#Scurf144: Of sick weekends and sweet smelling Pasoori
Routine is good but also bad and madly musical all the same
In the last few years, since I started holding permanent jobs mostly, I’ve fallen sick numerous times and mostly always towards the end of the week. I would get cramps, and menstrual unease, eventually descending into the blood bath of periods — all of it almost always on Thursdays that would gently eat away into Fridays and seep into my indoor weekends.
As much I love relaxing and having nothing to do (even on weekdays), falling sick on weekends has the most debilitating effect on my mindspace. With covid, and eventually, the thriving 30s gathering moss, I started getting periods that would be followed by fevers, cold, and a weakening body ache. All of this during the week while I work was to me absolutely splendid because, with work and other things going on, my restless mind wouldn’t find the space to crib about anything external (as much as the period pain is physical, I’ve always thought of it as an external something).
In a way that isn’t happening to me, but to a person to whom my body belongs. Some sort of twisted disconnection that helped months in and out in conquering menstruation-induced ennui.
But after 2020, all of this changed in keeping with most other things going downhill, my body too started giving up. Almost as if by osmosis.
This month had been blissful in a way that left me with something new each week. New in the form of skin peeled off of my index finger because a new ring got stuck. New in the form of a kind of heartache that emanates from losing someone suddenly to death. New in the form of unbridled chaos that comes from a change in routine. New in the form of nearly escaping a viral bout and then crumbling down and into it ON A WEEKEND!
Mid-July as I moved into the second half of the year, of the month, of this intensely humid summer I was also engrossed in a new kind of shuffling. A new office, new place of work, new commute, new mode of transport, almost everything new and yet. I tried to not falter, tried not to give in to the melancholy but nothing really worked. At some point when I was sulking deep into the purple recesses of the most humid July of my life, I found my way into music (viola!).
It started with the usual — listening to Pasoori some 8-9 times a day possibly in a go. There is something so powerfully healing about the song that escapes me each time I think of writing about it. Like a sermon, a psalm, a salve — the song opened my senses once again to the possibility of literature. The temerity that a supposed break-up song can muster.
I’d listen to the song on my commute, in between work calls, while in the loo, doing laundry, etc. My days have come to be enveloped more with the perfumery of Pasoori than my own little drabby life. A few memes came to mind, some studiedly poor writing on the song also crawls back into my head, but I don’t let any of it get to me. The song has by now become the soundtrack of these imperviously heady days and dank heavy nights.
Then there was the strange sensation of having made a friend or two in the desert island that my life in Delhi has been. Their influence sang fresh life into my isolated being. Willfully I went out, saw movies, had dinners, made plans. Like I was never that cranky plan-canceller. A joy infused into these dewy days — like a sweetly murmured joyous secret on a heavily rained-in hill station morning.
As I write this dispatch from yet another excessively humid afternoon in Delhi, my ears seem to singe as the airpods continue to blast Pasoori a 35th time. My antibiotics make me delirious enough to fantasize that if I listen to the song some 20 times more and if that gets the airpods to really melt, Ali Sethi’s diaphanous voice would infuse itself into my being. Liquid gold I can afford and perhaps I also deserve. The sweat is reeling as I swallow my bile, turn on the air conditioning and slide into my bed. It’s time for an afternoon nap, a time to heal and succor the senses.
Some listening for your weekend: