Experiences

Post Number 82: Woman with a Turban

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Before leaving for the office, Mum points me to a pink bag propped up on the table. I look inside and see a large, framed picture of her, wearing a Safa Pagdi (Rajasthani Turban) on her head. As the head of the health services in her region, my mother regularly gets photographed in power poses these days. However, this particular photo of her struck me. Every official function she attends as a chief guest, she’s gifted a Safa to symbolize her importance, something that is typically tied to men’s traditional clothing in Rajasthan. Isn’t it funny that the only way to emphasize her authority is through male symbology? It is as if the best of a woman pales in comparison to that of a man. 


Surprising.

Maybe I am noticing this especially strongly now because I have chosen to go through something where I grapple with labels every day. Unlike ever before, I feel acutely conscious of how I present. In the beginning, I believed that letting my work speak for itself is the best way forward. It partially still is, but it needs to be marketed too. Unless it is wrapped in pleasant packaging and tied with a pretty bow, it is like that tree in the forest that no one heard falling. You must be able to talk and do it well. You must be engaging, and be just the right kind of convincing, or else you could be eccentric. And you don’t want to be eccentric. Especially not an eccentric woman.


The next question is what makes the packaging and the bow pretty? My options are even more limited than my male counterparts. Be a woman of few words, and you’re reticent or underconfident. Be vociferous and you’re noisy. I am constantly teetering on the fine line between them. 


I envy my female friends who have figured themselves out or at least appear to have. They don’t sweat the minor details of others’ opinions and if they don’t agree with someone, they aren’t shy about calling it out. Some carry being loud as a badge of honour (as it should be!). They have figured out the games they need to play and how much they are willing to compromise. 

I wonder if men go through the same convoluted reckoning to find their voice. Do they second-guess themselves before confidently stating things — even when they’re wrong?

Post Number 81: Fleeting Fragments of Japan

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I had the opportunity to revisit Japan after nearly 2 years. My friend, Karan, and I had planned this vacation to coincide with the cherry blossom (sakura) season. Armed with past familiarity, we decided on a blend of new experiences and the comfort of previous haunts. Because we were going back as experienced tourists, we had learnt our lessons with regards to carrying luggage, walking long distances, having to rely on gestures and hands to communicate, and taking a mix of local trains, metros, and Shinkansens (bullet trains) to navigate the cities. I won’t bore you with a day-by-day breakdown, a conventional travelogue, if you will, but I do want to share fleeting thoughts I documented in my journal. 

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Post Number 80: Regrets and What-Ifs

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Another year is about to end. I too, am about to finish another year around the sun. And with each year, I seem to keep collecting regrets and what-ifs. 

When I was younger, I had more life ahead of me than behind me. I remember staying awake the whole night as a kid, buzzing with excitement for the first swim class of the year at school. Now, there is always some music or some show playing in the background to drown out half of my thoughts. 

When Dadum died earlier this year, I remember remarking that my luck had finally run out. I had considered myself incredibly lucky that I got to grow with my grandparents actively present in my life. When kids and adults would mention family members passing, I would send God a quick prayer to keep everyone safe and healthy at home. That clearly worked for a while. Dadum got to see many milestones in my life, except for that PhD. That may or may never happen.

Having these fears didn’t make me cherish all my moments more. It wasn’t as poetic. When Dadum recited poems or shlokas from memory, I would get bored, but I would still listen attentively for as long as I could and he wanted me to. Many days I would naturally gravitate towards Didum, or my aunt and mum because sometimes, finding it easier to talk to them because I related to them more. This birthday would be the first one without him. Last year, around this exact time, we had almost lost him, but he miraculously came back to us for a couple of more months. It was almost as if he wanted to stay back for just another birthday. 


I should have called him more often. 

It’s funny saying that. I haven’t turned into a new leaf after his passing. Many days, I still don’t feel like talking. I could be calling everyone and living in the moment more often. Yet, here I am, fully aware that I should be studying for the finals coming up but choosing to ignore it in this moment. I suspect most people live outside of their moments, but to those who manage to squeeze in as much as they can into their time, I envy you and admire you. 

Dadum isn’t my only what-if. I go through so many periods and events of my life daily, re-hashing everything I did or could have done. It never helps. Of course, you are sitting there reading this and thinking, just stop thinking so much! Yeah yeah, I should, and there are days when I do. And then there are days that I don’t, or I can’t. I adjust with the questions on those days. They will come, and some will go, only to be replaced with new ones. People will come, make their ripples. Some of which will die out, and some defy the laws of physics and never let the water just stay still.

Post Number 79: A Room With A View

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[Waking up in Florence]

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”

Thus wake up Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett, the characters from E.M Forster’s ‘A room with a view’, in an Italian pension but not without causing a scene at the dinner table that leads them to this serene view. The story, more focused on Lucy, makes the reader see how this excursion to Italy was to forever alter her outlook on life. A couple of weeks away from England, and Lucy returns to find the mores of her social circles stifling. Florence, and by extension Italy now flutters across her mind like a representation of everything that signified independence and romance. Though the story takes a different, a more conventional angle of a romance eventually, this initial section of the novel, ‘Lucy as a tourist’, made me think of the rooms with a view that I had inhabited during my travels.

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Post Number 76: An aria. A requiem. A dream

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In the midst of packing for my vacation, I wondered which books I should carry. I couldn’t be thoughtless and grab whatever was nearby. Picking vacation reads requires alchemy. It must complement your mental state, your expectations from the vacation, and if you’re not already there, should put you in the mood to unwind. I was feeling very stuck in life; the December air seemed to thicken the sense of stagnation and melancholy around. I woke up sensing the onset of winter and wishing for it to end before it even began. The sun no longer shone through my window with a blinding sharpness. I ached for summer, for warmth. Cloaked under quilts, I reached for my bedside books, opened a page in Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train, and read…

“…a looming continuum of calamitous skies that subtly permeate my entire being. Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue”

I knew exactly what I wanted to read on my vacation.

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Post Number 74: A displaced Indian

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I had never hoped to come to the US to improve my life. My career yes, but not my life. I loved how the DDA flats used to look so clean after rains, how the corner Uncle’s garage/convenience store was one of the biggest selling points about our apartment complex. I loved how I would come home to a cold lassi or mango shake in the fridge my mum made before she left in the morning. I would then sit and watch Bengali tv serials that had been on for three years at that point, with Didum. I looked forward to the FabIndia sales at Himachal Bhawan and one of my big adult moments was when I got the chance to buy clothes from there with me own salary. Yet, coming to the US seemed necessary at that point. Even as nostalgia tints my glasses in a rosy hue, it would be unfair to leave out those many moments in the couple of years before I left, when I realized that career growth in India isn’t that simple. Going for a Masters in the US seemed the best idea then.

It is still too early to say whether it indeed was or not. The only thing that I can talk about is my life outside my career. What do I do when I shut down my computer? What do I look forward to and who will I spend my time with? Three years ago, I would have been going to my music classes or go on a walk with my aunt to veggies. Keeping up the Ahana from then was easier because everything that made her was right there with her. It took little effort to do what I liked because people around me would do the same things too. The Ahana now, is busy looking up all the songs on youtube that she grew up listening to. She must try that much harder to find new songs on her own because All India Radio won’t do it for her. I actively tune out my boyfriend’s music from me head because it would take away the memory of the music I liked. I hungrily watch Indian news channels on youtube to stay Indian, but I cannot escape the fact that everyday Indian news seems more otherworldly.

The only thing my mum never had trouble with me was that I was never a picky eater. I used to be made fun of that if I was given insects to eat, I would even eat that without complaint. Now, I don’t sleep well if I don’t eat daal bhaat torkari. Everyday, I choose to remember what I used to do in fear of losing what has made me, me. I go extra hard into being Bengali and Indian because who will do it for me if I don’t? Who would have imagined that I would willingly sit through a whole show of Indian classical dance and shed a few tears because I was so moved?

I may already be that US wala relative who tries a little too hard when they visit India. Be kind to them next time. Their idiosyncrasies might just be protective mechanisms like mine. My life in India will always be suspended in the year I left it while it has move on for everybody else. And that terrifies me.

Post Number 73: Arrivals and Departures

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Airport terminals seem to me places suspended in their own reality. The weary woman with her infant; the wonder-eyed kids with backpacks; the disgruntled, underslept consultant in formals; the family with no concept of personal space or volume control; the man, and it’s mostly a man, who thinks the airport is a hotel and the stewards his servants; the doe-eyed couple on their honeymoon, apparent from their body language; All alert at 3 AM, seemingly indifferent to being carried in space around a rotating and revolving planet in a big, metallic box held together by the laws of physics and the ingenuity of humans. The baristas and flight crew offering their smiles at the strangest hours; the immigration officers refusing to, looking beyond you as they speak to you; the security officers moody – at times helpful, other, short tempered; porters walking like they own the place, cutting through queues; the flight crew strutting in pairs or threes, never alone. 

Everytime I enter an airport terminal, two things happen. First, I am reminded of the movie The Terminal. Tom Hanks stranded on an airport terminal, temporarily a denizen of nowhere as his country undergoes a military coup, rendering his passport invalid. Catherine Zeta-Jones running around catching flights, always making time to pick up History books from the bookshop. “I have to go”, “I have to stay”, they remark to each other. In that space when we clear the immigration check but are yet to board the plane, we are all denizens of nowhere. One country says we have left and the other doesn’t know when we will arrive. We all belong to Krakhozia for a while. 

Second, I am reminded of the times I have traveled before. I will be standing in the queue for the check-in or in the boarding lounge or browsing the overpriced books in the bookstore, and my memory will retrieve something from millions of mental threads. Time curls and folds on itself. And like a body in jet lag, I become suspended in time.

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Post Number 72: A Thing or Two on Shifting Houses

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I recently moved from my childhood home of over twenty years. Like most plans in life, it was simmering slowly on the stove of possibility. I wasn’t sure if it would even happen. Until it did. 

When you decide to shift, you expect that something as significant would require a magnitude of time and effort proportional to it. But when you start working towards it, there are weeks where nothing happens and days within which everything does. There is a lot of anticipation but little fanfare. The world outside, spinning and revolving around a star, suspended in a swirling galaxy that is surrounded by millions of swirling galaxies, has no way of knowing that with every passing day, within those walls, another world is being taken down, a star, a planet, an atmosphere at a time.

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Post Number 67 : It’s not so easy writing about nothing…

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“It’s not so easy writing about nothing”…

Thus begins Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train, a 275 page odyssey that takes us through the world – through the graves of literary legends like Plath and Genet, to ice-covered Japan, rocky Iceland, and sunny Casa Azul, the boardwalk shacks of New York, and importantly, the most expansive and fascinating of them all, the inner working of an artist’s mind. And thus shall begin my musing, by shamelessly borrowing her line, lazy plagiarism in the guise of adulation. 

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Post Number 66 : The Art Of Quitting A Book

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For the second time in a year, I attempted to read Rachel Carson’s iconic book Silent Spring. For the second time in a year, I stopped at page 115, unable to rein in my brain from branching off to its Lala-land as Carson wrote passionately about pesticides endangering all the facets of nature. For the second time in a year, I felt the pinch that I wasn’t properly taught to deal with as a kid, the pinch of quitting something.

Out of an infinitely large collection of books and texts, what was it about this harbinger of the modern ecological movement that gnawed at me?

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