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Two tomatoes, two potatoes, finely chopped. An onion too? Why not.
A little oil, warmed. Some cumin seeds. Let them sputter.
One whole red chilly. Fried until you can’t breathe without coughing from its hot vapours.
Then, a flurry. Onions browned, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, dal — everything dunked in together.
In ten minutes, there is a meal.
Hot, nourishing. We slurp it up with cold curd. And marvel at our good fortune.
Look, we say, what a feast. And I thought cooking was difficult, I laugh.
No, that’s just a myth. Perpetuated by perfectionist mothers. And nitpicking grandmothers.
We laugh some more. Sated with khichdi — humblest of meals.
No, we say, food fit for the gods…
Last night, at the traffic signal, a boy came up to the car. As they often do. With a bunch of jasmine strings. “Take it, for your hair,” he giggled. His eyes, though, were weary.
Yes, I will. Two strings of jasmine. One for you, one for me. One will adorn my hair. Cool my head, too. The other will be my gift to you. For jasmine-scented dreams. For a touch of me with you.
The boy is waiting patiently. The light turns green. We pay him in a flurry. Five rupees. For two sets sets of jasmine dreams.
Who says the price of living has gone up?
Words meant, left unsaid
Fester in the silences
Between our breaths…
Words thought
Words birthed
in our being
Left unsaid
Slowly suffocate…
Oh, for the liberation of writing
the act of freeing
words
from my bosom
into the vast outside
where they’ll live
or die
without me…
In the ugliness
of concrete and tar
of greed and lies
of unforgiving city life
stands this silent
yogi of a tree.
It blossoms
in peak summer
in harshest weather
soaking in
punishing heat
emanating
cool, yellow shade.
Its blossoms’ brightness
fades every day
deepens every night.
And when
a gust of cool wind
loses its way
and blows into my room
the yogi tree
sends along
some leaves
some blossoms
– its own inspired poetry ….
Some words evoke images that may be completely different from their intended meaning. It has to do with cadences of language, languages rather, that exist and commingle in our being, that determine which sound evokes what in one’s neural pathways.
Take ‘frangipani’. It’s a beautiful word for me, and not only because it is the name of a beautiful flower. Whenever I hear ‘frangipani’ — roll it around my tongue or just think it — the sense that is evoked in my mind is….’fragrant water’!
‘Frangi’ I suppose sounds similar to fragrant because of the ‘fr’ sound. And ‘pani’, well, it is water in Hindi, my first learned language, the language in which I still do a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, a lot of dreaming. Despite this whole thing about being a writer in English.
This, then, is the gift of the language that has seeped into my psyche, has formed me in so many ways. That I can hear the name of a flower, and think….fragrant water!
My grandmother told me once, when as usual I pestered her about families and histories.
“My family came from Takht Hazara.”
I looked it up on the net. It is where Majnu came from. I told her this.
“Did he also come to India after 1947?”
I looked into her 96 year-old eyes, withered from a lifetime of seeing.
“Majnu, the fabled lover,” I whispered.
“Oh, I thought it was a person….”
She closed her eyes. She seemed to sleep. Then, suddenly, vehemently, “Why do you ask so much? The visions don’t come anymore.”
“Visions, what do you mean?” I asked.
“My grandmother, visions came to her. Celestial beings indicated to her what was going to happen. She died before I was born. She wasn’t there in 1947… Otherwise, maybe, somehow, we would have known….”
But the visions, they don’t come anymore…
A thunderstorm blessed us last night. It woke me up from a restless, nightmare-punctuated sleep. The solitary window in my room was awash with raindrops, and rattled each time a bolt of thunder streaked across the night sky. I inhaled deep the perfume of wet earth, and tried to catch some drops of warm rain on my tongue.
Intoxicated, gleeful, I returned to my comfortless bed. The new dawn came kissed with the aftermath of the storm. The new dawn came cool and beautiful…
Summer’s fire is quelled for the day. Who knows what will happen tomorrow?
A thought — what will happen to us?
Nothing new, nothing everybody hasn’t asked/felt always, all the time.
Just a re-articulation of chaos. That lives in the pit of our stomach, in the back of our throats. Always.
Ready to leap out the second something goes wrong. Which actually means, when something happens that is not expected, not wanted, not needed.
What will happen to us?
I asked my mother this morning, quite casually. She looked at me quietly.
Nothing, she said. The same that happens to everybody.
You mean, we will die?
Of course we will die, she said. We all do.
Then what will happen to us before, between now and then, I persisted stubbornly.
What you make of it. Just be.
Said my mother, the Zen master.
Just be…..
A new blog, a new beginning.
New amaltas blossoms, bright yellow
Fading quickly in the May sun
I’ve heard,
in some places
on earth
summer is actually beautiful
not ruthful, or vengeful
not searing, or harsh-tongued
Is it true?
I have never seen it…
It seems odd to begin things in this heat. But so it is. A new beginning without reason, but with meaning. Something to live by in unforgiving circumstances. A quiet pool of beauty to immerse oneself in, on days when the hot dust-laden winds howl at my window and time dissolves into one eternal sweat-soaked moment.
Yes, some of us in the Third World have no air-conditioning. Just fans, and rabid moral policing. And yes, we used to have mangoes too to make these summers tolerable. Until this year when the Americans bought them all up.
Love to all, anyway…
