tree house
Monday, August 4, 2025
Thursday, July 24, 2025
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.
Saturday, July 19, 2025
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Monday, July 14, 2025
Saturday, July 12, 2025
Thursday, July 3, 2025
Saturday, May 3, 2025
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.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Monday, March 31, 2025
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.
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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.
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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."
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Monday, March 3, 2025
Monday, December 30, 2024
In the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy, 42 was the answer to the universe's deepest questions. I turned 42 this year and coincidentally felt like I had unraveled everything that truly matters. and now the year is coming to an end, and what an end with us moving again. Its been a year of multiple fallings in love. I'm obsessively crushing over someone who I barely get time with, I've fallen in love with the person I married all over again from scratch despite the early morning sleep-marination smells that I was just last year finding so unbearable, and I keep getting this out-of-body falling in love with myself through the intent gaze of the person I'm crushing over. They say the secret to a successful long term love-sex relationship is that the couple fall in love with each other again and again as they change with time. What they don't say is how sometimes you can be so full of love you could be falling for many people all at once while you re-fall for that one.
I recently met someone whose existence I had known of for about two decades but had not been introduced to ever before or if we had then neither of us really remember it. I opened the door to him and stared at him a minute because he looked so foreign and then within the next five minutes we were chatting with each other in a half teasing half smiling manner. I blamed his 'reticence' for us not having met or known each other, and he was amused by my choice of word. I was later pondering how and whether he and I could have fallen for each other 20 years ago, or whether the person I and he were then would have made that impossible.
I wasn't always so full of love and affection and openness, even though I still carry my shell ready and prepared to hide in it. In fact I do the latter quite a bit with my obsessive crush when his eyes seek mine and I stubbornly refuse to meet them, self conscious of other people. I do not take compliments and attention well. Even when he said my chicken curry was delicious, even when one of the reasons I admire him is that I believe he says only what he really means. And now I've been obsessing over how it is unfair to him that he and I share the knowledge of him observing me, but the fact of my awe for him is still my secret.
But I want to talk about other people. We made friends this year. It was the year of us having home dinner parties. I was also hosting my department's seminars and annual conference this year and invited and met and befriended some sweet folks. And in this month's conference season some of those people, men and women, came up to me with warmth and affection and I embraced their companionship.
These sparks of human connection, such affection and attraction, I feel, is what is precious about life.
In Accra last year and Nairobi this year I met a person each, while walking somewhere in those cities alone, who took me around showing me things and leading me. Those experiences would never have been memorable without those guides. In Accra I found him in a community center and I paid him for showing me around; in Nairobi he appeared out of thin air on a trail opposite the Giraffe center and claimed to be a ranger. The first showed me some boxing gyms in the Bukom community in Jamestown in Accra. The second showed me tree hyraxes, a viewpoint, his chicken coop and the birds that mysteriously get into them to steal the food despite there being no gaps in the coop net; he was dressed in ranger khakis and never asked for any money, only for my phone number to send me his pics of animals, birds and flowers, in response to which I gave him my email id, and then soon as we were approaching the end of the trail and could hear human voices on the main road again he excused himself as taking a route different from mine and disappeared as into nowhere as he had come from. Looking back now both those people feel like avatars of the same spirit, and remind me of those tales from Indian mythology I grew up on, wherein deities visited mortal folk in avatars to test them, and I feel I failed those tests at the margin cos although I was open and friendly with them I made the Accra guy believe that I would come again and I never did and I stopped responding to the emailed pics sent by the Nairobi ranger. Husband says the ranger was just hitting on me and he in fact got worried for my safety in hindsight on both occasions when I narrated what I had been upto. My response, which came from somewhere deep within surprising even me, was 'what could they take from me that I wouldn't heal from'. I do believe that fear of other people and the fear of how they could hurt us spoils possible beautiful interactions with those who have no such intentions. In fact the ranger mentioned something like this, in the context that I wasn't behaving like other tourists, in a city where tourists are told to beware. That same day I also went to lunch at this beautiful farm-restaurant Cultiva where they put me at the bar cos I was alone, and another lone luncher came and sat next to me, who I chatted up, learning he was a runner and a swimmer and then said bye matter of factly when I was done eating. Later in Masaai Mara though some of our camp staff said some sexist things to me on our last day there which offended me and the friendship I showed toward them; there was not a single woman on their staff either.
But even I can still be afraid, of getting too close and hurting others, myself, him; of appearing too familiar with someone I am not supposed to have that kind of access to. And this fear of mine can lead to me ignoring or offending the very person I most want to know. His wife has been visiting my dreams and I've been letting her down there.