Poona memories
July 2016, I was brimming with words, in my shared flat where I had a room with a balcony and a study. One of the most memorable cities I have lived in, and possibly the best house that homed me so far for less than a year. Crucial coincidence though that as these pop-up on my Facebook account I have none on me—a steady flow of words, the rains against whose thin background I had written these, and a house, a home, that balcony, the lack of humidity.
July 18, 2016
I have lost count of the number of times, pages of dailies, weeklies, fort-nightlies romanticise Calcutta (Oh how I wish I was born a Bengali), Delhi (Oh for Khan Market..), Bombay (for you a thousand times over... Leopold Cafe) and Madras (everything and yet nothing that I can put my finger on.. Let's say the beaches for this one here). It's stranger how names of these cities have changed over years but writers, magicians of a special kind, weavers, have nevertheless sought out those slice of life stories from each of these cities. Stories that lend character to these cities, stories that show us who it's people are, stories that borrow largely from history and blend into the present, stories that bounce in and out of the larger narrative of the landscape of nation building. Stories... Features... On Bombay or Kolkata.. On Hazrat Ganj or Ganga Barrage (I had to put Kanpur in here, okay?)... Writers will come and go, these stories will remain and so will these cities... Always larger than life, amassing so much more than these stories... Larger than their names... Well of course, what's in a name!
July 16, 2016
Smell
It has been raining in this city for the last fortnight and the incessant pouring has ceased, held itself back for the last four three days. The weather-girl at a national daily says it's because of the lack of any systems in the Arabian Sea, but I know, for once I am sure I know it's because the impregnated clouds want us to pause and awaken our senses to the growing foliage around us. The smell of wet trees, the whiff of ferns, the sight of fallen flowers, the undergrowth on garbage, on the rusty cycles by the forlorn bus-stand, the leafage that accumulated on staircases of buildings, the wetness in the pages of my diaries, the sogginess in my ironed socks, the moisture-laced sides of the book I got home delivered just the day before. The living world is germinating, from all shoots, herbs, and corners of the listless city. I sat this noon by the window and watched movies on my laptop. One after the other, wondering if one could get a volatile high by drinking endless amount of tea while watching movies. It's not everyday that I find myself in the balmy company of movies and tea. I did pick up the newspaper from my doorstep this noon, but I chose not to read it. Confined myself to the seven walls of this beautiful rented apartment where I've been living for the past seven months. I drank copious amounts of tea, watched movies and made studious notes. How these notes will help me, I have not a clue but the process was beautiful. Its close to seven now and daylight is about to simmer away, so I will move my butt and switch on the light. Wait for that friend who has promised to visit me with samosas and bhutta. I will make some more tea and we will eat crisp lijjat papad while talking about office politics.
Another post about having lived away from home for eight years shall pop-up by the end of the month.. and maybe that will motivate me to put pen to paper, after two weeks of this tepid aridity that has hit me when the atmosphere around is nauseatingly humid, stingy and causing one rash after the other.
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july 18, 2018
the writing chipping away from me, like the dry skin that covers the space where an erstwhile wound used to be. observations intact, yet words flying away, one by one, disappointment galore at the end of each 24 hours. fleeting circumstances in which some words are strung together, but on others, writing cheats its way out.
i don't know how. but i know when, and i can see this happen to me hour after hour. i can feel the weightless burden of the unwritten.
i blame it on the weather, the steady humidity, i blame it on being in between moving spaces, i blame it on the lack of drive.
the writing, is difficult, it always has been, but today the thought returns to me. returns to haunt me. like motes of dust, the words have flown off and away, in the grim irritating din of the rainlessness, this errant humidity with its various creatures spiralling out of nowhere onto my limbs, on my back, my neck, my feet and giving my rough rashes. i scratch this itch that burns, while waiting impatiently of course, on the other itch that i can't scratch.
gashed with sleighs of red on my skin, i wait for the rain to stop, the errant humidity to turn its back on me, for the words to find their way back, albeit a bit dramatically, when have things not be shorn off drama and poetry!
words are few, in such times, and far in between. like someone trying to enter a cuboid through a locked door.
what do you do? you eat more, you drink more, you watch, read, read and read. no notes in the notebooks these days though, no notes in the margins of pages and bills and am receipts. no words to look up meanings of.
i feel like i am living in a sinking place, unable to cope with in hive of not-written but lived experiences, writing escapes like this. like the sun on a humid, overcast day, like the clouds on a summer May morning.
my mornings bereft of words, my nights sleepless, sentence-less. i try to read, eat, drink words. i read read read. scrub the mind for words, i try to look at things and think yes, i'm going to write about this, i shall strap this detail in, i sharpen my observation skills to understand what is happening inside the head such that i am not able to write at all. the chin burns. the eyes sting. reading Murakami is balmy.
life without words waiting to be written, is nothing but unlivable. each day a drag, each hour a debt to more and more unwritten words.
understanding the luminosity of the incapacity to write, i lug on. the train of unworded experiences choo-chooing. steadily grumpy, words within me churn and twist and threaten to vomit out of my head. garbled—all the ripe thoughts mixed with the unripe ones, i try to stall life to manage the fabric of living.
last night i learnt the bengali word 'shokal'. it means morning. the night was not wordless that way, i had one new word to satiate myself with. trying to chew on it, and to make do with it mentally, still at unease though for not having written at all about anything. this vacancy, kicking me in trepidation. uncompromising though, i watched a relatively new Hindi film that used Bengali (bangla) and English words sparsely.
last night i had tried to hold a conversation about the dilution of Hindi language from my vocabulary. i tried to drive the point home that even though in the last decade of having lived away from home, i have not in the real sense been away from the language, and yet the language in its sparsity thinned away from me. i try to over-explain, driving my friend over the edge.
i know i can live without writing, it is nothing heavy, no. i try to tell that to myself. i might have amplified the terror in my head, but these songs help. when travis laments on the rains falling only on him, it echoes with me, distinctly though. i want it to rain words on me, to pour sentences, for the observant roving eye to come back, the absolute glory of the feeling of belonging with words to wind back to me.
and then a thought crosses my mind, why do we need to write at all? too many experiences collected over these years, what's the point of it all anyway?
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