Treble Clef and Polaroids

Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

You see, this is not the poem I want to write but when the city pulls from my window and settles at your doorstops- I gather parts of me that want you to         touch them    the most, and say I have never done this before but I am learning to forget

Today, when the owner of a restaurant I had dinner at asked me where I lived, I told him all about my tiny little room and called it home. But on most days I miss Delhi, its college-wall graffitis, branching streets, and on some days I even miss June’s melting summer heat. And just now, I am missing Novembers, which for last three years mostly meant watching too many tv-shows because the exams were coming, or running in and out of each other’s rooms because we were certain the panic was ‘worse this time’ and a warm hug was all that would make it alright. Those days, home was where battles were waged against Sarah’s unceasing snuggle attempts, or where we camped with a spring bound reading bundle, and too many empty-frappe cups on the side. Home was knowing exactly what Laksmi would say if you poked her on the back or that Monil could be wearing a leaf-suit to class the next day. Home was simple as that, knowing. 

On days like today, when Diwali means unexpected rasgulla at an Indo restaurant or talking to the dada who proudly shows us his Green Card, but breaks down just the next minute because he hasn’t been home in years, home becomes the heaviness of not knowing. Not knowing what changes while you aren’t looking. I open every IndianExpress notification on my phone most days, and probably spend too much time following twitter feeds, but the hardest is being unaware of all the kids Kavya is annoying just now, or the TedX videos Fatima is replaying, or the height status of Sarah’s bookstack which grows by the day or all potentially weird things Raza could be thinking this minute. 

Beginning(s) One of the last entries on this blog was a shabbily written poem on my twenty-first birthday, about how I constantly feel twenty. Another year in, I feel pretty much the same. Twenty. Something about the finit-y of a ‘0′, I guess. In the morning today, my alarm rang to Love is a Laserquest, and Alex Turner’s voice sang from the tabletop, “Do you still feel younger than you thought you would by now. Or darling have you started feeling old yet?”

This is probably not the beginning I had in mind, but feeling forty and twenty on the morning you turn twenty-two is a good reason to write, I think. For my favourite people (whose timezones I try really hard to keep up with), for all the postcards I have hoarded but am too lazy to send out, and to my future, hopefully less anxious, self- here is a journal that sometimes might double as a doodle wasteland, but will mostly be a bucketful of thoughts on (from) living in a country whose language I am trying really hard to comprehend.

A big thank you to everyone who took the time out to wish me in person, or coordinated with the time zone to skype/whatsapp/call. It wasn’t such a quiet day, after all!

** 

One of the recurring images I have had in that last speck of wakefulness before sleeping, is of a tunnel that opens to light and a cliff that looks over the greenest of all greens. Last weekend, on a field trip to Kirishima (Kagoshima), we stopped at the Kirishima Open Air Museum which has a very curiously curated set of sculptures that you can touch, feel, lie down or just casually lean on. One of them was ‘Beginning’-  A corridor, safely tucked between trees, with slits that formed light shadows on its walls. At the end a glass pane looked over a setting sun to the west, and paddy fields on green hills that seemed to rolled downwards.

I can’t find the name of the artist right now but here is an excerpt from what he/she had to say about it: “The corridor-bridge leads to the edge, to the view that suddenly reveals itself, to the light, to the sky, and the earth, to the mountains, to the valleys, to the most marvelous of all- to Nature, to changing seasons, autumn, winter, spring, summer, with all their colours, This is the work, the sculpture...The Sculpture is not the Iron, it’s the air, the view, and the trees all around.”

I postcard caricature of the tunnel.

More when I finally get the photographs developed. Hope everyone is doing well! 

In a paradoxical comparison of understanding with distance, Amitav Ghosh's collection of three essays- Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma- drives home questions of political boundaries and history. Quoting someone very knowledgeable he says, there are two constructions of the modern world which have become instruments of surveillance in a strange way- history and science. His first person accounts of his travels across South Asia, primarily Burma and Cambodia, resonates of travelers from a past that didn't know of The Age of Machines. And yet a historical awareness peculiar to his writings makes the narrative very contemporary.

It's one thing to look at some one you know through a stranger's eyes, and another to look at someone you don't really know through a stranger's eyes, in both cases we seldom fully comprehend the person being made intelligible to us.