there's something wrong with people who haven't yet had covid, that is if their claim of not having had it is correct. if a disease ravaged humanity the way covid did, and the wave of death, fear, and fatigue caused by it changed us for ever, then if you were not a part of it are you even human?!

No one,

but him and me,

has the time to spare 

to stare

at the lonely dancing peacock

this Tuesday morning.

Even the peahens around it

are busy pecking 

the grain

that my neighbor puts out ritualistically,

before the twice as many pigeons 

devour it all.

While on the other side of us

leaf by dozens of leaves

the peepul

sheds its old avatar

in its annual (or biannual?) molt

preparing for its figs and greenery 

that will invite the migrating 

rosy starlings.

Till then

we wait and watch 

the tree's skin descend 

on our terrace.

And in a futile attempt 

at scooping the leaves off it

I find a stubborn pair

of black red moths

stuck at their rear

busy creating their own new life.

Delhi has been so beautiful this March. Its like it's compensating for more than 4 months of awful pollution. There are numerous shades of fresh leaves, in the range of red and green, and birds have been dancing and singing. The kingfisher is visiting us again today. A sunbird is cleaning her wings and coat. Coppersmiths are flying in and out of their tree-hole-home. Its Holi. And people are starting to understand the idea of consent in playing it. The water is still too cold to swim (I went last Sunday and returned shivering). The habitat international film fest was superb, and fell in the week of my midterm break. I saw different moods of women in different films; there was a focus on movies by women and those from Germany. One of those days I wasn't well, and I took my rest in the Stein auditorium, watching 3 movies, one after the other. I need to start running again though, was taking a break to let calluses heal on the sides of my big toes, and was waiting for new shoes (again) to come. I have fallen in love with this city again, and I didn't think that was possible. Been thinking of getting a bike cos most of my movement is in the small lanes in this corner of the city...

I've had some sleepless-ish nights lately. The aftermath of him visiting my campus and me having to chaperone him around. Took me 6-7 years to be able to talk to him finally this last December, after awkwardly pouring my heart out to someone I've known for ages and suddenly realising he was sitting right next to. When I did finally (the next day) initiate conversation with him, we just looked at each other a minute and chuckled/smiled big. But I still tortoise-shell myself every time he comes at me, and he does do that even now. I skipped half a class to be able to meet him, hoping it would clear the air. His knowing smile and intimate-conversation eyes though scared me and made me withdraw within. But I did recover each time within minutes, pretending to have forgiven and forgotten. We had to walk without others, be in an elevator by ourselves and there was nothing I could think to say other than what I was asked. For a minute, in the audience to his talk, I felt like another colleague could see our eyes locking and feel my disturbance and discomfort. And at least once, or maybe more, I looked at him and felt like telling him he was so old, that I admired him immensely and was flattered by the attention and really seeked to get to know him but also "please don't do that, it makes me want to run away". Our words keep playing over and over in my mind. And I also keep craving to see him again. We live close by, but somehow I only see him in work settings where often at first I will notice him staring at me. Does he not realize the power dynamic here? Does he not realise I am not myself at work? Can we still be friends

happy new year

I don't understand why for days and weeks and sometimes months I don't feel like writing. Even though a lot is happening that I would want to put down somewhere, and even if I have had the time to spare to do it. And then someday I will be reading something, about a writer's urge or practice of reading and writing, that will suddenly - like a tic - make me want to write. But if I'm lazy for even a minute around that, it passes. 

It's been very busy in my mind lately, reading and pondering about the human body, esp the female body, about evolution and gender and sex and athletics (was reading Eve by Cat Bohannon and Sohini Chattopadhyay's The day I became a runner; and then of course movies like Thappad, Mammootty's Kaathal, and She's lost control found their way to me).... The books blew my mind in many ways and the movies jolted me. But it was all way too much to pen down. I've been talking so much about all of these things and the way my neurons are connecting them to whoever has been near me...

And I've been running on a treadmill in a gym for a change, cos the air outdoors wasn't worth breathing this whole winter. Gave me the opportunity to measure my Running stats for the first time. Combine it with the reading and I've been trying to increase my speed and aim a half marathon by next Jan. Apparently women beat men on ultramarathon run speeds, and our bodies are in many ways better at stamina, healing, and living longer. So I'm preparing myself for that next phase of aging in my life, equipped with what millions of years of evolution have given me and the possibility that others' words and thoughts keep opening up. Quite the right time in my own life to encounter all of this, and just when a couple months back I felt like I barely knew anything about the female human body...

In fact even just now I picked up the typing act because I was reading Amitava Kumar chronicling Joan Didion's death and quoting her as saying in an interview that the act of writing is a hostile act because it forces one's thoughts and dreams (unwelcomed but tricked into) on the minds of the readers...

So reader, last night I dreamt of participating in a murder and disposing of the body cleverly, after a busy day meeting a friend, buying fresh produce and then an intro bouldering class with sis and her partner and mine that has left me with leaden arms this morning. The murder probably a result of watching Poker Face too long... but possibly also some creative darker version of feminism being play-acted out. 

it was conference season in delhi. I had set myself three difficult tasks: initiate conversation with three specific people, each much older and more senior than me, each a somewhat awkward conversation, one a purely professional "are you aware of my existence" that might be a future tap for a recommendation, the second a very personal "how are you" after the loss of a spouse that I don't know why I kept feeling persuaded to ask because the person left behind is genuinely very nice, and the third a somewhat acknowledgement of my tangled feelings of awe, intimidation, attraction. I am proud I kinda did all three, not very suavely, with very few words (and more body language), but with outcomes that would pass a binary assessment. I feel strangely and simultaneously light and satiated. today, unlike all other evenings post professional/social meetings, I don't think I will be regaling him with post-analytic tales of every wrong word or sentence I blabbered...

I'm reading Virginia Woolf; feels like I couldn't possibly have read her works at any other time in my life but exactly now. 

A few weeks ago I just felt like therapy wasn't helping us any more, especially not teaching me anything more. Coincidentally, things have been feeling more like our early days and years, not because of therapy but just because. I felt like the need to go to therapy, or that to fix something, was possibly misplaced. Even though it taught us things.

Getting older has been more sobering lately. There have been more than 5 people I've had conversations and connections with worth reminiscing. But yes conversation, the idea of it, the potential it holds, is limiting or is limited. So much more is said by a look, a pivoting of someone's gaze or body toward or away from me, shock and embarrassment, chuckles, and involuntary bodily reactions, ...

There's a conversation without words I have been having with someone for about 6 years now, over rare sightings a year or two apart. What will I say if I could talk? Would anything be valid be true and be sayable? Would trying to put a form to that inexplicable thing kill it in the process? There is a restless anxiety to talk and to communicate, and yet the past has taught me that I have wasted it and that it dies it's death after a futile bout of time.

There were times I wondered why he wasn't insecure of my affections, why never jealous. He said it was because I always told him things. Once he did get angry, frustrated. Makes me smile today when I think of his lack of insecurity regarding me, as he sleeps peacefully while I lie around restless in the middle of the night, reading and writing. We have both been sensible, patient, and loving, even when we couldn't make love, or I couldn't desire him. 

But also sex is more and less than everything people attribute to it.

I haven't had the time to write about many things. about our panic and failed attempt at snorkeling in La Jolla caves in the cold pacific ocean in July. about visiting the US after five years. about mexican food and people, and swimming in cenotes - the cave pools created possibly by the impact of the meteor that erased dinosaurs from earth. about our visit to Ghana (erstwhile Gold Coast) and how the tragic history of slave trade and the opposite of anger that I saw in people's faces there has changed me, made me more humble and compassionate. how we made friends with a local cat in Elmina - the place that reminded us of Goa, both Portuguese colonies around beautiful seas - and how the owner said that locals look at you funny if they see you trying to make pets of animals. how I've started to also recognise the beauty of the glow of darker skin; how I was mistaken yet again for an Ethiopian; how I roamed about alone and random people showed me things; how some flavors in their fermented foods and meat stews were way too strong for me and made me smile while I couldn't continue to eat them. about how I felt my life's journey was taking me to places that felt like pieces of a jigsaw that told the story of America and the world, of the intertwined fates of humans, and how now I want to visit South Carolina to dig into the Gullah food and culture.  

about the apocalyptic levels of air pollution (about a week of 400plus pm2.5 and a couple more weeks forecasted) in Delhi this Oct-Nov where people are walking about without masks making you wonder whether their belief of you believing this to be harmful and hiding from it behind your masks and air purifiers is in fact your fragility and your woke-ness. about transitioning to flowy skirts as I grow older. about a slow acceptance of having aged, while airport officials in Accra still marvelled at my age (and also told me that Indian brides are in demand there because they pay good bride price; technically African ideas of bride price imply the groom's family paying the bride's, quite the opposite of dowry in India).

A realization has been perplexing to me, but it persists and is pressing to be more concrete than I at first thought it might be: people often say exactly the opposite of what they want to say.

Sex education is a very good TV series with beautifully thought out characters who are complex yet consistent. There are actors in it I can never like in other roles, they feel so true to their characters in this show. 

And I started reading Alain de Botton's How Proust can change your life. It is funny, amusing, revelatory and engaging.

Both are reinforcing my realization. 

I dig ideas, and values. And I admire them in others and am attracted to them. Psychoanalysis doesn't quite admit such statements as stand-alone. It reduces every action every behavior every habit and personality characteristic as arising from a need or a need to alleviate personal distress. It wears it's own convenient blinders, and uses it's own convenient language to twist meaning to suit it's perception of succeeding to explain. "a higher need". which I call ambition, because one can easily survive without it but chooses not to in pursuit of a goal. Maybe one 'needs' a goal, you could say; maybe one needs ambition; possibly because without it one perceives life and this world to be pointless and hopeless. But you couldn't say that the ambition satisfies the need for hope then. Or would you? It is somewhat similar to how economics has reduced altruism to 'warm glow'. In both philosophies, one wouldn't do something unless it made one better off, satisfied some need or gave some reward or alleviate some pain or personal distress.

I am reading Sherry Turkle's Empathy Diaries. I was struck by how she says the youth of the 70s, politically conscious and active and idealistic, rejected psychoanalysis' diagnoses of their idealism and actions arising from self distress. That's how I felt when my admiration for and attraction to courage was reduced to my need for the other to listen to my point of view; my need to interrupt and argue against patriarchy taken to be arising from personal distress; neither made sense, neither satisfied me. Unless you argue that I have a need to feel and be different, from others around me; a need to feel non-ordinary.

Turkle also talks about how her work was initially rejected because it seemed unlike the establishment, even questioning it. I remember telling the interviewer who came some months ago researching the question of gender in economics academia, that possibly women collaborated less with other people because the nature of research was defined by men into these tight boxes into which women's ideas, thoughts, methods, and work probably didn't fit very well, and that this might lead to a reluctance from women to collaborate (with men).

And then today I read Marilynne Robinson, "There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival or procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. .... We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and too small."

when I was younger I fell for confidence, even a bit of swagger if I'm being honest. now I realize I am attracted to an open mind that is also somewhat self aware, an openness that is not completely lost, that has the courage to be vulnerable and show it. apparently, Jung said we spend one part of our life trying to prove ourselves, and only after do we understand ourselves and our shadow. 

It is strange that courage and vulnerability are two sides of some same thing. Contradictions that are lock and key to each other. Somewhat like how inoculation is the key to contagion, or how acceptance of anxiety is that to an eventual triumph over it. I feel as a species we have been brave to embrace our vulnerability, and thus cracked some of the secrets of nature.

water makes me feel like a child. at 40-41 now i behave like one when i refuse to get out of the pool every day even after an hour. this summer, whenever i am not swimming i am watching youtube videos about swimming, obsessively. i am found walking between our home and the pool imitating free style arms and imagining improvisations. i still cannot tread water. but i can swim in many ways. and i can flip from back to stomach and back again, again and again, inventing my own style to tread in place. i can do handstands, while the water keeps me upright before swirling me around and throwing me back up. and i can finally go under, crawl along the floor of the pool, deaf and oblivious to the world and the instant i raise my head i find it being led upward gently and magically till i almost hold and push the surface down and gasp for a big breath of air. how did i live this long without knowing this world, this lack of solidity, but which catches me reliably like a friend a mother a playpal whenever i fall in it, and that cradles me like a loving hammock on its surface. i love its density, its resistance, it counterintuitiveness, and its silence. its now even started to get back out of my ears easily, softly and quickly. how is it that i've gone from fearing i will sink when i fall in it to realizing how hard it is to sink? how do my mouth and nose instinctively now know not to breathe in and to start giving soft bubbles out soon as i submerge my head in? the water isn't just teaching me how to swim and float and dive, it is also teaching me who i am and how my mind and my brain learn to be in this world. its teaching me that drills help me make new connections in my brain, new ways of moving that i learn through repetition, and that which felt impossible a few weeks ago becomes elemental almost on its own.

people feel like possibilities.

and i went from feeling friendless to feeling missed and remembered..

therapy is teaching me that people's response to me is often not about me but they themselves. and thus the realisation that there is often no need to feel embarassment or offence or frustration or anger. I'm feeling more magnanimous with this realisation. if people have galoshes or blinkers on because they're just protecting themselves, then I can be the one to extend an arm out and to smile, even if often they don't notice it or are unable to smile back.

and I'm discovering a lot of music. Rosa Balistreri's voice, reminiscent to me of Chavela Vargas', and through the former, the world of Italian folk (try Cu ti lu dissi), John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards because Mubi happened to have Stranger than Paradise on its movie of the day list y'day (one of the cutest funniest movies ever), some i am already forgetting but Spotify will keep in mind for me: Mose Alison, Screamin Jay Hawkins. 

our therapist asked each of us one day to express what we meant by trust, what made us trust people more or less. my answer was long and descriptive, harping on 'honesty' which she later summarized as focused on 'authenticity'. his was mostly "i don't know, its instinctive", but before he said that he also said almost apologetically, "my answer is not as pretty". that sums up a lot of our thoughts or rather our expressions on things. we were watching 'the banshees of inisherin', and at the end he asked me what i thought it was about. "what is it about? i think it has at least a few themes running through it... why, what do you think its about?" "i think its about how people can never really forgive each other." "maybe, but its not just about that. i think it has 2-3 themes: one, is something on the lines of 'posterity' and what you leave behind and what matters to us as human beings; two, how different people value different things and whether it is okay to classify people as one thing or another; third, if there is a third theme, it is probably something about 'niceness' or more generally what do we owe each other. so yeah, as a whole its probably about what it means to be a human being, how we are different, and what we owe each other. there, even here my answer is prettier than yours." both smile. recently i've been on a women's writing spree. Mary McCarthy, Tove Ditlevsen, Toni Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Emma Forrest, Janet Malcolm, and a Magda Szabo that my friend gave me but I couldn't bare to keep reading cos it was disturbing. and today i came across some book review on nytimes where the words "why women need to read other women" caught my attention.

the cup of my desire to write has not been filling up. yesterday, two old men told me that some of my work would not count toward the tenure decision without bothering to specify the line that separated what counted from what did not and without assigning weights to individual items. i succeeded at not expressing my anger and frustration at them but of course broke down after. it took me more than half a day and a night's sleep to wake up with the realization that my reaction was very like that of the apes who express anger at not being treated fairly, about who I was telling my students just a couple days ago in reference to explaining 'fairness' both substantive (outcomes) and procedural (rules). at least i can still laugh, ex post, at my anger. we were watching the portuguese movie 'The metamorphosis of birds' on Netflix the other day which had poetic narration and a strange experiential theatre-like presence. somewhere in it i heard that before we started to understand that birds migrated, people had believed that they had seasonal metamorphosis such that birds seen in one season were believed to have changed into those seen in another season. thus the title of the movie. today we were sitting on our terrace eating lunch when something about the birds around made me mention that aloud again - how cute and interesting it felt/sounded/must-have-been. K didn't quite get it and kept saying that if people saw birds fly in one direction in one season and fly back in the opposite direction in another season, how could they have understood it to be anything other than migration. i tried to explain that birds don't systematically just fly locally in one direction in a season; they usually hang around making travel stops wherein they fly and eat around for days etc such that people wouldn't have necessarily seen them fly only in one direction. and that it seemed very plausible that if people saw one type of bird in one season, then given their ignorance regarding their migration, they might have interpreted the sightings as arising from the metamorphosis of the same birds such that they took on different forms in different seasons. it was hard as sometimes it is hard to explain ideas to someone, esp him. i gave him an example to illustrate the limited knowledge that comes from local observation/information-collection: how early humans (before the ability to fly; sorry, before math proved otherwise) believed the earth was flat cos from our perspective we could only see as far as our horizon of vision which revealed nothing of the spherical nature of the planet. he still looked half convinced. and then the perfect example came to my mind, bringing the idea closer to home, to the birds. the male sunbird changes color only in mating season, and because we see male sunbirds as green the rest of the year and shiny purple in mating season we understand that it undergoes seasonal metamorphosis. similarly if we had never followed birds' long distance flights and our only information was local from place to place, then if blackbirds were seen in spring and some green ones in fall, we might have simply thought that the blackbirds turned green in fall, or vice versa. i really dig ideas, logic, thought, epistemology, ... and i still very much like the person i have grown to become.

when we started dating I could tell it made him happy, and there was something about it that gave me joy. just making him happy. now with the slow realisation that outward happiness can often be an unconscious front, and possibly for many other unknown reasons, something of that has gone away. now he says he has never felt better, but I feel uncertain of what I'm doing here. there's also this strange feeling that this was probably the purpose of us meeting in this life, and that my work here is done?!

we have stopped fighting, he has a lot more control over his anger, and on his compulsions. but I am always nagged with the thought that what I see is only the tip of it, as was always the case.

but much more than that I wonder if I owe more to myself, in living elsewhere, a different life. I thought I didn't want children, but then I felt this unexpected momentary desire this summer for it, that I still recall clearly, and that made me wonder if my want or lack of it was conditional on the life i am living. 

Laura Marling's lyrics "there's a life across the river that is meant for me..." resonates. but then there's also "stop desiring a life that you want, and live the life that you have" or something to its effect that keeps knocking ... 

I listened to Anderson Cooper's podcast 'All there is' driving up and down to work mostly yesterday; there were horrible traffic jams all over. him and his guests talking about loss and grief, and there was so much of both. I hadn't known about Gloria Vanderbilt witnessing her older son jump to his death, I hadn't known Stephen Colbert's tragic loss. but I had seen the film 'Dick Johnson is dead' and the maker was a guest too. and another guest Laurie Anderson said some things about death and how it reminds us guiltily of what more we could have done (and how we make it about ourselves) that reminded me of something I had written here a few years ago.

and then there are these conversations i have with my new friend at work, that always leave me feeling that he has barely experienced life, it's brutality it's unfairness, but also it's variety and beauty, and that his worldview is immature. 

K said y'day that he worried about me because I got angry and upset at every rejected paper, but barely savoured the few positive responses and little successes. to me those always feel much delayed and much played down, like crumbs thrown out at me as consolation prizes.

I tried therapy one day, on my own, to figure out if I have fallen out of love. but it was all too much to explain to a stranger. plus my feelings keep flipping too. 

one of my teaching assistants has OCD, bipolar disorder, and delusions. and then this one day two of my colleagues and i were having lunch when one of them started talking about their anxiety issues and how their PhD advisor had first realised it and spoke to them about it. then the other colleague started talking about their unbearable anxiety while on the job market. and then both talked about their journey in therapy. the woman said she had had a hard time with an American therapist because it had entailed her having to explain her cultural baggage from scratch. I feel quite the opposite or i feel judged unfairly by Indian culture and those brought up in it because I seem to want to dissociate and distance myself from all that my home towns, cities, and country have offered me and taught me. and i don't feel apologetic about it either. in fact in another conversation when my immature and bookish friend said he missed being younger and innocent, my reaction was that I was only stupid and brainwashed when I was younger andnow i finally have my 'own' opinions...

the banjaras or gypsies understood life better - nothing is permanent; don't get attached. this September and October it has been raining like crazy in Delhi. our walls are getting soaked and the water is seeping in. our laundry room on top of our lil terrace is turning to mush with all the water; we are just praying its roof doesn't cave in before we manage to put up some jugaad protection. the people I learned to know in the summer already feel hazy as if they were dreamed. those i have known for many years also keep flipping in who they claim or show themselves to be. and then there are the new ones i am getting to know... one reads and has been giving me books, its rare i meet someone who has read what i have and more. its rare we go into a bookstore and i show them something and there is a history of what we have said before that gives it meaning, or we realize upon random browsing in the store that we have read the same book recently, something very few people around us have. and then there are the indefatigable ants in our kitchen who keep finding new holes and gaps in our walls to travel to and from, and we keep barely catching up with them in plugging the holes with tube-paint-caulk. sometimes in doing so i think i bury them alive in these holes, wondering whether there is an exit for them on the other side somewhere such that they have tunneled through the bricks in our walls. i also wonder what the new arrivals to the now sealed hole are thinking, whether they panic when they suddenly turn around and reconsider their path, what they tell each other when they meet on their path in opposite directions - the ones bringing news back from the disaster and warning others to abandon their journey to it, and how they deal with the loss (if that is what it is) of their peer as they persevere on simply exploring and finding a new hole a new home a new purpose. can they also smell sugar and crumbs of carbs? is their community the organism? and what do they think of us.

I've been alone and I've thought a great deal. and I've read and am just about to finish Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews; the girl goes to Barcelona in this. familiar names of neighborhoods and important streets crop up; names that I had barely learned there, barely reached. He had spent years in Barcelona, was telling me about his time there when I told him I was off to Spain and that would be my last stop. coincidences. K comes back tomorrow. I wonder how i will feel when I see him, i haven't seen his face or his body in the last 10 days, we just talked. I went to a party in the rain, rain enough to cancel plans, but I went because I wanted to feel different i wanted to talk to near strangers i wanted to see how i felt about people. most still don't move me, i feel as if they lack a curiosity of the soul and a carefulness that understands fragility. K has that, and so did he. I miss both and i can't afford to lose any such people. 

I'm on my own for some days. I have a friend at work now, but he's a kid almost. K is away and i am wondering who I am missing more. I feel like life sneaked up on me, caught me unawares, and i can't recognise myself anymore. I'm not able to work much. Sometimes i binge watch something that feels close to my situation. Everything seems to be trying to tell me something. When did this unraveling begin, how did I not see it then. The last two years have been heavy but just when it feels like we have done well, i realise I've forgotten myself somewhere, I've obliterated my memories because they all felt corrupted. I don't know what our life has been about anymore. Were we together to work this mess out. Was it when the confessions began, was it when he began to gain weight, was it Budapest and how alive i felt there, was it what happened in the hospital, was it the things my sister said, was it me feeling like I was here only to 'care for' him. I've been cursing, exclaiming, and holding my head in frustration again and again today. Why aren't we taught to recognise and deal with our feelings ever. Mister Rogers' senate speech from 1969 popped up in a show i was watching, in a very powerful scene. I've been watching his speech on YouTube again and again since then. "What do you do with the MAD that you feel". I wish he had been raised like that.

I've also been more blatantly ignoring his parents now. what's the point in obligatory respect and conversation? they don't even acknowledge our truths, our struggles. they are full of prejudices and sexism.

I remember quoting Vikram Seth's words from golden gate when he had proposed. to make the point that some people thought in that way but I didn't, or didn't want to. but I guess it was too much attention from someone i was also in awe of somewhat, and as with much of what's happened in my life i fell into what was chosen for me by life. what is it that life is trying to realise through me now? why must i always be on the edge of something precarious? why is it so hard to understand what i am feeling 

snatches

how much is too much when it comes to expressing hurt felt due to, or affection for, someone you newly know.

can we truly really know anyone, other than possibly one's siblings.

is falling out of love a thing? and if so, what does it mean to prevent it, to rekindle ...? one doesn't 'try' to fall or not fall in love, then why 'try' to not fall out? is it because the falling in destroys nothing but the self but the falling out devours all around while giving birth to a new self?

awkwardness, and the things unsaid, those are what i care about. let us talk them out aloud.

when is a relationship simply co-dependency, and when is it mutual addiction? the friend who once told me she feared being single because she feared being alone (in response to someone else's break-up news) lost her husband to cancer some years ago, and is now left with a daughter. the other person who shed tears when her decade long relationship broke off, saying she feared she was too old to find someone again, got married about last year.

why have my students not heard anything of the opioid crisis? why are my colleagues not aware that Italians in Europe are stereotypically similar to Indians in the world? and why do i care that I stand out amongst my people and feel different; abroad that doesn't bother me much.