one month, thirty days, 720 hours, etc.
it has been two months and i have not punched out even a single blogpost. its nothing new, this radio silence, especially since its wintery-covid season now. a few things have been at the top of my mind, and those aside i have been stuffing my face with home-cooked food and goodies my mom was able to send through via a relative last week. a duffle bag full of various kinds of perishable food items, accompaniments, condiments as well as dessert items. made with love as pure as the ghee in them and i allowed myself to wash in the glory of that love.
this has been some kind of a rite of passage for me for the last dozen years that I have lived away from home. mom sending through someone or the other a bag, sometimes two, full of things -- that signify love, care, warmth and a ton of thought. the way she sends the bag(s) is a struggle she often has to fight alone, because i don't want people to be burdened and i hate her to have to ask anyone for anything. and more importantly, in today's time, more than ever before, with the skyrocketing intrusion of internet in our lives, hasn't it become all the more easy for us to secure anything anywhere?
my mother would love to digress and emphasise on the true importance of a kind of love, raw, pulsing and vulnerable that can be felt in the taste of a peda, a spoonful of ghee, and a dash of dhaniya ka namak. these are the things, and more, that i call her projects of love. she makes them, sometimes upon my request and at others, on her behest, for me, my father, older brother and his family. mostly no one asks them for these things, we just mention in passing, that we miss this taste, or that spice, and she registers. she keeps a tab on each one of our silly needs like these, without ever making it obvious. and slowly, starts piling things up in heaps inside her head.
in a month's time she will make these things resurface, almost make an appearance. the amount of invisible love, physical labour and mental toiling that goes behind it almost always ignored and looked away from. but this time around, as she went through the entire month before my cousin drove to Delhi, every afternoon, putting on a mask, walking or taking a rickshaw to the nearest market to secure items on her list, then coming home to start their preparation, followed by their packing, something shifted in me. i understood for the first time in my 30 years of life that this is exactly how she has worked. this, along with her full-time semi-government service. that, along with fulfilling the caregiving responsibilities of a north Indian daughter-in-law.
in bits, pieces, fragments she makes us whole. one bite of gajar ka achar at a time. with her voracious reading as well as deftly serious knitting and crocheting hobbies on the side. i take pleasure and immense pride in her life, love and labour like a shallow, shamefaced idiot, and constantly work on repairing my relations with her. this blog post is a pause, a kind of a sitting back, resting our heads, visualising our mother's face and understanding in the smallest of her day's minute, how much labour she intuits into our lives.
******
on a different note, here are my most recent personal essays:
1. In LA Review of Books where i write about my relation with Chai and how its consumption dropped during the pandemic: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/chai-stories-pandemic/
2. Multiplicity Mag where i recount times and memories from a vacation i took with my mother last year: https://multiplicitymagazine.com/the-dharamshala-sun/
3. Popula where i write about my three lives in Delhi in the three distinct geographies that I inhabited: https://popula.com/2020/11/12/my-three-lives-in-delhi/
In case you are interested in reading more/all of my pieces so far, you can find them on my website: https://anandimishra.contently.com/
You can (& should) also follow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/anandi010
And last, but really not the least, share this letter as a gift (Literally just press forward) to a friend who loves reading and writing. Send this link to more people: https://tinyletter.com/anandi
I plan on including a monthly movie and album/artist recommendation to my letters from now on. If and when I feel like, I'll also throw in a couple of great essays and perhaps a podcast in the mix too. Here goes those for December 2020. I might not live up to my own hype, I'm famous for it.
-- Music: Waxahatchee's Staying Afloat has literally help me do right that this last couple of weeks. https://youtu.be/yHuhABPbOaE
-- Movie: Garden State (available for free on YT), which I don't think is a horror movie, but some people think it is. Go figure!
-- Essays: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/opinion/autism-adult-diagnosis-women.html?login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock
-- Podcast: City of Women, which is exactly about that -- women, cities and who we claim and reclaim them over and over again. Bangalore-based and full of peals of laughter, this podcast has me in its thrall since i first discovered it.
I promise to be a little more punctual with these now. Going forward you should expect a letter from me in the first ten days of every month. ANDDDDDDDD, I would love to hear from you folks... your thoughts, exchanges, jokes related to what I write. Share, pass it on and enjoy the upcoming season from the cozy confines of your homes, please!
and leaving you here with a view of a window seat from the Pune locals, yes you read that right.
warmly,
a
