I'm finally understanding the mechanics of water colors. and learning how to add color and and some life to my sketches. probably overdid that here, like the one with color only in ficus the best.

in other news

a cousin's wife has got covid19 in Bombay. they have a 2-yr old kid, I'm worried how they will care for her. hope they don't all get it. she hasn't yet been tested, but doc on phone said it looks like it. I'm also worried that she's having some breathlessness and her O2 levels have not been checked yet. they've been advised to get a meter. cousin's mom has chronic anxiety issues, so we are refraining from calling and expressing our worries. 

I am reading about schizophrenia, and I can barely put the book down. and because I mostly read before sleeping, this means I'm not sleeping much these days.

so this morning I had to unwrap the pencils k had gifted to me last year. and I had to sketch. this ficus has lived with us a couple years now, time enough for me to know it's needs and for it to get used to our environment. 

summer

our first summer back here was like roasting in hell. it was intolerably hot, our tummies kept giving up on us and we ate rice, potatoes and bananas each time it happened. and lizards poured into our home, themselves looking for shelter from the burning outdoors, from cracks between windows and walls, from gaps under the doors, and most of all from the badly filled-up electric-wire cavity for our split-AC. upto 3-4-5 baby ones would crawl in from above the AC in a day. the mother had probably laid eggs in that cavity after getting in from the other side of the wall. 

we formulated a tiring routine of scaring, trailing, and trapping each lizard with mop-rods Colin spray, and an upturned plastic bowl (washed and saved up from some home delivered food I think) on the hapless creature. then we would slide a piece of thick packaging paper or card under it, and holding that system tight I would rush out while he held the door to throw the living thing back outdoors. once I think it was inert with all that spraying on it by the time I threw it, but mostly it scurried away. I am terrified of lizards, but I rather than he would inevitably do that last part; because for me the thought of it remaining at home was more scary.

that summer and probably most of that year, we then spent sealing our windows, door gaps, in fact his first idea was to tape around the split-AC and seal the gaps there; that last actually worked, we got our AC guys to do it, that cleared us of lizards 90 percent. 

the next summer was mostly just very hot. and I swam again for a month, both years, just for a month cos I couldn't afford to spend all my savings (while unemployed) on more swimming. I felt, both those years in the peaks of those summers, like I'd die of the heat if I didn't swim. soon as I'd stop swimming I'd get diarrhoea from the heat. also both summers we got away for a bit, the first one a lil too late around June end and last year earlier in the beginning of that month (he got away a second time last summer).

but last summer was an improvement over the year before, with lots of intermittent showers. and this year is even better maybe thanks to the virus and reduced pollution, who knows. each of the previous summers I have thought I couldn't take one more, but it keeps getting easier, is it me or the weather itself? it's already mid-May and my tummy is still strong, without the swimming this year. I can sleep early mornings on the polyester sofa to escape sounds from the bathroom. I'm not dying and I'm even using less AC. 

it feels like someone is trying to prove to me how hyperbolic I was being in what I could tolerate and how long I'd be around. I had come thinking, max one year or maybe two. no more. and I'm still around and it's getting easier. now more than ever this fortified home of ours feels invaluable, where no one is coming and we have no where else to go from. 

for most of my adult life I've slept alone in a bed. so whenever I live with hubby I have sleep issues, he sleeps earlier than me, usually as soon as his head touches his pillow, while I pillowless, have to read to travel to another world before I feel drowsy. and then he wakes up before me. I now sleep with cotton in my ears and an eye mask, but even then his movements both in his sleep and his wakings interrupt my very flimsy slumber. 

last night he woke up for a leak, and therefore so did I to make the best of a disturbance. he goes to the toilet within the bedroom and I to the one just outside. I was struck by the light streaming in our living room windows, the place looked like a stage flooded with white light. I peered out the window, I knew the moon had been waxing the last few days. and there it was, a grown full rounded ball of warmth. complete with the halo around it. I smiled at it. now it would begin to wane and so would my creativity with it. 

the moon is like an old friend I've taken for granted. this year though, with this pandemic upending everything in human life, the full moon feels even more magical. since I've hit my 30s, how often have I stared and smiled at it thus. but now I can imagine a day when there'd be no moon. I can imagine the end of everything as we know, just because so much has changed. 

In the last two days, in bits over meals, k and I watched Lunchbox; him for the first time, me revisiting. I'd been irritated and impatient with the movie the first time I saw it, annoyed at Bollywood for juicing romance out of every meaningful human interaction. But this time I realised how sensitive, how real, each dialogue, each written and spoken word, each look and pause, and everything unsaid, was in this movie. the scene in which her mother tells her that she's simply hungry now, just after her father has passed away, that after months of worrying about being left alive without him and of taking care of his wasting body, all she desires is some parathas because she's hungry; that broke me down. I wept thinking of all the women my mom's generation, in India at least (maybe elsewhere too), who lived like an appendage to their spouses, who couldn't imagine outliving them, living without them (for what?), who lived their lives without any ownership over them. since my Mausa's death, I've seen my Mausi slowly become her own person.

I've been video chatting with mom and lil sis, together, every evening now. since that day when lil sis wasn't well and we all thought it was covid and because she lives alone we were debating how best to take care of her. today sis told us one of her seniors at work in Hyderabad had a sudden stroke and possible brain haemorrhage after a bout of working out, and is hospitalised since then, unconscious. we got talking about age, and health, life and death, covid and cancer, Irrfan Khan and this hospitalized guy, about responsibility of oncoming disease and of chance and luck. we are each a flimsy thread in a flimsy world, at the mercy of chance, but also with choices, and senses through which we feel all of this. The glowing moon, the starry gulmohar, strange birds now regular visitors. A kiss. all so flimsy but in that moment, so all encompassing, almost overwhelming.