kerala in the far south of India. All were sick, starving and in some cases, mutilated. Muslims from India were going in the opposite direction, similarly traumatized. I read too much, had just finished looking for inspiration in the old and new Testaments, The Baghavad Githa and Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. Thompson’s An Indian Day, which came at the end of this readathon stunned me. I could no longer live my casual, gossip-and-cinema existence with my friends. I drew away, started wearing white clothes, put my jewelry away and became vegetarian. My aunt said I needed a laxative and my father looked hard at me and as usual commented, ‘She’ll get over it.’ He was right. But my friends became impatient with what they called my posturing and abandoned me.

  Lin Yutang spoke to me directly about enjoying all the sensual things in life. Use your senses, he said. Enjoy the murmur of the crickets, the gurgle of a happy baby, the birdsong, all the sounds that make you stop and listen. Look for the beautiful in your life, flowers, sunsets, whatever gives you pleasure. I remember reading that one of the most satisfying tactile things in life would be to scratch an itch. And so on with food, smells…

  This was a gap-year for me and I had time. We lived surrounded by rice fields, as far as my eyes could see. Every evening, I sat on the edge of my compound, blissfully alone, with my latest book in hand, relishing that lovely feeling of contentment. Later, in the night, as the rain poured in torrents, noisily, down the Calicut tiles on the roof, I lay awake and listened. The crickets set up a soft whir and the bull frogs croaked in their watery domains. I have never since enjoyed a more complete existence.

  All my life since then, I have let my senses revel in the world around me, the people in it, and the spaces around me. I remind myself, agnostic that I am, that this is all there is; don’t let it slide past unnoticed.

  Some Hindu spiritualists believe that we are living in Maya, a hallucination. This life does not exist; it is magical entertainment for the Gods, of which there are so many in the pantheon.

  So, wherever I am now, I am open to the sights and sounds and all that make me aware that I am alive. I stroke my cats till they purr, watch the goldfish in the pond (they are not unlike us humans) and the sunlight glinting on the silvery Kochi backwaters near my house is magical.

  Within all my insecurities and discontents there is quiet core of completeness, thanks to a Chinese author I stumbled upon at the right time in my life.