#scurf106 winter is gone

dreams, sighs and some misremembered selves

Feb 02, 2022

The winter season has turned its back to us all in the northern plains of the country. Last week this time the temperatures were still dropping, the air in my house was dripping wet, my fledgling limbs were numb and the tip of my nose was stony. But now I sit on my desk, wearing just three layers, and a pair of woollen socks to protect my feet. There is a remnant of chill in the air, and I wouldn’t call that winter/cold, more like a memory of a memory, a language remembered.

This makes me think things about having to step out, face the world, be in post-lockdown space of life. An old normal way of life, not the “new normal”. I can’t begin to imagine a future with the old normal. And I think a part of me doesn’t even want to be thinking of it.

When I started writing this dispatch, I was thirty and life felt never not okay. Now I am thirty one and it’s still the same. But sometimes things don’t feel all that great. It’s almost as if a pale lifts and all things good dissipate into thin air. Last two weeks, I had been overcome by an eerie feeling. Like something somewhere is not going right and was stopping me from surrendering to the rhythm of my life. I felt exposed, slightly vulnerable, in perhaps an imagined porous phase where I might be able to do absolutely nothing. I was continuously leaving things behind, forgetting the way life was supposed to be lived, in the kind of waking dream that life used to be in a pre-something malaise. It made me want to step out, wander into a cafe and just write there. As unselfconsciously as I could. Write in a cafe.

I have never ever written in a place that has not been my own desk. So the romance of trying to write in cafés, hotels, and other such public spaces eludes me. I once (almost) dated a guy who wrote in little cafés all across Pune, won literary awards and immersed himself in the cartography of all those places where he wrote. He used to see them as justified experiences that helped him demystify the process of writing, an essential, indispensable part of his life as a writer, which was almost all of his life. I’ve never had the whole of my life about being a writer or writing. There is work, my life, my family, my weird dreams, monsters, so much more than just sitting in pretty little cafes and writing. But I still wish, I get there sometime.

It was evening, just over the tip of the gloaming hour, and the leaves outside were one large, damp, fluttering mass like that of a dark body of water in the depth of winter. The city behind my window receding farther away with each passing minute. The corner of eyes started to sting, as I felt my throat tighten. It was ridiculous. It was out of nowhere. It was a familiar sensation.

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t know why. I wasn’t sad. It was just like all the days before this one, when I was working from home, thinking about writing, fretting about reading and writing, and preparing for a semblance of life after all this. I had just had a session with my therapist and we had zeroed down to four chief triggers behind my current stasis, and none of them were about other people. That part made me light.

But this unease was not about having to plan meals or navigate social engagements, like the years before. Yet it lingered in the room, like an invisible presence so tangible it shakes you. I guess it was this very freedom, the sense of being so indomitably unshackled, that was driving me to the point of emotional instability.

I stop myself from crying because its February, the season’s best month. The days are perfect with their shimmering light and small cold, the nights poignant with the quiet outside distilling out the sound of far off rattling trains. And yet the lingering hint of chaos subsists.

Today my therapist said something to the effect of “You can’t be creative in chaos,” and it stung me keenly. Whenever I’ve been knee-deep into the recesses of confusion, I was wandered over to the desk, to writing, to meditating on the page. But even that doesn’t help now.

Perhaps a walk will help me close in on these feelings of ill-ease. Last week I was on the street a lot more than many of the weeks before, and as it turns out, then I was also in one of those slightly better spaces. This is not one of those heavy in the heart, clumsy, knot in the chest feelings. It is just a desire to be glum maybe shed a few tears that returns to me on a handful of occasions every now and then. I am thankful though for all the work and other life things that keep me occupied, leaving the desire long back inside a forgotten drawer of the mind. But it keeps coming back. Like a post-covid fever, lingering for longer than you had signed up for it.

The feeling is light blue, not cobalt in its intensity. Not yet, at least. It occurs roughly around at the same hour every day, or whichever day it decides to descend, pressing me slightly from the inside out. If it strikes me once, and I try to fight it, shaking the mind and body off it, it doesn’t bother with me again. In that, it’s weightless. A tepid feeling working its way through my wind pipe, down into the pit of my gut, making my face feel warm and fuzzy, not in a nice way. A muted presentiment of wanting to cry, a silent sense of foreboding fishing for a release of some kind.

It’s the same feeling I get when I rewatch Her, or In The Mood For Love. Or when I think of Hema and Kaushik from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. In a way I think it is an earlier version of me remembering those people who are no longer a part of my life. There is some sadness to that, isn’t it? The people who were once a part of my every day, every hour, every week. People with whom I shared this same life that I have since continued to share with another set of people. That is a patch of melancholy that does exist, doesn’t it?

It’s a feeling of wanting to eat as many peeled carrots as I can. I skin carrots bone thin, and bite into them, filling myself up with as much red food as I can, as a way of substituting all the love that I had for all these people. This feeling is an immenseness of wanting to reach out and touch something and be totally enmeshed in it. I do the same with junk food — but only to the point of ingesting as much as I can. Roadside Indian Chinese food, chilly chicken, bad splotchy oily noodles, sometimes honey chilly potatoes even. I often get diarrhoea afterward.

As far as memory takes me, I always remember myself as a woman who was hungry for life. For a lot of my formative years I was unhappy, isolated and hemmed in by myself, and family. I longed to break the conventions of family and society. Then plunging into exciting, pulsating literature really helped take the edge off. Now, I am happier than that previous self, and perhaps in a minimalist, sober, unsentimental phase of life which is also reminiscent of a kind of life I secretly wanted to live.

I think these nerves are also a result of a very Delhi sense of existence. There are days that are raw, yet lyrical, moody and full in their expression of life, while others are morose, sordid tales of a being in a city at the cusp of catastrophe. This metropolis in its stink has moved past euphemisms. In it, it is now a malodorous, dangerous and brutal shell of its previous self. It is hazy, grey, heavy and no longer exudes the previous allure. My mother introduced Delhi to me as a kid as a place that couldn’t be hospitable to women in any way. There was a darkness in its boroughs, that always went away when you had either of the three: a car, a gun, a man.

Sitting on my desk here, I try to give shape to the gaps between my own words, those mute spaces. To give a grammar to what exactly is happening behind this human hospice, to lend a rhythm to the silence between the unsaid. The pauses here are as much a part of the text, I feel, they may even be the finest parts saying in their absence all that these present words can’t.

Perhaps this sadness is a recognition of a known sensibility. An elusive something at the bottom of everything. Perhaps it is longing. Perhaps it is craving. Perhaps it is nothing and just a creation of a mind addled with too many things all at once. The being unable to grasp at what I had wanted all this time, a sudden sadness at achieving something that I longed craved for.

I try to sketch out a mental image of this longing during a walk.

Returning home from my usual park stroll, passing from underneath the big, gently swaying winter trees, a chilly breeze lifting me with it like a cloud, the sad but beautiful blue of late evening, and the quiet that attends a city at the heels of winter. The ideal, jovial desolation of the city in winter, with its streets ringing deep in their quiet, and its crepuscular neighbourhoods laced with the annoying, hungry, irate Delhi stray dogs. As Naomi Fry calls it, the “interstitial weirdness of the city”, making me realise that I was doing okay, just like a lot of other city beings. And that we were all together in this loneliness.

What colour was your dream tonight? A crepuscular jamuni? How far were you in your dream? Where did the dream go when you forget it? Does it dwell in the spaces between your thoughts? Or in fleeting memories of misremembered touch, restless words, and half-recalled curve of the lover’s lips? Dreams stick between your naked toes, like unseen spots of grime and muck and ebb away as you open the window in the morning. They tail away with the late winter smell, melting with them every iota of dream logic. Reason soaks you then, and in place of the dream is a cluster of words: spoons, balloons, bare moons and junes…

It’s been a slow few months. This is my recently published essay: Angela Schanelec’s Films and Me