I'm getting older. But still, many firsts in my life yet to go. Bring it on, fear is only exciting.

wrote this on the last flight back home

We are each a lil speck. Sometimes down below, when seen from a skyscraper window, or from a new York city fire-escape. but not just then; even in a window seat looking down on the world. A lil thinking speck, looking down on the seemingly unthinking expanse of curves, scratches, abrasions, in an ocean of blue-green-ness that we know better as earth when we are down there ourselves.

We become a body when in close proximity with others like us. When we are hugging, when our hand brushes onto our lover’s, when our lips touch, when we meet, and say goodbyes – and walk on, to become specks again. Or all that in between, when we ‘socialize’ consciously and unconsciously, living our daily lives, when we are in the same room, at the same crossing on the street waiting for that white man to appear, in the same line, across a table, each of us with our own thoughts – private, yet affected, with lil screens and filters, with sieves and walls – both transparent and opaque.

Who are we? Who am I? where do I end and you begin? In our conversations, on our shared bed. In our arguments. Tomorrow I’ll repeat with conviction, what today I’m vehemently disagreeing hearing from you. We merge, we separate; we are gas, in liquid containers.

Like that blue water below, mirroring the sky, appearing isolated from the green pock-marked grey-blue-ness around it, but secretly seeping into its boundaries for god knows how far, and sheltering it in turn, under itself, owning it up as its bedrock. Threatening haughtiness at the same time as a sense of rooted humility.

It’s all inter-personal angst, once the stomach is fed and there’s no perception of immediate danger or threat.

But till then, fear and bad luck lead to mistrust and violence. And yes of course, history, the center where everything leads to and returns from. The stories of scores of specks. Fighting for and with and against each other. Loves and wars; of bodies and specks. Points and lines, and circles, and undecipherable shapes. Bloodied and saved. Pictures and cries and songs.

heard this is Harlem, in one of those corner basketball courts, on a Sunday morning, right opposite a church that had mass going on with lots of tourists walking in (including us). blasted on full volume. catchy tune, slay lyrics. been humming.. is it just me ..

been a summer of reading

sometimes I feel this very strong inward tug, toward something external, to imbibe it, make it part of me. right now, its black literature. I haven't read much of that. strangely, many yrs ago I tried reading Toni Morrison but could not. just could not. don't think I got it, and I abandoned it.

things have changed. plus, with all the racial tension in the air, I've been feeling disconnected reading Franzen. as if its for people who live in their cocoons, immune to everything else outside the window. 'white literature'. luxurious - the very metaphor of reading something like it.

plus, I'm visiting Harlem later this week. one of those neighborhoods that white people and brown people and other lightly colored and non-colored people hesitated to go to some years ago. and now as they say, its been 'gentrified'. makes me feel like a racist ass. and reminds me of a day many years ago, when I was new in this country and I got frightened by a black guy asking me for change. things have changed, like I said. last year I got mad at my dad for getting scared of people darker than him, and for getting scared for me when a guy asked me for college money at a gas station in L.A.

of course, I got led to Harlem by something. someone rather. Luiselli's book. and the pointer in it that I was unaware of the Harlem Renaissance. and of course, you can trust Teju Cole to keep that going in my head. I've been looking at his books and those of James Baldwin's and because of the abundance of choice, esp in the latter, have been living with that restlessness of the inward tug, unsatisfied. (I did read Giovanni's room some yrs ago, but again, don't think I fully got it, although I did finish).

and then I was jubilant today for reading before an interview (Cole's) about the comparison between him and Coetzee. yes! I'd got that too, with one book of each, probably, coincidentally, the one (in each case) that is (are) most related.

guess it will be Baldwin for now, cos Cole being contemporary is not running away.

the internet brings famous people closer home. they reply, strangely, to sincere efforts at connection. Amitava Kumar wished me luck for my work too. I wonder if he knew that I am lost. what is my work in this world? reading others'?

'Go tell it on the mountain' or 'The fire next time'?

and then, these words:

"Statesmen have known visions. And, not alone,
Artistic men prod dead men from their stone:
Some of us have heard the dead speak:
The dead are my obsession this week."

- Geoffrey Hill

are we selfish even when facing death nearby? do we really think as much about those gone, or is it always me. death is particularly harrowing because it makes me feel completely helpless against it, because it fills me with guilt, toward the gone and the left behind. because it makes me feel powerless, unable to reverse it, unable even to understand it.

till death hits home, it is only a metaphysical concept - an idea. that arouses philosophy.

each one of us processes death in personal definitions. what the gone meant to us, what we meant to them. which of his words ring in our ears, while his eyes shine, although the words were surely said to us on the phone which meant we didn't see those eyes, not then at least. what the absence proves about us as people, what it says to us, how it calls us - as always - in life. it is always apt. what it says about distance and past and memories, also those that weren't formed.

and when people die on us unexpectedly, peacefully, do they smile as they go away. like they always did in life, with every cackling joke?

more even than the words, why do their signature tones speak still

Jonathan Franzen: Books Made Me Survive

and this will be shared on my blog, because no real person in my life shares my enthusiasm for this writer

"I get affected", she said. as a reason for being insulated. as if it was a thing to be avoided.

I did not quite understand. of course I get affected. why won't you? why won't anyone? or why shouldn't anyone? its to worry if someone doesn't, or ceases to.

like that day when I was walking with hubby and two sisters in law (one by marriage, one by marriage-squared) and we stopped for ice cream. no chocolate ever for me. and if there's salted caramel, then there's no choice to be made. the guy asked us if we had tried it, almost as a warning. as if he was saying, "do you know what you're getting yourself into?". he said it was intense. my sincere reply, don't you worry, I'm intense. laughter from my ppl, attributing it to the dinner cocktails. the guy's face falls, as if I'm pulling his leg. but I was doing just the opposite, expressing sincere affiliation with the forewarned loner ice cream. bring it on, I want to be at its mercy.

like when I read fiction about relationships shattering, and behave in mine as the words move in that. start to wonder about all that sex we didn't have this week (maybe longer). imagine the possibility or consider the eventuality of us not being 'us' anymore. and then if the book ends with a return to the absence of pain, I look at him with tenderness again. and if it didn't, we'd probably be fighting right now.

it was all meant to be. every wave of emotion that rises in me has a stimuli somewhere in the world that I touch, I occupy. how else would I be alive? is there another way?

and the exotic from around the world was strangely although faintly/vaguely but also tragically disappointing.

on the other hand, the recommended, seemingly mainstream and boring and commonplace and unattractive, turns out to be riveting. and brilliant, more so, precisely because it is so rooted.

in the years of my youth I was more receiving, more open to recommendations. I will have to go back, to that judge-less-ness of what people point out to. there are gems I am unaware of.

it may have occurred to me in many different ways before, but the first time the thought clearly hit was a couple days ago when hubby and I were watching Life Story narrated by David Attenborough, on netflix - we humans think we are the smartest, but is there a very deep illusion there? are we actually dumb? and worse, making ourselves dumber using little skills to replace what intelligence and natural sense we did have?

I had resolved some days ago, that I would get out more often, out of the apartment, out of the suburb. spend more time in the city, awake, unlazy, out in the world, and more importantly, doing more work than I was getting done at home. today I set out around noon in search of a public library, found it, sat around for a bit, even figured something out in the literature I was unsuccessfully reading so far, and felt good. I noticed there seemed to be a lot of homeless-looking men watching stuff on youtube on the public computers. it set me thinking to what extent the whole internet revolution had touched the poor in this rich country. a couple other lone students were studying around, definitely younger than me, one moving rhythmically almost like Indian kids did when they memorized stuff. an Asian student with an exam coming up. another asked me to 'watch his bags' while he looked for some documents (I wondered if he was hitting on me).

there were announcements about free lunch somewhere in the building either for those aged less than or more than 18 (I didn't quite catch that). I got up to get some food for my grumbling belly too. found the neighborhood around a lil seedy and yet colorful. also emptyish. again, that luxury of being free to roam on a weekday afternoon. the Thai restaurant wasn't bad. big windows, lots of light, small tables, three couples lunching and some loners on the bar and me with my hardbound reading and watching Obama in Dallas on the big TV. the duckrolls were not the Vietnamese rolls that I would have liked and had expected (god knows why) but lil paratha rolled around strings of veggies and minced duckmeat. I ate, carefully pulling out the noodles of ginger from my rolls. that had a strangely meditative effect on me.

walking around after, updated my information as the neighborhood being more Latino than it looked before. lots of hole-in-the-wall places to eat, can try in the future. a cafe sign caught my eye at a crossroads and the walk sign to it was on. why not? not a soul inside, although empty chairs spilled out into the lil courtyard outside. Brazilian owners - a young girl and her mom/aunt - and their tiny lil dog (I'm not good with breed info). I got a tea and settled right under the TV talking about giant catfish eating or penetrating humans (?) in the Amazon. I must have sat around for at least a lil under a couple hours. aunty gave me a brochure for the lil cinema next door. the girl made some chore phone calls, they talked about some financial processes. a couple other relative/friends of theirs dropped by, more to chat, than to buy. one with two kids. the lil boy as boys are let be probably teased or kicked the dog (I didn't see anything cos I wasn't paying attention, nor did I hear any whines of any sort). boy was also excited by the giant fish on TV. after a lil while, the dog, snoopy, just jumps up to where I'm sitting and lies right next to me, his body kinda snuggling against mine. I was touched. all the dog-phobia that I've been infected with being with hubby so many yrs went poof and I stroked it very gently. the boy tried to reach out to snoopy, snoopy makes it harder to be touched, and I figure maybe this is harassment of some sort. I ask the boy if the dog is scared of him, he says something about maybe cos he kicked him or maybe cos he is standing, taller than the dog and if he crouched to the dog's height it wouldn't be scared). thankfully, boy's mom takes him and his sis away soon and I become snoopy's savior, by coincidence.

I'd hardly coochie-cooed to snoopy for more than an instant before this, but he knew. I wondered while I stroked him, how he knew that I would stroke and not strangle. people take so long to trust people, and maybe that's smart cos people do strangle. are dogs simply more naive and therefore trusting, and pay the price when it comes to it, or do they know better than us, in an instant? the question isn't do they know better? I'm sure I can find some answer to that with some research into the repository of human knowledge, the question is how do they, what is intelligence, and should there be a common definition across different species? I'm sure even that question will have some answers, somewhere.



I also ambled around, picked up some produce from a tiny organic market run by two young women, walked more, saw some plants outside another market shouting to me across the street. crossed, stood by them, wondering which one was willing to risk death while it added some life/color to our lil apartment. finally got a tiny pot of African violets, believing they are easy to raise. kept also wondering whether it would last enough to be reason to buy a pretty pot to put it into, reached home while thinking "there must be something at home practically unused that can serve exactly that purpose", after being dropped off by the bus at a strange corner I didn't want to be dropped at, retracing my map and figuring out the right bus by the same number that got me home. and ya, attracted attention from a couple more black (always) guys - one waved to me from behind his wheel, another after receiving a hi and a small polite smile from me in response to his mini-stare started to ask me my name. I laughed and said I didn't want to buy anything, somewhat disappointing him. some days.

I remembered why I liked Teju Cole's Open City. It was like Youth by J. M. Coetzee, which I'd liked a lot too.

and yes, I found something at home in the recycle bin that at least now is serving as a perfectly sized tray under the violet pot. this wouldn't have happened in my own apartment; no material lies around unused for future creativity. I throw, very often.

the abstract idea of reading is consuming me. I have to write that book. before my mind gets some degenerative disease and all those memories of notes get erased or lost. strangely, a pure strategy price equilibrium is known as a degenerate price equilibrium.

books pile on hubby's bedside table, which is chivalrously/generously given to me for the summer of my stay. one I'm forcing him to read, and he, despite hating it, is probably reading cos he wants to know what I saw in it. but is not really reading it, cos he keeps picking up his 'other' book piled on top of this, that he is repeat-reading; that one is boring to me and after he asked me two hypothetical questions from that, and I tried reading two different essays in it for a paragraph each and saw no point, I am ignoring with undiluted indifference. it is full of essays on pop culture (I don't understand that anyway).

another one is what he gifted me on my birthday just gone by. I logged into his amazon to order some bras that very day, cos he has the prime account, and I noticed it was arriving. I looked it up, wondered whether to keep the finding of the surprise a surprise or not. didn't really make a decision on that, and just blurted it out to see how that would go. and then I wondered, whether the book was some sort of nudge, an inspiration, to get me to take myself more seriously. no, not that. I take myself more seriously than I ought to, in many ways. then maybe, a nudge to get me to shake that laziness off, get on my toes. cos its a female economist's feminist memoir about breaking through (and keeping the door open). its actually much better than I thought it'd be. not written like a practiced memoir-ist, but way more real precisely cos of that.

the last right now, if you have read the last couple of posts here, you should know is a Valeria Luiselli. a new-found love. I hope it lasts. or was it for the voice of the narrator (which is partly she herself but partly a storyteller a liar and a chimera), cos another voice is replacing that one and since I realized this was happening, I'm not picking it up.

I was thinking my blog is my collection of notes like Luiselli's post-its were. but would I ever sell any of this? am I asking myself if I would ever be able to sell any of my writing, or if I would ever choose to sell my writing given someone would want to buy it?? two question marks for those two very different questions. do I write for the rare spike in website tracking views that I sometimes get, or do I write to be able to sit down on those days and read what I wrote years ago, also spiking the view-counter as a by-product? I've told it many times not to count my page-views but it ignores me and goes on counting me.

Keywords here (like in academic journals): degenerate, read, write, essays, surprise, nudge, feminist, liar, questions, sell, spike.

and I just bought another book on someone's recommendation. rare that, people who recommend books to me now. hope hubby and I will both read the same book at the same time, and I of course will be still reading the beginning while he finishes. I am the tortoise, yes.

there's an exhilaration in finding a contemporary writer, not my contemporary, but that of my age, or 'the' age in which I live.

I'm memorizing their faces, so if I walk any some day I'll know.

cities I visited this (academic) year: Lisbon, Los Angeles, Denver (& Golden), Santa Fe & Albuquerque (& Taos & in-between & around), Seattle, DC, and maybe NYC next month. not bad. yr end bank account fiasco mystery solved.

next yr (academic yr again): Delhi (& Bombay & Bangalore??), Assam (not a city), New Orleans/Lima, and of course DC.

I make plans. as one vacation comes to an end. always looking forward...

will I ever publish? will this wannabe academic ever be one?

back to Luiselli. am I aping her style?

the life that I have does not suffice. neither in spirit nor in capacity. I want to be this, and also to be that. I want to be here, to be there, and also to be home. when 'home' is many places, all at once. I want to do this, and to do it well, but it takes away from doing all those other things, being in all those other places; I can't then do this, can I?

and this is when (or because) I have been many things, many people, in many places. my pasts fascinate me, haunt me; leave me dicontented, and incredulous. I have been the quiet, the ignored, the geek, the malleable, the popular, the snob, the misanthrope, the idiot, the hated, the despised, the loud-mouth, the mysterious, and the failure. I am also, the critic - but not the enemy, no.

I was to be somewhere the coming Sunday but I will now be there no more. was that stupid, haughty, immature? I will never know. but this I knew long before, that I would regret both being there and not. that in the larger scheme of things, it was irrelevant. I am irrelevant.

guess its finally time to read 'The Bell Jar'. or to go (more than I have been) peripatetic like 32 yr old Valeria Luiselli. I choose Luiselli over Plath; life over death.

walking with people

'walkability' is a growing determinant of housing location pricing in the country. to live where you can walk to get some drinks, or brunch, is a big plus, or walk back when drunk so no one has to go dry to drive. that's why I pay almost double the rent (pointed out to me by uber drivers who pick me up) to live a city apart from where my office is. but cities in the dallas metroplex don't really deserve to be called that, on their own. whatever.

so you get brunch together (or maybe dinner or drinks or a combination) and you end up walking together. to coffee. to drinks. to one person's home. one of those. group walking. 2-3 pairs of ppl, some pairless. sidewalks are just wide enough for double walking, but if the group is an odd number of ppl, you squeeze three in a row. the doubles usually are couples or those who have known each other really long, long enough to not wonder whether they are friends, whether they enjoy each other's company. the three in a row will usually be awkward together. neither can tell if the conversation is flowing between all three or it is forced between all three, or if one of the corner thirds cannot hear, doesn't care, is wondering if he should just stop pretending to be a part and walk on, alone, between two pairs of ppl he is with.

some ppl are great at small talk. others are super bad. and some keep wondering if they are doing it right. keep tuning in and out.

when I walk with ppl, I don't know where I'm going. I stare randomly left and right, letting myself be led. especially if I'm the one that knows the city less, I'm the visitor. and if you ask me to retrace my steps without help, you will be setting me a big challenge. when I'm on my own, on the other hand, I realize I'm quite good with maps, I smile even at roadside bums until one calls out to me.

its somewhat like how women used to being on their own are suddenly with their partners. every physically demanding, sweaty task - no even the small easy ones - are suddenly handed over to their partners. without thought. when on their own, they could move mountains and the thought of calling for help wouldn't occur.

or like older men doing odd jobs and suddenly visited by youngsters. they have a sudden desire that the youngsters pick up their tools and walk after them, even if their hands are empty and as dirty as the tools they just finished with.

and its Teju Cole's birthday today.. feel a strange affinity with cancerians born at the end of June. happy happy.

There’s no space more private than a bathroom. Different genders, and different cultures use them differently. Over and above how they defecate and bathe in them. From the beginning of the idea of bathrooms in open fields, river/lake banks, a community/courtyard tap/well, being in the open was not only unhygienic but also not private. You could observe the world while doing your job, but you couldn’t look inward, you couldn’t look at yourself.

Indian homes always have a small mirror right above each bathroom sink; usually too high for children and short people, usually with rusted edges and silvered out bits. You can barely see your face. I’d say the sole purpose is for men to not cut themselves while shaving. You come out of the bathroom half clad, managing to hide yourself as best you can because outside that bathroom door, is the whole world. Even if you live in a nucleus family or with friends/roommates. Bedrooms are not private spaces at all. At the very least, you never know when the bai/help/maid is swishing around your bedroom floor when you make your exit. Bedroom doors don’t really shut unless its those sleeping hours and you discreetly use others’ unconsciousness to have sex, masturbate, read/watch illicit material, etc., or simply breathe that rare being alone.

Or you could use the bathroom for that.

If it is clean and nice so you want to be in it. Which is more than you can say for many Indian bathrooms, where stains, broken and blackened tiles/buckets/mugs, make you want to clean yourself after you’ve touched anything within.

Soon as I stopped sharing a bathroom with my sis, and with everyone else in the house/hostel, so that I no longer had to rush through the washing of the behind or the hands or the hair or the pits to the sound of fists on the door peppered with half-audible yells of “hurry up”, I started spending time in the bathroom. I didn’t realize it then, that I was using the sacred space as my escape. I’d often read on the seat in my heavenly dry tiny white/grey spaces (plural because moving from one home to another is the only constant I’ve known) and often get carried away and end up being late for work.

Maybe the rarity of the private space is why Indian women don’t shave and prefer to wax. I mean why else would you go through the humiliation of letting stranger hands deal with your limbs, especially legs, like they are gourds to be peeled. And tolerate their incessant commentary on them, that your body hair is too thick, too much, too hard, too untamed, too difficult to pull out; while they pour burning wax on you and pooh-pooh your complaints as coming from a weak heart. As soon as I learned that you didn’t need a parlor license to buy wax I started buying my own and started shutting even that bedroom door.

In America on the other hand, women go into the bathroom and come out transformed. They shave in the shower, and all others can see is that lil pink razor with the bottles of shampoos and shower gels, lying around innocently. American bathrooms also have huge mirrors, sometimes covering a whole wall. You can use it for more than shaving, and applying make-up, and drying your hair, and plucking your mustache, and when all of that is done (or maybe before) you look into it, and if you concentrate, you realize you can see beyond. Beyond your hair and your face and your skin and its detested pores, and maybe your bare shoulders and breasts (or chest hair and nipples if you’re a man), maybe your whole body if you tiptoe and come up higher, those self-loathed hips or knees or the way the bones jut out or just don’t show anywhere under your handles and flab, the color of your skin, and its different shades in different spots (how it darkens exactly where you’d like it to not), and then if you’re still there you start to think and to look within. to dream, to reminisce, to flinch, to ponder, to wonder, to remember, to connect and weave, to regret.

I had puppy fat when I was entering my teens. I remember in that strange national dress which was also the school-uniform in that other country, I used to feel like I had oversized boobs for my age. Just like I felt I had oversized feet for my gender and size. And like I had way too much limb hair for being a human. Each of these I could observe as pieces to my whole, cos the bathroom mirror was too high and too small, and the bedroom - I shared with my lil sis.

When we got back to India, I got jaundice after a year. That’s the first time I remember forcing a privacy for myself, not sure the disease had anything to do with it other than the fact that I was home when much of the world wasn’t. I lost a lot of weight from that, and from then have I, my earliest memories of my whole self in the bedroom mirror cos I started shutting its door. That was my beginning, of learning to accept myself – my body – for what it was or for how it looked and how it changed under different influences. That was also I think the very beginning of me trying to give myself space from the world, whenever I got it, of learning how to preserve that.

Much later, in a girls’ hostel when I had a room to myself where I could in fact lock it from within, I would often pretend to be still sleeping and remain unresponsive to early morning knocks at my door – invitations simply to companionship, someone else’s plea out of loneliness – only because I wanted to be alone.

with age, new languages become not just difficult to learn, but also difficult to try and introduce to one's mind as a language. one's sense of being is too old now to understand even the idea of speaking in a foreign tongue. almost like learning to swim when an adult; one's reflexes and natural responses refute the possibility that water, a foreign medium, can be conquered, 'walked upon'.

no matter how many french/spanish words I will understand now, my mind will always treat them as extensions of my vocabulary of english.

sylvia plath ted hughes interview 1961