in our tiny balcony, which we didn't really count as homespace ever since an AC unit filled it up, I have just two plants, old ones, an Adenium and a green yellow ornamental leaves plant the name of which is escaping my aging memory right now. I had planned on hanging some flowering plants in pots from its railing too, but the visiting pigeons there kept me postponing the plan. we used to sleep in the bedroom that hosts that balcony till it was still cool. now we have moved to our summer capital; I call it our 'simla' bedroom, which is in fact mine. 'delhi' is his and as is the only br upstairs, the upper floor acts like his 'bachelor pad' I tease. but for me pottering up and down multiple times a day in the mornings and evenings to water my plants spread over the house, the tiny balcony, the terrace, and to watch the bulbul parties in the peepuls bordering the terrace. we noticed some pigeons were collecting twigs in the tiny balcony. but as in the alcove above my window where for days nothing else happened, I thought they might just be playing around, or 'creating art'. of course I was wrong, I had just been hoping it wouldn't be a nest; most people around me detest pigeons, they love lots of other birds ... but crows and pigeons ?!! so they told us to fear pigeon nests and to break them up etc. etc. ya pigeons can be noisy early mornings but have you heard screaming peacocks, those exotic giants of birds? either way one gets used to them. there was a time when we first saw this place and the broker told us that the funny cracked broken shards of yellow plastic around the large windows in what is now 'simla' was soundproofing installed by previous tenants, we were completely mystified: why would anyone need soundproofing in this quaint quiet neighborhood bordering and surrounded by a biodiversity park? now we know that human noise isn't the only noise one needs to keep out for a good night's sleep. one morning some dog wildly yelping woke me up at about 5 in the morning. but there are benefits to that too. i got to witness that magical enchanted hour with these colors painting the sky

coming back to the pigeons. mom pigeon laid first one egg, then another. we had mixed feelings in the beginning, conditioned by what people told us. the eggs hatched after almost 3 weeks, on consecutive days. the chicks are yellow. mother pigeon first learned how to recognise his face and be unafraid of him. she would still scuttle away and fly off when I went to shower the green yellow plant with water. now she knows me too and watches me quietly. her chicks are slowly developing wing bones and her body no longer covers them completely. I think there's a father pigeon too (he's been reading up and tells me pigeons are monogamous) but he is still scared of us. mother just blinks her eyes now observing my routine of pulling the curtains together, apart, watering plants, and sometimes coochicooing to her and the chicks or taking a short video or pic of them. I'm reading a book about the genius of birds.. pigeons are known to be able to discern different human faces. whereas I cannot tell one from the other and know the mother only by where she is found, dutifully protecting her babies and waiting for them to grow up, for their brains and their wings to mature. apparently birds are of two broad kinds, those whose young are born nearly mature, have larger brains when they are chicks, and can fly in a few days; versus those whose chicks (like ours) are born helpless and tiny, and take a long time to grow and fly. the second type realize a larger adult brain than the first. also like us, birds have evolved to have large brains (to the size of their bodies) by shrinking their jaws and other facial appendages. birds also probably dream, at least they do have REM sleep. I met a neighbor who used to live in our flat some years ago. our flat owner had told us about them but we hadn't realised it was them he had told us about. she is married to a British guy and they have a daughter, a cat, and two dogs. in fact their daughter was born in our flat and that's probably why we have a 'prevent-a-baby-from-tumbling-downstairs' red door at the top of the stairs in his bachelor pad. there's something about a white guy living in the building next to you in India; we still are hungover by our colonized history, or possibly by our colorism and racism. even after years of living in white man's land. that doesn't change anything in fact: there we were the few brown people so we stood out, here the few white ones do and we are eternally curious about them. you might have heard of rented househunters in China, white people who are paid to pretend to be looking at houses because it impresses other househunters and can successfully hike the rent up. when we had first seen our older smaller flat, days after returning to India after years of living away, we saw a white couple also do the rounds of the rooms, allegedly prospective renters. was it that that gave us the confidence that we could live there when every other place so far had felt filthy, broken down, or both? that place was visibly better kept than any other flat we had seen, but yes maybe the possibility that non-Indians were considering the place and thus that the place was comfortable enough for people who weren't used to this hopeless country, might have tricked us, despite the fact that we talked about it and were aware of how we had been primed. later we laughed about it with a friend visiting from amreeka. here now, our flat owner had tried to play that card with us by telling us about this couple, this British guy and his 'partner' who had had their child in this flat. it didn't work on us this time, maybe cos this place before we patched it up, was pretty rundown. our reaction behind his back was 'can you believe that British people could live in this place?! hah!'. still the same higher standards though for their housing expectations. one day, just weeks into this place, I was standing alone in our terrace and staring far at the trees and birds across the colony road in front of us. I felt watched suddenly, looked down and this couple was walking by and the guy was looking up at me. we looked at each other a mere instant and then turned away, back into our thoughts. I didn't know then but now that I do that moment came back to me. he must have been looking up at his old home, transformed by new people and the changes they made to the terrace (she told me they noticed the terrace was being tiled and how that suggested to them that maybe the flat owners were planning on living there because after all tenants don't bother to improve any place in this way)... our older flat we booked on the very first day we saw it. it felt like it was vacant just for us and that it was the only place where we could imagine setting up a home. this one, two months in now, feels to me like we have lived here for ages. it will be weird if that couple from the next building comes in someday and we talk about how the place looks and is different now from when they lived here. does a house change with the people occupying it or does it change those who come to live in it? the first day we saw this place I noticed peacocks from the kitchen window, rufous treepie in the peepul near the terrace and those were my arguments to counter hubby's hopelessness about the rotting wood in the kitchen cabinets (they turned out not to be rotten after all). this neighborhood was also spotted by me a few years ago, on one of my aimless drives around to cheer myself up; but then I never thought I would one day be sharing a place here with a family of pigeons and their chicks. there's also a sweetheart of a stray female dog (neighbors call her Bella) who was left homeless by someone in the next colony moving away apparently and adopted by this place. do we choose our homes or do our homes choose us?

photopost

Setting sun. Kitchen. Geraniums.

shopping; at the plant nursery. Another buyer, a gardener, gave me some tips, and started talking about prices in hushed tones as he saw I was kinda done; I told them to talk freely as I was leaving anyway, thinking to myself "yes of course I'm aware of price discrimination between us".

the peepul showering our terrace with its dead leaves (barely minutes after I've cleared them there's just as many more).

parrots; kitchen window.

I am writing from the delhi metro yellow line. I have lost my commuter mojo a bit, I can't run down the innumerable steps as I used to nearly twenty yrs ago in Bombay local train stations. I'm wearing better shoes now, but they could become slippery soon with so many steps each way. we are about a 10 mins walk from the metro station, I kept thinking I'd be late and would miss some train, and as is with trains even if it's not the last one u need to take, the sight of a train just gone by always feels like a small failure. But no, I still walk faster than the average guy walking in my direction, and even though I kept looking at every auto passing by, wondering if it made sense to take one for those few hundred feet or meters(?) that remained, i let them go. I had to change at Hauz khas and the fast walking crowd leading me to where I needed to go made me smile. Men women kids young students, all seemed so determined, so focused, so prepared and ready and alert; and yet quiet. Most people commute alone, silently walking on, with a purpose. Delhi metro feels like the one rare thing in this country that works and works well, driven by some logic, some planning, and managing to keep its promise. And because it works well it seems to bring out the better human in us the commuters. I have probably written about this before but am still surprised that Indian men behave themselves while on board this thing. They keep their hands and their legs, and even their eyes to quite an extent, to themselves.

A father and daughter boarded somewhere midway in my commute. The little girl had a bandaged arm and was holding it awkwardly raised and folded. A young sardar next to me gave his seat to the girl, also asked the father what happened. I heard that she had been burned. The sardar suggested cold coconut oil as a balm. The father asked the girl to keep exercising her fingers and palm by making fists and claws. The skin was peeling like tissue, off of her palm. She said "abhi nahi" ("not now"). after a bit the train emptied out a bit, I shifted to my right and the father sat to my left next to his child. The person on the other side of the girl started talking to him, "how did it happen?" ... "Boiling water..." and then started giving tips for a quick healing. In his words he had been burned too, in fact had been run over by an automobile and the heat of its running engine had burned him; yes, coconut oil worked, ...." I grimaced at the image of his accident. A young guy opposite us observed me, the girl, the father, the guy with the story. I saw this shared emotion in his eyes, and in fact in other eyes watching the girl; gentleness i think it was. The girl wasn't crying. In fact she got a spasm of pain on her right chest (which was also burned) and exclaimed to her father and then after some small words between them she smiled and chuckled. 

At some point I had crossed Delhi University station, as far as I had ever been on this line, and entered into that other Delhi part of that other India where I don't live or visit. I had chosen my clothes carefully for this first commute, foreseeing this: a cotton crepe white blouse tucked into police green pants, the blouse has sleeves and a neck that can be problematic only because the blouse is loose on my body but falls short of being 'revealing'. The train was also no longer underground and I could see clusters of unplanned unpretty cement houses. the people remained as courteous though, as disciplined. In the entire metro ride I saw one woman in a knee length skirt though, every other was clad from shoulder to ankles. I am now on the University shuttle which is the second hour of my commute, and I am as yet not tired kudos to the metro for that. although I was reluctant to start commuting and saw no point to stop teaching from home and wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been forced by my employers, I am learning to not fight things beyond where the fighting is pointless. and maybe this getting out of my comfortable well will be good for me. so far the weather is good.