The week that was #1

Autumn doesn’t show up where I stay. It is just a mild summer. No browns, reds or oranges. I am mostly in bed these days, exhausted, because my body is making a tiny human. I try to invoke an autumnal aura by pulling down the window shades to filter in a soft honey light. And by vegetating in front of a Gilmore Girls binge watch. And daydream about talking to my child.

I read Janice Pariat’s book of short stories, ‘Boats on Land’. It was a real pleasure. It offers up an engaging mix of hills, sprawling tea-estates, mists, folklore, incessant rain, lives of people in places where nothing much happens, displacement, forbidden feelings, wistfulness, fragile hopes, and so much more. I read it this weekend, and have finally broken the reading slump I found myself in the past few weeks.

An assamese lunch has become a ritual every Sunday, a welcome break for me in a week of paneer, dosa, sambar, pasta etc. I take out the brass metal plates and bowls my parents gave me the last time I was home. My husband buys fish the evening before. We fry the Rohu pieces and later dunk them in a mustard gravy. The green chillies are from the garden. There is masoor dal with a generous sprinkling of squeezed lemon juice (unfortunately one-third the size of the ones found in Assam). Mashed or fried potatoes. With mustard oil. An unhealthy indulgence, but a loved one. There will be round slices of brinjal dunked in besan gravy and fried. Maybe an egg. Greens are in the form of a soup. Mango pickle. A slice of lime. And I am transported back to my childhood, and my mother feeding us the same food. The comfort of knowing it will be the same every day when we come home. Every single day. Its recreation is the comfort now.

Photo Project: Day 5- Interiors

This is a labour of love. Plants. Books. Accumulated. Nurtured.

List #1: Books I Read in May 2020

Books I read in May:

My Father’s Book – Urs Widmer

1. ‘My Father’s Book’ by Urs Widmer: A son describes his father ‘s life, growing up in Switzerland in the early 1900s-going through two wars, his painter and architect friends, a brief spell of being a communist, following a woman to Paris and living the life of poverty yet voraciously reading, setting up an enviable life with his wife, nonchalantly digging into her inheritance to buy records and books and wine, a career in translation and publishing, battling with chronic pain, but above all a glimpse into rural/ small town Switzerland and making me aware of its vibrant culture. I had always tagged Switzerland as ‘neutral’ (read bland), and known only for its cheese, banks and scenic vistas. But this book gave me a glimpse of its early and mid century politics, response to war, art scene, literature. What stood out: character quirks, the idea of documenting everyday of one’s life in a fat blank book gifted to them on their twelfth birthday (a tradition in the village of the author’s father), the practice of keeping open coffins outside the village homes for each of the family members (a daily morbid reminder of life’s brevity). This book meant more to me because I visited Switzerland for the first time last year, and was highly impressed by its beauty and efficiency. And this book offered me a view of the rough, uncertain and slow evolution of this wonderful country.

Close Company-Virago New Fiction

2. Close Company – A Virago New Fiction collection of short stories depicting lives of mothers and daughters throughout the century. It highlights the (often very, very) subtle inequalities and prejudices faced by women at home, work and society at large; the largely invisible chores assigned to and demands made of them ; the guilt and subtle shaming still being the price of their seeking independence; relationship power dynamics and mostly their dreams or its graveyard. The stories range from a couple of pages to longer ones, and includes a variety of authors from Alice Munro to Fay Weldon to Margaret Atwood. I was struck by the palpable helplessness I felt on reading Fay Weldon’s ‘ Weekend’

Atomic Habits – James Clear

3. Currently reading : Atomic Habits. Lesson imbibed in the first few chapters. Strive for 1% betterment in all spheres of life and goals. Gradually accumulate the benefit of these consistent mini-improvements.

(Unintentional) Things I Learnt This Week

# Even when the first sentence of the book provides details about the suicides of the female protagonists and even when the narrator is a vague collective ‘we‘ of neighbourhood boys, it can fuel curiosity and end up being a page-turner. Sometimes endings makes for great beginnings. Or maybe each ending is always a beginning, considering that’s when everything makes sense. I’m reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.

# There is always the option to dive and resurface with an appropriate mask that won’t make a valued friend uncomfortable to be around you. It can be a mask of essential detachment that would not crowd their imagination with unnecessary obligations, worries about unmet expectations and unintended hurt. You will feel a secret guilt that you aren’t being true to yourself, but then sometimes detachment spares unnecessary confusion and ironically maintains friendships. If you want things to be normal, take the initiative in behaving normally.

# Just for once put the words ‘hips‘ and ‘boobs‘ in the title of a post and watch the blog traffic escalate. It doesn’t matter that the content of your post isn’t remotely pornographic; a crowd of faceless strangers titillated by such anatomical catchphrases would swarm to your blog. Majority would be disappointed by the lack of sexual content and never return. You are relieved by the exclusion of such audience; but they had served their temporary purpose of upping the web traffic into numbers that you had never received with titles relating to books or love .

# I had heard of post-coital rituals that involves any combination of psychedelic music, naps, cuddles, smoking, or maybe reading; but it alarmed me that there is an unofficial genre of post-coital literature. I wonder what are the points that tips a book into that particular genre. Sleep-inducing? Post-modernism? Titillating? Spiritual? Or maybe good old love?

# It is amazing the innumerable ways things can go from point A to point B, and in real life, a straight line is the least common of them all.

# Coffee that has turned cold (and not cold coffee) can act as an unintentional laxative for some people (not me).

# Sitting in a pool of sunshine, away from distractions and people and responsibilities, with just a good book and some imagination can undo a lot of emotional ravages and allows for fresh starts. A vacation in an exotic locale isn’t a prerequisite for it; a quiet spot in the park, the terrace or even the bed by an open window does the trick.

# German language is populated with hefty compound words but they end up being the fun and unintentional motivation of learning it. Take fernweh (an ache for the faraway), backpfeifengesicht (a face in need of the fist) and my favourite herbeisehnen (the feeling of missing something you love while knowing that its likelihood of return is unknowable and entirely left to fate). I can’t wait to know more.

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Smorgasbord: A Joke, Anne Tyler Read-athon, Rumi’s Words

I read this little joke on Twitter and only fat people will be able to squeeze out the last drops of humour from it and laugh so long that you will get hiccups. Here goes:

Doctor: Are you sexually active?

Me: I am not even physically active.

*hic! hic!* Yes, I am fat. 🙂

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I had an Anne Tyler read-athon recently; started with Dinner at The Homesick Restaurant, and followed it up with The Amateur Marriage and Breathing Lessons. The common elements of each story are: suburbs of Baltimore; emotionally volatile wife and subdued husband, who have a whirlwind romance and long tumultuous marriage, and despite their best efforts and the shared years the love often fades; at least three children and the eldest one is usually the rebel; the other two are obedient, intelligent and hence rather dull, nothing interesting happens in their lives; lack of communication, quick and wrongful assumptions, incoordination and unsaid words creates irreversible rifts; and an all-pervasive despair and bitter-sweet emotions about how things could have gone so well, if only they knew how to go about it and said what they felt. The prose is poignant and insightful, and certain sentences strike such a chord of familiarity that a new lump of heartache forms. But The Accidental Tourist is the last of Anne Tyler books I will read.

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Then I go back to Rumi:

 The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

The most heartening words:

What you seek is seeking you.

And a poem about finding the way back to your own life to love yourself:

Love After Love

 The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott

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Ignoring Life

The clock in my room observes a twenty seven year old wearing mismatched prints and a pair of precariously placed reading glasses, poring over a book with her mouth half-open, till a few hours before dawn. If these discrete hours of reading every night are gathered and calculated, it would amount to nearly two years of uninterrupted reading. Two years of my relatively short life had been spent in scanning words of unseen men and women to crowd my imagination with new stories, lives, places, ideas, stirrings, perspectives and often discovering a hitherto unrealized or unexplored thought, or a trace of familiarity. It brings a new plot to my life where things head in a specific direction, reach a climax/anti-climax, and i don’t have to wait for ages to see how things will turn out; i can skip decades with the flick of a page.

Real life introduces new plots and unexpected twists too. But they don’t come frequently and take ages to develop into something substantial; also the restlessness of not knowing what is to come is just too much for me. It is our prerogative to decide whether our life will be an open book that stands revealed and unapologetic about its contents; or be as private as an adolescent girl’s journal, with stories that are open to a select audience of choice. I have chosen to be an open book after years of being the latter. But what are its contents? I open my journals and all i read are accounts of the people i have met, the conversations i had, the funny thing that occurred, the disappointments; people walked in and out of these pages with no definite pattern or purpose. My days have no specific continuity as i run helter-skelter through life; there can be a wide discrepancy of the events of one day from the other. Milestones are often insidious and realized in retrospect. And so is love. He might be an irregular visitor on the pages of my journal, but all of a sudden i mention his name with the intimacy of an old lover. I miss the transitions. My life’s plot is confusing even for me to follow; it’s all over the place, going in every direction, and hence stagnant.

It is somewhat tragic to be reading old journals, only to be acutely reminded of the passage of time, the surges and dwindling of hope over the years, the unforeseen curve-balls, and the things that never amounted to anything substantial. Love had come into my life, and i waited with bated breath, wondering where it would lead. A few departed with the usual fuss and drama, and the hurt reached an early crescendo before ebbing away. They were easier to let go. And then sometimes things fell apart without a distinct snap of ties, without drifting apart, without monosyllables replacing conversations, and without a heap of failed expectations; they were just a clean and abrupt end; no explanations, no mess; it was just that over, and just that uneasy.

I am here now, experiencing these feelings, having these thoughts, writing these words; and a hundred years ago there must have been another girl pouring out her heart, believing in the permanence and relevance of her world. Where are those thoughts now? Didn’t they end with her life? I am just another person and my thoughts will end with me too. It is alarming to dwell on the impermanence of our hopes, thoughts, love and secret desires;and  i feel like spilling out the chaos in my mind, the love in my heart, so that it doesn’t wither away with me. But then i wonder if it is even wanted, whether it will be valued, and grudgingly accommodate the word repression in my life. And continue my quiet reading about lives where things happen. 

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life”~ Fernando Pessoa

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Smorgasbord: Recklessness, Procrastination, Dating a Bookworm

Impulsiveness will be my nemesis, someday. You tell me, “Be careful not to bump into that wall, you will get hurt“. My restlessness grows and is vented out only when I kick the wall and limp on my bruised feet, content in the knowledge and first-hand experience of the pain of kicking a wall. I need to know things for myself. I will hear the advice, read the wise words, nod approvingly at the sermons of infinite wisdom and caution; but in the end, I’ll run headlong into that wall, you know, just to make sure. Instant gratification, sometimes it provokes the impulsive behaviour; the irrepressible urge to let something be known, to go somewhere, to recreate a memory, to meet a certain person, to write for myself, to just escape. I never foresee the ramifications of acting on my impulses; I just do it, because that’s what I want to do at that very moment. I had once told someone that I loved him, after knowing him for just a month, knowing fully well that the answer wouldn’t be what I wanted to hear. One day I woke up before sunrise and set off on a long drive, with no destination in mind, just because the road didn’t end, and it felt like an escape, from I know not what. Yesterday I told a near stranger things I had never told anyone, aware of the uneasiness such revelations will cause, and on a reckless intuition that they wouldn’t be shared with another individual again; just because I felt like writing it down and telling someone, “Hey, this is me, you know. I know resilience.” Nowadays, I speak up if I feel something is wrong, not worrying about revering age, or giving undue consideration to the consequences that would follow. My mercurial temper had tapered down over the years, I am surprised and somewhat amused at my own patience. I am not too optimistic about the eventual dwindling of this recklessness and impulsiveness that creeps up on me without any warning. Someday, hopefully, life would make a person with calculated moves and measured words out of me. Till then, I will continue to wear my heart on my sleeve.

I procrastinate and put off things till the maximum time admissible without any adverse effects on the outcome. So instead of pursuing a consistent study schedule of at least ten hours every day for two months, I prefer studying fifteen hours per day for one month. It’s the poorer choice, but until the moment I feel the fear and the adrenaline rush of knowing that I can’t delay a task anymore, I don’t feel any joy or enthusiasm in undertaking it. It leads to anxiety, and that’s not a habit one needs to cultivate, but some people thrive on that essential anxiety, that aura of unrest. I am one of them. One month till an exam, and the study marathon begins from today; social network deactivated, TV disconnected, all novels (except for three) shoved into a trunk. Only three portals of connection with the outside world: gym hour, blogging, and highly filtered phone calls and texts. I need to re-read the massive Kaplan and Saddock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, and it would be one of the rare times I haven’t felt studies as a chore, but as fun, like reading a good story. 

The review of the book I’m reading, Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, will be posted soon. I am now onto the last story in the collection, Smog. A friend e-mailed me a delightful post enlightening people on why they should date a bookworm; it was adorable and made me smile for hours, wondering when would I find my fellow-bookworm. Read it here. “A true bookworm will go far beyond the traditional flowers and chocolates and move onto professing their love for you in the pouring rain without an umbrella.” That got me thinking. If I don’t re-create all the good ideas that I had read in my one and only life, it would be a sheer waste to confine them to a corner of the hippocampus. I’ll keep a notebook for that very reason from now on, collecting pebbles of romance from the books I read. If anything, it’d make a nice read on a dreary day.

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The Books This Week

Show me a girl in love, and I’ll show you a one-track mind. I had drifted off into daydreams, I worked myself into subplots of the book I was reading; it was all very distracting and made me a slow reader. But in the past week I had tried hard to get some much needed diversions, and succeeded. Four books. Aah! The reader has snubbed the lover. The Uncommon Reader, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; English, August; Quiet Days in Clichy are already in the ‘read and relished‘ pile.

The Uncommon Reader has been reviewed as a ‘bedtime story for adults‘. It is that good. A delightful capsule of wit, reading, libraries and even a queen. The repercussions of being a royal and a reader too. I learnt the word opsimath; a person who learns late in life, and I think I’m one too. I wish I had a Norman in my life; someone to discuss books with, and who would suggest what to read next. But definitely someone without any specific preferences, like Norman had for gay writers. I will carry this little book in my handbag always. For a quick pep up.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I had searched nearly all of the bookstores in Guwahati for this book. I never ordered it online. I wanted to chance upon it among a pile of books and relish a moment of quiet serendipity. And I did, when I found an old, worn-out, almost tattered copy buried under a pile of cookbooks in Daryaganj book market. It has a war, but it is about love. All sorts of love; laced with lust, platonic; and the one where it is “what is left when the passion has gone“. I enjoyed the latter. The narratives are scattered; the reader can’t rest. Pelagia and Corelli. Read their story. My wait was worth it.

English, August. It’s about surviving a sense of inner dislocation, of being a foreigner in one’s own land, of clashes in perspectives, of thinking in English and working with the vernaculars. It’s about the coveted cadre of IAS officers and the inner flurry of adjustment troubles in rural India where they begin their journeys. The prose is pithy and contemporary. Agastya is a city boy; he reads voraciously, listens to rock music, smokes marijuana and touches himself thinking about the pert bottom of a tribal woman who comes to him for some work. He thinks, he tries, he suffocates, he finds himself. The narrative feels like a good friend telling you about his life on a long evening; which won’t be stretching it too far, because it’s ‘slice of life’ fiction from the author’s life. Go back to Agastya’s life in tiny pockets of time stretched over a week. You’ll enjoy it more.

Quiet Days in Clichy. If you are a woman, you should leave behind all your gender-associated sensitivity in some deep cranny, and retrieve them only after you are done reading this book. A thinly veiled autobiography of the writer’s early life in Paris as an yet unknown writer, this book disturbs you as much as it captivates you; maybe the disturbance is the bait. It’s about fucking prostitutes (stress on the plural) on quiet, rainy days in Paris by two struggling writers. However nauseating it sounds here, if you can disassociate your inner feminist for a moment to enjoy the prose you might like it. I don’t want to go down that lane and analyze; but I keep telling myself that it doesn’t degrade me as a woman if I enjoy reading Henry Miller, Hemingway or even our own Khushwant Singh. I haven’t watched the film. I figure the visuals would be too much; I’ve kept the words subdued in my imagination. I need a palate cleanser now. Something that deifies my gender.

 I will read ‘Birdsong” by Sebestian Faulks next.

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Smorgasbord: Books, Badminton in Winter, Sketchbook Snippets, Chaudhury!

My trapped soul celebrated its freedom today by splurging on books. There’s a hole-in-the-wall bookstore in Panbazaar where the books are stocked from floor to ceiling, obscuring the walls from view. Orgasmic! The tottering piles overwhelm me, but I linger for hours as I leaf through one book after another. I had missed them so dearly during the self-imposed three month hiatus, I actually sniffed a new book! I am sure there is a name for this book fetish in a therapist’s heavy tome somewhere. I bought six books today; my December is made. I will be in Delhi and Noida for a fortnight, starting this weekend, and I plan to visit Daryaganj’s Sunday Book Bazaar again for some cheap bargains. Can you hear my squeal of pure delight?

I bought the following books:

1. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark

2. Atul Gawande’s Better

3. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August

4.  Henry Miller’s Quiet days in Clichy

5. M.J.Akbar’s Blood Brothers

6. Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers.

I start with August this December.

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This cold is a poor fragment of the winters of my childhood; it’s almost reluctant. But December is here and I shake out naphthalene balls from the folds of the woollens. Often I wake up as a Jedi warrior with my ears warmed underneath a hooded sweater. My mind rushes back a dozen winters when the winter sun held so many opportunities for happiness. There were the oranges, peeled and succulent, that I ate with sticky hands; and the naps I took, curled up on an old mattress on the terrace, and a book would slip off my hand as the sun got mellower.

We used to set up a badminton court every winter, and I had a hard time controlling my enthusiasm as I watched the coral coloured net stringed between two bamboo poles, the boundaries marked with chalk powder and even outdoor lights being put up, so that we played badminton late into the night, often after dinner. I was competitive and wanted to keep score, but my sister threw a tantrum every time I insisted on it. She found it an insult to our blood ties, but she was just scared of losing! My youngest uncle was my main competitor and we were ruthless on the court.

My grandmother had a grimy coal stove over which we toasted our feet every night. And as I got into bed, Ma would cover me with a quilt still warm from being sunned on the terrace. Then there were the picnics, but that’s another story.

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I have a writer in the family. How thrilling is that! My jethai (mother’s elder sister) is a powerhouse of talent. She paints, writes, cooks and excels in all three. She was Assam’s first female jailor, then she quit it all to set up her home. She held a paintbrush for the first time after the birth of her son, and then went on to set up her own art school! After her sons left home, she filled up the empty nest with her words. She is a prolific writer and has penned several novels apart from being a regular contributor to newspaper columns. Her book “Karagar’or Diary” (Prison Diary) has been serialized and adapted on screen. I wish that even a fragment of her genius rubs off on me. She taught me it’s never too late to follow your dreams. When I visited her today, she showed me a folder that held few of her paintings and sketches. For her these sketches are just spur-of-the-moment ideas captured on scraps of paper. But I feel they deserve more light than the dark recesses of the old Godrej almirah where they had been tucked in for years. I will put a series of her paintings on my photo blog soon, but here I leave you with a few of them.

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Snippets from the sketchbook of my jethai, Elu Devi Baruah

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Meanwhile I can’t stop listening to this song in a loop, despite having a very vague idea about its meaning. The song grows on you after each hearing. Here’s “Chaudhury” feat Amit Trivedi and Mame Khan.

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Book Spine Poetry from My Library

The Waves,

French Lover;

Memoirs,

A Moveable Feast.

 

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

Lifting The Veil,

Great Expectations;

Girl With A Pearl Earring.

 

In Praise of Idleness

Speak, Memory;

More Great Stories,

The Age of Innocence.

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Where’s My Corset?

Dark, rainy afternoons. Feet under blanket. Austen. The Bronte sisters. Dickens. Hardy, Thomas not Ollie. Brooding, plain-looking men with intelligent eyes and mocking smiles. Women with proud tilt of a slender, white neck, and mouths that were not rosebuds meant for saying just yes or no. Lots of grey, weather and attire. Untamed shrubbery. Parsonage and vicars. Panting, star-crossed lovers. Unabashedly emotive conversations; each sentence a squeal of love or sorrow. Rich men, poor women; poor men, rich women; endearingly predictive equations. Dissatisfied wives. Eloquent discourse on love and religion. Cruel, authoritarian relatives with a favoritism towards middle-aged aunts. Moors. Long walks in the garden. Courting as opposed to dating. Dressing for dinner. Intense gazes. A lot of swooning. Chimneys. Law books. Hansom cabs. Maids in waiting. Delicate laces and fans. Stubborn people. Opinionated people. Difficult childhood. London. Paris. Voyages. Sisters, similar. Women who want to write. Whirling petticoats. The trials of the fallen rich striving to manage with the bare necessities of at least two maids, one as a constant companion and ro brush one’s hair at bedtime, and the other to help with the mundane household chores, along with the undeniable requirement of a cook and if residing in the countryside, a gardener. One can have four personal employees to cater to comfortable living, and still be poor.

Victorian literature and its aforementioned charms had occupied a large and unregretted portion of my reading life, and I have re-immersed into this world of haughty, intelligent heroines with Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South‘.  I have been reading the trials of Margaret, a poor vicar’s daughter, whose adolescence was spent under the care of an aristrocratic aunt in London. She was just back in her country home, revelling in the blue skies and trees that whispered to her, when her father made the hard decision to relocate to an industrial town in the north of England. It was a contrast to all sensibilities and elements that Margaret had been exposed to. Smog colured the skies of Milton and its people preferred hard labour in the mills and factories, real work, to spending leisure time reading Homer. They were bold and boisterous, spoke clearly and with a frightening frankness. She wore old silk, they wore cotton. Margaret was prejudiced towards their surface crudeness, till she found a ‘human interest’, a friend. She met a reluctant opponent of her ideologies in John Thornton, a wealthy mill owner, who valued hard work and competence above everything, while she struggled with the humane side of the industrial revolution.

 I am occupied with studying for my exam in November and can manage a reading pace of no more than ten pages everyday, so I am just halfway through the book. But what I have read so far has caught my interest; Victorian literature by a woman, that is distinctly ‘not‘ Austen or a Bronte. I have been so immeresed in Margaret’s world for the past few days, it’s a wonder I am not wearing corsets and grey silk bonnets yet!

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Smorgasbord: Dating Readers, Ephron’s Neck, Calvino and Me, Being Jane Morris, Birthday Blues, Wedding Whiff

via urban sketchers

I spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand how my words and actions get interpreted, because more often than not people read between the lines for non-existent revelations. I lack the social graces and the ability for small talk; I get nervous when the onus of conversing with strangers or more than one person befalls me. I can’t talk about the weather, the people in front of me might not be readers and that eliminates books as conversation starters, I stare with my eyebrows raised to show interest, my mouth freezes in a half-smile and to heighten the creepiness I check the time every fifteen seconds. My tongue utters sentences that seem alien to my mind, I curse the unbearable length of a minute, I feign nonchalance and tip my head back but tip it further than I intended to and my chin hangs in an awkward thrust towards the ceiling, and heaven forbid if I have food in front of me, my lap is littered with crumbs. The  funny sentences, the smart one-liners, the queries about the pet and the travels, the sympathies about dental work and humidity-assaulted hair, and interesting trivia about Einstein or Madonna come to my mind usually a day after the end of such disastrous conversations. Despite the utmost caution with which I tread in making my point across, I often send innumerable wrong signals. My list of faux pas when it comes to interactions with people other than those in the inner circle of friends and family is longer than Sheldon Cooper‘s failures in detecting sarcasm.

Today I re-read this article about dating ‘a girl who reads‘ that I had read a year earlier. I present an excerpt from the article; it’s a lovely message that only lovers of book lovers will understand thoroughly.

“If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.“

via Cyril Rolando

Sundays find me awake at a frighteningly early hour and staring bleary eyed at textbooks ranging from medicine to orthopaedics, and later reading the fat weekend newspaper while I eat my breakfast at the pace slower than of a snail finishing a marathon. Then I struggle for a frustrating ten minutes to hide my scalp, the graveyard of my beloved and recently deceased clumps of hair. I drive out of home a few minutes to nine am and on the way I rewind and keep listening to the songs that the iPod throws my way. I appear for a mock test every Sunday morning which I hope will equip me well in preparation for the important exam in January. I get bored of attempting questions after just twenty five minutes and start tapping my foot till the students around me glare disapprovingly. I dash home for the half a day in the week when I have declared a self-imposed ban on my MCQ books; from Sunday noon to midnight this bird is free from its cage. I sweat in anticipation and my hands grow cold as if I’m off for a secret rendezvous with a panting lover hidden in the dark bushes outside my window. I got that from Madame Bovary. I open the novels that had titillated me in stolen pockets of time throughout the week and watch a movie later at night. Twelve hours of pure, unadulterated pleasure and none of it involves a lover or dark chocolate or Disneyland.

I read two books last week Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart‘ and Nora Ephron’s ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck‘, and they were as diverse as they can get. One is set in a Nigerian village towards the end of the nineteenth century and the other is set in  1960s-1990s New York City. One is fiction based on stories the author heard, the other is an essay of womanhood. One is written by a legend of African literature and the other wrote few emotionally-manipulative Hollywood movies that I love so much. One is about drinking palm wine in the first hunted human head and the despise towards a lazy, flute-playing father, the other is about the joy of Julia Child’s cookbook and hiding wrinkled necks in mandarin collars. I loved both the books; but since my week had started on a sad note, Achebe’s grim novel was slightly upstaged by Ephron’s breezy essays about living in the most vibrant city in the world, the woes of ‘maintenance‘ by manicures and blow drys in case one runs into an ex-lover, the stages of parenting etc made me smile more and she won my heart with the sentence ‘Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.‘

 
This weekend I bought three books from Flipkart: Italo Calvino’s ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller‘, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Complete Stories‘ and Julio Cortazar’s ‘Blow Up: And Other Stories‘. I also got Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl‘ and David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas‘ on by e-book reader. I am reading Calvino this week because his imaginative novel makes me, the reader, the protagonist!

I make sure to indulge in something sinfully good every week; sometimes it’s poetry by Whitman or Cummings, sometimes it’s a dark chocolate ice-cream, last week it was browsing online for  Pre-Raphealite art by my favorites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse. I devoured these paintings for hours till I fantasized being Jane Morris with the long honey-coloured curtain of hair and that proud nose and those sensual lips. I was mesmerized by the warm greens and mellow golds in their paintings.

 One of my favorite paintings is by an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Sir Frederick Leighton; I had an acute case of Stendhal Syndrome when I first saw his ‘Flaming June‘.

Birthdays make me delirious with joy, they are highly over-rated in my world. I become excited on New Year’s Day for my birthday in November! I expect the world to stop spinning for a moment on my birthday to acknowledge its significance in my life. I blame it on my parents. Growing up, birthdays were the most coveted and lavishly celebrated events in an otherwise commonplace childhood in a small town. There were more than five hundred guests, I repeat, five bloody hundred guests on each of my birthdays till I decided I was too grown up to wear a party hat and cut a cake while standing under a tuft of balloons. I missed the mountain of gifts though. I continued celebrating birthdays that ranged from a rowdy get-together of friends with mock stripteases and dangerous truths to quiet dinners with family and a temple visit in the morning. Birthdays rule my life and birthday cynics turn me off. I make sure I don’t let the birthdays of my loved ones be just an ordinary day; I am worse than Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreations determined to celebrate Ron Swanson’s birthday. That’s why the news that this years AIIMS post graduate entrance exam is scheduled for the day after my birthday has caused such an emotional upheaval in my life! I don’t want to study on my birthday, but that’s what I’d probably wind up doing instead of all the good stuff I’d imagined, one of which included a leisurely lunch with my girlfriends who would coincidentally all be in town this November.

But God is kind, and he soothed my bruised heart with a news that made my heart do joyful somersaults. My oldest and ‘best-est’ (yes, I use this word) friend is planning to tie the knot next year and I feel so happy for her and the ‘best-est’ (again!) guy in the world that she has chosen to spend her life with (I told her just now that I am officially in love with him too after hearing about his romantic gestures and old-world, Victorian era gentlemanly concern for her which is so hard to come by nowadays. He is Mr.Darcy or ‘non blind’ Mr.Rochester!).

I will watch a movie now, In The Mood For Love.

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Reading In Bed When Cold Rains Killed The Spring

“When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

–Ernest Hemingway (A Movable Feast)

The bright spring morning and the promises it held was a deception; and as I bent over the sink washing my face and trying to rub off a pillow imprint, I could hear the first drops of rain. The sky was overcast with dark clouds; blotting out the sun and it’s tinseled rays, that had entered my window at dawn and had spread so unabashedly over my bed as I tried to hold on to the last remnants of sleep. As the downpour grew steadily, I looked longingly at my bed, overwhelmed by a strong desire to climb back into it, snug under a quilt and a book in hand. The human brain makes innumerable connections, and a certain stimuli can bring about the need to re-create a pleasurable ambience from the past. Rain for me meant being in bed with a book.

My earlier disappointment at a cloudy day ebbed off as I eyed my books, running my fingers over the spines that had seen better days and careful owners. I had picked up these books last winter, squatting on a footpath and haggling over prices while precariously balancing a dozen books on my hands. And now I stared at these dozen new books, trying to decide on a good volume of short stories. I’d started reading Hemingway’s ‘A Movable Feast’ yesterday, but today’s a ‘cloudy’ spring day, and I want to read short stories, and will get back to Hemingway when the sun comes out. I tried to recall the passage I had read before drifting off to sleep last night; about hunger making the senses grow stronger, as pictures seem clearer and writing more vibrant. I was yet to have breakfast, and my mind was quick to paint the picture of a foamy cup of coffee and homemade vanilla cake while leafing through the familiar writing of a favorite author.

The rain drummed on against the windowpane and the tin roof of the old shed next to my room. It was early morning, but it looked like dusk, as a bland grey suffused through the sky, the horizon, the trees, the buildings, and the silhouettes of people with raincoats and umbrellas. I turned back to my bookshelf where short stories of Chekov, Maupassant, O. Henry, Saki, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Tagore and even Murakami vied for my attention; and Maupassant won. I took the fat, purple volume with the now yellowed pages and extremely small print, as I remembered the first time I had read Maupassant. It was a story called ‘Love’, about the love of a wild bird for its mate that had been shot dead. I was ten, and I remember the teacher squinting as he read out the lines, “I’m a simple man with simple tastes”, and he paused for a while and then looked so contented with himself, as if he were the inspiration behind these lines.

So the foamy coffee and two slices of vanilla cake and the stories of Maupassant and a warm bed and the rain with occasional thunderbolts, created my happiness on a cloudy spring morning. 

And as the sun came out, I went to gym, showered, studied for an exam, and crossed items off a ‘to-do’ list and at midnight returned to Hemingway, Shakespeare and Company and writing in 1920s Parisian cafes.

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