A new age, just for you, will be born, my dear.

Photo: The Tower card, Rider-Waite

For a whole year before I got diagnosed, I dreamt of the tower card. 

My dream was always somewhat similar. There would be a large leaning tower that was silhouetted against a crazy, fire-lit sky. So many oranges, browns, reds in that sky, lit brighter by crackling bolts of lightning. As it can be sometimes in the dreamscape, I felt little fear, and only had a vague sense that I was witnessing something of great import. There were people scrambling up the tower, a tower that kept growing even as I watched it, even as the colours in the sky got brighter and the lightning flashed dangerously in quicker intervals.  As a witness, it felt like I was on the precipice of some great thing, though in the dream, I didn’t know whether it was good or bad. Then, there would be a sound, and it would always be the same - like the Earth was cracking wide open, it was the loud roar of boiling rage. The bolt of lightning would hit the tower and I would see it topple, crashing to the ground, sometimes at great speed, sometimes in slow motion. Strangely enough, I would never hear the screams of the people who were climbing that tower; I had a sense that they too were falling, that they were in some danger. But I could never see what happened to them. As the dust rose from the ground, the air around me would shimmer, and I would wake, heart thudding. 

Always, some variation of this dream, except for this one time, when I was one of the people climbing the tower.

I was wearing a white toga, rough-spun cloth, the colour of a frothy egg white, and I had a crown of hawthorn twigs in my hair. I was climbing the tower, a sense of elation and pride filling my lungs, heart, because I was climbing higher and higher, reaching something that had hitherto been inconceivable. I was high up enough that when I stopped to rest and looked around, I could see the undulating plains of the land I was in. Soft golden brown sand everywhere, rising up and down in mounds of dunes, gentle as a woman’s breast. And then, this tower in the middle of it, and me climbing like my life depended on it. In this dream, I remember I felt so much, again, a departure from how most dreams went for me. As I continued to climb, I noticed something was changing, the air was getting hotter and the sky looked like it was on fire, flames dancing across its expanse, stars barely visible amidst the bright oranges and blues. It did not make sense, if I was higher up in the sky, I should be feeling cooler, not hotter, and yet there I was, burning up, sweat soaking through my toga. The hawthorn twigs in my hair were digging into my scalp, everything was starting to hurt. Then the lightning began, crackling energy moving through the sky at speeds I could not fathom, seemingly coming closer and closer to where I was on my upward journey. I looked around, and there were others too, just like me, though they seemed oblivious to the tumult around them, so intent were they in making it, making it to the top. And then, all of a sudden, that sound, that terrifying sound of the Earth shattering, that howl of rage that seemed to come from the very bowels of the ground. I felt the tower begin to shake, slowly at first, and then the disintegration began. My hands slipped and I lost my foothold, and for a blissful strange second, I was floating, hands and legs perfectly balanced against gravity, before I realised I was falling. Falling. Falling. So much dust. 

I woke into darkness, feeling sand in my mouth. 

+++

The image on the tower card is not reassuring in any way. It is a chaotic mess of greys, blues and reds - if you look at it fleetingly, you imagine that this is some depiction of hell. There are people falling off this monstrous grey structure, and a lightning bolt in garish yellow that lands perfectly in the middle, at the top. There is are flames, in shades of yellow and orange, and most interestingly, a crown that is being toppled off, just where the lightning bolt strikes the tower. Who does this crown belong to? What does it symbolise? 

Whenever I see the tower card in a reading, it fills me with trepidation. In some ways, I find it more terrifying than the death card, because at least with death, I sense that there is some benediction, a hint of renewal, and newness, the possibilities that lie in the after. The tower card offers me no such reprieve. It feels like a caricature of being a pawn in fate’s game, of irreversible change that is already happening, being in the middle of chaos, that precise moment it hits you that you’re flailing as the rug is being pulled out from underneath your feet. 

However, what I often forget about this card is that some say it is based on the Tower of Babel, the origin myth and parable from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. This is not just a tale of a door being closed, but it being slammed shut in your face because this *is* *not* *for* *you*. 

The story of the Tower of Babel goes something like this:

The Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens”. While they were building this tower and reaching higher and higher up in the sky, God looked at them and said, no, you are not meant to be here. If you continue down this path, you will falsely believe that nothing is impossible for you (read: you will be ruled by a false sense of superiority).  So, he introduces languages to them, multiple languages, so that they get confused and cannot understand one another’s speech. They are unable to continue building this tower, and end up getting scattered across the lands. 

The tower is never rebuilt. 

I find it a little bit funny that it is language, the word, that ultimately destroys them. 

+++

I came back from Sri Lanka on 17 June, and it is now 28 July. In this time, I have not been able to write, or do much of anything really, besides turn up. I have sunken into one of the deepest states of fugue that I’ve experienced since I was in the US a few years ago. 

Unsurprisingly, I have also been pulling the tower card constantly, sometimes days at a time, in my readings. My good friend, this card. 

In my conversations with my therapist, I break down and wail, asking her why I am still here, in this state of  nothingness, struggling to move forward, struggling to make amends, struggling, period. I understand the tower card at such a visceral level, because indeed, I am that falling human with her mouth frozen in a silent howl. 

One and a half years after completing my treatment, I feel like a thunderbolt has struck me (anew), at the root of everything I have ever held dear. Now, I am looking at the ashes of my past life, and screaming, screaming, screaming, because right before I was struck, I swear I felt I was so close to something, some human idea of greatness. 

Then the cancer happened, and my life changed. And I cannot go back. 

It feels terrible to write that, that I cannot go back to being the person I was before. Someone who was so convinced of getting through life, come what may, someone who didn’t have to reckon with physical limitations as much, someone who didn’t understand what it meant to live with chronic pain and disability. 

Now I am all of that, I am this other person, and often, I do not recognise her.

In the time that I have been back from Sri Lanka, I have been grieving. You see, I never allowed myself to grieve through my diagnosis, because I did not have the time or energy to tend to my wilted garden of a heart while my body was waging war with this disease. I was in full soldier mode, I had to fight, and fight I did. 

Now, a year and a half after completing treatment, when the aroma of normalcy is drifting through my senses; now, when my body is able to unclench from its survival mode is my heart finally able to dissolve its gilded cage and say - now, tend to this pain, this agony you’ve been protecting. Now, tend to your wilted garden. 

It is hard to explain to this to people around me, because for all means and purposes, otherwise known as performing life in a capitalist world, I am very much back. I am thriving, I am travelling, I am turning up, I am getting things done, I am here, baby. 

And yet, I am also not, because for each time that I am able to show up and do, I am closing doors, supplicating on my knees to god and praying, praying to understand this new me, this new life, this new way of navigating my existence; I am praying for acceptance from myself, for grace, that I remain soft, not just to my own pains and suffering, but to those around me whom I love and adore beyond reason. My lips go back to the same prayer I have been incanting for the last few years - 

Please, please, dear Lord, grant me the grace to move through this world to reach my soul’s highest good; give me the grace to trust this process, and in my faith, and in You. 

+++

A weeks ago, A R Rahman releases a song that features one of my favourite artists, Ganavya Doirasamy. 

I hear the lyrics, and a new prayer forms on my lips in my mother’s tongue, I use the word to rebuild myself.

Pogura paadha theriyalaiye
Yaar thandha vidhiyo
Dhoorathil varum velicham ellam
Nee sellum vazhiyo

 Inga parandhu kedakkum boomi
Unakkum thandhadhaiyaa
Ingu irukkum athana saamiyum
Unakkum sondhamaiyaa

Un kavalai ellam
Un kavalai ellam
Dhoosa parakattum raasa
Ini unakunnu oru kaalam
Porakattum raasa…

I do not know the journey ahead of me, 

I do not know if the light I see guides me, 

this beautiful expansive land is my gift too, 

all the gods that grace this land also belong to me, 

all my sadness, will disappear into the wind like dust, a new age just for you, will be born, my dear. 

A new age, just for you, will be born, my dear.