Its the morning rush as I get ready for another flight to Bombay. There's a wordless lull as my mother seeks things to busy herself with - after having promptly finished all the work on the previous evening. Her daughter must seem like an alien creature who wears her tam-bram hair open, turns left and then right, adjusting her strap. This morning she decides that she wants to plait her hair - something she grew up always wanting to do, but never got round to. Single plaits were a mark of 'womanhood', while double plaits were girly and innocent.
My mother suddenly offers to do it and I gladly let her. For a ritual is being performed - perhaps a couple of decades too late, but even so. In the act of plaiting and having one's hair plaited both women are transported - the mother to memories of her grandmother plaiting her hair. " 'Tight and thick', she used to say..and then I would steal to the other room to try and loosen it up."
" Make it tight", say I. " I like how definite it feels."
Soon the plaiting is done and mother admires the result. " Wish you were here everyday, then I could plait your hair..." Uncomfortable now, both of them nod a smile and look away.
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"Doesn't your mother kiss you and tuck you into bed?", she asked her once. The girl shook her head a little too vigorously, trying to shake away a choke.
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Ritualised expressions make her uncomfortable. Loud pecks on cheeks always make her look away. Shouldn't it it always be present in the unsaid?
There is a very lonely nerve to confusion. It throbs silently, unsatisfied, defiantly. Defiant in its belief in itself - that this confusion must be valid. It must have, in its heart, something true that is worthy of pursuing. It is a very un-self conscious stubbornness... Something that itches at the edge of one's reasoning. For confusion must imply a certain validity to the discordance - between instinct and another's loud words.
This confusion makes me silent now. Earlier, while in younger blood, it would fuel me... Incite an uncontrollable passion to mouth words... To double into word the wordless cloud in my head.
Young blood can be self destructive. It will always lose to sudden expectations of tenderness from the other side. For those things creep upon you when you least expect them.
Somehow it feels like anger shouldn't accompany femininity. Like its a form of cruel that cannot be swallowed. One must engage in a performance of vulnerable defiance it seems. An interesting thought, but i don't have the first clue to getting around it.
There is something
To be said
For that unnamed fear
An uncomfortable tugging
At an unimaginable part
On the underside of
What they call the heart
And something more
To be said
For when it is teased
Out of its place
To assume
A monstrous proportion
It blackens
Casts a shadow
And leaves you with
A perpetual drone
Stirring somewhere inside
It becomes
Your incompleteness.
And no intelligent verse
Or sugar saturated word
Can help you coat it
In vain, to try and seal it
Like that root
Growing around a stone
Until a handcrafted ped
Dislodges it
Dislodged now
It reveals
A rough healing
But the sun
Warms with its shining
I am not the festival celebrating kind… as in I love being part of it.. but I like to pretend I do it as a chore. Somehow conforming to the ritualistic nature of it always got me down. I didn’t like that it had to be done cos for generations we have been doing it and it’s a happy time, so we must do it. I would much prefer it if someone said it’s a chance to make merry and indulge ourselves. That’s all it was to me anyway. My middle class home had a mother who worked in a bank. And every year she would have applied for the diwali scheme which meant that at the time of diwali.. we all got a humungous diwali cracker package worth 3000 rupees. Every year 3000 rupees. And it had all these goodies and I used to make her exchange the sweets box for an extra box of crackers at the local shop. So we didn’t have to eat badly prepared non-traditional sweets and got to eat the yummy hot ones mom made at home, while we had more crackers to burst.
Even arguments against the noise and air pollution they caused didn’t touch a chord within me beyond a point. For in a tam bram household, very rarely did one indulge in something that was inherently wasteful. You didn’t laugh loudly, you didn’t make special dishes every week and you definitely didn’t buy new kinds of products just cos you liked the ad you saw on tv. Everything was weighed down by The Wait. We were made to wait for our first doll, first bicycle, first telephone, first television. It was ensured that every consecutive generation somehow miraculously gleaned the collective gravity of The Wait of all the previous generations. There has probably not been a single diwali when my dad and mom haven’t sat us down and told us how when they were kids they couldn’t sleep all night cos for the first time in the entire year they would get new clothes and guess what that would be – a new uniform set for school. Those were trying times and I’m sure it was rather tough growing up then.. but we didn’t care. It wasn’t our job to continue revering another’s hardship.
We wanted to burst crackers. Make some deafening noise and revel in the boundarylessness of that. No one could reprimand us for it was the nature of the ritual to make noise. We would wake up at 4 am and sit on teak wood palaghas while patti sat us down and rubbed hot oil into every pore of the body. Gleaming and slipping off red oxide floors all of us would be lined up one by one and given one pittale sombu full of hot water by patti.. and then we could use our ‘modern’ soaps and rub ourselves down. The early morning smell of manjal and nall-eNNai was heady. It told us.. it was time to celebrate. It would stay with us the whole day. Recasting our skins in new textures, the ritual changed the air around us. Suddenly malli-poo clad hair was but natural. We left our convent school sensibilities and dove right in to the traditional.
It isn’t so much the festival as the air it created – clean, sparkling, crackling and new. To be felt from the surface of our skins and radiating outwards. Like vaseline lined camera lenses in real life – or maybe my myopic eyes magically created the soft glow around everyone. It was a perfumed time, kissed by sunlight and the easy boundlessness of our innocence. Skipping along, we never knew we might need the images for nostalgia.
Your fractured mind does not let you see the hole you are burning. And the way you disgrace yourself, is painful to watch.
To what end. Does someone need to show you a mirror.. so you see that your evening lies within you.
But we brought ourselves up well. We develop new skin. Layer by layer. Each one tougher than the one before, you know how a wound heals don’t you.
I can’t remember when, I began substituting the question mark with full stops.
But something has to be said for us, and if I have to say it myself, so be it. Somehow, miraculously, both of us find the strength to look at you with sympathy.
But we are finite. and the day that sympathy dies, you will go with it.
image from: http://mr-twingo.deviantart.com/art/turn-into-wind-140546521?q=boost%3Apopular+turn&qo=22
Where i grew up, when the weather gods decided it was supposed to be a gloomy day, the weather did complete justice to it. Sincere and whole-hearted attempts. The skies would be overcast, with a particular shade of grey... one that makes you think that behind the clouds was clear blue sky and nice light... you could sense him covering it delierately, with focussed effort.
And if by mistake it let some light through, the difference in temperature was so apparent that it made you feel small. One step into the light with the other foot under the shade meant you had goosebumps on only one leg.
And gloomy meant it made you want to snuggle up behind thick razais.... old ones that have evidence of years of human kicks and stretches under the soft cotton that was loosely held by muslin-esque cloth. It never moved totally towards 'biting cold'. It always threatened to... leaving us perenially confused as to whether its going to get colder or not... imagine an elogated, slow, lazy threat of things getting colder but never actually doing it.
And you snuggle up under the blanket... tuck it under your feet... stretch inside and hug yourself mummy-like to conserve the heat. And that's enough. You don't need layers, woollen socks and gloves... you just feel like you want all of those things. And then the weather man starts his hypnotics... he creeps slowly into ur bones until any movement seems like an immoral act... you know if you bend your knee a little bit, you would touch that patch of cold under the blanket and who would be stupid enough to do it.
School on dreary mornings was the most cruel thing Bangalore made you do. It was never cold enough to not go... but nothing about the weather made you feel like you could pull it off. And so you tear yourself away... apologising to your knees and cursing your favourite blanket. And the weather always strikes up a personal rapport with every individual... he affects each of you individually... slowly at his own pace... making each of you alone in that misery at that point of time. Hence, for a certain period of time my mom was the most 'sensitive ' of us all... then it was me... then it was the asthma in dad's lungs... and now its probably my sis.
But he will get you. He will use rain on a perfectly sunny afternoon and make you run into your blanket. Its the only place where I've seen people never completely pack off their blankets for the summer... just shove them into a lower shelf in the cupboard. I used to put mine below the sheets I used to sleep on... I loved my blankey too much. Plus he was this heavy, tantrum throwing lazy thing who would never completely stay within my grasp... I folded him to a third of his length, hugged him and tried walking to the cupboard... but the lazy fucker would just decided to get heavier with every step... until i threw him down and fell asleep on him.
Gloomy days meant that the plastic toilet seats felt like cold metal under your bum. Gloomy days meant everyone was excused from talking in the mornings... from greeting each other.... meant that if you told mum you fell asleep while brushing she didn't laugh at you. Only those from 'colder' parts didn't get what the big deal was. Until they came down and stayed in Bangy for a year... until a Scot came down and said she needed a sweater at 12pm while walking out in the sun and until all your overactive cold loving never sleeping in the afternoon since birth skin wanted to go to bed at 11 am and dozed off into a comatose-ey snooze on a 4 day trip. Until that happens, you are probably a weirdo who feels cold at 18 degrees.
And he makes you have an emotional connection with warm beverages... not many people get the notion of a coffee shop... its easily brushed away as another form of creating consumption channels... make people buy into a well marketed sit-down version of the same thing peddled by Hallmark greeting cards... selling popularised, American versions of Parisian cafes.. calling them 'hang-outs' for the youth. They are probably exactly that for most people, who hasn't seen a bunch of 7 college kids buy one cappuccino and sit around a cramped table... trying to pull as much time as possible for them to sit there, chat and get noticed at the 'right' places.
But my bangy doesn't have coffee shops for those reasons. She has tiny, sit-out cafes where the filter coffee kind of people actually come over to sit alone and let warm watered down frothy coffee of fancy names and read books or just stare out onto the road. And you know what, the mood of these places is so apt that you realise the coffee is actually perfect. I've done it so many times that I actually have a mental map of where to go for which coffee on which day in what weather.
CCD is cheap, crappy shit... machine made coffee for when you want to have a quick meeting or if you have absolutely no other choice. The coffee at Barista is a little more careful. They have short, wide cups... generous enough to let you cup your hands around them. The coffee is machine ground but the milk is added later (atleast the ones I used to go to in Bangy). The coffee is a little thicker... but the brew is not that dark... light coloured, bordering on thick beverages that course down ur throat giving you a sense of fullness... with a coffee chip muffin on the side... just to make things look pretty. A lil bit of decoction drip over the side of the cup, chocolate sauce drizzled over the muffin, non air conditioned open air spaces... and chairs that give you the right distance from the table so u can sit and play with the rim of your cup. And then there is Mocha, tall dark coloured glazed mugs with rich robust South American coffee brews… which you make entirely by yourself… its actually 3 coffees packed into one…. So u can add whatever proportions you want… low seating that lets you lean over towards ur cup… hold it with both hands… dimly lit even if you are sitting outside… (I don’t know how they achieve that)… Moroccan furniture… weird trippy music, long bent out forks and good food. Conducive to deep introspection and non-conversation, or maybe a private one.
And all of these versions of coffee simply taste better in Bangy. They get everything right there. And I wont talk about filter coffee or about India coffee house… both are too beautiful to be described and better left un-classified.
But nevermind all that. I miss my gloomy bangy days. Its dull where I live... I keep the dull tubelight on all day and all night.... but its not my kind of gloomy. Its irritating... cos it doesnt lure you to snuggle in... you just sweat less. And the coffee shops here just try.