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the weather. the poor. the curious neighbors. potholes. social inequalities. family overload. some things cannot be clicked. reverse culture shock.

if change is healthy, how and why do you unravel growth?

I was very sweet to Peter, from Bangalore just now. I used to get annoyed when my calls as a customer were answered by a desi voice affecting an accent and missing the nuances in my problem because of a lack of translation of context. but today I smiled, was patient with him, overlooked his difficulty in understanding my address, put myself in his shoes for a moment, put myself in Bangalore's traffic for a minute and gave him a concession for that. Indians deserve a break if they have to deal with other Indians every waking moment of their daily lives.

but no, I wasn't being nice. If you're leaving a place, or have left and don't plan on coming back, you can be honest and brutal with what you think of it and of them. but now I'll be at their mercy again. I have been disenfranchised.

is there a word, an emotion, that implies wanting to flee one's country because one cannot stand one's people.

there are two kinds of Indians in America. those who are just people, like people from any other country, and those who underline their Indian-ness.

I met a nine-yr-old American born of Indian parents, whose idea of American food was a Subway sandwich. she was ignorant even to the name 'Subway' while she tried explaining why she loved Indian food because the alternative - American food - was too bland for her. I asked her what American food she was talking about, "was it a pizza, a burger?". She was blank on that and her parent had to fill that in for me. I haven't been able to get that conversation out of my mind.

its almost like she was a different person, she who drove my car across this country. bits of what she saw come back now and then, when I close my eyes, or look at the pictures. or like last night when I was talking in my dream to him, about how I would take him across the lands in four more days.

I was she who panicked and cried and made an SOS call to him, believing it was beyond her just the night before the second leg of travel.

its difficult to be contained in this lil apartment after spending days out on the road under the vast skies.

I used to live there nearly 30 yrs ago. and was skyping with my parents today, while they visited the place. and the people. everything seems to have fossilized in that place. but of course so much time has passed. most of those same people, I used to know them so well then, they were the bulk of the world I knew in those yrs. now some have passed away, some others moved like I have, and those that stayed have grown older, and have grown branches - families of their own, kids who remind me of my childhood, of how full of hope, and how ignorant childhood in small town India is. his/her life can go anywhere from there, or can remain there. anything is possible. makes you wonder, childhood is so full of expectations, those small playful moments, in fact, waiting, biding time, choosing one of the many paths of life.

I've been very curious. asking my parents about how things are there. asking my sister, who went on a much shorter visit, and is now back home, her home, in a city which itself reeks of my past. feels a level lower than where I am now. and this place that I'm talking about, feels further removed, a lower level still. like in video games, you pass a level never to go back. unless you die out and have to re-start, all over again. going back is defeat, in a strange never-mentioned way. no one proclaimed it be so. but your heart tells you that.

but I am defeated. and maybe in this defeat is a cloaked blessing.

I wish, in ridding myself of all my grime, I hadn't come away loathing my origins. I wish I could still connect. cos there are some I left behind I would want to care about. I carry that guilt. without knowing how I could have done it differently. yes, I would have betrayed and ignored again, if it came to it. don't demand too much from me, whether you are a place or a people; I often am blind to it, and when I see I rudely refuse. I was taught to be self sufficient, although I have myself been saved and rescued many times. but I ditch any call for help, always finding the sound of it a burden or a taken-for-granted-ness. I am not apologizing, I wish I were.

the past. was it those stone floors and pillars. those corridors where we invented, mimicked, told tales, grew taller, ran about, learned how to use our legs. or was it the people. those who died. and those who are alive, for god knows how much longer. cycles. memory. complaints, of course complaints. why wasn't everything perfect. if only they had done this or not done that. blaming circumstances, and the people, for what I know was (is) my lack of generosity, my lack of gratitude. I was never a generous person, was never grateful. but I do want to go back. to those last words exchanged. where we left a conversation, it must have grown so much, what does it say now? what and who are you? are you happy? do you hope? do you want to see all that I have? do you want to show me and share with me what I missed? before one of us dies? I thought it was sacrilege your confidence then, in this world being godless. I thought it was over-confidence your sacrilege then. do you want to sit down and listen to mine now? do you agree, or have you changed?

sometime later this year, it will be 10 yrs since I created this blog and started scrawling stuff here for posterity. or did I do it to enable imagining myself as a writer, to start off a quiet dream? even I cannot answer that anymore, I don't remember. probably both. probably more the latter.

but over time its taken on quite a different role, much of the time. its become my space to argue with myself, to spell things out to myself. myself. myself.

that's probably also cos I lost all my audience. or since then. cos one thing is for sure, although I self elevate myself to being this talented exceptional person in my head, I am very shy about exhibition. this blog gave me the cover of anonymity that I needed to experiment with showing the world what I wrote or drew. of course, I had to tell that one person then. he was the only one who knew I was writing here. and then I let one more person in - to boast while still feeling shy? I don't know. maybe also cos I was reading hers then and I felt it was unfair this one-sided sharing of secrets. and then another person found out, a lil by accident. but that was it. that stopped there. and anyone else who came here was a stranger to me outside of these white pages. a couple of them became regulars too. but now, now they have all gone. left me here alone, to dig in deeper into myself, to self-censure, to self-pity, to self-aggrandizement; and also to why I called this 'tree house' in the first place - to this secret hiding hole of mine, from where I could shit down onto the world when I so wanted to. without being seen.

I've always been drawn to writers using the people in their lives for their stories. also comedians. it smelt of betrayal, of cowardice, and yet strangely was the bravest thing I could never do. not unless under cover.

for starters, how do I ever write about the little moments of embarrassment my people cause me time and again. of moments when I have steered away or have wished to disown my loved ones, simply because I was embarrassed by their small behavioral oddities. or by their large gaping weaknesses.

nah, I still can't do it.

there's this hard topic to try writing about - self-assessment. I used to think I had some talent with moving my pencil to capture an image. copied images; from photos or life or others' drawings.

this last weekend I saw a lot of skilled people's works. at an outing with them. my sketch was hardly visible, almost childish, not worth looking at, in comparison. since that day I've been turning the pages of my old sketchbooks, wondering if I never had anything.

how does one know? how can one tell?

was I lying to myself all these years? or am I trying to fit myself into the medium of others?

even now I do like my old sketches... and even some of my newer ones. is it just my outdoor stuff that's not good? or was it just this weekend?

how can one tell? esp. when friends and family feign appreciation. when one's own assessment is so biased.

the same in many ways, goes for my aspiring-academic work as well. and maybe also for my writings here, on this very blog.

like a friend used the words 'subjective' and 'objective' to describe academic criticism.

how does one tell?

I have ignored you, my blog. and I just read two lines of some memoir-like-writing that gave me a sudden strong pang of nostalgia for my own. life happened while I was away.

its creepy how signs and symbols exist in my life. an out of nowhere flashback comes, only as a precursor to another end. I kept telling myself not to wish for something. to fear the wish coming true. and here it is. no more the certainty that was making me complacent. here I go, all over again. wish I had made this choice rather than be blown again.

I wonder why everyone else is so worried about my lost job. guess, I really was expecting this, despite appearing not to, cos people didn't think it would happen. like the Hiccam's dictum, or maybe just the occam's razor. sometimes two opposites can describe a situation, cos you don't know which side you were on.

when I was younger, my friendships and niceness would wear off in a place with time, such that by the time it was time to leave I was more than relieved; almost dying to go. but the last few places I have left, I either never warmed up to them at all, or didn't want to leave. unlike all that, here, socially and personally, I was just warming up. professionally, I think I was gathering dust. but what now?

some people become symbols after they are no more. some couples do too; the idea of each fighting and loving the idea of the other. merging and standing out with the other. multiple symbols, co-intersecting, bouncing off.

Plath and Hughes are one example.

Kahlo and Rivera another.

ironically, for both, the woman's memory, her symbolism, somewhat overshadows the man's. (aside: we have been made to believe there are two genders in humans; we are wrong; there are at least three and maybe a spectrum).

ironically also, Plath and Kahlo are somewhat opposites of each other. Plath alive in body but tragically seeking and feeling death in her mind; Kahlo so tragically half-dead and propped up in body but so ambitious and craving to fly in her dreams.

tragic. both symbols of feminism.

Kahlo's story made me want to cry. her stoicism, her detailed efforts at hiding her disabilities alongwith her frankness about her nude body, her exasperated fretting and hopeless despair on her inability to procreate. Frida and Rivera's story hits you with a harsh reminder of the smallness of us all, our vulnerabilities, our being at the mercy of nature and of our mistakes (which is nature again), of our wholesome imperfections, of erring and forgiving, of the hopelessness of fidelity, of the desire and the passion to live and to create, and of course of the beauty of curiosity and acceptance and of a continuous chiseling away at ourselves; because we each leave at least one sculpture in this world - that of ourselves and the symbols we will be used for, if ever remembered.



notes: Kahlo painted from a wheelchair, and sometimes lying down on bed with an easel that propped up above her.
Rivera had an affair with her sister, friend, and mentor.
They divorced for a year, only to remarry again.
My mood right now also influenced by the raw grief in this:
http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520013269/first-listen-mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me

bubble tea is the 'f$%# the world' drink for a grown up on a lunch out from work. it comes with a free carry-to-work game of catching black balls and pulling at them with a straw. alongwith a hearty meal with some sea animals whose names are unknown and therefore unacknowledged.

one of those days

got some cool books I'd been looking for, from a hidden bookstore in that far-away city, while doing that rare - travel alone - thing. the owner even looked like the sort of guy I would have hit on (I probably did flirt a bit, or at the very least made some totally unnecessary conversation), if I weren't boringly married and faithful, and yes, the thought did cross my mind right then, given I was there exactly one more night on my own at a tucked-away hotel, the address to which no one knew right then. hah!

this shop in fact had one row peppered with author-signed copies, had no one bothering to dust the orphaned second-hands they must have procured from various sources, and had one of the two guys writing out this chalk-message on a lil blackboard. It took me some time to figure out what it meant, as I had been cut off from the yelling and shouting of Indian news on tv for about a week thanks to the traveling with family and alone. Modi was supposed to address the nation that evening, and the message was prescient about what he would say. I teased the owner a bit by giving him crisp fresh Modi currency notes.

today, strangely, I want to be back on those streets, not just in blore but in delhi and in kochi.

the sun still shines the same. its still peaceful and calm outside. birds chirping, kids and parents fetching or being fetched from school. still those lil worries frowning brows. has my kid eaten? did he poop? did she make friends? is she learning or is she slow? how much time do I have before I must get back to work? when is the next deadline? ...

in the recent very recent past, two mornings I have been stunned with the normalcy of the world around me, with the apathy that results from the practical attending to the minute details of a daily routine. life must go on, the living must worry about inconsequential details because for now, we are safe, we are spared the destabilizing effects of world politics.

there are those that don't understand. and then those that don't care enough. also those, who avert themselves from uncomfortable information. and those who wonder, and keep wondering, what is their role in this, in what led to this and where it will go. and those who actually contribute in ways that have real, immediate or long term effects. those who make the situation worse, knowingly or unknowingly, passively or actively, by saying and doing, or by keeping silent. and those of course, who belong to many or all of these categories together. those who shout themselves hoarse, coming out in solidarity with the destabilized, and those amongt these who congratulate themselves for their voices, and as a result award themselves a break from any real action.

and those who have troubled dreams, feel and allow themselves to feel helpless, crave for the golden sun to calm their minds because that's all they can hope for. and wonder if they are using this as an excuse to feign inability to work, on their daily routine, their weekly routine.

I have already become a foreigner to my own country. A foreigner who needs no translation, though. I find myself sleeping at places full of white tourists and India-wannabes; find myself dressed more like them in just bought colorful scarves and shapeless harem pants while the locals aspire toward the western garb that we try to leave behind at home; find myself gravitating toward eating holes that offer a solace to foreign palates or rundown bookstores that hide dusty Indian pages. I feel at home in places where there are other single foreign women travelers sleeping behind neighboring doors. But I also have stories of a decade ago when I was a local. Of when I had no clue who I was, and now that I think I know better, my identity is much more confused.

I’ve lost a chunk of sentimentality, a huge load of attachment and sense of duty, and now I feel guilty for having made myself foreign, so alien, so heartless.

At the same time, cursed by a beggar child, indifferent to the curse but with its memory lingering, I know and recognize this place but feel disappointed in it.

If not for the people, I would not come again.

some 'chairs' are not worthy of that title.

I recently spent some money on some beautiful brown wooden chairs, made in malaysia. spent a couple of hours assembling one yday, soon after I fought with the heavy parcel, arguing with it to first get in to my car and then in to my bedroom. skipped a couple of nylon bolt protectors and realized it later.

had no patience or energy to assemble the other. hubby will come tomorrow and assemble his before he sits down.

and then when I carried my new royal seat to my table (dining/study), it put the ikea thing to shame. the erstwhile 'chairs' that stood by it looked like neanderthals next to a New Yorker.

the seat can take 1.5 times my behind, even after me cross-legging on it. and its nice and low, for my short stumps of legs. it literally glows gold in its oak stain color. and the back-rest, ohhhh, as if someone's massaging my much-abused spine.

read about some sacred Brooklyn bookstore shutting down, not because it could no longer compete but because the husband-wife owners simply wanted to retire. it apparently "smelt of hard wood floors and books".

aroused a momentary fancy in my head. what if I owned and worked in a bookstore, a beautifully wood-fragrant place with oak stained tables, chairs, bookshelves, many many of these, with the sole decoration of books and readers. oh and yeah, oak stained church-pew-like-benches too, along any windows. maybe some plants, the green offsetting all that brown and gold.

an early morning call with confusion, hurt, and despair in her voice, cloaked with a blankness that reflected shock. and me wondering how it felt, to her; this, that I had known would come, had been inevitable, but that she had been denying, refusing to accept, still hoping for a revival, from a near-demise, metaphorically.

some messages, many messages, full of sadness, hurt, accusations, helplessness. and me wondering what this meant, why it happened over and over again, what she was missing in having the protagonist's view, what was haunting her, and how this would play out, when it would stop. and also of course, whether i was being harsh in my judgments, in judging at all, in trying to empathize by putting myself in there, and also in trying to show her an unseen perspective, from where I could see.

and here i am. at the end of this day, tired, with aching limbs, with a sense of dread and of disgust, with my own life. and neither of them would understand. just like i don't understand them.

and there goes, my subconscious proves me juvenile to think I revel in self-sufficiency. I had a dream last night, of being a new student (an oft-repeated experience) in a dorm in a boarding school/college, with some faces from my past, lots of new introductions, hanging out, reaching out..., confessing my sense of being lost, and in turn, being led around.

I woke up suddenly, with the alarm, with still the lingering euphoric  emotion of camaraderie .

I do really miss being a student.

students are needy. they are obliged to seek connections to fill their needs. and it's good, its mutual. grown up life, in becoming self sufficient, also becomes a world of nuclear islands - each with spouses/partners and babies..

I've been wondering lately if I'm a horrible person. whether I do really chastise people for their lack of precision or getting their facts right, especially when they come to me with their troubled hearts. whether my sense of being special and my perceived self-singularity is not naturally human but especially nauseatingly my singular characteristic. whether my life alone is not more than just circumstance and chance, and is in fact a judgment on my caustic-ity. i.e. I'm alone cos no one sticks with me.

but worse yet, my satisfaction in being alone, is worse than all above thoughts, more so, when accompanied by all those above; cos it proves them all to be more than conjectures.

I just read these words in Andres Neuman's book: "An American tourist next to me vociferously demands his lost luggage."

that line makes me smile. and simultaneously, both together, makes me empathise with the rest of the world that makes such observations about Americans, and empathise with the American who is the victim here of the incompetency of the rest of the world. funny, human perspectives, and the judgments that arise from it.

yes, I can see why life in America gives us a sense of entitlement. on the other hand, like in this example, it's usually an entitlement expressed for something intrinsically owned being snatched away... and vociferousness? a protest against the snatching.

haha.

I remember myself being similarly vociferously indignant once, at Barajas airport, when each item in my suitcase was pulled out, and left out, thanking me for my patience (and for my re-packing skills), while I was already v late for my connection, after having missed a flight cos the gate officials messed up some communication and barred me from boarding.

ahhh lost in cultural translations of efficiency and etiquette

so far I've lived in a dozen cities/towns, in a lil less than 3 times that many yrs in life, some for merely months; not counting the different locations, apartments and houses within them. the longest continuous stretch being some 7 yrs. some of those places I forget that I ever was in, some feel like vacations, and probably were cos I was visiting my parents on n off while they actually lived there. but there's this one place, I keep squinting at on google maps nowadays, wondering why it feels so alien when it was home to me for a year. bangalore.

so of course, I didn't look at google maps when I lived there, or if I did, I have no recollection of it. I lived in two neighborhoods, a month in benarghatta, and the remaining 11 in koramangala. and I depended solely on local autowallahs (or pillion on the bike of my broker in search of an apartment) for my sense of direction and for my means of navigation. while I was there, it felt like I commuted far and wide, it felt like I knew the place, it felt like I was getting out and about. and now, staring at its map, I lack even a basic sense of east and west. I can't even locate my erstwhile neighborhood on the map, forget my apartment, I have no idea what the distance to work was (only that it took half an hour in an auto), I don't remember street names (I barely remember the names of 3-4 neighborhoods), and to make things worse, the city seems to have changed so much in the last 10 yrs. almost like it underwent puberty, and has a cracked voice, and unrecognizable hairs and curves.

and yet I clearly remember days. in places. the outsides of those places elude my memory. I remember Koshy's and in fact the crowded MG road and Brigade road, our fav restaurant Spiga (that always felt like a house party) and our always getting lost trying to get to it (that was one address the autowallahs never got), loads of other eating holes - chinese, mallu, andhra, even littis, bong, barbecue, ... (blore, even then was eclectic in its food scene). I remember clearly the interior decors of these places, the atmosphere in each, the sense of high I'd get on andhra chilies in one much frequented place, but no idea which side the sun rose from in each, no idea how far and where (except the much frequented andhra place Maharaja, which was just steps away from our apartment, and of course, my daily run route). even the place I most frequented, Forum mall, I can only picture its entrance and the street corner right outside and a lil bit to the left and right, and then suddenly it zones out into blackness. no idea how many and which turns led the auto there. even the old airport which was like a local bus stop then, apparently down a straight airport road after a while on the ring road, but where? why can't I trace my tires back? not even when I spent so much time at the airport, not just flying in and out of the city, but seeing bf off (don't remember receiving his arrival ever though) every time with my fav american cheesecake in my hands (forgotten the place that used to make it, aaaarrrgh) and two lil plastic spoons, the two of us sharing it while we waited to say goodbye. for many yrs after blore, in fact, I couldn't bare to look at cheesecake, let alone eat it, I always felt so overstuffed with it.

some weeks ago I drove about 470 miles in a day. that is about 750 kms. it was tiring. but also exhilarating. I started out early morning driving west against the sun on a beautifully cloudy and windy day. that's the best way to do a long drive. drive against the sun and back again, against it, by the way. its amazing that despite so many yrs in this region, I hadn't traveled west in texas. it was beautiful. forgotten and lonely and green. and of course flat. but also undulating. with eyes revealing the land for miles on either end. and this city ends very soon to the west and then its like nature lies untouched around the smooth paved steel grey road, curving with the yellow and white stripes on it, cutting into un-trampled wildness.

I was scared and excited and sweating like I do when I'm a combination of those two. it was just me and my faithful car. with the radio playing. and that stopped catching signal very soon (I did realize that I could still catch npr at a different wavelength). I didn't stop too much cos I was trying to avoid a sleep-over somewhere, cos despite a grown up job I'm still always short of money. and when I did stop, ppl stared at me almost as if I was an alien. a brown girl in and orange flowery skirt and a pink tank top, amidst truckers, mostly older white Texans, and some Mexican/Texans. I felt foreign. I felt like an explorer.

but at one of these stops a car stopped behind me, just as I was getting back into mine after clicking left and right randomly, my windows phone camera doing no justice to the panoramic views around me. a youngish hispanic looking guy was driving and talking on his phone, and then he hung up and got out while I could see him in my side mirror. he gestured to me to show that he was coming to me, I froze for a minute, trained by years of cat calling and sexually threatening strangers, and gestured back that I was driving off. thankfully he turned back to his car and I did not see him follow me after that. he probably thought I had car trouble, and maybe stopped to help..? or maybe the alternative, who knows..

I stopped to pee and grab a donut at a strange Chinese place just off the road at one point. the lady had a small praying display with donuts displayed in front of it, and I didn't stare at it too much fearing I'd cross the polite-line, but a customer before me commented on her deity being El Trump. I was amused more than horrified, but even more at the similarity of that display to what back home would be called a 'puja-ghar' with lil lumps of fried dough instead of the yellow laddoos one would see back home. like I've said before a million times... ppl are the same everywhere...

oh ya I did reach my destination unhurt and un-lost. and I did see the breathtaking water lilies that were the reason for the trip. but they aren't the point of this post. cos, although that was beautiful, it was the journey that jolted me into wondering why I don't do this more often. with more years tucked under my belt, I'm becoming more and more a misanthrope, and I realized how much I like being on the road by myself with the radio in my car.

I had another whimsical stop at a self-proclaimed 'red-neck' barbecue place for a late-lunch on my way back. where I almost left my credit card, I was so overwhelmed with the tender brisket and so intimidated by appearing so different from everyone else around.

there was one really sad bit to the whole day, one that I slowly got used to too (even more saddening, my getting inured). there must have been at least 30-40 small dead animals on the road in those 470 miles, squirrels, possums, armadillos, ... god knows what else, one freshly hit with its tail furiously wriggling while its body was pasted to the road by its blood and innards. it was mostly an empty road, except when it passed through some small town, and cars drove at 80-90 miles an hour (yes, me too, although I swear I didn't hit anything), way past the speed limits; and its sad to see that human life has such a casual destructive impact on the world around us.

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