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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aankhein dekheen to main dekhtaa rehgaya

Jaam do aur donon hi do atisha

Ankhen yaa maiqade ke wo do baab hain

Aankhein inko kahoon

yaa kahoon khwab hain;

Aankhein neechee huin to haya ban gayeen

Aankhein oonchee huin to dua ban gayeen

Aankhein uth kar jhukeen

to adaa ban gayeen

Aankhein jhuk kar utheen

to qazaa ban gayeen

Aankhein jin main hain

qaid asmaan-o-zamin"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------

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

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

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

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

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

------

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

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

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

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

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

I also managed to dig up the generation gap.

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

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

Everything is constantly changing. So why is death permanent?