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".

I wish I had learned how to swim before I developed cellulite. I wish I wasn't embarrassed of my dimpled thighs, showing out of my swimsuit. At a hotel recently, a guy and I were waiting for the chlorine crystals to dissolve and the foamy patches off of them to dissipate, and when we finally opened our bathrobes to get into the water I was conscious of the guy's gaze on my suit and thighs. and I felt him dismiss me because of my cellulite and the stretchmarks so visible on my dark skin. The guy felt unconscious of his aging body and to me his swimshorts clad white hairy middle aged body looked perfectly normal, a common sight. 

Most of the lionesses we saw were sleeping, or lazying. But one stood up a while, alert and looking toward thr leopard's tree, walked a few paces and then gave me a view of its side profile. One was running away from a jeep catastrophe (stuck in a ditch, the start of an orchestrated human-jeep team rescue event). And one, alone, emerged out of a bush when I spotted it and caused our jeep to stop, with flies covering it's face (possibly on blood from a kill), and slowly disappeared deeper into the bush. Every time a lioness moved upright, I watched her muscular body, rippling thighs, like womens' underwater, where each movement leaves reverberating echoes in the skin and muscles around it.... And I was conscious of the lionesses' unselfconsciousness regarding their bodies. How lovely to be like that.

First written: Sep 2024

Updated: February 2025.

there are 3 cousins i am kinda close to. all of them are men. one on my dad's side who still lives in that city of my earliest childhood memories and feels sort of left behind by us, me and my sister, who often feel sad and maybe a little guilty for having abandoned him there. the other two on my mom's side, both of which my sister is not as close to as i am. one is about 3 years younger than me, and the other about 5 years older than me. this older cousin i barely knew when i was little, but around when i was in high school, mom, me and sis lived with his mother for some months in that family house built by my mom's father, and soon after in an apartment in the immediate neighborhood; my own dad was then posted in a city where my parents did not want us to live or study. this cousin was doing his MBA then and would come home for vacations. we would sit and talk, often when the others had retired to bed. he told me about his seemingly cool life then in that elite post grad institute where i probably aspired to go to too. he had also just finished studying at one of the best undergraduate colleges in india, in delhi, and delhi had been calling me in an inner voice for some time. i looked upto this cousin. i thought he was wise, unconventional, pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and liberation from the norms of the society i had been raised in, as he possibly had girlfriends then and more importantly he was of the opinion that our society was too moralistic about sex, which he evidently found claustrophobic. 

i was part of that society for him then, and at one point when i curiously asked him about some girl in his yearbook he reacted angrily and with derision about how i came from a moralistic perspective of sex and male-female friendships. i probably had something of a platonic crush on him, i was in awe of him, liked spending time with him and looked forward to his visits. his angry burst did not disrupt any of that because i just let it erupt and die down and afterwards we were as if it hadn't occured. 

once my dad was visiting while my cousin was around, and because my parents occupied the bedroom that mom, me and sis shared, my sister and i had to sleep in this large common room which was also the dining room, the tv room, and also had a large bed where visitors often slept. i remember my cousin was to leave the next day, and i insisted that he slept with me and my sister. that raised a strange argument and discussion in the house because the adults, our parents, felt something was wrong in cousins of different genders sleeping in the same bed but because no one mentioned the word 'sex' and no one wanted to even suggest it, and because i persisted in my demand adopting this attitude which was seemingly unaware of what the problem might be, everyone relented knowing how i admired and looked upto him and also possibly because this 'middle room' was open, large, quite the opposite of any surreptitious space, and shared windows with my parents' bedroom. throughout the night i remember my dad kept waking up and coming to these windows to make sure 'nothing happened'. and i didn't sleep well because that bothered me. it made me feel the weight of how the world expected any male and female body when in proximity especially at night to only be capable of having sex. but it also made me feel like i was my dad's property and thus his responsibility to protect. but that it wasn't me really that was his responsibility but simply my virginity or my 'honor', because i had never seen my dad so worried about me in other respects. it also made me feel very defiant such that i slithered on my bed closer to my cousin, pretending to be asleep, as close as i could get without touching him; and then i slowly started slithering downward to the bottom of the bed where i thought i might be out of my dad's view. i felt like i was challenging my dad to say the words and be open about what he was afraid might happen. even in those days i realized, without having the realization of it, that the society that was bringing me up was hypocritical. 

months later, when we lived in that apartment in the neighborhood, and my dad got transferred to another city, a much larger, more reckless, more 'immoral' city in my opinion then, and i was upset (but also excited) about moving to, leaving my high school friends who i then felt were the people of my life, my cousin was brought in by mom to speak with me, to console me about the move; he knew the city better than us and had been working and living in it. since then my cousin and i have met and stayed in almost constant touch throughout our life. ours is also a close-knit family on my mom's side sometimes to the point where three generations of people gather meet and talk together which i have been finding annoying as the oldest generation has been tending farther and farther on the scale of religious and cultural staunchness or fanaticism. 

except for the years when i was living in that other country, my cousin and i would also call each other up on weekends sometimes, when not in the same cities, and would have long conversations. he was the one person in my larger family (other than my parents, sister, husband) who was curious and open to ideas other than his own. since our return back to india, in fact, this cousin showed even more curiosity to our ideas, way of living, but mostly our political ideologies and how we lived in and understood our marital life; he was still of the opinion that our society was moralistic about sex, he still looked down upon that, he still put me in that category too, but he also understood and possibly wondered about the way we defined our marriage, with fidelity and loyalty being the cornerstones without the need to procreate and grow our family and without co-habiting with parents (which i think is the norm even now in urban india as long as the younger married couple lives and works in the same city as the guy's parents). 

meanwhile my cousin had had multiple girlfriends, had married one of them, and after many years in the marriage had realized how incompatible they were and got a divorce. the rest of our large family had always known how incompatible his then love and wife seemed to us and thus him, how he had been smitten not by love but by the glamor of her (she is an exuberant, ambitious, loving, extrovertish and stubborn person, who was a TV actress and an event hostess, and who loved the spotlight of attention). he had had a few girlfriends after the marriage as well. 

but this post is an effort to understand this last weekend when my cousin said to me that he needed to recalibrate and dial down our relationship, and show up in my life less often. that he had, in his love for family, misunderstood or misjudged how welcome he was in my life. and that my definitions and my way of life were becoming too much for him to bear in his cost benefit analysis. something to that effect. in response to something i had said to him. we had been walking in Mehrauli archaeological park, him, me, my sister, and my husband, and had just sat down in its restaurant to eat something. maybe the food or something else led the conversation to our recent visit to his hometown, and how there, an aunt of ours had felt obliged to invite us home and cook for us even though she had been sick. and how or whether our appreciation of her cooking, despite me being down with a travel tummy and not wanting to eat her puris and halwa, somehow perpetuated the belief and the custom that women live to feed and care for people. my cousin was of the opinion that given that our moms and aunts grew up in a world where they were not just taught this, but they started to derive their happiness mostly from others' happiness when being fed and cared for, the least we could do was continue to give them that happiness. i of course, differed by saying something to the effect that it was upon us to show them other possibilities of living, and that we were part of the problem if we just ate and praised their cooking, sometimes against how we truly felt about that, and thus kept demanding them to continue as they had been brought up. he said something about why i was always wanting to change people rather than accepting them as they were. i acknowledged that i was and replied that other people had told me that i was 'too progressive', and suggested that maybe he and my other cousins didn't get my perspective because they weren't possibly as progressive. that angered him and from there it spiraled onto how he thought i was calling him a racist (despite my confused protestations that i had never used that word for him), that i didn't need to judge him and everyone else all the time (to which i pointed out that in telling me that i didn't accept people and tried to always change them even he was making a big judgement and how people should be willing to be judged by others if we all do it all the time; he did relent to this grudgingly), and then eventually into a calmer declaration that he couldn't have someone in his life who thought she was more progressive than him. i remember saying that we probably had different definitions of what progressivism meant, that we would all always be less or more something than the people in our lives; and i remember the restaurant staff asking us to leave because of our loud argument disturbing other patrons. somewhere in that argument he also hinted at how me not letting people wear shoes in my home and not letting them take their chappals onto my living room rug had offended him; how he was usually the sorts who went with the flow and how my rigidity made him feel constrained.

this cousin was brought up by my mom and her younger sister, substituting for his mom in his early childhood as his mom had not really been prepared for or wanted motherhood, especially that for the little boys she gave birth to. When my mom got married and left her paternal home, it was her younger sister who cared for him and he considers her like a mother. his mom had wanted daughters, if any children at all, and she was particularly fond of me.

once, years before he found the woman he would marry, his mom had visited him and stayed with him awhile. we used to live in the same city as him then. i remember my mother getting a call from his, an agitated hurt call after she had found condoms amongst his belongings. he had been unmarried then, probably in his mid/late-twenties. i also remember hearing his defense to the find, something about using them for masturbating, and possibly some hint to how that was a 'healthy habit'. i remember talking with mom and sis about it, that of course he was sexually active with his girlfriends, and that we shouldn't have to lie about such things simply because our parents couldn't accept the natural truth. his mother had always been somewhat neurotic too. (some years ago now she slipped into a deep depression, soon after retirement from a long academic career; she is a little better these days.) i remember feeling that although he, unlike many others in my family, dared to live a life beyond the boundaries of what our society permitted, he did not have the courage to come out with honesty about it. this was early 2000s. a few years later i would fall for this guy, who would take cross-country trains/flights to stay with me for weekends, once a month or so, and we would have feverish sex, without condoms, with him pulling out to prevent conception. the only person i have ever had sex with so far, who would also teach me much before we had the privacy for sex, that i needed to tell my mom something to that effect was up despite my growing up with a father who we had been taught by my mother to hide our lives from.

another time, a few years after the above episode, he was arranged to 'see' a young woman with the potential of them getting hitched. they lived in different cities then and he had visited her city a couple times, met her, kinda liked her, but was not sure of anything yet. I remember a family gathering somewhere around then, wherein we all sat in my aunt's (mom's younger sister's) living room and conversation turned to whether he liked this woman enough to send out a signal of commitment to her family: some sort of unofficial engagement between her and him. I remember him saying something like 'he was interested in her but wanted to be able to date her for a while before he would be able to understand whether he wanted to take it to the next level, but because this had started through the 'arranged marriage' network and because her parents were probably orthodox and would not let her date him as he wanted, he was willing to get engaged to her only so they would allow them to spend some time getting to know each other; and if in good time he did not feel like he wanted to marry her he could always break the engagement off'. I remember being angry at his cavalier attitude and words, and remember pointing out to him that what he was suggesting was somewhat dishonest and ignored her and her family's values but also that it might hurt not just her but something of her family's reputation to have an engagement broken off (if he could already foresee that possibility). I also think I remember my sister and mom agreeing with me in pointing this out, while no one else in the family said anything. our words angered my cousin, there was a loud outburst from him in response, which ended in us shutting up, and in my aunt fussing around him in an appeasing manner (which to us felt misplaced).

my cousin started visiting us and staying with us a night or two, since our return back to India, on his short visits to delhi sometimes. we would take him out, share our only proper bathroom then with him, lay out our sofa-bed for him in our living room in our tiny flat then, and talk, play games, well into the night sometimes. once we took him out to dinner and i remember us talking about the movie Gully Boy, especially about the women characters in it. whether the girlfriend was crazily possessive or normal in threatening other women in her guy's life. whether the other character was stereotypically a 'white woman in india' given how easily she kisses the guy, knowing possibly that he is in a committed/complicated relationship with someone else. i remember these last words coming out of my mouth, and how i thought the director always cast Kalki Koechlin in such stereotypically white women roles, blissfully unaware of indian culture. and i remember my cousin accusing me of moralizing her desire for the guy, that that was how 'people' behaved when they felt attracted to someone, that if the kiss was reciprocated it grew into something more but in itself it was often the first expression of desire; but how would i know that in my small morally restricted world ... ending with the pointed question of 'had i ever just kissed someone like that?' i hadn't but i didn't then say that aloud. i thought about it for a long time, i still do. how for me there are eyes and words and body language and careful thought way before a kiss. how after a few months of dating my husband, i had on the phone told him how natural it felt for us to be breathing into each other's ears and necks, and i had asked him why he hadn't yet kissed me. how the next time we met we kissed, first barely brushing our lips against each other's, and then when i wanted to kiss him on the cheek as a goodbye how we ended up in each other's mouths. he used to call me a prude for the first few years we were together, affectionately. but even today, i wouldn't kiss someone to express my desire for them unless i had pondered over the consequences for both of us till its death; desire to me is still mostly emotionally and intellectually felt, much more than the need to kiss. 

for days after that argument with my cousin in Mehrauli archaeological park i went over every word said and not said, and i came to the conclusion that he misunderstood 'progressivism'. that although its definition is about wanting to change, people and society, to a more equitable and just one, he was probably unaware of it, and that in accusing me of wanting to change people he had in fact acknowledged that 'i was more progressive than him', but somehow he did not like the sound of those words, because unlike his judgement of me they sounded more in my favor. 

he recently called to wish us a happy new year, and we talked like nothing had happened to disrupt our relationship.

in one of my classes this semester, only 4 students are enrolled. and on any given day, 2-3 turn up to class. 2 are guys, 2 are girls and only one of them is kinda regular. a few days ago only one guy and this regular girl were there when i started talking. i showed them the attendance sheet i had created and put up as it was still the start of the semester and i started logging that day's attendance in it. the girl interrupted me with a slightly concerned "maybe we can wait for 10 minutes ....". my instantaneous reaction (to all such words by students in general) was "don't worry about other students/people". and then something about her guileless concern about those missing the attendance call made me add to that, "you know we women are brought up with the training that it is our job to worry about everyone else, and it is not fair". the other kid in the class was at this point busy writing something down in his notebook and seemed disconnected from our conversation. and the girl replied to my words with "but shouldn't everyone be like that?" implying whether it was not an ideal world where everyone was worried and concerned about everyone else, and rather than me telling her to tone down her concern for others which i was suggesting came from our conditioning as women in this society, would it not be better that we also conditioned men like that? i don't remember my exact words, but i said something to the effect "No. this is probably coming from not just age (and some experience) but also how we (human beings) have started to understand these things better... there is only so much worry one can take, and worry turns to stress, and moreover we don't have the same information as those other people have for whom we might be worrying so that worry might not be helpful often..." i did not say that sometimes it might actually worsen things for those others or for third parties in the situation, that such worry can often turn women into nags, that it is not just not fair but also possibly counter productive... she nodded somewhat absorbingly. and then i started teaching. 10 minutes or so later i just realised that no other students had walked in. and i happened to smile and mention this. the girl student smiled back.

someone asked me this summer "why is it so hard if someone does something for you?". I felt exposed. I also felt like I hadn't realised that person knew me so well. I felt cared for, but also extremely uncomfortable. 

about a month before that, when those guys had fed us warmly in their home that evening, he had asked his wife to pass the bowl of chakhna to me, saying my name specifically. on receiving the bowl, without looking at anyone, without dipping into the bowl or helping myself from it, I passed it further on. I felt compelled to. almost like because he had meant it for me, I couldn't bring myself to take any of it.

but it isn't always hard when someone does something for me. and not for every someone.

I just realised today that he had apologised that day possibly not for his bag that was left with me, but possibly for making me feel uncomfortable, after seeing that discomfort in my eyes.

Laing's The Garden Against Time is like a running blog, about her restoring her garden, but also about her thinking through it, reading about it's history and the history of gardens, gardeners, Eden, paradise, land and its many effects on people and the ways in which it is used personally and politically. Its a lil bit like my own blog, but more painstakingly recorded and more beautifully written.

She is writing about finding the writings of John Clare now, his poems and his 'salvaging' of the land and its flowers around him that was being lost to private property in his time. I realised I was smiling as I read through her descriptions of his poetry and journaling about the various flowers, and realised my expression changed to one of worry concern but also displeasure as soon as she got to his documenting his ill health.

flowers, plants, birds, trees, what do they mean to us. I stare at the monsoon greenery of the neem and peepul. yesterday I saw the black Kajal like symmetric marks on the neck of a tailor bird through my Binoculars. I am continually mesmerized by the plants I tend to on my windowsills and tabletops, the Anthurium someone gifted me last week, my snake plants one with yellow edges and one without, the marbled pothos, my jade (also a gift as a baby), my arrowheads, the ficus I've been trying to rid of something that's eating it by repotting, drenching, sunning, and also giving it the prettiest pot I could find to cheer it up, and my zebra plant a pup of which is just lying unattached to the soil and still doing well. Yesterday I also finally assumed responsibility and replanted some cuttings from a basket of portulacas mom gave me (she refurbishes them for me each time they stagnate) into a lovingly bought wide round ceramic bowl. everytime before I've tried to stick a cutting into soil it has perished. This time I followed mom's instructions, very wet soil, and I was careful to peel away leaves at the bottom of the cuttings. I stuck them into the wet soil lovingly, one by one, keeping branches together wherever possible. And pinched out the soggy snail-like after-flowers, throwing them into the overgrown lane between our terrace and the next. 

these days when I close my eyes I see plants and flowers. And this morning the replanted portulacas are blooming, seemingly have had grown some roots to their new home.

this summer, in Seattle cafes, in an Oregon airbnb, and in a glass sunroom in the store of an olive farm, i finally realized how much i loved and desired houseplants. they had beautiful greens, in different shapes and sizes, some creeping down from baskets, some curling up toward the light, some variegated some marbled, broad leaves, and spindly ones, dwarf succulents and monstera deliciosa's cheese-y holes, some spineless with air roots just lazily flopping around their pots, and some so perfect they seemed almost plastick-y but gave you the feeling of life between your fingers when you reached out in doubt. i love real plants that look like plastic but hate plastic ones that pretend to look real. it wasn't the first time i had seen beautiful house plants, or the first time i loved them. two years ago in a budapest airbnb with sis and hubby, i had fallen in love with the flat with its huge bright windows on the top floor right under the red sloping roof and its beautiful stained glass and art on the walls decor with this half-tree in our bedroom, and other lovely plants around the flat which i remember i went around watering as if it was my home. even last summer in the airbnb in Oaxaca i sketched the potted plants inside, and some peeping in from the windows. in my own home in covid quarantine i had sketched some of my own houseplants, still new from the nursery, the first few sketches in my life i put color to, because the greens and yellows demanded it. houseplants btw are a very millenial thing, but also i suspect a very female thing these days. and the pandemic led many of us toward them, kinda like how it turned birdwatchers out of many of us, around the world.

what was different this summer was that i realized that some of those plants i was seeing in those cafes and in that airbnb, i myself owned, but somehow mine didnt look as grand cos i hadnt bothered to give them space, some were almost bursting out of their pots and i had forced them to remain, tying some, wrapping some round and round multiple times around their pot. what i realised was that at least a few of mine could in fact be grander than their twins oceans across if only i graduated out of being the kind of plant parent that i was - a consumerist who bought, kept, and threw away when they died, to go on to buy new ones. i realised that although that had been the pattern for the first some years of my gardening/plant parenting, something had changed without me fully realising it - that the pattern had broken for many of my plants such that they had been with me for years now and had grown, taller and wider, and were healthy to my surprise. evolution of those that survived in my environment, but also me having learned how to listen to my plants. over years i have been touching them and their soil, feeling whether the leaves feel taut or limp, whether the soil is old wet or newly watered, whether the soil needs sun or the leaves need more. and without consciously realizing, i had managed them better. i still regret the ones i have lost. the beautiful green and yellow croton, somehow all the flowering plants (other than my faithful Adenium and the Bougainvillea with who i had a complicated hard to communicate relationship but that was doing better and i recently gave it to my mom to keep it from moving between her place and mine every time i traveled), one just yesterday that i put out with garbage after trying to salvage it. but somehow the green ones that don't flower often, the ones we desire for their leaves rather than their rare if at all flowers, have been growing on me and some are even thriving now. there is something about plants that do not find it necessary to attract bees and butterflies often, that reproduce by giving off pups in their soil. my snake plants have done this in abundance and i have given them bigger pot homes twice now, the second time after returning from Seattle, inspired by the northwest, realizing it had to be done sooner than waiting to move into another home. i also saw some useful props in the Oregon airbnb, these twisy green-painted iron supports to rein in shoots reaching too far out of the pot; i now use them also to help my climbers get some height within small pots. one of my snakeplants alongwith its pups in a large pot is now a beautiful and much loved half-tree in my bedroom. yesterday i went to buy some pots and planters for a few small window ledges. i probably went to the wrong place - the mall - usually i would have gone to the shops attached to the roadside nurseries. but even then i was surprised to see most pots/planters without drainage holes in their bottom. those would work if i had inner plastic pots where the plants actually live, so a double pot system. but since i haven't been buying new plants, and only need pots to either propagate pups from old plants or to replant those bursting out of their smaller pots, these didn't work for me. i asked a number of the store assistants why they didn't have pots with drainage holes. the answer was the same each time, people are buying to house plastic plants in them. and then one of them recommended i visit this store called Pure; turned out Pure only sells plastic plants and flowers. something fell through and got lost in my world then. plants, animals, the diversity of life is what we hope will counter our 'civilization', but now people desire even their plants to be plastic! i ended up buying some books instead, one about restoring a garden. i came home and couldn't help searching for reasons why people bought plastic plants for their homes. in all the forums people kept saying its convenient and easy, you don't have to take care of them. Duh, well of course. not a single answer even dwelt on the plastic, on us replacing even the hope for this world. i have often felt like convenience is going to be the death of us someday. if people could eat and digest plastic, they would out of convenience cos after all plastic food wouldn't rot, it wouldn't turn yellow, get bugs, hell yeah we might not even need to excrete it. there's no life in it, so there is no risk of death. and now i am reading Olivia Laing, The garden against time, her memoir of yearning for, finding, and restoring a garden (with a house) with her husband 20-30 years older than her; i think it was their version of making a baby in this world before he dies.