An older friend of many years told me that my piece on biking reminded him of some white man's book about walking the city. He couldn't remember the name of the author or the book. And then misremembered it as Khushwant Singh's beautifully illustrated (with watercolors by Suddhasattwa Basu) book on the seasons in this city. I went looking for it and bought 4 books, testifying something about this city that I have felt since childhood, years before I ever got to live here.

Turned out Sam Miller's was the book he was trying to recall. And Sam Miller took me to Thom Dunn's poems... apparently Dunn's early poems became known for his 'unembarrassed portrayal' of the interpersonal conflict of human romantic attraction. I am moved by this review, this rare acknowledgement of the war between people when they start to want the other but are unwilling to admit it, denying the power the other has, wanting to challenge and tease it, wanting to hurt the other in vehement refusal of the vulnerability to being hurt oneself. Till they start themselves to ache when the other hurts, and the line vanishes between hurting as a verb and hurting as an emotion... 

I seem to have lived this journey with two people in this life so far. 

I believe both of them were part of the pull that I felt for this city; both belonged to this place and were here in the years when it started to tug at me especially strongly. The first I met almost immediately after starting to study here, and he introduced me, virtually, to the work of the second and to his existence. I met the latter 12 years after that and am still, for the last 8 years or so, negotiating that interpersonal conflict with him.

Poetry does to us what koans are supposed to do to the monks. 

Reading Anne Carson, whose choice of words made me look up 'koan'.

My period is knocking to be let in. I wasn't quite ready for it, but more than that I now realize why I've been sleeping uneasily the last couple nights and why I've been waking up groaning in response to dreams and half-dream thoughts admonishing me for who I am and how I am hurting others around me. 

Our therapist had, just before I broke up with her, challenged me with the proposition that I needed to feel exceptional, that that was why I persisted with my daily life activism, arguing and rebelling against family, traditions, and society, and feeling the need to point out and counter their small mindedness, their racism, their prejudices, but also their counterproductive and limiting Indian-parent-behavior of refusing to acknowledge that their children are adults and more importantly, are their own individual beings. Since then, despite brushing it away as "that's an ambition, not a need; and everyone considers themselves exceptional, otherwise what's the point of consuming energy to stay alive?", I've been putting that question to myself again and again, wondering if she was right and I too haughty (or too insecure) to accept it. 

two nights ago, getting into bed, I asked him if I was (a)Odd (b)Smug (c)Both. After failing to ignore me, his forced response was a safe "(d)Neither, and (e)I don't know", to which I added, "The correct answer was: Stop thinking so much about yourself!".

As far back in life as I can remember, I felt odd and alone, left out, different, unwanted, but also like I had a secret voice and thought within myself that others did not seem to have - almost like I was chosen by something supernatural, something that was especially benevolent toward me. I remember standing outside my classroom in lunch breaks when I was possibly 5-6 years old, looking down at my classmates running and playing around; I don't remember wanting to join them. 

Growing up I started slowly to turn that feeling of odd-ness and being left out inside out. I started to convert it into my shield of honor, into a "but I do not even want to be with you, or like you". I started living in stories, in books (at first comics bought for me by my mother and slowly books won as prizes in school, and then borrowed from libraries), movies, the Mahabharata on TV, and my perceptions of what went on in others' minds and thoughts. 

In my teens though I started to become popular, never as a desirable girl but rather as a fun companion who could also help with schoolwork, possibly because I didn't care much for rules and yet somehow managed miraculously to ace school.

I've grown up to be a contrarian, a rebel in all the small ways. There's a friend at work who keeps asking me if we are obliged to do this or that, and my response has usually been a rhetorical, "what do you mean by 'obliged'?". I realize that that word doesn't much exist in my dictionary. That I do not function like most of my colleagues do, led by crumbs of incentives into an unquestioned direction, and when they try to help me with friendly advice to do this or that to make my life easier or more successful, my knee-jerk reaction (thankfully not revealed often) usually is, "I am not like you, I'm better than that."

A few long-time friends have seen through my politeness. Even a few new ones have now started to glimpse it. Otherwise I usually keep it wrapped up, at least for a long time, to not scare a new acquaintance with my odd-ness. Because soon as they realize my oddness, they feel one or both of pity or envy, and when they realize that I've begun to proudly own and embellish my oddness, they expect my condescension and my superciliousness. Those last two I often do not express, but when someone showers me with pity, I can't help both spewing out. Because you cannot pity me for what I have chosen, can you?!

Him.

Long before I ever met him, I was both infatuated with him and felt like I understood him. One of those para-social one-sided connections you feel, somewhat like for celebrities. And then when I probably first saw him, I felt his eyes on me. Of course I had dreamed of him knowing and loving me. But I knew very well the distinction between dreams and life. In life he was not supposed to notice me. I found myself both star struck and dumb, and indignant. I hadn't prepared this script, I didn't know my lines. I alternated between feeling angry at him noticing me and at his impertinent gaze, and pitying him for staring at me; between freezing and turning tail with fear of being known to be ordinary or worse stupid, and teasing him and feeling my power over him; between being frightened of wanting so much and realizing it was within reach that I would flee, and with time a little bored and just returning the gaze - which is when I realized that at least some of it was as if his eyes couldn't help it, which is when I also started to sympathize. And then when I saw him after more than a year - a year in which I had had a radical haircut - I stared at him, angrily, because he seemed not to recognize me, not to remember me. Till he put two and two together. His reaction to recalling me and to the change in my behavior was to deliberately walk almost right into me, at a moment when I stood in a small static crowd - all of us staring meditatively at snow-capped mountains in the distance. I wonder how he thought that would help. He stunned, scared, and angered me; I cursed "Dude?!" half aloud, wrapped up my body in its ready curtains, and simply walked back and out of that space. But in just the next moment he walked up to me straight and sane, smiling and addressing me, and we chuckled at our madness. 

Its been years since then, we now know each other better, and I have been helplessly documenting our story.

These mornings I wake up with this deep immense sadness that here is yet another day where I will not see him, not yet. He now somewhat understands how hard I find it - approaching him, talking to him, till I am actually doing it - and how his eyes see me and affect me. Its been a while he bumped against my shoulder deliberately while I was laughing and talking to someone else. I now am somewhat able to stop myself from fleeing, or invite him and prepare for his presence. Although even now, after apologizing for it, I will sometimes turn my back on him and turn to talk to others in whispers so he doesn't hear. 

But now I know that even if I were to simply tell him how much I miss him and how much I yearn for his company, there is this insurmountable distance, beyond his or my control. Why does he have to be so much older and so much more successful than the nobody that I am. And why does he have to be known to me through my significant other.

So much of how he and I have learned to know each other has been wordless. 

He has now become like a drug to me. I crave his company, even just sightings of him. And then when I get them, for a brief moment of time I am high and delirious. Till he looks at me with those eyes, really looks into me, and I feel transparent and naked and want desperately to hide, and thus I run away; or till he suddenly asks me to dance with that extended arm of his and his ear coming close to my mouth to better hear my protest, and I shout out at him to get out there and I will join him, (a visible intimacy between us that stuns others around), but then I join the floor later far away from him, playing it cool, when all I want to do is be with him, learn those dance steps with him, teach him teach me. And then after the high has died, I want more and again. I have begun to feel the futility of mustering up my courage: I might do it once or twice, for a moment here or there, but then I will be caught unaware, and I will smile and blush and become blind, and tongue-tied and frozen, and then run.

I have not felt like this about anyone in my long life this far. And I feel like I need to confess; if it isn't already obvious to him. He does read me like a book at times. At other times he observes what I eat, how I eat it, who I know and how I smile at them, how I fumble for words and have others ready when he needs them, finishing his sentences for him, how I think beyond how others do, and what theories I seemed to have formed. 

"how did you learn to hold fruit in your hands" - Laura Marling.

Her. 

Before I ever met her I had heard stories. Other people did not seem to like her much. But I was somewhat enamored by her, by her grace and her saris, by her always quick preoccupied walk that seemed to show she didn't want us, that she didn't care for us mortals. 

And then when I first met her, I did not like her. She looked me and my dress up and down, judgingly or enviously - I couldn't say which - but also kept coming to me, sitting with me, stopping me when we crossed paths, and asking me all these questions. My answers were often repudiated by her as being too simple. She told me I needed to put on a rhino skin and put myself out there, and she asked if I wanted to help her out with some boring paper-desk-work. But there was an honesty about her, a directness, and even when I did not like her I was taken by her.

Update/continuing; date: Dec 10, 2025.

She is afraid, of being stuck in elevators, of riding bicycles, of the depth of oceans, despite being someone who cycled in her youth for exercise (I mean which girl in India did that in the early 80s?!) and despite having learned to swim as a child in another country. She hides herself, in the various roles she plays in life: a wife, a mother, an academic and a professor, a guide to other younger researchers who look up to her, are scared of her, in awe of her, a daughter in law, a somewhat celebrity to all the universities that invite her. I am none of those to her, I have none of those relationships with her. I wanted to get to know the deeper her, the person beneath all these roles she plays, the person who is tired of wildlife safaris because she accompanied her husband to so many; the person who somewhere through life developed a distaste for physical movement and realized it only after it was done, but who still stings when her husband points it out somewhat dismissing her comment about joining me on my morning runs in the park between our homes; the person who didn't remember the last time she had some Fenni and whose husband still tries to sneak some alcohol into her glass hoping to relax her but the person who is genuinely annoyed by this; the person who understood deeply the pain the character of Kate Winslet felt and fought with, in Mare of Eastown; the person who confesses her fears but gets offended when I point out its irrationality and thus the need to conquer it; the person who barely eats out and knows nothing of the world that exists and is changing right around her, but who travels the academic world; the person who laughs at my persistent invites and assures me she wants to get to know me too, but then doesn't answer her texts, and calls only to thank me for silly irrelevant things; the person who warms up to me because I get her son a chair to add him to our post-dinner dinner table, who doesn't quite get my quizzical look in response because I am not a mother and it was just a chair. I still cannot forget the many ways she has looked at me, when I said something poignant about traffic choices and constraints, when I received her for a conference and she tried to thank me for the chocolates but I wanted to keep friendship at home and not mix it with work, when I talked freely into the mic and introduced her as not needing an introduction, when I teased her husband, even when I cooked for her but dismissed her comments coming from across a generation gap as being ridiculous or missing the point, when she was telling me how she hadn't been able to work much that year and suggested a housewarming at my new home and how I had to cut our conversation short and open her car door for her to leave because I didn't have more time to give her. 

Every time I asked to take her to lunch (she likes the kind of food I do but does not eat out) she would try to turn it into a coffee meet, like the ones she does with her PhD students. And then she possibly got offended because I didn't gratefully take whatever crumbs of her time she was willing to give me. How she was struck awkward when after that I turned up for a memorial for someone in her family. How earlier she had once called to thank me for acting courier to her tupper-ware, and how in response to my concerned "Is everything okay?" (because there was no need for a thanks call for something so irrelevant) she replied openly "yeah, yeah, all is okay". 

Damn, as I write this ode to her, I realize how in love I am. Two days ago, I met a friend who brought her up and told me that she was possibly going through a tough time at work, where she didn't seem to have much support for what she was trying to do. Both of us concluded that other people didn't understand her. That conversation brought her back on top in my mind, where all these months I was trying to move on from her. I felt all over again like she needed me, like I alone could give her something in this life in this world. 

I am drawn to anxious people. Another someone (younger) I have felt an inexplicable sympathy toward, told us she has OCD.

Do I feel like I'm their balm, or does their anxiety make me feel more sane myself? I think I like how they relax around me.

I got more honest. And now she's pushing me away. It hurts but is also making me sick. 

Some people are paralyzed by the thought that we will all die someday. But mostly we don't let that occur to us.

i have been borrowing books from a wooden cupboard in a faculty lounge, where the books seem mostly untouched by the people who work there. dusty and some even mouldy. there are more than a few historical books, some very good ones, especially those i would not have come across otherwise. i am reading one that i will now probably not return; instead i put a different book back to thank the nameless mysterious donors to this library. the author of this book says Jawahar and Edwina met first in Singapore, on an occasion when all three of them (Dickie included) were mobbed by an admiring audience to the extent that there was almost but not quite a stampede of sorts and they had to rescue each other from being trampled upon, which they apparently did laughingly. that kinda explains the informality J&E shared, but also all three of them were part of. 

for the last few years i had been worrying but also procrastinating to get my body checked up healthwise, especially my reproductive system. this last week or so i finally found the time. it had been more than a couple years since my last full blood tests, and i had never before visited a gynae. my sister in law had once joked that i must be virgin if i had never been to a gynaecologist. and given how we still have a lot of trouble with the explicit act of sexual intercourse, and how enjoy other forms of sex a lot more, that felt like not too far from the facts. moreover i believe i am finally in perimenopausal stage, petering out slowly but steadily to losing my reproductory powers.

so i finally went to a doctor. and she recommended a bunch of tests, ultrasounds, sonograms, etc. one of the sonograms was TVS (trans vaginal sonogram) and naive me didn't know what it implied. i have many years before had some ultrasounds done, when i was sick or recovering from jaundice and my body skipped a couple periods. i remembered the gel on my tummy, and thought the TVS would be similar but might go lower down and closer to my panty line. despite the whispered warnings by the doc or her helper (i forget which) that that hospital's TVS technician was a man and if i didn't like that i could go elsewhere for it. 

i did go elsewhere without googling what TVS really was, and noticed that everyone kept repeating those letters - at billing and in the supply chain of humans who finally took me to the testing bed - with a special emphasis suggesting both extra care but also some degree of secrecy to it. for the ultrasound before the TVS they need you to sit around and drink bottles of water to bloat your bladder as they said. "ab lag raha hai? zyaada der to rok nahi paoge naa aap?!" anyway the ultrasound technician rubbed that gel with the wand in her hand, made me turn on either side to get scans of my ovaries etc. and then said "urinate now and then we will do the TVS". i was so full of what had the potential of urine, that the sound of that word and the permission to finally let it go made me believe i could do it right then and there, and it took me a minute to realize what she meant and to stop my muscles from relaxing. the loo was surprisingly very clean and i thankfully did my job. when i was back on the bed i was asked to strip waist down and the word 'panty' was mentioned in hushed tones both as a question and an answer. the technician realized i had never had TVS done to me before. and she explained it, asking as a second thought if i was sexually active. i responded in the affirmative with the qualification that i did not enjoy penetration much, hoping that would excuse me if i were found to be a virgin. she said most women don't. and then she inserted a phallic thing coated in a condom and lube into me. i felt it probe only when it entered and then when it exited. and later relating it to him, explaining how simply it went in unlike our personal escapades, we joked about the angle and how we could use this learning when we next tried. he said i wasn't supposed to have enjoyed the medical test - rape in my words with some prewarning and partial consent - to which i replied that would be better than the pain/discomfort most women feel, and that the fact that i didn't feel it within me precluded enjoyment. was it just me or did most women not enjoy penetration?! and maybe biology meant it that way??!! i asked the technician if most women did not like it, and her answer was she had meant that most women didn't like TVS; as far as the real thing was concerned of course it depended on personal preference. we smiled. 

i had another medical rape a day later, when my doc asked me to go in happy baby position, while nude waist down, and either punched something in multiple times or sucked something out in a syringe multiple times, for a pap smear. he and i joked about that later too. and the doc looking down into me said almost laughingly that my cervix looked healthy and that it was usually pregnancies and childbirth that injured it and left it otherwise. one of his cousins had told me that i would possibly have a harder menopausal transition because i had not had children. i asked my doc this at this moment and she refuted that matter of factly, confirming what i had once read somewhere that procreating kills our bodies partially or wholly (in some species). 

the doc was surprised that i was married and had been so for more than a decade because i hadn't liked giving my name as a Mrs. and she was more surprised after inquiring whether i was thinking of having children when i said, well all these years we did never decide in favor of that.

that same evening we went for a play. by rural women in MP. and we took one of his younger colleagues, a woman, along. the women who were actors had also conceptualized the scenes, based on their personal experiences - what being a woman felt to them. they had been helped by some social workers and theatre experts to realize their ideas into theatre form, without a written script (cos the women were not literate) and with pictorial storyboards instead. the theatrical advice given to them had been put your bodies in the center of it all. it was mindblowing how they had done just that. with minimal dialogue, out of which most were songs, they strung their bodies into the scenes to create a very visceral experience for four rows of us the audience in that intimate theatre. we, especially the women in the audience, laughed, danced, cried, and shook with the anguish that their bodies related. and then after the performance they sat down and wanted to talk with us. a man asked the first question, a plain stupid question about some water bottle used in a scene that seemed from another world that the women inhabited. but his stupid and unselfconscious loquaciousness served the necessary service of breaking the ice, making us laugh and open up. we talked about how it had moved us. and i thought back to my doc visits, to the community and customs (older than science) of gynaecology, to my travels in metro these last few months in the women's coach (to swim and back), to my relationships with my sister and mother and mother in law (and her rejection of feminism), and all the ways in which women are the same everywhere in the world and how we sometimes band together and understand each other without words, how we stand for each other, and how at other times we beat each other down. most men in the audience didn't fully get the performance, and i realized even some women did not - the younger colleague with us took the cannibalism scene, when one woman eats the others alive, literally, till i gave her my understanding of it. 

these women who were both creators and actors in the play had wanted to communicate how their bodies felt when they were decorated by other women on their weddings but how they were chastised when they wanted to look beautiful otherwise when they felt so. various other universal emotions. in one scene, one woman repeatedly says that she couldn't meet your eyes because she knew how you usually looked at her. that's when i started to become water. 

a couple days before that i had texted him. and he had rejected my asking for his company. but now he is in my phone and i in his. 

Nusrat's Afreen Afreen... ufff what lyrics.

"Aankhein dekheen to main dekhtaa rehgaya

Jaam do aur donon hi do atisha

Ankhen yaa maiqade ke wo do baab hain

Aankhein inko kahoon

yaa kahoon khwab hain;

Aankhein neechee huin to haya ban gayeen

Aankhein oonchee huin to dua ban gayeen

Aankhein uth kar jhukeen

to adaa ban gayeen

Aankhein jhuk kar utheen

to qazaa ban gayeen

Aankhein jin main hain

qaid asmaan-o-zamin"

I had an epiphany in a bout of possibly perimenopausal insomnia, brought on by my husband's anxious mind's possibly disturbing dreams and his resulting tossing and turning around in bed last night (his meds have been tuned down a bit). 

Idealism, living by what one thinks are important values, is my top value. I seek and try to inculcate this in myself, and am hugely attracted by it, and also supremely repelled by its opposite when I witness it. My ideals have changed as I have aged though. Sexual fidelity has been examined and found wanting, and has been appropriately replaced with honesty. But also with something akin to being true to some deep self, acknowledging what one truly wants and needs sans hypocrisy, and this implies ceasing to deny our bodies and souls. As Blake repeatedly stressed, body and soul are not different things, and there is no exaltation of the latter from abstinence of the former. 

For this time and place in my life, it means I need to stop burning bridges to kindred souls when I find them, I need to stop running away and turning my back on them. And start taking steps toward the light that sparks when we touch. Its the very least, before our short lives end.

But if we are all (at least a little) bisexual, then just like an intensely affectionate friendship is possible between two women, so it is between a man and a woman. Sex is just one way of building and expressing intimacy that also fulfills the basic human need for physical touch, but is not necessary within every human connection especially if one is getting some sex with at least some one.

Am reading about Jawahar and Edwina. I wonder what their first encounter was like. 

Too many men, these last few years, are unable to hide how they feel drawn to me. What about me is different now than before? Is it my childlessness, my deceptive youthfulness accompanying my greying hair and maturity, my last decade before menopause, or some long delayed but found at last comfort within my skin and openness of my body. Or is it my erasing shyness and genderedness that reduces some distance with them? 

A few of them led me to believe it was their age, and mine, and the years in between; the combination of fading youth and dawning wisdom at my gender and age that made them feel accomplished and yet younger in my company. Men touching 60 or a few years beyond who cannot help but gaze at me and sometimes find their feet walking toward me. I have been quiet but sympathetic to some of them. Of course other than the one. 

And then there are the men about my age and some younger who I've felt be surprised by me, and how they are pulled by my gravity and playfulness. 

This is a strange age. In which I'm both lamenting the death of a younger me and celebrating a quiet but confident coming of age of sorts... all that feeling undesired in the first couple decades of my life is turning on its head within my know and seek circle of people; with random strangers that make up the somewhat inanimate world around it's a little of the opposite, when i was young I was supremely conscious of my growing body and their eyes on it, now I am defiantly oblivious of how they look at my shape-changing body (other than the hungry desperate men in and around swimming pools sometime, who also fail to embarass me).

And then there is something of the nuance we all gain with a decade or more of being married or beyond, that helps us discern the myriad ways in which you can feel for someone. The lack of jealousy of someone's spouse when you feel yourself drawn to them, the understanding of what it means to have known someone half or more of your life and to have lived the small moments with them as they change and do not change, as they bewilder and frustrate you and yet feel so predictable, and how their proximity and distance go unnoticed sometimes. Marriage cannot be explained in words, and married people's understanding of love, affection, attraction, lust, friendship, and those unnamed froces that bring and keep people together - that inexplicable chemical magnetism that's almost superhuman and telepathic, and that calm naturalness of someone's close presence and touch - is unsurpassed. There was a time I wrote about being safely able to be friends with the opposite gender only with married people aware of their commitment; now not only has that barrier melted with age and years, it seems to have become a catalyst for unsaid unnamed inexplicable warmth and connection.

I feel like writing is leaving me, like sketching has long left me. two career options no more. I'm also bored and exhausted with my paid work. 

But one of the nameless trees in front of our home turned out to be Jamun. Its been dripping it's purple fruit.

And I spent almost a month just reading and doing nothing else (other than cooking cleaning biking swimming and taking a short holiday in which sis and I ended up fighting). And I fell off my bike but am alive and unbroken; kind strangers stopped to help me and kept me company while I bled, waiting to see if I needed an ER visit.

I also asked her out a couple times, and realised she doesn't have that kind of time for me. That she's always taking care of someone other than herself... what was I wanting from her I still don't quite know other than that when she's at our place she relaxes and does nothing for a change.

And I got a life-changing massage on my birthday. One in which I felt naked at first and then didn't care as the masseuse's fragrant with oil hands and forearms reached into every nook and cranny and fold and burrow in my body, while she poured her life story out to me. Other than my nipples and my crotch, she bossed my body like I was a baby. 

When I chance upon him, unobserved by him, I see an old man, either unaware of or denying his frailty. But when I raise my eyes to meet his, its as if my eyes find their home - a place where they want to be as long as, held, and oblivious to everything and everyone else - till the warning voice within me reminds me of the inappropriateness of it. 

Fighting this is painstaking but also feels futile and potentially wasteful given the preciousness of every moment of life and the fragility of it.

The last time he was here, and just before leaving, he said 'thank you, this was very nice' to us but really to me, not looking at me but down and within himself, which is unusual for him (is more my style). I believe those were not easy words, but that he was following my example, of trying to put into words difficult to express things, our deep regrets and appreciations in words of apology or gratitude. 

Delhi is home to various species of beautiful flowering deciduous trees that are actually not native to India. Most were probably brought and planted here by the Brits; many are native to central and south America, some are native to Africa. We have given them local names, indianising them and commenting on their flowers and fruit, sometimes with local innuendo. 

And you know how trees are, often silent and reliable, reassuring but ignored, like women in human society, till they suddenly burst in color, blooming and dripping their pollen, flowers, and nectar. Its then you notice them. So far just part of the green background, when they're in bloom I realise their names, or look them up searching the images of their flowers on Google lens or sending them to my mother who does that for me often. Almost every couple months, every season, some tree or the other is in bloom. The start of the year is often followed with the semal flowers, deep blood red in leafless trees painting the city alive. And when the last of them has been squashed underfoot and the tree starts to leaf out again one forgets which trunks and branches were that beautiful. Recently, on a rare April visit to sundar nursery, we discovered the Maharaja tree, two of them, only because they were in bloom flaunting their bright pink brush like flowers (resembling the plumage that decorates Maharajas' headdress) and littering them around the entrance; April is usually too hot for a sundar nursery walk and thus the ignorance so far. And today on my drop-bar-super-light-and-cool-new-bike ride I stopped to pick up and admire and later look up the flowers of the sausage tree (called Balam kheera) named after their phallic fruit. 

I'm sitting in my balcony now admiring from above the white speckled red flowers of the gulmohar in front, and wondering whether the amaltas follows it in bloom time usually or whether the gulmohar overtook the amaltas this year. And how I admire and then forget the season of the silk cotton flowers and the yellow trumpet flowers and how I've been meaning to look up the two flowerless trees in the front garden for months now but because of their lack of flowers, I lack the urgency to admire, name, and appreciate them.

I'm reading Maria Popova's Figuring. her women heroes that she writes about in this book are exhorting me to persevere in my work (repeating a much-needed message that I saw also in the feedback from my midterm review), whatever my work is in this world. sometimes I feel my work is to be an example of a goal-less dripping sponge who immerses herself in everything and anything that moves her in this magical world, who digs tirelessly in spots no one would think of digging, for the pure fun or joy of the digging itself, and then exhausted would prostrate herself under the trees the birds and the wind, giving up to the fatigue while bells ring around the world waking others and keeping time in their clockwork lives; who would have nothing to show for her adventures and explorations but her half-remembered unverifiable stories and the lingering joy and sadness of her being which she emanates, upon continual self reflection with her eyes looking inward when relating them, which are also only partly share-able. that anything else is human hubris, to capture and want to define and explain, to kill sometimes only to view and record the inner workings of the beauty of this world. can this indolence, what comes easily to me and is my base nature, be my work or am I just being lazy.

but also I thought women would have a different perspective on hard work, perseverence, success and contribution; and yes, some of that is true in her writing of these women. they cared about creating or discovering more than about the accolades their creations received. 

------

a few days ago we met some old friends. one of them I always had an inexplicable shared warmth with. he had recently, accidentally, found a 13-yr-old email rant from me, one he never replied to, and he read it aloud to us. I first thought he was making up a story to pull my leg as he often does. from that I went to prepared embarassment as his reading started. and from that to a small sense of awe for my younger self, with a feeling of self-acknowledgment of "I guess I was always tending to be who I am today; this is my work and my destiny, my personhood." viewed from a regular person's life, I am ridiculous, a failure who partly revels in the failing and thus a double failure. but in doing so I question the desirability and definition of 'success', and illustrate another way of being. but of course I have been lucky that the world has let me survive despite my futility and failure. 

another friend put it aptly in words about me, that I don't know the concept of picking my battles. these two are married to each other.

and yet another, after some indignation, absorbed my argument regarding the actual implication of the work 'woke' rather than its caricaturization to imply left wing or 'liberal' which itself has been caricaturized enough. a day later she also messaged me thanking me for having 'moderated' the conversation very well such that it was general interest and fun. I told her I hadn't realized I was moderating anything; but I did also realize that I had interjected a spasm of incessant questions about a friend's spell of unemployment and past jobs from another friend.

a few days ago, in an online group training for workplace behavior, I felt I aptly put into words the subtle questions that might come up in trying to isolate and define a case of sexual harassment from that of unwanted commentary which might be sexist, colorist, or simply needlessly judgmental. someone thanked me in the comments section.

reflecting upon the above I realize I love talking and writing about myself. a work friend would call this solipsism; I call it valuable self-reflection and insight.

------

and after nights of intermittent sleeplessness and days of replaying conversations from the dinner at our place that night I realize my last post was incorrect. although I reached out a 'hand of friendship' (what does friendship mean?) to communicate both that his curiosity for me could be platonic and that contradictory to my crab-like backward/sideward movements, even I desired to know him or be in his presence, his intentions are fuzzy and unclear still. the last time I had instantly shrunk away from the slightest accidental graze of my fingers on his on a glass, and had felt him notice that. this time the tips of his fingers touching mine did not perturb me, but left me wondering if he had designed it, to test my courage or to communicate something else. there is also surely still something wordless between us, in our eyes when they meet. but do I even know my own intention?

"It is almost banal to say, yet it needs to be said: No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves." - Maria Popova.

And her quoting Emerson in this book: "Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. The scholar loses no hour which the man lives."

And her quoting Ursula K. Le Guin: "Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

I tried to normalize my awe for him. And his curiosity for me. I mustered up the courage to show myself and to meet his gaze back. I invited them home again because in work settings I kept feeling inferior and self conscious. I've never been more disappointed with my success at something so long planned and aimed for. The awe mutated into fine dust, or Daal if you know what I mean. There wasn't any poetry or beauty left in it. And I felt abandoned and alone in this world, like the default of most before; like the language I thought he and I shared without words had evaporated or possibly never existed and I was revealed talking to myself. 

I also managed to dig up the generation gap.

I wonder how I will behave the next time I see him. Right now it feels like I'm going to be avoiding crossing paths for a while.

I took 3 Are you in Love quizzes online, and got the robust result 'You are falling in love/You are definitely smitten/You are in a flirtatious phase!!!'. FUCK

Everything is constantly changing. So why is death permanent?

In the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy, 42 was the answer to the universe's deepest questions. I turned 42 this year and coincidentally felt like I had unraveled everything that truly matters. and now the year is coming to an end, and what an end with us moving again. Its been a year of multiple fallings in love. I'm obsessively crushing over someone who I barely get time with, I've fallen in love with the person I married all over again from scratch despite the early morning sleep-marination smells that I was just last year finding so unbearable, and I keep getting this out-of-body falling in love with myself through the intent gaze of the person I'm crushing over. They say the secret to a successful long term love-sex relationship is that the couple fall in love with each other again and again as they change with time. What they don't say is how sometimes you can be so full of love you could be falling for many people all at once while you re-fall for that one. 

I recently met someone whose existence I had known of for about two decades but had not been introduced to ever before or if we had then neither of us really remember it. I opened the door to him and stared at him a minute because he looked so foreign and then within the next five minutes we were chatting with each other in a half teasing half smiling manner. I blamed his 'reticence' for us not having met or known each other, and he was amused by my choice of word. I was later pondering how and whether he and I could have fallen for each other 20 years ago, or whether the person I and he were then would have made that impossible. 

I wasn't always so full of love and affection and openness, even though I still carry my shell ready and prepared to hide in it. In fact I do the latter quite a bit with my obsessive crush when his eyes seek mine and I stubbornly refuse to meet them, self conscious of other people. I do not take compliments and attention well. Even when he said my chicken curry was delicious, even when one of the reasons I admire him is that I believe he says only what he really means. And now I've been obsessing over how it is unfair to him that he and I share the knowledge of him observing me, but the fact of my awe for him is still my secret.

But I want to talk about other people. We made friends this year. It was the year of us having home dinner parties. I was also hosting my department's seminars and annual conference this year and invited and met and befriended some sweet folks. And in this month's conference season some of those people, men and women, came up to me with warmth and affection and I embraced their companionship. 

These sparks of human connection, such affection and attraction, I feel, is what is precious about life. 

In Accra last year and Nairobi this year I met a person each, while walking somewhere in those cities alone, who took me around showing me things and leading me. Those experiences would never have been memorable without those guides. In Accra I found him in a community center and I paid him for showing me around; in Nairobi he appeared out of thin air on a trail opposite the Giraffe center and claimed to be a ranger. The first showed me some boxing gyms in the Bukom community in Jamestown in Accra. The second showed me tree hyraxes, a viewpoint, his chicken coop and the birds that mysteriously get into them to steal the food despite there being no gaps in the coop net; he was dressed in ranger khakis and never asked for any money, only for my phone number to send me his pics of animals, birds and flowers, in response to which I gave him my email id, and then soon as we were approaching the end of the trail and could hear human voices on the main road again he excused himself as taking a route different from mine and disappeared as into nowhere as he had come from. Looking back now both those people feel like avatars of the same spirit, and remind me of those tales from Indian mythology I grew up on, wherein deities visited mortal folk in avatars to test them, and I feel I failed those tests at the margin cos although I was open and friendly with them I made the Accra guy believe that I would come again and I never did and I stopped responding to the emailed pics sent by the Nairobi ranger. Husband says the ranger was just hitting on me and he in fact got worried for my safety in hindsight on both occasions when I narrated what I had been upto. My response, which came from somewhere deep within surprising even me, was 'what could they take from me that I wouldn't heal from'. I do believe that fear of other people and the fear of how they could hurt us spoils possible beautiful interactions with those who have no such intentions. In fact the ranger mentioned something like this, in the context that I wasn't behaving like other tourists, in a city where tourists are told to beware. That same day I also went to lunch at this beautiful farm-restaurant Cultiva where they put me at the bar cos I was alone, and another lone luncher came and sat next to me, who I chatted up, learning he was a runner and a swimmer and then said bye matter of factly when I was done eating. Later in Masaai Mara though some of our camp staff said some sexist things to me on our last day there which offended me and the friendship I showed toward them; there was not a single woman on their staff either. 

But even I can still be afraid, of getting too close and hurting others, myself, him; of appearing too familiar with someone I am not supposed to have that kind of access to. And this fear of mine can lead to me ignoring or offending the very person I most want to know. His wife has been visiting my dreams and I've been letting her down there. 

we were watching The Substance the day before yday. in various parts i groaned with the discomfort and pain of watching it. it is brilliant but gruesome and gory. for the first time i saw him unable to watch something. he covered his eyes by pulling up his tshirt over them. i bent down to him (i sit on the sofa, he on the rug just below me) closing my eyes and his, and wondered aloud if we were doing the same thing as the character in the movie by being unable to stop. then i stopped it, but we played it again, and this time i forwarded the gory bits. the end is an explosion of excesses, visual and visceral. 

it is about sexism and body image issues, about social pressures on women, but i also felt it was about bulemia and anorexia, about the anxious compulsive and the other self in OCD (the more the anxious self indulges in compulsions believing it will help, the more restricted the other-normal self's life becomes), about how we all have different parts within oneself and how we indulge one hurting the other sometimes... 

i think i have started to understand better what is meant by the 'female gaze'. it is somewhat an undoing of the default male gaze, wherein everything is viewed from the perspective of men. what pleases men, how do they want women to be to look to smile to behave. am i pretty only when a man finds me so. am i attractive only when i realize a guy cannot help being attracted to me. 

i have before on this same blog asked myself the question of whether i get turned on by men who are turned on by me. and i do think there is something to it. something conditioned something i am unable to unlearn and undo despite being conscious of it. the quiet guy I met in Budapest had some of that effect on me. 

but with this person who i am finally getting to know after six odd years of eye-locking across public and professional spaces, it is different, although still heavily influenced by my position and conditioning. i first heard of him when hubbby (then not) raved about his work around 2005, and i helped him understand something in his paper/work. i absorbed that hero worship which continued over the years. and then about 12 years later when he interviewed hubby and then finally hired him, i had this premonition or dream about him and myself. 

yday he and his wife finally came over to dinner. i barely slept the night before and this night after. i've been conversing with him and her in my head for months now and the conversation grew more intense in anticipation. i usually ensure i do the things that scare and excite me, but i also believe it is futile to try and fight a strong pull for something. i have written even about this in my post about binge watching, addiction, and emerging like a sphinx from what remains after giving in to desire to its expiration. 

i was the one who did not give up on inviting them despite multiple failed attempts. after knowing him, but also them, for a lil bit, i had to have more. but i had to have more also to erase his unconscious gazing at me which happened recently again when he saw me after about 5 months: i was having breakfast with hubby at his conference where i had tagged along to holiday after and felt someone's gaze on me. looking toward i noticed him and raised my eyebrows in acknowledgment as if to say 'ah there you are, how have you been?' but that did not break his gaze and took me back to before dining with them; somehow i had hoped and felt that that would change things given now we knew each other. i then half waved, gently, to break his stare, and he averted his eyes, mumbling a hi which i could not hear because he was a few tables away. i went with hubby to say hi after we were done eating to once again break that ice. and we chuckled over some inane things, all three of us. he said 'See you' into which i read a million meanings. 

so they came for dinner last night. as usual i felt i messed up with not serving not heating not cooking the right way. both him and his wife left aside the baingan peels, the baingan i had cooked in that Turkish manner without its minced red meat and substituting for the pine nuts with corn. i wanted to tell them it melts in the mouth despite looking tough and stringy. but i felt that would be too controlling and instead gulped down my disappointment with my baingan and their eating habits. 

he turned the coaster next to him over and examined it carefully. its from Japan but we haven't been there yet, its a gift. i noticed him do that and wondered what he thought of it in connection with us. he peered at the books in our bookshelf, at our pics on the fridge and the travel magnets there with a half smile on his face which made me squirm/blush. he watched every facial movement of mine as i spoke with him, his wife, their son, my hubby. and i have realized no one else i have known in my life so far has understood the language i speak with my eyes and my face, the way i smile or stifle one, the way i give a lopsided one sometimes, the way i draw back, or guffaw, or just look back into people's eyes with intensity that sometimes when i am self aware of makes me uncomfortable myself. 

i have now increasingly been seeing myself as i imagine he has been seeing me. after they had left yday i sat in his spots and tried to see what he could have seen or did see. his gaze is defining me now. why is he so curious about me, and what else is it if not curiosity. for some unknown reason i am not curious, i already feel like i know a lot about him, from hubby, a lot that also feels coincidentally like me myself. even yday he said he had recently found Ronny Chieng... ditto here. 

and today is his birthday. i knew yday, facebook had told me, but i did not reveal that, and i somewhat also forgot. 

i found it admirable when his son said that his father was probably the best loser in sport he had known, but laughed out loud when he also said that when he does win he cannot help gloating about it for days. 

when they were leaving he said my name aloud and blanket invited me over to play Bridge with them. 'Oh' was all i could muster.

two days ago, hubby was teasing me in his parents' company. he said in all my childhood pics, my sister could be seen free and childlike while i was always prim and proper. and then yday while we were waiting for these guys to arrive, and i told him i was feeling hot and cold because i was nervous, he teased me again saying i would now have to be a 'good girl'. i asked him if he generally thought i was a good girl, and what that meant. i have forgotten his exact words, but they were something to the effect that i wouldn't do bad things. am i too much of that?

Update on April 20, 2025:

Maybe it is not just conditioning but human nature to be aroused when desired. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote 

"The love within us and the love without

Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,

We scarce distinguish."

And although she wrote this about people in their youth, I have come to realize that we all are children within, pretending to be adults pretending to hide our vulnerabilities. Like when hubby's mom first complains that we didn't pick up her call, then when I informed her that we were leaving home to meet my parents she feels sorry and guilty, and then messages me an apology and is disturbed and cannot fathom why I wouldn't reply immediately (while I'm driving). Like when he in conversation with my husband would recall also having read about this Russian scientist who refused to eat seeds from the seed bank at the cost of starvation, he would suddenly look directly at me (unsettling me) as if to say "I too read".