I had expected to blog more about Budapest from here, about the city maybe this country, some sort of a travelogue... but being alone after so long has been kinda self introspective and meditative. 

I think I am still in love with the idea of falling in love, and with the idea of someone falling in love with me. 

I find conversations with men so much easier than with women. I make friends rarely but fast. I like people who don't like making small talk, who are awkward in one way or another, who are non-ordinary and/or uncomfortable. but yeah I am still surprised by the people I like, by the deception of first impressions, by how comfortably i reveal my soul to some..

I got that longed for haircut. But only after about a week it's feeling like I could have got more chopped off, it's a nice haircut though, realised after getting it that a lot of women both old and young here have something similar. Had got a feeling that here they would be able to do a short women's haircut justice. now for that coloring it, waiting for paycheck. 

there's a person at work who is shy and sweet, older but feels more alone and possibly still single. I think almost everywhere where I get to know a few people, I feel like one is falling for me. and even I seem to like him, rather I'm growing fond of him. but as I was telling hubby i wonder if getting any more friendly would send out the wrong message, and that being married sometimes inhibits me from exploring serendipitous connections. 

are all European homes within built with IKEA parts as if they were Lego?

there's an Italian colleague here I at first thought was cold. y'day he and I had Vietnamese lunch together cos no one else was around. we ended up talking. he's lived in Shanghai, even in DC a bit.. loves that city like I do too. made a face at NYC, said it has a soul (like Rome for him) that is too much, it overwhelms. i think I understand; NYC is the only place outside of India and Kathmandu that has felt overwhelming. and now I want to visit Rome to meet its soul. 

we started talking about politics at some point, about how no one in Budapest seemed to care while news from outside about Orban seemed full of fear and boding. he said "because we are privileged..". from there on he got sad or hopeless and started talking first about India's abstaining regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine... and then about Italians and their anti-Americanism and fascination for Putin and strong men.. i almost felt like hugging him he got so morose. I tried to cheer him up by asking if he had seen Zelensky's show on Netflix but he doesn't have Netflix! just like his surprise at me not using WhatsApp maybe. and then he left unsaid many things which he said were for another time... and then left to buy blueberries...

even at work he looks like his mind is on another plane sometimes, I'm not sure it's sadness, coldness, or something quite else.

Later i went and bought blueberries too, from the central market; and strawberries, and apples and mandarins, and puffed rice and celery (with root). fresh produce is so cheerful, esp sold lose by weight. but even here they give each thing in a separate plastic bag; I've started recycling and carrying my own; the Asian woman in a stall y'day was annoyed at me for that, dunno why. 

I was watching something on Netflix, a coming of age of Indian (short) love stories, about queer people, about casual love, found but that probably would never last, etc. ... In one a guy asks a girl why she and her friends stage protests about the degradation of the environment when they know it won't change anything in the world. the girl says, "so the world doesn't change me".

Ive been wanting to cut my hair real short again and maybe color it blue/purple, now I wouldn't even need to bleach it before adding color cos there are lots of whites...

walking around a few days I got the feeling that very few Budapest locals work white collar desk jobs and that a number of them probably are employed in art, music, movies, media, etc. or the food and restaurant business. also saw a couple very small groups filming something on the streets, no fanfare no crowd. barely anyone around wears formals, even on weekdays commute hours; such a contrast to DC where I always feel under-dressed with the immaculate women in their pretty dresses going to work in those numerous offices.

now watching a presentation by an American academic visiting this place who works in communication and media studies. he informs me that a major industry in Budapest is films and commercials production, often outsourced from the rest of the world; and that Dune was produced here; and that Budapest has the largest film industry in continental Europe! apparently it even offers a great variety of architectural and geographical locations while remaining in and around the city.

I am in Budapest visiting the IAS of a university. it is funny how many books and shows that I am/was reading/watching have recently and unexpectedly referenced the history of Budapest during the holocaust.. or just the city as today. Russian Doll; Boris on youTube; Sheila Heti's 'Motherhood'; and what I picked up to read on my phone's Kindle today (hubby's account), a book about Kurt Godel.. in fact the last one hit home even more intimately ... I had just received (as I woke up this morning) a rejection for a short paper close to my heart from yet another journal, and the book started with reproducing Godel's psychiatrist's notes about him: "Belief that he hasn't achieved goals that he set out for himself - hence a "failure" - therefore other people, particularly the Institute (Princeton IAS), will also regard him as a failure and try to get rid of him. ... Took on big subjects, may not have been talented enough. - Usually works on his own, in way and fields that are opposed to current stream. ... Listed the various distractions that have interfered w/his progress w/his philosophical work. ..." I was sitting in the office of the National DG of Aliens Policing then and unprepared for a long wait, this was all I had. by the way, the office felt so like the DMVs of the USA, but less crowded and much more European if you know what that means. incidentally, Doha airport felt very American on my recent layover; efficient, clean, with a lot of the ground force of African origin. In the Buda office of Aliens policing I then spent some time looking at maps and reading Wikipedia about the Habsburg empire and the names of the major cities and what they are called now; for eg. Lemberg seems now to be Lviv in Ukraine. Sheila Heti on the other hand moved me by writing about her mother's and father's parents' history in Budapest, and of her mother later in Canada: "When I was five years old, my father and I went to visit her in the apartment where she was living for several months, so she could focus on studying for her exams. There seemed to be nothing so glamorous or romantic in the world as a mother who lived alone in an apartment with her colored pends and books. I wanted to grow up and be like her. I wanted to live in an apartment, too, with no one around to bother me.", and of course the reason why I bought her book in the first place: her questioning, similar but much deeper than mine, of the reasons to become a mother, of the need to do so or not... incidentally also, I am staying in an Airbnb apartment in Pest, in one of those old buildings all stuck together with courtyards in between that house many people with space used very efficiently ("most Hungarians homes are small" a man said to a small boy walking with him a couple days ago behind me on some street here, as he explained to him possibly the difference between Hungary and whichever European country the boy, possibly his nephew, was visiting from) - mine has a loft bed right above my living space - with no one to bother me and so I can work on a new proposal and on old rejected papers, undistracted by anyone, thanks to this visiting grant. also I have always been struck by what Virginia Woolf said and wrote about women and their need of "A room of one's own" which they often didn't have and without which it was difficult if not impossible to tap into their talents... the day I came in, the cleaners were still cleaning out this place, there were no bed linen or towels and the ones used by the previous renters were running in the washer in the bath, my phone and computer plugs wouldn't go into the electric outlets in the walls (European plugs look like Indian ones but have thinner metal pins and smaller plugs and the last times I visited Europe was from the USA where the plugs are different... I got fooled into thinking I didn't need converters this time), there was no shampoo and bath products, ... such that I spent hours hunting around the mall near this place looking for various things and feeling utterly lost. luckily I was carrying my old computer which has an american plug and I realized the small jugaad converter I carried for it works for all my plugs, but this only after I stopped a random desi-looking guy outside the mall to ask him for where I could get an India-Eu converter and he lit a bulb in my mind by saying "there are these Chinese shops..."!!! now after finally having also bought a stove lighter (the apartment has an old stove w/o an auto-lighter that seems like no one has used in a while cos there was no lighter around), which was hard to find as the shops around only seem to carry the portable gas-lighters for the numerous smokers in this city, this apartment is finally feeling like a room of my own. the trams are similar to Jerusalem, you buy tickets and punch them inside the train, but even if you didn't no one is checking, and most locals seem to be traveling with something either more permanent that doesn't need to be brought out at all or without it.. another university I ran into yday, in search of a large park where I could run, felt similar to my university where I got my PhD from, simply in the combination of vast space modern architecture and young people rambling around the campus... (the university where I am visiting is in contrast, a smaller campus, more in the center of town, where you don't see hoards of students milling around). on my way running back, a bus-driver waved to me (or so I thought) and I waved back (felt very American), and then after about 5 minutes of driving along with me or a little faster than me, he stopped at a bus stop and clapped looking at me supposedly to say I made it (catch the bus); I felt like I had misled him but just smiled and ran past; not many people running around (a few near the Danube in the mornings and more inside the modern university campus), but they do seem to walk a lot, and faster than me, which is not usual in most places.

this week has been a whirlwind of emotions that I didn't know I could feel in such short a span of time. students have been harassing and emotionally blackmailing me on email in anticipation of their final grade. one of the two balcony born pigeons died after being unable to learn how to fly. I discovered it with the stench of death and then saw its hardened feet sticking out from under the AC unit there. I've been having trouble eating chicken since then. the nauseousness and simultaneous diarrhoea and throbbing blood through my veins in the middle of the night that sometimes preceded my period in Texas came back mysteriously. got a more welcoming visa after almost being sure it was going to be denied and after thus ranting at 'them' annoyedly. took the metro to try and attend someone's farewell at work and missed the shuttle so took the metro back home. the heat. the mosquitoes. spent a day with visiting parents and bid them off with all my plants so they can water them in my absence. feeling very sad, lost, confused, at leaving home and them even though it's barely a few months (that feel scarily long) and even though I always thought I'd be excited to go in this way. stole a freshly laid egg from the balcony after the death, and put it in the garden under a tree; went next day and saw it still there. watching Russian Doll.

we are funny animals: we kill factory style to feed ourselves and yet we feel for the loss of other birds and animals. I am scared of lizards and have infected him with the fear too and now seem to be losing it a lil bit, and wonder whether I'd mourn a baby lizard's death too if I saw it be laid as an egg. 

India always made me sentimental.

he usually buys overripe fruit. and vegetables. I sometimes drown the worms in a mug of water for half a day, to avoid them crawling out of my kitchen bin. 

what is it that really matters?

and if I see a mosquito right now, I'll abandon everything else to kill it. Either with my bare hands (water on them disables their wings) or by electrocuting them with that racquet insect killer.

One day we will be just nothing.

this is the year of making new friends, just when I thought I was too old for that. one a classmate's sister from when I was 12-13. another a neighbor. and yet another, much more surprisingly, a much younger colleague who joined this place with me and turns out is a lot like me and has lived a similar trajectory of life (our dads shared a profession). 

but something scary is happening in my country. this whole political polarisation of the two main religious communities against each other is going a little too far, getting a little dangerous now. where my shuttle picks up commuters from the metro station, there was a small riot a week or so ago. (my reaction to the question of whether I should continue commuting that way was "what sort of a riot is this with no deaths?!"; I have become so inured, such a cynic). and then y'day mom told me some houses were razed down in a demolition drive. there have been similar demolition drives in some other places, predominantly homes of people of a particular religion. (I haven't had the time to read news lately; or there isn't any pleasure in reading them anyway). and now I connect that with the removal of loudspeakers from mosques. I love the call to namaaz. but we are still not doing anything, we are still silent. my father supports all of this, and so do many other relatives. that is the scariest bit here.

birds start chattering in large numbers these days very early in the morning when it's still dark; I haven't seen this anywhere else. It's fascinating to hear but also jolts me out of my sleep if i do. so I protest sleepily when he invites me to come see.

I've been so busy lately and so overworked; also nervous about how exams would play out etc.; that metro has become my retreat to catch up on precious sleep. and then someday when I drive, I feel like the car and me don't get to see each other enough these days. One day Google maps tried to help me by saving me the hassle of road closures and traffic delays on the highway to sonepat; I ended up lost on unpaved paths in rural haryana and it took me a while to find a way out. but even there an electric blue flash of a Kingfisher flew by.

Neutering dogs makes them more gender equal; it empowers the females. I feel like I've said this here before. in Udaipur recently there was a pair in the homestay where we stayed: the female growled at me when we reached and I tried to pat her. I realised then she had just been raped; the male next to her still had its unnaturally large (compared to its tiny frame) penis out. I wanted to click but I restrained myself. the owners lived what their daughter called "sustainably". it's not like they were blind to the female's plight; they talked about it like it was an unavoidable nuisance.

I saw the white throated (or browed) fantail there; a day or two after i heard his beautiful song. there was also something that kept screaming a monosyllabic sound like a warning or an alarm; haven't yet been able to identify it. and we had a bay window where if u lay u felt like u were lying in the trees.

in our tiny balcony, which we didn't really count as homespace ever since an AC unit filled it up, I have just two plants, old ones, an Adenium and a green yellow ornamental leaves plant the name of which is escaping my aging memory right now. I had planned on hanging some flowering plants in pots from its railing too, but the visiting pigeons there kept me postponing the plan. we used to sleep in the bedroom that hosts that balcony till it was still cool. now we have moved to our summer capital; I call it our 'simla' bedroom, which is in fact mine. 'delhi' is his and as is the only br upstairs, the upper floor acts like his 'bachelor pad' I tease. but for me pottering up and down multiple times a day in the mornings and evenings to water my plants spread over the house, the tiny balcony, the terrace, and to watch the bulbul parties in the peepuls bordering the terrace. we noticed some pigeons were collecting twigs in the tiny balcony. but as in the alcove above my window where for days nothing else happened, I thought they might just be playing around, or 'creating art'. of course I was wrong, I had just been hoping it wouldn't be a nest; most people around me detest pigeons, they love lots of other birds ... but crows and pigeons ?!! so they told us to fear pigeon nests and to break them up etc. etc. ya pigeons can be noisy early mornings but have you heard screaming peacocks, those exotic giants of birds? either way one gets used to them. there was a time when we first saw this place and the broker told us that the funny cracked broken shards of yellow plastic around the large windows in what is now 'simla' was soundproofing installed by previous tenants, we were completely mystified: why would anyone need soundproofing in this quaint quiet neighborhood bordering and surrounded by a biodiversity park? now we know that human noise isn't the only noise one needs to keep out for a good night's sleep. one morning some dog wildly yelping woke me up at about 5 in the morning. but there are benefits to that too. i got to witness that magical enchanted hour with these colors painting the sky

coming back to the pigeons. mom pigeon laid first one egg, then another. we had mixed feelings in the beginning, conditioned by what people told us. the eggs hatched after almost 3 weeks, on consecutive days. the chicks are yellow. mother pigeon first learned how to recognise his face and be unafraid of him. she would still scuttle away and fly off when I went to shower the green yellow plant with water. now she knows me too and watches me quietly. her chicks are slowly developing wing bones and her body no longer covers them completely. I think there's a father pigeon too (he's been reading up and tells me pigeons are monogamous) but he is still scared of us. mother just blinks her eyes now observing my routine of pulling the curtains together, apart, watering plants, and sometimes coochicooing to her and the chicks or taking a short video or pic of them. I'm reading a book about the genius of birds.. pigeons are known to be able to discern different human faces. whereas I cannot tell one from the other and know the mother only by where she is found, dutifully protecting her babies and waiting for them to grow up, for their brains and their wings to mature. apparently birds are of two broad kinds, those whose young are born nearly mature, have larger brains when they are chicks, and can fly in a few days; versus those whose chicks (like ours) are born helpless and tiny, and take a long time to grow and fly. the second type realize a larger adult brain than the first. also like us, birds have evolved to have large brains (to the size of their bodies) by shrinking their jaws and other facial appendages. birds also probably dream, at least they do have REM sleep. I met a neighbor who used to live in our flat some years ago. our flat owner had told us about them but we hadn't realised it was them he had told us about. she is married to a British guy and they have a daughter, a cat, and two dogs. in fact their daughter was born in our flat and that's probably why we have a 'prevent-a-baby-from-tumbling-downstairs' red door at the top of the stairs in his bachelor pad. there's something about a white guy living in the building next to you in India; we still are hungover by our colonized history, or possibly by our colorism and racism. even after years of living in white man's land. that doesn't change anything in fact: there we were the few brown people so we stood out, here the few white ones do and we are eternally curious about them. you might have heard of rented househunters in China, white people who are paid to pretend to be looking at houses because it impresses other househunters and can successfully hike the rent up. when we had first seen our older smaller flat, days after returning to India after years of living away, we saw a white couple also do the rounds of the rooms, allegedly prospective renters. was it that that gave us the confidence that we could live there when every other place so far had felt filthy, broken down, or both? that place was visibly better kept than any other flat we had seen, but yes maybe the possibility that non-Indians were considering the place and thus that the place was comfortable enough for people who weren't used to this hopeless country, might have tricked us, despite the fact that we talked about it and were aware of how we had been primed. later we laughed about it with a friend visiting from amreeka. here now, our flat owner had tried to play that card with us by telling us about this couple, this British guy and his 'partner' who had had their child in this flat. it didn't work on us this time, maybe cos this place before we patched it up, was pretty rundown. our reaction behind his back was 'can you believe that British people could live in this place?! hah!'. still the same higher standards though for their housing expectations. one day, just weeks into this place, I was standing alone in our terrace and staring far at the trees and birds across the colony road in front of us. I felt watched suddenly, looked down and this couple was walking by and the guy was looking up at me. we looked at each other a mere instant and then turned away, back into our thoughts. I didn't know then but now that I do that moment came back to me. he must have been looking up at his old home, transformed by new people and the changes they made to the terrace (she told me they noticed the terrace was being tiled and how that suggested to them that maybe the flat owners were planning on living there because after all tenants don't bother to improve any place in this way)... our older flat we booked on the very first day we saw it. it felt like it was vacant just for us and that it was the only place where we could imagine setting up a home. this one, two months in now, feels to me like we have lived here for ages. it will be weird if that couple from the next building comes in someday and we talk about how the place looks and is different now from when they lived here. does a house change with the people occupying it or does it change those who come to live in it? the first day we saw this place I noticed peacocks from the kitchen window, rufous treepie in the peepul near the terrace and those were my arguments to counter hubby's hopelessness about the rotting wood in the kitchen cabinets (they turned out not to be rotten after all). this neighborhood was also spotted by me a few years ago, on one of my aimless drives around to cheer myself up; but then I never thought I would one day be sharing a place here with a family of pigeons and their chicks. there's also a sweetheart of a stray female dog (neighbors call her Bella) who was left homeless by someone in the next colony moving away apparently and adopted by this place. do we choose our homes or do our homes choose us?

photopost

Setting sun. Kitchen. Geraniums.

shopping; at the plant nursery. Another buyer, a gardener, gave me some tips, and started talking about prices in hushed tones as he saw I was kinda done; I told them to talk freely as I was leaving anyway, thinking to myself "yes of course I'm aware of price discrimination between us".

the peepul showering our terrace with its dead leaves (barely minutes after I've cleared them there's just as many more).

parrots; kitchen window.

I am writing from the delhi metro yellow line. I have lost my commuter mojo a bit, I can't run down the innumerable steps as I used to nearly twenty yrs ago in Bombay local train stations. I'm wearing better shoes now, but they could become slippery soon with so many steps each way. we are about a 10 mins walk from the metro station, I kept thinking I'd be late and would miss some train, and as is with trains even if it's not the last one u need to take, the sight of a train just gone by always feels like a small failure. But no, I still walk faster than the average guy walking in my direction, and even though I kept looking at every auto passing by, wondering if it made sense to take one for those few hundred feet or meters(?) that remained, i let them go. I had to change at Hauz khas and the fast walking crowd leading me to where I needed to go made me smile. Men women kids young students, all seemed so determined, so focused, so prepared and ready and alert; and yet quiet. Most people commute alone, silently walking on, with a purpose. Delhi metro feels like the one rare thing in this country that works and works well, driven by some logic, some planning, and managing to keep its promise. And because it works well it seems to bring out the better human in us the commuters. I have probably written about this before but am still surprised that Indian men behave themselves while on board this thing. They keep their hands and their legs, and even their eyes to quite an extent, to themselves.

A father and daughter boarded somewhere midway in my commute. The little girl had a bandaged arm and was holding it awkwardly raised and folded. A young sardar next to me gave his seat to the girl, also asked the father what happened. I heard that she had been burned. The sardar suggested cold coconut oil as a balm. The father asked the girl to keep exercising her fingers and palm by making fists and claws. The skin was peeling like tissue, off of her palm. She said "abhi nahi" ("not now"). after a bit the train emptied out a bit, I shifted to my right and the father sat to my left next to his child. The person on the other side of the girl started talking to him, "how did it happen?" ... "Boiling water..." and then started giving tips for a quick healing. In his words he had been burned too, in fact had been run over by an automobile and the heat of its running engine had burned him; yes, coconut oil worked, ...." I grimaced at the image of his accident. A young guy opposite us observed me, the girl, the father, the guy with the story. I saw this shared emotion in his eyes, and in fact in other eyes watching the girl; gentleness i think it was. The girl wasn't crying. In fact she got a spasm of pain on her right chest (which was also burned) and exclaimed to her father and then after some small words between them she smiled and chuckled. 

At some point I had crossed Delhi University station, as far as I had ever been on this line, and entered into that other Delhi part of that other India where I don't live or visit. I had chosen my clothes carefully for this first commute, foreseeing this: a cotton crepe white blouse tucked into police green pants, the blouse has sleeves and a neck that can be problematic only because the blouse is loose on my body but falls short of being 'revealing'. The train was also no longer underground and I could see clusters of unplanned unpretty cement houses. the people remained as courteous though, as disciplined. In the entire metro ride I saw one woman in a knee length skirt though, every other was clad from shoulder to ankles. I am now on the University shuttle which is the second hour of my commute, and I am as yet not tired kudos to the metro for that. although I was reluctant to start commuting and saw no point to stop teaching from home and wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been forced by my employers, I am learning to not fight things beyond where the fighting is pointless. and maybe this getting out of my comfortable well will be good for me. so far the weather is good.

the terrace life is good, especially when it borders a peepul grove welcoming of bulbuls, parrots, tailor birds, mynahs, pigeons, kites, barbets, peacocks (very noisy though esp early mornings), and hornbills. the view on the other side although pretty too is distracting as it faces the colony road. in short people are a distraction from all that is worthwhile and beautiful. hah. 

I had thought we would want to share this place with friends and family. but so far it feels comfortable without, plus maybe the curtain rod will fall down on their heads (etc.) if people unfamiliar with the weaknesses of this home stay here. hah.

running in the biodiversity park is even more exhilarating than just running. y'day I met a fellow runner from the other park in it and he started giving me tips on how to use my hands; apparently my hands are too lose and it bothers him. hah to that too. and i always thought his hands looked too tight, too close to his body, and too uncomfortable for what I consider freestyle running. but I didn't mansplain.

Safal outlets I have grown to appreciate a lot. there's one near here too, I like stopping by after a run and picking up produce, dairy, frozen stuff, etc. the guys who man them are different from random others all around. they will initially stare but immediately avert their gaze when they realise you are conscious. and they are very efficient, professional (as can get here), and to the point. I wonder if they are trained.

work (research) is suffering. and last class I made multiple silly mistakes in how answered questions on indifference curves in one of the two sections of intro classes that I'm teaching this sem. after so much study of this subject it is still possible to do this? I must be an idiot

Coppersmith barbets have almost vanished, but their larger cousins, the brown headed barbets have exploded in numbers (and calls). 

we took the broken down house surrounded by forest and birds still in this corner of Delhi over the perfect interiors, dishwasher fitted, hauz khas place from whose bedrooms you could see a semi clad uncle brushing his teeth late in the day. he called this our 'romantic crumble' then, and now our 'jungle home' although he can't be bothered to get out amongst the trees; for him the windows and terrace are more than enough. bird species are mostly the same as in vk, but we have also spotted an owl and an Indian grey hornbill so far. there are leaks in our bathrooms and kitchen that persist after numerous plumber visits. the first time we ran our washing machine in what we have renovated to be our laundry room up on our terrace, our bath flooded with its water (the drain is common we learned). our repair contractors have been so awesome (sarcasm) that they've gifted us a kitchen sink that slopes the wrong way, with a joint in it's slab through which the water seeps below,.... I could go on. but we can see the sunrise from our bed, and for the first time in his life he has been watching the pole star rising. people are a lil more weird here: seems like car washers are banned and drivers are monopolizing that market too; them and cleaners keep lying to sabotage each other's chances; the guard seems like a broker for odd jobs; and neighbors yell at me without specifying what about his parking caused them inconvenience. I can still drive to my running park, in less time than before in fact. and there's another larger park here, but ppl seem older on average, richer, and less outdoorsy. I can walk to the local market which has nice restaurants too (and behind which the park lies) after my day of teaching and get a sweet crisp morning bun for an evening snack. My hotel swimming pool is walking distance for when the weather warms up. and we can stare at trees and listen to birdsong while crapping on the hotseats. we chose to remove the exhaust fan from the kitchen too and use the windows instead which look out onto a large tree that seems to be a home for rose ringed parrots. we do have a lot more space than we need but hopefully we will learn how to use it better as we spread our stuff. and we finally got a proper (large hand me down) dining table that serves that purpose. we also got another more modern roomba and updated our older one with new wheels etc. and I no longer have to leave the house when he has therapy sessions upstairs.

this has however also helped me decide that we are not doing this (choosing forest over interiors) again. and maybe that's just as well. he turns 39 this month, and later this year I turn 40! the next home has got to be more compact, with better plumbing, and easier to manage. this one probably was fated to be ours for exactly now, before we become decrepit. 

In old suitcases forgotten in closets and claimed by mould, sometimes one finds remnants of one's past self. safe and dry. asking one whether one finds them precious still, enough to save them for the future; or whether they will be thrown away such that their tomorrow is impersonal, disconnected, and they become orphaned and meaningless. 

I rammed the car today. it's barely 4 months old. and I think I'm a pretty good driver. but I rammed the car today. about 5-7 mins after having a strange thought that said that I might have an accident the way I was driving, fatigued and distracted. I'd been about 6 hrs in the new place we are to move into getting wifi fixed and electrician odd jobs done in an empty flat. I had left home a lil after lunch. but in the hrs there I had had no water or snack or rest. I hadn't really wanted to call both those guys together, after a full day there last week with multiple ppl that had left me exhausted. and wifi had been his job to get done. but it hadn't been done to satisfaction, with the guest bedroom getting the strongest signal and the rest of the place left out a bit. so I had to get it redone. plus these wifi guys were supposed to come in the morning so I could finish with them, come back home for a few hrs and then go back to deal with eletricians. but as is in this country, nothing goes according to plan. ppl don't show up when they are supposed to. I also went and bought a ladder before I got to the place. so ladder-equipped, I thought I could do it all. and I did manage to get all of that done a lil before dinner time. all that was left was get my big notes of money changed somewhere, pay the electricians, and then decide whether I could also stop buy groceries or not. but even that's not what caused the accident. I once read somewhere that most automobile accidents (probably in the US) occur very close to the driver's home. (my last car in TX also I rammed into a pole at the gas station closest to my home on my way back after a long tiring teaching day). today I was driving back tired and listening to radio, and like I said a lil distracted after all that had happened - I had managed to drink a small bottle of juice after buying grocery to hydrate myself before starting back - when I had that funny thought about what if i hit someone in this state, which made me use my headlights much more and be careful. and then as I took the last big turn away from one of the busy streets into the lil VK lanes, barely 5 mins from home, I suddenly realised my windows and windshield were fogging and my vision was blurring cos of it. I slowed down and decided to stop by the roadside cos I didn't trust myself to use those controls while moving cos I knew I was fatigued and possibly driving without that sixth alive sense that drives automatically. I was stunned as I rammed into something. for a minute I couldn't even figure out what cos I couldn't see anything by now but before I had turned the car to the roadside I had made sure there weren't any vehicles or people there. and nothing else is supposed to be on the road, right? but no, this is India, and nothing makes sense where it is and things will always be where they aren't supposed to be. after turning on my heater and windshield warmers I could see that I had hit a giant bunch of twisted iron electric (or some such) wires that were anchored in the ground on that patch of the road. I've seen them before and one usually drives away from them but this time I missed seeing them cos of the fogged windshield. a man stopped and got out to check if I was ok. I reversed a lil to clear the car of the hit, and assured him I wasn't hurt or drunk. he thought I must have been on the phone. and advised me where to get it repaired and to leave the crime scene before policemen came around and harassed me. the iron wires were as strong as ever, well grounded, permanent. my left headlight was shattered, the broken glass had cut the car body there a bit, and the wires had bent about two inches of the bottom of the front. some part of that had also come unhinged and was sticking out. 

I'm frustrated. shocked that I did this. but more annoyed at this place, where trees grow in the middle of roads, where wires are planted on streets, where people don't turn up when they are supposed to, where nothing has any logic to it. and I feel alone in trying to fight it, even though these months I've given in quite a bit to 'the hand of god', that's why I wasnt angry this morning with those guys not turning up as scheduled, and I've been trying to 'go with the flow'. but I shudn't be hitting anything when I'm trying so hard to avoid just that by stopping along the side of the road before figuring out how to clear my windshield. but that's exactly what happens in this place. f#@$*&@ shit hole

I think I need help dealing with his illness. It sometimes overwhelms me, scares me, makes me feel helpless. and I've been feeling lately that the therapist isn't helping me, cos she is his therapist firstly. everything she does or says comes from the primary goal of helping him learn how to live with his illness. I feel lately like that's not helping me, at least not in the same way I had hoped it would. She doesn't respond to my messages or emails anymore either. and there is literally no one I can reach out to, who would understand or help me when he is in that frame of mind, expressing it as anger directed at me. sometimes it feels like there's been no progress at all. sometimes I feel my life is not mine. sometimes I don't know how I will smile tomorrow and forget. and how I will deal with it again because there will be an again. cos this is not going away. the therapist told him in his session today that he was much better. and soon after that we were watching a movie he thought was brilliant and I disagreed and thought was bad because I felt it was trying to create horror out of (what seemed to me) terrible tragedy and bad parenting (possibly a mentally ill mother); that caused him to be annoyed at me and when I didn't understand why it turned soon into anger and accusations. I have walked out many times, sometimes out of the room, sometimes out the front door without a purse or warm clothes, just to preserve myself. I have also tried shutting up, holding his hand, listening, ignoring, trying to reason, ... nothing helps till it passes, and that can sometimes take very long and is unbearable while it lasts. it's like he can't take it that I don't share his anger and he keeps lashing out trying to invoke it in me too. anything I say then gets distorted in his mind. and when he starts shouting I just can't think anymore, I feel trapped and constrained, I feel numb and tired and I want to hide or run.

when we did not live together it was easier. I would shut my phone off or throw it under a pillow. he would go on calling till he got tired. and I waited for him to cool off, for it to pass. now there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to wait. 

and yet most of the time I am glad we finally live together. especially in this pandemic. and when I hear news of death. today I heard from another friend who has lost her husband. I gasped when I read her email, I knew he was sick but I didn't think he would pass away. 

life is unreal.

they gave trees their annual haircut here, to let the sun into human homes in winter. I managed to finally touch and feel the long twisted seedpods of the mother tree in a mass of its cut branches and soft large floppy leaves. on asking I found that those leaves are often used to make pattals or leaf-bowls. and the tree is a Kath-sagwan! someone also said it grows wild in these parts. Wiki also says its oil is therapeutic. Kath-sagwan is similar to - or is in fact the very same - Teak. it's wood is used in furniture. it's trunk is not wide, feels like a waste that it would be cut for furniture ever. especially when it's such a generous hospitable tree to so many birds (they love it's buds and flowers and it's sunny perch on top), squirrels, and insects. and then I dreamed about a beautiful giant tree cut and yet bellissimo and host to a small local ecology. 

a Drongo has been visiting us for the last couple days, and once a week a (white breasted?) Kingfisher also shows up. Purple sunbirds keep sue-sue-ing all morning; I recently found out that their local name in the Chota Nagpur region (where my dad's family lives) is 'sue'. But we have been house hunting cos this has become small for us and is disconnected from all commuting arteries of (and out of) the city (travails of a job far away and yet technically in the same metropolitan area and of course of a plan to an 'end' to the pandemic and wfh). we will miss these birds, and possibly also this quieter corner of South Delhi which feels less like the rest of the flashy loud city. alternatively we stay this side and move up to be slightly more commutable and live in a dilapidated place that has charm and character and is surrounded by the ridge and forests. the coice feels like that between a practical balanced meal and a mouth watering dessert, the latter possibly hard to digest as well. 

my problems are I chase perfection too much (which can make me controlling) and yet I don't like to perform and be in the hotspot. or maybe I like it but the possibility of messing up while in the hotspot is too upsetting. Online teaching is teaching me what I like and don't like about teaching. I do not like leaving my home to teach, because teaching is a lot about performing and that makes me anxious and nervous, and my tummy runs; and that becomes a source in itself of embarassment if I have to visit the loo often at school; I used to go into buildings where no one would recognise me, far from my own department. online teaching is also easier cos only my face and shoulders show, and I needn't get into the "is my butt showing, is my bra showing, am I looking too good/sexy for a teacher's image...; what should I wear...". and that has felt easier moreover in India cos American students even commented on these things a lil more; once a student bothered his neighbor cos he was wondering about my sexual orientation. here there is more deference (or so I think so far) for heirarchies, which though not always good, does help in class.

I also want to butt into his therapy, recovery, maintenance, etc. but I am conscious of it and try to kill that instinct. sometimes it's hard, when I know my life with him depends on it, my own sanity and well being depends on it. I usually leave our home to give him privacy for his video therapy calls. and I have realised that helps me disassociate myself. cos y'day I was at home with my ears plugged with music (cos the pollution outdoors is awful these evenings and cos I get tired after long teaching days) and it was harder; I felt shut out, unwanted, wondered why I needed to be shut out, how and why did he benefit from a wall between me and him. 

my problem is also too much honesty, and the expectation of the same from others. so I end up blurting out everything that bothers me about someone, about the how and the why, and then it upsets him. he isn't so good at self expression, plus his therapist has been teaching him to ignore and dismiss thoughts, and I think the first step to that is not offload them at me. but that again makes me feel shut out.

I'm reading a book of personal notes on mental health that he read and recommended. and I kept feeling this is so much more than about mental health and illness, this is simply about one person's place in her world, about her connections and her bias toward herself in how she perceives everyone and everything, said and unsaid, from within her mind. we all have that relationship with the world, maybe more or less frought, maybe with a greater or smaller feeling of being victimized or a greater or smaller effort at self analysis. I know if my mom in law wrote notes like that, she would always be the victim. what I like about the book is the self analysis, the effort to peek out from the biases imposed by the illness to turn the tables and to practice empathy, to question and unravel her biases. writing helps do these things. and I keep thinking of those lines where she writes, asking herself if her illness was abusive to her then partner; and what does it ask from a caregiver. I think all personal relationships become emotionally abusive at some moment or another. I also think 'abuse' is a very big word. the goal is to realize, be conscious, and to prevent. and two people can be constantly learning and practicing that. I am learning that my concern, my need to help, my need to belong in every solution, my need to adopt every problem, can upset.