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?

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. 

we were watching The Substance the day before yday. in various parts i groaned with the discomfort and pain of watching it. it is brilliant but gruesome and gory. for the first time i saw him unable to watch something. he covered his eyes by pulling up his tshirt over them. i bent down to him (i sit on the sofa, he on the rug just below me) closing my eyes and his, and wondered aloud if we were doing the same thing as the character in the movie by being unable to stop. then i stopped it, but we played it again, and this time i forwarded the gory bits. the end is an explosion of excesses, visual and visceral. 

it is about sexism and body image issues, about social pressures on women, but i also felt it was about bulemia and anorexia, about the anxious compulsive and the other self in OCD (the more the anxious self indulges in compulsions believing it will help, the more restricted the other-normal self's life becomes), about how we all have different parts within oneself and how we indulge one hurting the other sometimes... 

i think i have started to understand better what is meant by the 'female gaze'. it is somewhat an undoing of the default male gaze, wherein everything is viewed from the perspective of men. what pleases men, how do they want women to be to look to smile to behave. am i pretty only when a man finds me so. am i attractive only when i realize a guy cannot help being attracted to me. 

i have before on this same blog asked myself the question of whether i get turned on by men who are turned on by me. and i do think there is something to it. something conditioned something i am unable to unlearn and undo despite being conscious of it. the quiet guy I met in Budapest had some of that effect on me. 

but with this person who i am finally getting to know after six odd years of eye-locking across public and professional spaces, it is different, although still heavily influenced by my position and conditioning. i first heard of him when hubbby (then not) raved about his work around 2005, and i helped him understand something in his paper/work. i absorbed that hero worship which continued over the years. and then about 12 years later when he interviewed hubby and then finally hired him, i had this premonition or dream about him and myself. 

yday he and his wife finally came over to dinner. i barely slept the night before and this night after. i've been conversing with him and her in my head for months now and the conversation grew more intense in anticipation. i usually ensure i do the things that scare and excite me, but i also believe it is futile to try and fight a strong pull for something. i have written even about this in my post about binge watching, addiction, and emerging like a sphinx from what remains after giving in to desire to its expiration. 

i was the one who did not give up on inviting them despite multiple failed attempts. after knowing him, but also them, for a lil bit, i had to have more. but i had to have more also to erase his unconscious gazing at me which happened recently again when he saw me after about 5 months: i was having breakfast with hubby at his conference where i had tagged along to holiday after and felt someone's gaze on me. looking toward i noticed him and raised my eyebrows in acknowledgment as if to say 'ah there you are, how have you been?' but that did not break his gaze and took me back to before dining with them; somehow i had hoped and felt that that would change things given now we knew each other. i then half waved, gently, to break his stare, and he averted his eyes, mumbling a hi which i could not hear because he was a few tables away. i went with hubby to say hi after we were done eating to once again break that ice. and we chuckled over some inane things, all three of us. he said 'See you' into which i read a million meanings. 

so they came for dinner last night. as usual i felt i messed up with not serving not heating not cooking the right way. both him and his wife left aside the baingan peels, the baingan i had cooked in that Turkish manner without its minced red meat and substituting for the pine nuts with corn. i wanted to tell them it melts in the mouth despite looking tough and stringy. but i felt that would be too controlling and instead gulped down my disappointment with my baingan and their eating habits. 

he turned the coaster next to him over and examined it carefully. its from Japan but we haven't been there yet, its a gift. i noticed him do that and wondered what he thought of it in connection with us. he peered at the books in our bookshelf, at our pics on the fridge and the travel magnets there with a half smile on his face which made me squirm/blush. he watched every facial movement of mine as i spoke with him, his wife, their son, my hubby. and i have realized no one else i have known in my life so far has understood the language i speak with my eyes and my face, the way i smile or stifle one, the way i give a lopsided one sometimes, the way i draw back, or guffaw, or just look back into people's eyes with intensity that sometimes when i am self aware of makes me uncomfortable myself. 

i have now increasingly been seeing myself as i imagine he has been seeing me. after they had left yday i sat in his spots and tried to see what he could have seen or did see. his gaze is defining me now. why is he so curious about me, and what else is it if not curiosity. for some unknown reason i am not curious, i already feel like i know a lot about him, from hubby, a lot that also feels coincidentally like me myself. even yday he said he had recently found Ronny Chieng... ditto here. 

and today is his birthday. i knew yday, facebook had told me, but i did not reveal that, and i somewhat also forgot. 

i found it admirable when his son said that his father was probably the best loser in sport he had known, but laughed out loud when he also said that when he does win he cannot help gloating about it for days. 

when they were leaving he said my name aloud and blanket invited me over to play Bridge with them. 'Oh' was all i could muster.

two days ago, hubby was teasing me in his parents' company. he said in all my childhood pics, my sister could be seen free and childlike while i was always prim and proper. and then yday while we were waiting for these guys to arrive, and i told him i was feeling hot and cold because i was nervous, he teased me again saying i would now have to be a 'good girl'. i asked him if he generally thought i was a good girl, and what that meant. i have forgotten his exact words, but they were something to the effect that i wouldn't do bad things. am i too much of that?

I wish I had learned how to swim before I developed cellulite. I wish I wasn't embarrassed of my dimpled thighs, showing out of my swimsuit. At a hotel recently, a guy and I were waiting for the chlorine crystals to dissolve and the foamy patches off of them to dissipate, and when we finally opened our bathrobes to get into the water I was conscious of the guy's gaze on my suit and thighs. and I felt him dismiss me because of my cellulite and the stretchmarks so visible on my dark skin. The guy felt unconscious of his aging body and to me his swimshorts clad white hairy middle aged body looked perfectly normal, a common sight. 

Most of the lionesses we saw were sleeping, or lazying. But one stood up a while, alert and looking toward thr leopard's tree, walked a few paces and then gave me a view of its side profile. One was running away from a jeep catastrophe (stuck in a ditch, the start of an orchestrated human-jeep team rescue event). And one, alone, emerged out of a bush when I spotted it and caused our jeep to stop, with flies covering it's face (possibly on blood from a kill), and slowly disappeared deeper into the bush. Every time a lioness moved upright, I watched her muscular body, rippling thighs, like womens' underwater, where each movement leaves reverberating echoes in the skin and muscles around it.... And I was conscious of the lionesses' unselfconsciousness regarding their bodies. How lovely to be like that.

First written: Sep 2024

Updated: February 2025.

there are 3 cousins i am kinda close to. all of them are men. one on my dad's side who still lives in that city of my earliest childhood memories and feels sort of left behind by us, me and my sister, who often feel sad and maybe a little guilty for having abandoned him there. the other two on my mom's side, both of which my sister is not as close to as i am. one is about 3 years younger than me, and the other about 5 years older than me. this older cousin i barely knew when i was little, but around when i was in high school, mom, me and sis lived with his mother for some months in that family house built by my mom's father, and soon after in an apartment in the immediate neighborhood; my own dad was then posted in a city where my parents did not want us to live or study. this cousin was doing his MBA then and would come home for vacations. we would sit and talk, often when the others had retired to bed. he told me about his seemingly cool life then in that elite post grad institute where i probably aspired to go to too. he had also just finished studying at one of the best undergraduate colleges in india, in delhi, and delhi had been calling me in an inner voice for some time. i looked upto this cousin. i thought he was wise, unconventional, pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and liberation from the norms of the society i had been raised in, as he possibly had girlfriends then and more importantly he was of the opinion that our society was too moralistic about sex, which he evidently found claustrophobic. 

i was part of that society for him then, and at one point when i curiously asked him about some girl in his yearbook he reacted angrily and with derision about how i came from a moralistic perspective of sex and male-female friendships. i probably had something of a platonic crush on him, i was in awe of him, liked spending time with him and looked forward to his visits. his angry burst did not disrupt any of that because i just let it erupt and die down and afterwards we were as if it hadn't occured. 

once my dad was visiting while my cousin was around, and because my parents occupied the bedroom that mom, me and sis shared, my sister and i had to sleep in this large common room which was also the dining room, the tv room, and also had a large bed where visitors often slept. i remember my cousin was to leave the next day, and i insisted that he slept with me and my sister. that raised a strange argument and discussion in the house because the adults, our parents, felt something was wrong in cousins of different genders sleeping in the same bed but because no one mentioned the word 'sex' and no one wanted to even suggest it, and because i persisted in my demand adopting this attitude which was seemingly unaware of what the problem might be, everyone relented knowing how i admired and looked upto him and also possibly because this 'middle room' was open, large, quite the opposite of any surreptitious space, and shared windows with my parents' bedroom. throughout the night i remember my dad kept waking up and coming to these windows to make sure 'nothing happened'. and i didn't sleep well because that bothered me. it made me feel the weight of how the world expected any male and female body when in proximity especially at night to only be capable of having sex. but it also made me feel like i was my dad's property and thus his responsibility to protect. but that it wasn't me really that was his responsibility but simply my virginity or my 'honor', because i had never seen my dad so worried about me in other respects. it also made me feel very defiant such that i slithered on my bed closer to my cousin, pretending to be asleep, as close as i could get without touching him; and then i slowly started slithering downward to the bottom of the bed where i thought i might be out of my dad's view. i felt like i was challenging my dad to say the words and be open about what he was afraid might happen. even in those days i realized, without having the realization of it, that the society that was bringing me up was hypocritical. 

months later, when we lived in that apartment in the neighborhood, and my dad got transferred to another city, a much larger, more reckless, more 'immoral' city in my opinion then, and i was upset (but also excited) about moving to, leaving my high school friends who i then felt were the people of my life, my cousin was brought in by mom to speak with me, to console me about the move; he knew the city better than us and had been working and living in it. since then my cousin and i have met and stayed in almost constant touch throughout our life. ours is also a close-knit family on my mom's side sometimes to the point where three generations of people gather meet and talk together which i have been finding annoying as the oldest generation has been tending farther and farther on the scale of religious and cultural staunchness or fanaticism. 

except for the years when i was living in that other country, my cousin and i would also call each other up on weekends sometimes, when not in the same cities, and would have long conversations. he was the one person in my larger family (other than my parents, sister, husband) who was curious and open to ideas other than his own. since our return back to india, in fact, this cousin showed even more curiosity to our ideas, way of living, but mostly our political ideologies and how we lived in and understood our marital life; he was still of the opinion that our society was moralistic about sex, he still looked down upon that, he still put me in that category too, but he also understood and possibly wondered about the way we defined our marriage, with fidelity and loyalty being the cornerstones without the need to procreate and grow our family and without co-habiting with parents (which i think is the norm even now in urban india as long as the younger married couple lives and works in the same city as the guy's parents). 

meanwhile my cousin had had multiple girlfriends, had married one of them, and after many years in the marriage had realized how incompatible they were and got a divorce. the rest of our large family had always known how incompatible his then love and wife seemed to us and thus him, how he had been smitten not by love but by the glamor of her (she is an exuberant, ambitious, loving, extrovertish and stubborn person, who was a TV actress and an event hostess, and who loved the spotlight of attention). he had had a few girlfriends after the marriage as well. 

but this post is an effort to understand this last weekend when my cousin said to me that he needed to recalibrate and dial down our relationship, and show up in my life less often. that he had, in his love for family, misunderstood or misjudged how welcome he was in my life. and that my definitions and my way of life were becoming too much for him to bear in his cost benefit analysis. something to that effect. in response to something i had said to him. we had been walking in Mehrauli archaeological park, him, me, my sister, and my husband, and had just sat down in its restaurant to eat something. maybe the food or something else led the conversation to our recent visit to his hometown, and how there, an aunt of ours had felt obliged to invite us home and cook for us even though she had been sick. and how or whether our appreciation of her cooking, despite me being down with a travel tummy and not wanting to eat her puris and halwa, somehow perpetuated the belief and the custom that women live to feed and care for people. my cousin was of the opinion that given that our moms and aunts grew up in a world where they were not just taught this, but they started to derive their happiness mostly from others' happiness when being fed and cared for, the least we could do was continue to give them that happiness. i of course, differed by saying something to the effect that it was upon us to show them other possibilities of living, and that we were part of the problem if we just ate and praised their cooking, sometimes against how we truly felt about that, and thus kept demanding them to continue as they had been brought up. he said something about why i was always wanting to change people rather than accepting them as they were. i acknowledged that i was and replied that other people had told me that i was 'too progressive', and suggested that maybe he and my other cousins didn't get my perspective because they weren't possibly as progressive. that angered him and from there it spiraled onto how he thought i was calling him a racist (despite my confused protestations that i had never used that word for him), that i didn't need to judge him and everyone else all the time (to which i pointed out that in telling me that i didn't accept people and tried to always change them even he was making a big judgement and how people should be willing to be judged by others if we all do it all the time; he did relent to this grudgingly), and then eventually into a calmer declaration that he couldn't have someone in his life who thought she was more progressive than him. i remember saying that we probably had different definitions of what progressivism meant, that we would all always be less or more something than the people in our lives; and i remember the restaurant staff asking us to leave because of our loud argument disturbing other patrons. somewhere in that argument he also hinted at how me not letting people wear shoes in my home and not letting them take their chappals onto my living room rug had offended him; how he was usually the sorts who went with the flow and how my rigidity made him feel constrained.

this cousin was brought up by my mom and her younger sister, substituting for his mom in his early childhood as his mom had not really been prepared for or wanted motherhood, especially that for the little boys she gave birth to. When my mom got married and left her paternal home, it was her younger sister who cared for him and he considers her like a mother. his mom had wanted daughters, if any children at all, and she was particularly fond of me.

once, years before he found the woman he would marry, his mom had visited him and stayed with him awhile. we used to live in the same city as him then. i remember my mother getting a call from his, an agitated hurt call after she had found condoms amongst his belongings. he had been unmarried then, probably in his mid/late-twenties. i also remember hearing his defense to the find, something about using them for masturbating, and possibly some hint to how that was a 'healthy habit'. i remember talking with mom and sis about it, that of course he was sexually active with his girlfriends, and that we shouldn't have to lie about such things simply because our parents couldn't accept the natural truth. his mother had always been somewhat neurotic too. (some years ago now she slipped into a deep depression, soon after retirement from a long academic career; she is a little better these days.) i remember feeling that although he, unlike many others in my family, dared to live a life beyond the boundaries of what our society permitted, he did not have the courage to come out with honesty about it. this was early 2000s. a few years later i would fall for this guy, who would take cross-country trains/flights to stay with me for weekends, once a month or so, and we would have feverish sex, without condoms, with him pulling out to prevent conception. the only person i have ever had sex with so far, who would also teach me much before we had the privacy for sex, that i needed to tell my mom something to that effect was up despite my growing up with a father who we had been taught by my mother to hide our lives from.

another time, a few years after the above episode, he was arranged to 'see' a young woman with the potential of them getting hitched. they lived in different cities then and he had visited her city a couple times, met her, kinda liked her, but was not sure of anything yet. I remember a family gathering somewhere around then, wherein we all sat in my aunt's (mom's younger sister's) living room and conversation turned to whether he liked this woman enough to send out a signal of commitment to her family: some sort of unofficial engagement between her and him. I remember him saying something like 'he was interested in her but wanted to be able to date her for a while before he would be able to understand whether he wanted to take it to the next level, but because this had started through the 'arranged marriage' network and because her parents were probably orthodox and would not let her date him as he wanted, he was willing to get engaged to her only so they would allow them to spend some time getting to know each other; and if in good time he did not feel like he wanted to marry her he could always break the engagement off'. I remember being angry at his cavalier attitude and words, and remember pointing out to him that what he was suggesting was somewhat dishonest and ignored her and her family's values but also that it might hurt not just her but something of her family's reputation to have an engagement broken off (if he could already foresee that possibility). I also think I remember my sister and mom agreeing with me in pointing this out, while no one else in the family said anything. our words angered my cousin, there was a loud outburst from him in response, which ended in us shutting up, and in my aunt fussing around him in an appeasing manner (which to us felt misplaced).

my cousin started visiting us and staying with us a night or two, since our return back to India, on his short visits to delhi sometimes. we would take him out, share our only proper bathroom then with him, lay out our sofa-bed for him in our living room in our tiny flat then, and talk, play games, well into the night sometimes. once we took him out to dinner and i remember us talking about the movie Gully Boy, especially about the women characters in it. whether the girlfriend was crazily possessive or normal in threatening other women in her guy's life. whether the other character was stereotypically a 'white woman in india' given how easily she kisses the guy, knowing possibly that he is in a committed/complicated relationship with someone else. i remember these last words coming out of my mouth, and how i thought the director always cast Kalki Koechlin in such stereotypically white women roles, blissfully unaware of indian culture. and i remember my cousin accusing me of moralizing her desire for the guy, that that was how 'people' behaved when they felt attracted to someone, that if the kiss was reciprocated it grew into something more but in itself it was often the first expression of desire; but how would i know that in my small morally restricted world ... ending with the pointed question of 'had i ever just kissed someone like that?' i hadn't but i didn't then say that aloud. i thought about it for a long time, i still do. how for me there are eyes and words and body language and careful thought way before a kiss. how after a few months of dating my husband, i had on the phone told him how natural it felt for us to be breathing into each other's ears and necks, and i had asked him why he hadn't yet kissed me. how the next time we met we kissed, first barely brushing our lips against each other's, and then when i wanted to kiss him on the cheek as a goodbye how we ended up in each other's mouths. he used to call me a prude for the first few years we were together, affectionately. but even today, i wouldn't kiss someone to express my desire for them unless i had pondered over the consequences for both of us till its death; desire to me is still mostly emotionally and intellectually felt, much more than the need to kiss. 

for days after that argument with my cousin in Mehrauli archaeological park i went over every word said and not said, and i came to the conclusion that he misunderstood 'progressivism'. that although its definition is about wanting to change, people and society, to a more equitable and just one, he was probably unaware of it, and that in accusing me of wanting to change people he had in fact acknowledged that 'i was more progressive than him', but somehow he did not like the sound of those words, because unlike his judgement of me they sounded more in my favor. 

he recently called to wish us a happy new year, and we talked like nothing had happened to disrupt our relationship.

in one of my classes this semester, only 4 students are enrolled. and on any given day, 2-3 turn up to class. 2 are guys, 2 are girls and only one of them is kinda regular. a few days ago only one guy and this regular girl were there when i started talking. i showed them the attendance sheet i had created and put up as it was still the start of the semester and i started logging that day's attendance in it. the girl interrupted me with a slightly concerned "maybe we can wait for 10 minutes ....". my instantaneous reaction (to all such words by students in general) was "don't worry about other students/people". and then something about her guileless concern about those missing the attendance call made me add to that, "you know we women are brought up with the training that it is our job to worry about everyone else, and it is not fair". the other kid in the class was at this point busy writing something down in his notebook and seemed disconnected from our conversation. and the girl replied to my words with "but shouldn't everyone be like that?" implying whether it was not an ideal world where everyone was worried and concerned about everyone else, and rather than me telling her to tone down her concern for others which i was suggesting came from our conditioning as women in this society, would it not be better that we also conditioned men like that? i don't remember my exact words, but i said something to the effect "No. this is probably coming from not just age (and some experience) but also how we (human beings) have started to understand these things better... there is only so much worry one can take, and worry turns to stress, and moreover we don't have the same information as those other people have for whom we might be worrying so that worry might not be helpful often..." i did not say that sometimes it might actually worsen things for those others or for third parties in the situation, that such worry can often turn women into nags, that it is not just not fair but also possibly counter productive... she nodded somewhat absorbingly. and then i started teaching. 10 minutes or so later i just realised that no other students had walked in. and i happened to smile and mention this. the girl student smiled back.

someone asked me this summer "why is it so hard if someone does something for you?". I felt exposed. I also felt like I hadn't realised that person knew me so well. I felt cared for, but also extremely uncomfortable. 

about a month before that, when those guys had fed us warmly in their home that evening, he had asked his wife to pass the bowl of chakhna to me, saying my name specifically. on receiving the bowl, without looking at anyone, without dipping into the bowl or helping myself from it, I passed it further on. I felt compelled to. almost like because he had meant it for me, I couldn't bring myself to take any of it.

but it isn't always hard when someone does something for me. and not for every someone.

I just realised today that he had apologised that day possibly not for his bag that was left with me, but possibly for making me feel uncomfortable, after seeing that discomfort in my eyes.

Laing's The Garden Against Time is like a running blog, about her restoring her garden, but also about her thinking through it, reading about it's history and the history of gardens, gardeners, Eden, paradise, land and its many effects on people and the ways in which it is used personally and politically. Its a lil bit like my own blog, but more painstakingly recorded and more beautifully written.

She is writing about finding the writings of John Clare now, his poems and his 'salvaging' of the land and its flowers around him that was being lost to private property in his time. I realised I was smiling as I read through her descriptions of his poetry and journaling about the various flowers, and realised my expression changed to one of worry concern but also displeasure as soon as she got to his documenting his ill health.

flowers, plants, birds, trees, what do they mean to us. I stare at the monsoon greenery of the neem and peepul. yesterday I saw the black Kajal like symmetric marks on the neck of a tailor bird through my Binoculars. I am continually mesmerized by the plants I tend to on my windowsills and tabletops, the Anthurium someone gifted me last week, my snake plants one with yellow edges and one without, the marbled pothos, my jade (also a gift as a baby), my arrowheads, the ficus I've been trying to rid of something that's eating it by repotting, drenching, sunning, and also giving it the prettiest pot I could find to cheer it up, and my zebra plant a pup of which is just lying unattached to the soil and still doing well. Yesterday I also finally assumed responsibility and replanted some cuttings from a basket of portulacas mom gave me (she refurbishes them for me each time they stagnate) into a lovingly bought wide round ceramic bowl. everytime before I've tried to stick a cutting into soil it has perished. This time I followed mom's instructions, very wet soil, and I was careful to peel away leaves at the bottom of the cuttings. I stuck them into the wet soil lovingly, one by one, keeping branches together wherever possible. And pinched out the soggy snail-like after-flowers, throwing them into the overgrown lane between our terrace and the next. 

these days when I close my eyes I see plants and flowers. And this morning the replanted portulacas are blooming, seemingly have had grown some roots to their new home.

this summer, in Seattle cafes, in an Oregon airbnb, and in a glass sunroom in the store of an olive farm, i finally realized how much i loved and desired houseplants. they had beautiful greens, in different shapes and sizes, some creeping down from baskets, some curling up toward the light, some variegated some marbled, broad leaves, and spindly ones, dwarf succulents and monstera deliciosa's cheese-y holes, some spineless with air roots just lazily flopping around their pots, and some so perfect they seemed almost plastick-y but gave you the feeling of life between your fingers when you reached out in doubt. i love real plants that look like plastic but hate plastic ones that pretend to look real. it wasn't the first time i had seen beautiful house plants, or the first time i loved them. two years ago in a budapest airbnb with sis and hubby, i had fallen in love with the flat with its huge bright windows on the top floor right under the red sloping roof and its beautiful stained glass and art on the walls decor with this half-tree in our bedroom, and other lovely plants around the flat which i remember i went around watering as if it was my home. even last summer in the airbnb in Oaxaca i sketched the potted plants inside, and some peeping in from the windows. in my own home in covid quarantine i had sketched some of my own houseplants, still new from the nursery, the first few sketches in my life i put color to, because the greens and yellows demanded it. houseplants btw are a very millenial thing, but also i suspect a very female thing these days. and the pandemic led many of us toward them, kinda like how it turned birdwatchers out of many of us, around the world.

what was different this summer was that i realized that some of those plants i was seeing in those cafes and in that airbnb, i myself owned, but somehow mine didnt look as grand cos i hadnt bothered to give them space, some were almost bursting out of their pots and i had forced them to remain, tying some, wrapping some round and round multiple times around their pot. what i realised was that at least a few of mine could in fact be grander than their twins oceans across if only i graduated out of being the kind of plant parent that i was - a consumerist who bought, kept, and threw away when they died, to go on to buy new ones. i realised that although that had been the pattern for the first some years of my gardening/plant parenting, something had changed without me fully realising it - that the pattern had broken for many of my plants such that they had been with me for years now and had grown, taller and wider, and were healthy to my surprise. evolution of those that survived in my environment, but also me having learned how to listen to my plants. over years i have been touching them and their soil, feeling whether the leaves feel taut or limp, whether the soil is old wet or newly watered, whether the soil needs sun or the leaves need more. and without consciously realizing, i had managed them better. i still regret the ones i have lost. the beautiful green and yellow croton, somehow all the flowering plants (other than my faithful Adenium and the Bougainvillea with who i had a complicated hard to communicate relationship but that was doing better and i recently gave it to my mom to keep it from moving between her place and mine every time i traveled), one just yesterday that i put out with garbage after trying to salvage it. but somehow the green ones that don't flower often, the ones we desire for their leaves rather than their rare if at all flowers, have been growing on me and some are even thriving now. there is something about plants that do not find it necessary to attract bees and butterflies often, that reproduce by giving off pups in their soil. my snake plants have done this in abundance and i have given them bigger pot homes twice now, the second time after returning from Seattle, inspired by the northwest, realizing it had to be done sooner than waiting to move into another home. i also saw some useful props in the Oregon airbnb, these twisy green-painted iron supports to rein in shoots reaching too far out of the pot; i now use them also to help my climbers get some height within small pots. one of my snakeplants alongwith its pups in a large pot is now a beautiful and much loved half-tree in my bedroom. yesterday i went to buy some pots and planters for a few small window ledges. i probably went to the wrong place - the mall - usually i would have gone to the shops attached to the roadside nurseries. but even then i was surprised to see most pots/planters without drainage holes in their bottom. those would work if i had inner plastic pots where the plants actually live, so a double pot system. but since i haven't been buying new plants, and only need pots to either propagate pups from old plants or to replant those bursting out of their smaller pots, these didn't work for me. i asked a number of the store assistants why they didn't have pots with drainage holes. the answer was the same each time, people are buying to house plastic plants in them. and then one of them recommended i visit this store called Pure; turned out Pure only sells plastic plants and flowers. something fell through and got lost in my world then. plants, animals, the diversity of life is what we hope will counter our 'civilization', but now people desire even their plants to be plastic! i ended up buying some books instead, one about restoring a garden. i came home and couldn't help searching for reasons why people bought plastic plants for their homes. in all the forums people kept saying its convenient and easy, you don't have to take care of them. Duh, well of course. not a single answer even dwelt on the plastic, on us replacing even the hope for this world. i have often felt like convenience is going to be the death of us someday. if people could eat and digest plastic, they would out of convenience cos after all plastic food wouldn't rot, it wouldn't turn yellow, get bugs, hell yeah we might not even need to excrete it. there's no life in it, so there is no risk of death. and now i am reading Olivia Laing, The garden against time, her memoir of yearning for, finding, and restoring a garden (with a house) with her husband 20-30 years older than her; i think it was their version of making a baby in this world before he dies.

movies that I haven't processessed in my mind yet, or in conversations with others, because barely anyone I know has seen these: 

Marco Bellocchio's Leap in the Dark, and then Fists in the pocket. That second one quite disturbing. I saw it over many days, bit by bit, turning it off whenever I was overwhelmed. Somewhat similar: The Dreamers, by Bernardo Bertolucci, but less disturbing, just as scandalizing/stunning though in a different way.

I've always marveled at and been fascinated with italian cinema, the old and the new. But these really pushed my boundaries, made me u comfortable, even watching them by myself.

I think I made him see Leap in the dark with me again but he doesn't view things as I do, doesn't dissect them and unwrap meanings...

But Anatomy of a Fall I dissected while watching with him a second time, that was quite a revelation of a movie without making me squirm in my seat. Should have been called Anatomy of a marriage, of growing up and old together, of finding fears and anxieties and rivalries and insecurities and ugliness within us as we grow, about the irrelevance of 'truth': I mean what does that even mean...? of perspectives and grey-ness and in betweens.

Why do we teach our kids that 'snitching' is bad, when it is the same thing often as 'whistleblowing'? Why do we call it 'snitching' with such a negative connotation to it? When does our teaching evolve into the Blue Code and also the idea that 'boys don't tell on their mates' even when they cross a 'crime' line? Why don't we teach our kids the nuances important and help them build an intuition they can trust and then give them the courage to act upon it. 

I saw Armaggeddon Time on the flight to amrika this time. And here have been wondering how to talk and listen to my lil nephew about difficult questions, many of which even he tends to avoid or says he has 'already forgotten'; that last were his words to my asking him about his note of 'bad things my classmates did when the teacher went to the bathroom'.

Sex is a waste of time when time is in short supply. With some ppl I crave conversations, even though that is also limiting. 

Margaret Mead had an affair with a colleague 20 years her senior, he was also a student of Papa Franz. While she was married to a third person, and while she was falling in love with Ruth Benedict, also a student of Papa and his teaching assistant then. 

woke up this morning a lil late. sleep has been erratic these last couple weeks. found a brutal full frontal red ants attack on the kitchen bin and all over the kitchen rug. we hadn't even thrown mango peels in there, but he had cooked fish last evening, I know the ants here to be non vegetarian, they love fish oil. just last week I was nostalgic about the ants; this year has been different, they were so far very few and very late in the season, and out of the wall opposite their usual annual.

spent the next couple hours or so cleaning up. washing the ants down, wiping every surface. he took the rug and trash out and away. I mopped the kitchen floor and walls, and then plugged any holes in the walls with the tile fixer pour cement thing.

had that can't live here feeling for the umpteenth time. called mom who is unwell. and finally sat down for breakfast at 11:30. 

and then noticed the usual late morning flameback woodpecker visit on the peepul outside the guestroom window, which is my summer breakfast reading spot. the red headed golden backed guy traipsed flauntingly up and down the tree for a long time. I put aside reading about Margaret Mead's childhood, gasped and smiled and tried unsuccessfully to click it yet again. and then a lil female sunbird swung on a wire just out the window a while.

such is the balance in life in the Aravallis, the pain and pleasure, the awe and angst of living in human houses at the edge of the jungle.

I dreamt of both of them. One night of seeing him in different places in probably multiple intersecting dreams, and then him disappearing in each. This was after they declined our invitation. And then this morning I dreamed of her after seeing why they had declined: she couldnt make it, was to travel and had a visiting sibling. In this more coherent lifelike dream, of sheltering in some home of hers, changing bedsheets and she telling us it was the wrong sheet, there were lots of people at some large Langar lunch of sorts, and I was swimming in her tiny L-shaped garden pool free like a fish, and when I got out her guard tried to talk to me, lecherous; I found some beautiful taps and buckets of water and plants in some of them, and then a broken bottle which when I showed her turned to harmless translucent soft plastic bits. 

I have discovered Wim Wenders on MUBI. Perfect days, Alice in the cities ("When you drive through America something happens to you"), and then will watch Paris, TX with him; had been searching for that one for years. I feel a strange nostalgia when I watch 70s amrika in movies, although I wasn't even born then.

sometimes laziness comes over me like destiny. I've been reading and watching stuff more than anything else this summer so far. and thinking and dreaming. we did also have some younger colleagues home one evening. some women and their spouses. I realized that day that ppl didn't take Linda Goodman setiously because barely anyone had really read her, "from cover to cover" as a spouse specified, most people barely just skimmed their own zodiac pages and who they would pair best with, no one but me thought of her as a poet and a lyrical writer. and then I found a fan club of her poetry online.

and we are finally somewhat friends. we dined at theirs. he showed me pics from when he was young, mustachioed. she fed us warmly, like we were her kids. their son licked the palm of his right hand clean when eating and then reached out with his fingers for some honeydew she cut for all of us; she scolded and protested in tamil, and the two of us smiled and helped ourselves to the fruit (which she had cut despite my "please don't bother" because he chose unthinking when she gave him options to choose from). their regular house help had gone off for a month and the woman helping left soon after dinner was served, but dirty dishes kept disappearing as if someone was washing them in between bits of our conversation. she didn't know where bones should be thrown when we were searching for their bin, and I forked them into her lil compost bin confirming it was compost material. he barked instructions at me to get the top right drawer and some spoons from it. I couldn't figure how it opened so I kept opening everything else around it. later he seemed annoyed when I wanted a serving spoon for something that didn't have one in it; that made me smile inwardly. they invited us over because we had some crisis level water problems. I really felt for her and warmed to her. they argued with each other over the role of the Supreme Court and the CJI in the institutions and politics of these times, even though they all have the same political inclinations. I felt like I hadn't learned how to swim in those waters, and both of us smiled to each other like we knew their weaknesses and stared from one of their faces to another. we realised they barely knew the shops in the market between our houses or they barely ate outside food. he flinched a lil and smiled and mumbled in embarrassment when i looked at him directly and complained against his distaste for a netflix series i thought was very good. I felt her eyes on me and him then, wondering how much we knew each other. I was meeting her after about 5-6 years. she is a morning person, always rushing from one thing to another, taking care of others more than herself, dislikes exercise other than swimming, is a doting mother, and has a caring soft spoken manner. other than being an economist and writer I admire. he is a lil impatient, not always aware of how his words might hurt or possibly believing that honesty is more important and the casualties worth it, trying incessantly to make sense of things, curious, and willing to be corrected. both have a frankness about them, simplicity, a sense of humor, and an awareness of the fragility of things. both are precious. my mind has been replaying words said and the expressions on their faces this whole week, sometimes also continuing conversations beyond where they were interrupted by failings of memory or thought, keeping me awake sometimes.

I was reading Sarah Polly's memoir of all kinds of trauma in her life. The bit about her erasing from her memory and retaining no recollection of a bad sexual episode and being choked and how she slowly recalls it in the midst of other similar reports only when her siblings remind her of her own, and her unpacking of it, was like nothing I've ever read or understood before. Like I've said before, sex is a lot more and a lot less than we give it credit. People remember selectively, they lie about it, they depict themselves in it selectively, and they manipulate their recollections of it to sometimes manufacture an image of themselves that they are comfortable with or that they would desire or that they can live with.

I am now reading Jill Ciment's memoir of growing up. And waiting to get my hands on her second memoir called Consent.

I think I'll always be in love with the idea of someone being in love with me. Of someone being curious about me to the extent of wanting to know my every thought, every motivation behind my every choice and action, every lil habit of mine, every practiced gesture. to be cont'd....

(Update on June 9th: randomly came across a movie that felt like it needed to be watched today. Sis was visiting. But she found it too heavy. Women Talking. Realised it's been written and directed by Sarah Polley. And so beautifully written, every word carefully chosen, to describe in a thought experiment, or a metaphor of a situation that tries to capture the entire argument relating to patriarchy and feminism. He and I ended up finishing the movie, me crying as usual; this time about why not everyone can understand this and why the world needs to be so messed up.)

we were in Kashmir this last week, mom sis and me. multiple aunts/uncles/in-laws with a certain political party/man loyalty kept telling us that kashmir had become safe overnight or that tourism had been restored there overnight since the abrogated of Article 370. talking to the locals we met, there did not seem to be much reaction or change since then. seemed like it was more the revival and tourism surge post covid that they found worth mentioning. 

in Srinagar we stayed in a cute cottage on the grounds of a professor couple. we saw the beautiful and long tailed Asian paradise flycatcher there a couple times. the couple's gardens had beautiful irises, lupins, apple orchard, a small pond (where apparently the flycatcher dives in). later we saw one of the same flycatchers flying and dipping in front of a local bus along the Dal lake as well. 

There were crazy rain forecasts for our days in Srinagar and Pahalgam and against our hopes that is exactly what happened. we got out in between rains, we saw some mughal gardens, we walked along the Dal lake, we walked into local bakeries (esp in Srinagar) and came out with bags of different kinds of breads, kulchas, khatais, rotis, bhakar vadis (seems like kashmiris don't cook rotis at home unlike mainland indians; they eat rice for main meals and buy open, literally by hand, from local bakeries for morning/evening snacktimes). the chinar trees were beautiful. our local driver and guides told us names of trees, flowers, food, and stories of bollywood songs shot in different places. the local taxis played bollywood songs from the 80s and 90s. between srinagar and pahalgam, there is a large industry making cricket bats; there were stacks of their wood lying open to drench in the rain which would harden them. After bollywood, or maybe before, cricket seems to be the other source of fandom. Our driver told us Sachin had recently visited and stayed for a week. i tried the various lamb dishes part of their wazwan: daniya/daniwal korma, goshtaba, yakhni; i tried the mouthwatering displays of halwa and paratha in the market next to Hazratbal; and we had kashmiri pulao and ferni in different places. their food is low on spices that are perfectly blended. they use a lot of yogurt, their yakhni is essentially a delicious yogurt gravy which you can find in veg versions for lotus stem (nadru) and louki (al) as well. Kashmiri people were very sweet, friendly, curious about us especially the women, and hospitable. One place in Pahalgam after the rains finally stopped i took mom and sis for a long aimless walk. we met lots of men walking with huge bags or cars that would stop with men's faces poking out trying to sell us shawls and lots of women/girls who would glance at us curiously and then break into large smiles in response to ours. some would simply ask us how we were and where we were from or where we were staying. a group of small girls shadowed mom for a bit and asked her where she came from or where she was going... and in response to similar questions from us told us they were on their way to see a new bride. i asked them if the bride was their age to which they responded with "woh to bahut badi hai". they stopped at a house near where we were looking for a hotel/restaurant to stop for tea, and they guided us to a resort two houses down. at that place mom and sis's grumbling about sugar in kehwa got the attention of a young Kashmiri couple on the table next to ours who demanded the restaurant guys to make freshly brewed kehwa for us without sugar. they turned out to have done wood/interiors for the resort. after we chatted with them awhile and had finished rounds of kehwa, they and the waiters refused to let us pay citing Kashmiri hospitality. that walk gave us some stunning views around Pahalgam that all the much touted tourist points would not have. Betaab/Hajan valley, named after the movie shot there, and Aru were beautiful though. in Betaab there is this dear little river running through, the banks of which are stone-studded and perfect for a picnic and birdwatching. we saw lots of Citrine wagtails (identification thanks to a friend) there, and some white capped redstarts. In Aru mom captured the cute little Plumbeous water redstart. we tried everywhere to distance ourselves from the busy touristy mule paths and to evade the calls for 'sightseeing', 'horse-ride', etc. 

Toilets on highways in Kashmir are dirty. and in many places only the women loos are indian. there is still a big gender difference in many ways and i kept wondering if tourists' presence and the internet (when it wasn't shut by the govt) did not make the youth question their culture. 

And then we went to Sonmarg. soon before that i felt like i was ready to go back home, or that i should go back home because hubby was traveling and had not locked our frontdoor well. i got this funny feeling like my holiday was done. there was also doubt to our Sonmarg plan because the rain had blocked part of the road to there. but the road cleared up and we did get there. even before we arrived the sights around me made me feel like we shouldn't have come, like we were trespassing in such stunning and outlandish landscapes and with such thick snow frozen around the road, that our car and the road built for cars like ours was somehow spoiling it. there was also an under-construction tunnel underway to substitute for when the external road is blocked/damaged by landslides and bad weather. i kept thinking that the weather and the lack of good roads is the place's only protection against us humans, that we should let it be. upon arrival i felt even sadder: it seemed like all the hotels, concrete infrastructure was built in the last 5-6 years, there were roads/bridges under construction and cement dust everywhere at teh foot of these grand jagged rock mountains capped with thick snow. and the 'town' was full of men with mules calling out to every tourist "tajwas glacier; sightseeing; horse ride; only 20 minutes; discount; ...". our car rode up on a mule path to our hotel. we had heaters in bathrooms although the hot water in my bathroom wouldn't work well throughout my stay. and i kept thinking that one should come here only if one was on foot and looking to trek. apparently the Kashmir great lakes trek starts from there. we wandered around aimlessly on those beautiful slopes avoiding the road and its cement colored dust of progress. i found what seemed like remains of a picnic/meal with plastic spoons, paper plates, eggshells, empty plastic bottles of water trashed around. there were mules left to graze with their front legs tied together so that they wouldn't go far. there was plastic waste all around. amidst all of this were some Eurasian hoopoes that would fly away as i tried to get closer to get their pics. i walked up once to some isolated huts that supposedly were homes of goatherds or of those who owned some mules. our hotel did not have Kashmiri food, everything was generic and north indian. the town in the center of the valley was new, dirty, and an eye sore to the majestic beauty of the surrounding peaks. i kept feeling sad that i had come and that the whole infrastructure had been set up to enable my coming. and on the night before we had to leave the place my tummy gave up. i groaned and flitted between my bed and the loo, thankful for the heater next to it. 

The security at Srinagar airport is weird. you have to take all your bags out of the car even before you reach the airport gates, and have them scanned and then put them back in the car. coolie-like men ask if you need their help for a fee for the whole process.

Oh and more than one Kashmiri driver regaled us with stories of how unsafe Paharganj and Purani dilli are...