#scurf101: a vast nothingness

this was supposed to be about a lot of things, but it turned out to be about nothing

Taking walks every evening after work in my neighbourhood I almost forget that there is a bad spirit looming over our heads these days. Yesterday was one of those great, cold days when even before sunset everything was lashed by almost sub-zero chills. As I stepped out of the house, feeling warm in the hand-knit sweater my mother made for my twenty third birthday, I forgot my jacket. After two days of weekend lockdowns, I was immensely content to gorge on the sight of so many people warming up in the sun. It was almost as if Sunday was two seasons ago and the desolation of Delhi in its curfewed winter belonged to a different time altogether.

As I reached the park, and made my way through its turned in lawns, smeared muddy with manure and tilling, a sharp cold teared first through my arms and then my chest. I wrapped my arms around myself and realised that I’d not been wearing my jacket. Quickly I retraced my steps and headed towards the house to bring the thin wind-cheater jacket out. On my way, an abundance of crows scared me. I’ve always been scared of them, and so managing my distance from them, I made my way faster back to the house.

Once I had the jacket on, I didn’t mind anything so much. I had my phone and my bluetooth headphones. Sheila Heti talking on my headphones about one of her old, old books on this 2012 episode of a podcast. I felt the protection of being watched by other people. The warmth of outsiders’ care. I had the small neighbourhood to me, its incessant construction noises and smells of nothing yet something smother me gently.

Earlier while on my walks I was encumbered by the sense of dust all around me. But now it was the constant construction noise. Earlier last week we signed a petition to stop ongoing construction in the neighbourhood school. It’s been two years in these lockdowns and while earlier most constructions were of apartment buildings shooting up in the area, this time it was the neighbourhood school. They have been at it unstoppably, shamelessly for more than 17 months now. In this time they have brought up a basketball court, some cricket practise nets, a golf course and a tennis course. Now, they are laying tar over a concrete section of the remaining part of the open ground. This construction, a direct manifestation of capitalism and its unfettered explosion, disrupts my mornings and interrupts the quiet of the night.

I miss the quiet busyness of a 10pm night inside my house. With winters, rains and lack of much movement of any kind in the area after 7pm, the construction noises boom and echo as if the devil is at work. It’s deeply unsettling, and had kept me up for many nights last winter. In the last two months, each time I wake up for a glass of water at night, I don’t feel like going back to sleep. The clanging of iron rods, the way they throw rubble from the fourth floor down to the ground, all of it sounds like the destruction of the world in a literal sense. Chaos mutating in various avatars all around us, all the time.

Still, to get over it, I take refuge in my glass of hot milk stirred with some Ensure powder. This drink has come to create a particular sense of calm and quiet in me in the last few months. Especially after I came down with covid in April, even the sight of hot milk soothes me. At night in the perfect light of blue hour I sit with the mug of hot milk, smelling of vanilla, tasting not too sweet, but of strength and humility. At times the first thing each morning when the golden light shards its way on my desk and slices everything with its warmth, I sit with the cup of milk serenading me like a warm, old memory. It reminds me of the time when I was a kid and drinking milk was supposed to be a chore. But secretly I was one of those kids who enjoyed the two daily glasses of milk.

Now, on some really cold days at around 5pm I try to get ready to leave for my walk. And sometimes I am struck by the beauty of the golden hour and stand in my balcony, looking up into the sky. As I notice the deep blue recede into the background, Pamela Petro’s photographs from last year come to mind. As the stilling blue fades to its paler, softer self, dusk descends on the world around. In that brief moment, also described in Rohmer’s Four Adventures Of Reinette and Mirabelle as a dawn moment, everything falls into a brief lull. The chirruping birds in the trees in my backyard, the blinking street lights in their solar glows, the whir of several water motors, the casual coughs and conversations of numerous construction workers on the roads. Everything falls into the background and what emerges is a beautiful, poetic silence, wrapping the world in its arms, even if only for a couple of seconds. When I am in those moments, I don’t want to be anywhere else because it feels so ordinary, almost perfect in its mundanity. Reinette describes this earthy moment in Four Adventures as teaching us “the finest lesson in humility,” adding, “We need nature, not the other way around.”

So far, the one defining feature of my lockdowns has been their very indoor nature, but I’m slowly trying to exchange that for bonding with myself amid nature’s splendors in the middle of the city. I want the heart of my weeks, days and hours to merge with the hidden, humble, natural abilities of the world around me. During my walks something makes me reflect on how my own passage in life, till now, from idealism to practicality, has been nothing short of an unbecoming. My own incipient revolution suggesting that it takes a roiling crowd to nurture a stern silence and a perfect solitude. Being constantly pushed in the extreme, opposite direction, even by my archly jargonizing day job, I feel a softness unfurl within.

Yesterday was colder than most days before, so I took a walk before sunset. I decided not to carry cat food with me, because I did not want to get distracted during my walk. The streets were golden and bathing in the silken halcyon glare. Sprinkled over by mud, foliage and all the dirt that comes together like slushpile after rains, the streets finally powdered off with a perfunctory dusting of soot. What you saw and what you felt was poles apart.

In the park, as I walked up and down the mounds of grass heaped together, I saw tufts of steam rise from the chimney of the neighbourhood club. People wearing various shades of blue, black and grey, walking the circular path. The financial service office in my neighbourhood again shut after the recent surge in cases. Outside their office, the LCD TV they had installed just a couple of weeks ago, turned on now, its lights dazzling solemnly facing a street full of people who didn’t care to look. Everything bedded down for the winter, yet the gaggle of people always outdoors, almost as if they didn’t want to be lonely.

On other side, hoards of people tucked away in the placid houses. Cold, devoid of central heating, solemn in their loneliness, these people warm themselves inside quilts or in front of room heaters that give you a parched throat and an heavy head. Overhead, the crows, and numerous birds hashing it out. Everything bedded down, tucked in, everything but the incessant construction that is so guttural in the destruction it brings along. It is also sometimes the only thing that keeps the otherwise dull streets alive, throbbing with the pain of being mutilated, disrobed. I fear that if they are left without this constant noise, the dark season would engulf us all.

As I walk, sweat starts to accumulate in my armpits, suffusing the pockets of space under my breasts, in the folds of flesh around my belly, around my forehead and above by upper lip. I can almost smell the stench, my clothes gathering a new kind of coldness that is poking itself into my skin, demanding to be felt. Sweat smells deeper, harsher during winters than summers. Yet walking in this forbidding cold, I feel remarkably alive. My knees still not entirely fine, but the thermals under my jeans, the socks inside my shoes make it a bit better. I feel guarded, padded against the 8 degrees chill.

I was walking up the hill that my society is located on, and I felt that dampness again. The soft, pillowy moistness that’s left in the earth after rains. The moisture seeping deep, green all around us, overlaid with patches of foliage from all the trees around. Plastic and paper droppings too. It felt like moisture has roomed up with me as I walked. Moist and chilly, the air cut my cheeks harder than before as I dug my hands into my pockets.

During the second wave months I had so terribly missed this chill and solitude. These shredded, dull streets, trying to match up to the perfect light. Yellow leaves all around like bird droppings. Pink roses shedding their petals, as if glowering at the winter season suspiciously. The low shrubs sprinkled with overnight dew. Their solemn shrugs as you brush past them. All of this topped by the unfettered, abrasive wind. Each step I take, I fear I’ll slip or dig into a mush pile of flotsam.

During these walks it’s almost as if I am searching for something. A soft, diffuse, unseeming entry into a story I’ve been trying to think. The thought bubbles, as they are right now in my head, are concentrated, saturated, stolid. I want an entry point, a leeway that maybe lifts the mist and helps me arrive at a way to get in.

As I make my way back home from the park, a lanky stray dog follows. I’m usually not petrified of strays but these CR Park dogs have been a cause of stress to me these past two years. At one point the dog stops chasing me, gathers pace and runs in my direction — all in a jiffy. I couldn’t see or sense it because of my earphones and excessive winter paraphernalia. I felt a softness bristle past the fingers of my right hand and realise that the crazed stray almost bit me. I can’t complain about him to the RWA too because oh Delhi and its dog lovers. I scurry back home, to safety, more coldness and a different kind of solitude.

At home, in my room as I open the window I see a long, crimson bird land on the small twig-y tree outside. It flaps around hurriedly, making a nasal noise, weighing down the tree’s frail branch. It looks around, not finding interest in anything and flies out.

I am reminded of the crows from a different walk in the park in the last week. A murder of crows gathered around various pits of water, drinking, splashing, bathing, dancing in it. I remember looking up and seeing no birds in the sky. All the crows gathered at my feet, tracing out patterns in the shallow puddles of rainwater gathered all throughout one corner of the park.

All the while they were quiet, their caws muted by a sense of persistent joy that demanded all their attention. I ducked and removed myself from their precincts, scared as ever. I imagined their calls to be loud, boisterous over the bustling park.

I looked to the west and saw the dipping sun, hiding behind the sprawling neem trees, under the tree a cat slowly crossing over to the other side of the park. The cat with its thick white coat and spotless black tail glided across the park. Against the setting sun, it looked like it was walking in the remnants of the sun’s rays. As I quickened my steps, moving towards the cat, curious to follow it, the wind picked up, cutting my cheeks. The sun now gone left the sky with its absence. Behind the trees a vast nothingness. In place of the sun, a grey shadow, singeing with the remaining darkness. A moth-eaten dream, shivering, never captured, flying away into the dusk.