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.