Magic at Your Fingertips

We were robbed of it and it is a crime I do not forgive. Covid, that shameless thief, took away the kind physical touch of even the people we didn’t know at all. Let’s be honest: physical touch is the best of the love languages and ever since the pandemic made us weary of being around each other (never mind coming into contact with each other), we’ve expressed that love language even less than before. I will not stand for it.

Physical touch is a deep, primal bridge into each other’s souls and I want to find it again. We owe it to each other to speak this timeless tongue again.   

Covid stole so much love from us—little moments of unspoken connection with faceless strangers. The gratitude you express when you leant forward and gently tapped the rickshaw driver’s tired shoulder when you'd reached your destination. The pure, implicit trust of the child next to you on the plane, when they fall suddenly asleep and rest their beautiful head on your arm, appointing you the cabin crew for their dreams. The shared delirium when you celebrated a last-minute goal at a bar or stadium and you blindly grasp for the nearest bouncing stranger and hug them and jump together in wild ecstasy. The tenderness of the old lady’s palm when you offer out your hand to help her climb the stairs. The unexpected brush with a kindly stranger every now and then reminded us that we are all human.

And what about the camaraderie of a packed Bombay local train car, where the same mass of bodies that moved you—helpless—from platform to carriage, now collectively contorts and parts to let an old man reach the doorway as we near the next station? As individuals, we are each tensed in discomfort; but as a collective consciousness, we instinctively relax our torsos and let ourselves be finessed into new patterns of commuter choreography. A new station looming in window, a new heave and sigh of passengers, a new arrangement of connected limbs forgetting to be uncomfortable. It was one of those innocuous instances of physical touch that Covid took from us. We had taken it for granted and it was taken from us.

We are capable of such profound love and then this evil pandemic stopped us sharing it. It took two years from us – from others, it took many more – but it cannot steal our memories. For seared into our skin is the memory of healing touch from our fellow human beings. We have magic at our fingertips that we must remember again.

Whale Song

I knew I was going to throw up. It was a question of when, not if. I could feel the telltale signs well up from my insides, an unmistakable queasiness I could taste in my mouth. 

We were pitching agonizingly back and forth in our 100-person whale-watching boat off New Zealand’s South Island. I was 14 and I just remember everything being grey. A dazzling grey blur: the inside of our stale old boat was a pathetic plastic grey, the sky above us—visible through great clear glass ceilings—was a chequered grey of thunder clouds and driving rain, and then there was the sea. A glowering grey of dark tumult, heaving and frothing and throwing punch after saltwater punch at our defeated vessel. One more punch would do it. One more punch and I’d empty the contents of my stomach.

I was sitting next to my sister in the middle row of seats, my parents—who were far less groggy than the two of us kids—were glued to their window seats with alert eyes scanning the horizon for a breaching behemoth. It was perhaps a week into our New Zealand holiday in December 2004, just a few oblivious days before the great Tsunami that would change the world. We were doing a classic Bhat Family holiday: driving a modest rental car around a faraway country for 2 weeks, stopping every couple days at a new town to shack up in a quirky youth hostel. I don’t even remember which town we were doing our whale-watching from, I just remember being about to puke my guts out.

The boat would tip backward on the way up a big wave and I’d feel my body rock back. Then the boat would crest the wave and slowly, torturously lurch forward and gastrointestinal plumbing would somersault inside me. I grabbed a paper sick-bag from the pouch in front of me. Another wave and on the way down I felt the air get sucked out of the crowded cabin, my self-control giving way. I felt my lunch come flying up my throat, that awful taste and gagging sensation. I felt so alone in that moment, with half the seated patrons looking outside the windows for whales and the other half looking deep within their souls wondering why they had gotten onto this chunder bucket. 

And then I felt a hand on my forehead. A beautiful, cool, soft palm gently settled on my face and I was not alone any more. The woman next to me, a total stranger, was smiling at me with one hand on my sweaty forehead and the other lovingly patting my back. I will never forget the feeling of her hand, the pure love in her touch.

I looked at her: She must have been in her mid-50s, a little older than my mum. She had short, thinning, greying brown hair—the only grey I remember fondly that day. She wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a colorful shawl slung across her shoulders. Her husband, sitting in the next seat, was also looking at me with concern and care. I don’t know what made her reach over and hold me, but I thank her with all my heart. I thank her to this day.

“Shh,” she said reassuringly, “It’s OK. It’s OK”

I never got her name, I wasn’t even able to splutter a “thank you”. I just glanced at her every few seconds when I would open my eyes for a moment. She made sure I was OK for the rest of that afternoon. She wouldn’t let the storm take me. 

When I feel like life is throwing me around and I’m dodging punches from the deep, I think about how nice her palm felt in that moment. A bolt of the peaceful light that cut through the grey cacophony. That moment, that feeling, has stayed with me for many years because she showed me how humans’ capacity for unconditional love and kindness can rescue us from the churning grey seas. 

A Grandfather’s Lullaby

My ajoba was my first best friend. By about four years old I knew that he, 60 years my senior, was also actually just a silly boy like me and that we would be friends forever. My ajoba—my paternal grandfather—and I had an unspoken bond that I cling to even now, years after he’s passed. My ajoba taught me not just how to climb trees and how make bows & arrows from sticks & string, but why it was so important to run and jump and explore and stand up for those who have less. Whatever positive masculinity I have in me, I attribute a lot to my ajoba. 

We would visit him and my grandma—my dadima—in Bombay every year around Christmas. Up until I turned 10, ours was the perfect friendship. He was still young enough that the youth in his body could keep pace with the youth in his spirit. And I was young enough that I didn’t care for today’s electronic opiates or touchscreen narcotics. This was a time before eye phones and face books. An afternoon at Juhu beach was enough. We would find games to play, we would create little challenges to complete. Bombay was our playground and we would play till the sun went down. 

And then the evening came around and Shambhu and I would be pampered by our two doting grandparents. Even the modest rice-and-daal meal was dressed up to make us feel special. After dinner, after singing our evening prayers, it was time for bed. It was time for the biggest treat of them all. 

Sometimes we would sleep on the bed in the second bedroom, sometimes on the rickety old cots in the living room, and sometimes on a gadda right on the floor—it would depend on how many people would be in the Bandra house that evening and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because wherever we would sleep, dadima would tell us bedtime stories and ajoba would send us off with one final indulgence: his fabled head massage. 

For generations, my ajoba has given these magical head massages to kids in the family. My dad got them, my aunt got them, and we got them. Ajoba had these hands, you see. They were powerful and meaty—the base of his thumb like a chicken drumstick. But they were also soft and full of love. So, when he put his hands on your head, something magical happened. You would be asleep before you knew it. Out like a light, before your mind had enough time to fathom dreaming. 

He would spread his fingers through your hair and bring them back together again. He would squeeze all tiredness from your shoulders and pour it into your sleep, like someone ringing the water out of a washing cloth. The best ones were when he put coconut oil in your hair at night. Ajoba’s head massage was the ultimate expression of love to his kids, his grandkids, and anyone else lucky enough to be his friend. I don’t know who gave him his head massage, but I do remember one day being lucky enough to return the favour.

I wish I had given him more when he was around—just a little bit more than I did. I wish my hands could remember what it was like to send him off into blissful starlight, the way he dispatched us. 

At the end of a hard day, when I am full of anxiety, sadness, anger or confusion, I try to remember ajoba’s magic head massages. I try to remember being a boy, sleeping next to Shambhu on a balmy Bandra evening, knowing that I would wake up again, tomorrow, to another day of endless love form doting grandparents. Ajoba’s head massages were telling a child that they are held, today, tomorrow and forever. His hands ruffled through your hair, whispering that the playground is open tomorrow as long as you let your inner child out to play in it. I remind myself, when I can, that I am still my inner child and that there is always a playground open tomorrow if I let myself seek it. 

All the peace you’ll ever need

And yet all those lovely feelings–the stranger’s kind palm on my forehead and my grandfather’s doting head massage and everything else–do not even come close to the cosmic comfort of laying in bed holding close a woman you love. It is the greatest feeling in the world and there aren’t enough words in all the love languages to describe it. There is no safer refuge in this universe, no moment more utterly transcendent. It is all the peace you’ll ever need.

The gentle curve of her hips, the quiet small of her back. How you can whisper something in her ear and feel her sigh in happiness and cling to you that little tighter. I love the smell of her hair when she rests her cheek on your shoulder. How nice it feels to kiss her forehead. In those intimate moments, lit only by the glow and drizzle of the distant city out the window, the two of you are all that exist. You hold each other for long enough and your bodies connect at a level your minds couldn’t fathom. Human beings were designed to touch each other, to hold each other. You learn how her breath sounds when she’s smiling; you don’t need to open your eyes. I love the sound of her smile.

I have no story to tell because it’s a feeling that needs no story—not one bound by words anyway. If you have someone to hold tonight, just hold them that little closer and make them smile. How lucky you are.