I hope you are doing well. I hope you are getting all you need and all you want too.
I am sitting outside of my current house, in the backyard, and it's a little chilly. The rain Gods were at doing what they do best today and its wetness is dripping from the trees which border the yard. The drops on the washing lines seem frozen, sparkling from the light which I just put on.
It's been a dead day, if there was such a thing. Nothing seemed to happen, or happen right too for that matter. I missed an interview appointment because I FORGOT! That's no excuse, it's just pathetic. And I have nothing exciting happening which should've prevented me from remembering this detail.
The skies were greyish since morning. You know how much light affects my mood! That is one of the reasons I want to come back home, to India. The land of monsoon and the land of enjoying monsoon! Rain here is just depressing. It carries no romance the Indian monsoon does. The first rain, the smell of the quenched soil, the sudden greenery, the bhajias, the chai..... it has been romanticised enough by all. I need that. I need to feel Nature. We, in India, are so much in tune with the forces of nature. We are celebrate the arrival of each season, we depend on it for so many things. A poor rainfall means food shortage, an untimely one means no mangoes that year. Yellow-hot summers leave us begging for the rains and we wait, wait for the massive force of winds to unleash some upon us. Here, in UK, it's perpetual rain. The summers are short and celebrated only by rushing off to parks and beaches and wearing one layer of clothes. The winter comes soon enough and puts on two layers of cardigans and coats on you again. Then, you put on a heater in the house and live as if nothing has changed from the transition from summer to winter.
I have done just that staying here. Stayed the same. Done nothing radical. Worn my layers of fat and ennui and prayed for the summer to come and melt it off. It was never hot enough. My summer here required some changes to my Indian perceptions. It was hard to think of summer as a pleasant season. Back home, we dread it and wait for the moist monsoon and cool, dry winters. I had to reverse my psyche.
Anyway, like all here, I am just discussing weather. That's one reason I find the British (and I guess most Westerners) shallow. They will spend hours discussing weather but none would ask you the state of your affairs. Your joys and sorrows are your own to experience and you can tell them to a shrink. Thanks for being mine!
I will see you soon enough and thaw out in our land of perpetual summer.
poems in the rainy afternoons. drops not touching me. falling from an ambition-less sky. yoked by grey. me in my solitude. in the dryness of the house. squeezing a poem out of the moment.
my sights are not set high. just like the heavy cloud. an ear to hear. a sympathetic hand. i can pour in shallow depth.
a paper-pen or keys on the board. just soul preceding over medium. i seek the poem. and comment on my journey. i never arrive.
I am obsessed with that word. It's comforting. My drug of choice. I like taking holidays from reality. Reality is confusing, lacks reason and is not satisfactory. Unlike the control surrealism gives. My laptop becomes my soulmate of no flesh and blood. My windows turn into cinema screens. The cursor is my fingertip gently cruising along a cold, steely skin. The streetlights are my suns, shining without hydrogen, not blocked by any clouds from reality. The Pangea forms again, and home is on the next street.
I am at many places at once. I live in a room with no great view currently except for the sliver of an old pub, scrawny rose bushes below my window and two dull green trailer boxes stacked up in front of it. I have another window, to use the cliche, this one.
I exist in India, Germany and US through this. I have the times put up on my screen. It's 19.33 and 15.04 now. At the same time. I feel like in some kind of continuous motion back and forth through time-space. One moment I am at lunch, the next, having breakfast.
Just before I wake up every morning I think I am in my bed. I wake up and realize this is a rental. My waking moments are filled with regrets and longing for familiarity. After making my self go through the motions of cleaning myself up, I get acclimatized to the here and now. Only to put on the computer and sink into the grey area between there and here.
I have travelled quite a lot in my country. Gone for journeys which have taken me a thousand kilometres away. But I never felt like this. I can picture the globe when I am trying to place myself. It's like a GPS zooming out and going westward from my home every time I try to find out where I am. It always tells me how far I have moved. I never gave much thought to physical distance, now I can feel every inch which has been put between me and home. Anything south and east will be like the direction of my Mecca. I bow my head in reverence and realize, I am lucky to have roots and now sprouting wings too.
I sit in a white-washed building. There are no windows. There are password-protected doors giving access to a few. The air is conditioned, pumped inside spending loads of electricity. A gentle breeze might be blowing outside. There are a thousand tube-lights. They illuminate and put everything into a spotlight. The sun shines brightly till evening. The ceiling hangs low. People move about suppressing spontaneous laughter. Business-like, busy. Thousands swarm into these precincts every morning. A human ant colony. Working on set instructions, following rules. Where do we draw the line? Human instinct or pursuit of something higher, less tangible, more ethereal. Do I need the support of cold, hard-earned paper money or the joy of doing what I like? Can these spheres intersect? Should they? Why do I feel like I wrong people who, along with me now, are a part of this worker-ant-like colony? I look at them condescendingly sometimes. Sometimes, I just envy their happiness in the materialistic. And wish I was never this ambitious. I wish I could belong. The metrics, the statistics, I am a part of, demean me. They cast their all-pervading shadows on my uniqueness. My sense of my own indispensability. I will struggle to break through. I hope to win. I don't know what I will lose. Hope the spoils are satisfying enough, if not, I will have my peace of mind, I tried.
We started early. My over-enthusiastic sister hauled me out of bed. I woke up and peered through the window hoping for overpowering rain.
“We are late. We are so late!” Shweta kept on her scolding ramble as she tried to hurry me. I cared a damn.
There were eight of us, fitted in two cars. Dressed in comfort-wear, we tried a few stretches before we got into the cars. On our way, we stopped to parcel some vada-pavs as breakfast.
“I want five of ‘em.” That was Tanvi. “ What? Don’t stare at me, I need to treat myself after all that exercise!”
The rest of us- Shweta, Niket, Shamika, Mandar, Manish, Kedar and me- settled for two each. With the steaming vada-pavs in our knapsacks, we sped on to the base of the mountain. All the way, I was hoping for a massive traffic jam, which would send us back home.
After the cars were safely put in the parking zone, we obtained our entry passes- to climb. I kept hoping for a “No entry on Sundays” sign to pop up from somewhere.
The weather was horrible. It had rained the night before and the whole of yesterday. But now, it has stopped. Summer was trying to overwhelm monsoon and the humidity was making us sweat rivers.
The climb started as soon as we crossed the gates. There was no prelude of a lazy walk through woods. Sticky, gooey mud covered much of the path. The mountain was steep. There were mud-coated stones and boulders everywhere. Scattered like after a landslide, slanting along. Strange buzzing mosquitoes and dragonflies ruled the air. Mounds of mud on the ground were teeming anthills. Dense foliage overhead made the atmosphere hotter and steamier.
At the point of a rivulet-crossing, my sneaker-clad foot stepped into the water. (Eww!) My overweight flesh and lazy bones were definitely not a big help for limbering upwards. I was panting like an asthmatic. Left behind by everyone, I was cursing myself for having come. I guess I kept on trudging only to avoid the ridicule of my friends if I did not.
It was some 30 minutes onto the mountain when I saw that these guys had stopped at a ledge. The canopy of trees was absent at this spot. The sun had reluctantly buried itself in woolly blankets of grey. The light that resulted made the world seem surreal.
“I cannot. I will not go ahead!” Shamika had a shrill voice. Her anemic skin was glowing pearl white in the surreal light making her seem like a wailing zombie.
“Thank God!” I thought. “Now I can go back with her!” I did a mental “Whooppee!!” But…I joined everyone in reasoning with her why she should go ahead. Unfortunately, she complied.
“How much time more?” I asked Mandar who had been on this trek before.
“Till we reach there….” He pointed to a black stone fort, far far away. “About 15 minutes more.”
“Cool.”
Mandar had lied. It was already 20 minutes and I could see no signs of reaching the fort anytime soon. I was tired of breathing violently and my legs pleaded for a rest. I kept on walking.
Soon, we took a slight turn and found ourselves on a thin, narrow plateau. Here, the trees thinned out. I looked around. The neighbouring hills and mountains were crowned with dull white clouds. You could see for miles around. The hills sloped down gently into plains with paddy fields. Everything was green. Moss, leaf, sap, viridian, vulgar. Green. I tilted my head up. Grey clouds stared right into my face. A slight rain began.
I was suddenly ecstatic.The rain washed away sweat and mud. I put out my tongue to drink it all in.
The fort could be seen now. Veiled in grey and white wisps of vapour. I started forward. Onward.
The last leg of the trek was the toughest. But now, I was prepared. I wanted to go up there. Small stones gave way to huge boulders. Brown mud had disappeared leaving only glistening black basalt. Putting fingers in crevices and feet in gaps, I hauled myself up. We helped each other on the difficult parts. One slip could have lead to at least a month in the hospital. But, the journey was not scary anymore. The boulders were just a step to the summit. The adrenaline rush made it worthwhile.
The fort on the top was hammered by weather. Half walls of stone, cracked steps leading to nowhere and blades of grass everywhere the earth could allow. We found a small cliff which had its beginning at one of the black walls. It was a patch of soft green grass overlooking the steep mountain and offering another breath-taking view of the hills and clouds around.
I sat down and spread my palms on the wet earth. Grass blades caressed my hands. I felt more happier than I had been in a long time.
We then munched on our vada-pav breakfast. Everyone ravenous and fighting for the extra vada-pavs Tanvi had. The food was warm, spicy and filling. Contentment spread. Eight of us laughed, joked and sang till we were hoarse.
The descent was faster than the climb. The way was still splattered with stones and mud; now, more familial than repulsive. I smelt fresh scents of crushed grass and weeds and mud. Heard the gurgling, tinkling rivulets hurrying downward. Sunlight filtered through leaves on my arms and faces of friends and the adventurous path.
I reached home muddy, sweaty, tired and happy. Then, sped past my sister into the bathroom, peeled off my clothes and stepped into a hot shower. Relief surged through me. My mind relaxed and wandered to the task at hand. I had an exam coming up next month. A listless and faithless mind had prevented me from studying for it. I thought of the piles of books and papers towering on my study table. Now, no mountain is too high.
