The windmills of our life
When I saw Eddie for the first time, he was sitting in his oversized chair. He had a wry smile, a story in mind, and eyes of delight. His son, Edward had apologised moments before on Eddie’s behalf.
“He has been trying really hard to pronounce your name right.”
Eddie showing me the little angel helper that he often had pinned up on his shirt.
My name has been mispronounced all over the world, including my own country. It is a part of my everyday that I absorb without thinking twice, yet here I was, amused that someone had really tried before my arrival.
It took me only the second afternoon in a month of afternoons that I spent time with Eddie to realise that it was no surprise that he tried. His mind was gushing with details. Details of his universe that his daughter, my companion, Jan also had a hard time placing in the memories of her childhood. Stories that became my door, my window, my every corridor that disappeared into the distance. I knew then that I had arrived in the very heart of Ireland and wanted nothing more than to follow its winding path.
Kilcooley Abbey, built in 1182. 766 years later, Eddie visits for the first time.
Eddie standing at the very front. His expression as always about to break into a wry smile.
The overgrown grass didn’t allow us to reach the steps of the house that overlooked the abbey. The place where Eddie once stood for a Sunday picnic with his family. Yet the gate that revealed the abbey transported me through its sound. In its extended groan, I could hear Irish laments of the weather through time. Their gratitude to have a glimpse of the sun, their relentless hope disguised in the realisation that things could always be worse.
Our conversations often began with him asking me if I was cold. He would be hopeful for the sun, but quick to remind himself that there is nothing any of us could do about it. The notorious sounding wind that sometimes roamed the corridors of the nursing home didn’t perturb him at the slightest. He was more concerned about the breeze that came through a window slightly left ajar. Lynn, his daughter told us that this breeze was the only chink in his armour. When he was well and Ireland had a rare heat wave, he would still call out to anyone to close any rogue open window because of the breeze. The breeze was his achilles heel.
The wind map of Ireland suggests wind, wind and more wind.
A little look into the wind and its ways revealed to me that the wind Ireland receives mostly comes from its south west coast and this wind originates from the Gulf of Mexico. The other two winds that appear not as often are a frigid wind that comes from the Arctic and a warm wind that comes from Central Russia. The moment I read this, a bridge through time and space was drawn.
This illustration of an eagle eating a snake on top of a cactus shows the legend of how an Aztec god marked the spot where these people would live. The symbol is still used on Mexico’s flag today. The painting is from Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firm by Diego Durán, 1588 AD.
On its easternmost point, the Aztec empire stretched to the Gulf of Mexico. It is where Spanish Conquistadors led by colonialist Cortez started their march in 1518 towards Tenochtitlán, the capital city of Aztecs. This fabled city fell three years later and became a prominent footnote in history’s never ending canvas. That footnote reached me through a friend who had a bookshelf of 15 odd books. A personal treasure trove in 1990s Bangalore. It was my first sighting of a book shelf. And my greedy eyes were soon comforted by my friend Jayanth’s generosity as he lent me a book that helped me frame my own childhood in real time.
The book that introduced me to the Aztec warrior. The cover that made me pay attention to shadows.
Unlike Jayanth, I had no desire to be one of the Hardy boys. I was more curious about the Aztec warrior. A man in the book who was hard to find, a man who was running across the ruins of his people, presumably fixing things back to their former glory. A man who was seen as wise and kind and fearless.
Side note - Now that I see the origins of the mystery wind through Eddie’s windows, maybe from Mexico, or the Arctic circle. Two places I travelled to as an eight year old. I wonder what my first Russian reference was. The name ‘Yuri Gagarin’ is the prompt answer. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space grew up in a small village called Klushino in Smolensk Oblast, the central Russian region where the warm wind that rarely reaches Eddie takes birth.
A commemorative Yuri Gagarin stamp in India introduced in the year 2001.
To understand the violence in my own childhood, I wrote a series of unanswered letters to the Aztec warrior. The address I wrote to was the only reference of the whereabouts of the warrior in the book. ‘Near the Tule tree, Oaxaca, Mexico’. The furthest I went out of my mother’s sight when I was a child was in pursuit of a post man on a bicycle, because I was suspicious that he was throwing the letters away, thereby explaining the warrior’s silence. It took me about three four odd years for reason to kick in and I stopped attempting to send it. This practice of writing those letters however continued as a personal canvas of reflection for a little more than a decade after that. The Aztec warrior was a man I looked upto, a man I one day wanted the approval of someday.
Árbol del Tule or the Tule tree, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Nathan Gibbs.
Local Zapotec legend holds that the tree was planted about 1,400 years ago by Pechocha, a priest of the Aztec wind god, Ehecatl.
Ehecatl is the creator of the wind that takes birth at the Gulf of Mexico.
Ehecatl, The Aztec god of wind with his traditional duck billed mask. British Museum Collection.
Eddie sang this song for us right after we made the long drive from Aranmore Island to Tipperary. Aranmore Island being the subject of our fisherfolk documentary. Each place we passed through, he had a story about. From the girl he had a crush on from Borrisokane village as a young man to the sweet family he met in Boyle town as part of his job after selling his pub and farm equipment store.
Every story started to have a common strain. It held a simplicity, an honesty, a clarity of seeing life through the eyes of a single day. There were trials and tribulations, hopes and dreams, all packaged into a way of life that renewed itself each morning. Building a contraption to hang the clothes was as important as climbing the Devil’s bit (the local hill which legend proclaimed that the Devil himself had bit into rock, leaving a gashing bite mark), playing Bridge at Thurles, to attending mass at the church in Two Mile Borris, to supporting Kilkenny in the Irish sport of Hurling. Every experience seemed to hold equal importance to him. The dignity he possessed in abundance extended to the way he consumed his time.
When the stories inspired by the places that we passed through were told, he saw the Equestrian event at the Paris Olympics on his crackling nursing room TV and told us about the story about his almost familial connection to the Mullins family who are a famous horse breeding family in the country. He spoke of how each of their grandparents came to the pub that he ran for years later on, and they tried to go back each other’s lineage to see if there was any connection. The story ran like a mystery novel, and in the end, they found nothing. He told us this story at least three times. Each time inspired by a horse that appeared either on the screen or by the window. Each time, there was a pause before he revealed the end. I found myself waiting for an alternate ending. His telling of the story was such.
I could really see how frail he was only when I helped him up to go the bathroom or back to bed and when I saw him lift his much awaited 5 pm cup of tea. Staying at his house, I could see photos of him being a strong Irish man through time, a man who fixed everything around, a man who was self sufficient till his early 80s. There was nothing in those photos that suggested that his strength would ever leave him. He hardly complained about his excruciating pain, a pain that I saw etched in a silent grimace across his face whenever we tried to put on his socks or take off his shoes. Yet he never complained about a thing barring of course that gentle westerly wind. He pushed as much as he humanly could before we had to call for help from the nurses. Nurses from my home state of Kerala who adored him and whom he adored right back. ‘Thank you darling’ came his faint voice. ‘You're welcome darling’ they replied.
Eddie in his 60s with Lynn and Jan, his two daughters. I adore this photo because they both lean on him, as he eventually did on them in the month that I spent with him.
He only showed signs of vulnerability every evening at 6 pm, for a short minute, when RTE, the state television channel would play the Angelus prayer. A prayer I had never heard before. Being raised a muslim, experimenting with Buddhism in my adolescence, finding my spirituality as a grown adult through the practice of a Hindu marital art, one would imagine that the Christian faith also would have found me somehow. But that wasn’t to be till I saw Eddie praying. I couldn’t tell why it moved me so much in the very first instance. Yet the more I heard Eddie’s stories of rural Ireland every passing day, the more powerful the prayer became. A series of bells that lingers as much as it moves, that was as joyful as it was melancholic. That was as distant as it was close. That had space for his laughter as much as it did for his pain. That had space for his singing as much as his silence.
The Angelus by Jean Francois Millet. 1857. Musée d’Orsay collection
“The idea for ‘The Angelus’ came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed”
Millet went onto mention that it wasn’t a religious painting, but a moment of pause, of reflection and as I read his description, I realise why this prayer moved me so. Eddie remembered every name, every connection, every detail from the past. The prayer itself was an act of profound remembering. He was the light that flashes through the endless shadow of time, bringing back to life the ones that brought him every sort of experience that made him the man that he became.
Eddie and Jan counting windmills
Despite Eddie’s curious relationship with the wind. He counted the windmills that he saw out of his window every day that we visited him. He gave us updates on how many were moving, how many he could see, as if they were travelling entities. Sometimes we counted along with him. As if we too expected them to be moving around.
In the first week of my 6 week visit to Ireland, I decided to shoot empty frames that could become part of the B-roll for our fisherman documentary. Thanks to a deviation close to the nursing home, the only deviation we came across on the road despite crisscrossing through the country. In that less travelled road, I caught a glimpse of a house dwarfed by windmills. The first time I saw it, all of the blades were facing me but I wasn’t carrying my camera. Everyday from then on I carried it only to see the blades facing away. In the end, on the last day of my visit I took a shot of it despite it still turning away. Now as I look at back it all, I see this frame transformed into one of profound meaning. It feels as if Eddie is sitting inside that house and the windmills are moving all around him.
I remember running to the little playground opposite my house as a child just as a monsoon storm was about to hit and the wind swirled up the dust around in dramatic fashion. I remember running towards it, being fearless because in the hardy boys novel, the clumsy best friend Chet almost gets buried under an Aztec ruin. The book describes crumbling rock, a fast enveloping darkness, a furious wind, but he survives. One part of me believed that I was the adventurous Hardy boy who would inevitably find the Aztec warrior. But a deeper part of me accepted that I was the clumsy sidekick, that it was the only way I could reach the Aztec warrior. The wind I wore on my sleeve as I turned and smiled and nurtured an excited scream in the depths of my throat. Yet when the dust settled, the sky cleared, and all that was left was a little breeze. The fear came crawling back. The breeze reminded me of my situation never changing, of it ushering me slowly back into my every slippery slope back home. A breeze that slipped through doors of which I did not want to be behind. Doors, behind which I stood for hours, wondering if I could walk through.
The last time I saw Eddie, I told him I will be back soon and he needs to give me all the gossip from the most idyllic village I have ever visited.
“I will do that so Naaaaveeed. ”
He said in the sweetest voice. Today as my heart swells in gratitude while remembering him on the day of his funeral. I realise that the strongest man I have known was also a little perturbed by the breeze. I realise that he was an Aztec warrior himself. I realise that I too will turn into an Aztec warrior one day. That is simply how life goes.