One Year

It has been over a month since I last posted here. I felt my posts were getting more strained, summoning up the same energy seemed more of an effort and so gave I it up entirely for a while. It is impossible to be dishonest while writing. I can exaggerate, indeed hyperbole is one of my pet techniques, but at the core I have to believe what I am typing, or my sentences turn convoluted and displeasing.
So, instead of lying, I chose not to write at all. I sat in my sweaty little room, staring at my computer screen, I went shopping and bought smart new shoes, I baked apple pie and joked with friends, all the time with a niggling feeling inside me that I couldn't quite explain away.
I haven't found an explanation yet, this post is just a start, a confrontation if you will. I sometimes think my teenage is catching up with me now, in my twenties. All the rebellion and confusion and lack of identity I should have felt then sometimes overpowers me now. We never really escape our demons.

I handle it like I handle everything else in my life, by pushing it and everyone away. Like Scarlett O'Hara, "I'll think of it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day" is my philosophy. I don't know if that's the best method. It is the only one I know.

I remember when K and I were in kindergarten, to make us eat our favourite uncle would promise us that if today we ate out curd rice, tomorrow we needn't. Uncle wrote it on my slate and propped it up on a chair. So every day we would choke down that rice waiting for the tomorrow when we wouldn't have to eat it any more.

I'm back home now. We celebrated K's birthday and I baked a cake. We called it 'Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cake" because it contained everything he liked: raisins, walnuts, cocoa, chocolate chunks, dates, coffee, rum and bananas. We ate tiny slices with chocolate ice cream. K left the next morning. The remaining half of the cake is still lying in the fridge. None of us want to touch it.

This coming year seems a godsend. Four years aren't enough. Not to figure out what you want to do with your life. Hell, a lifetime isn't enough. But I have one year. I gamble on it like Scheherezade gambled on the dawn. My story isn't finished yet.

Travel in a city

I do love traveling around Mumbai in an auto. Autos are just the perfect height above the ground to see the dust flying when a humid breeze blows. I can look either way to catch everyday scenes of this city I've learnt to love.
From either side I see pan-stained sidewalks, but if I just hunch the littlest bit, I can see gorgeous mannequins under neon lights. Close enough to count the ribs of panting stray dogs and to see the glistening skins of mangoes stacked high on fruit sellers' carts. Close enough to see brightly coloured polythene bags clogging open gutters and the red high heeled shoes of the woman in Chanel sunglasses waiting for the valet to bring her car.
Fast enough that I feel weightless while we race down a flyover, narrowly avoiding potholes, yet slow enough for me to read all the billboards.

25 things about me

I've been tagged with this particular meme several times, and today, finally decided to respond. While I'm hardly reserved about myself on this blog, here's a list of things I might not have mentioned about myself in the past three years. By the end of the exercise I realised, it's hard to come up with 25 remotely interesting things about oneself. While I'm not tagging anyone in particular with this meme, if you're reading this, do feel free to consider yourself tagged.1. I dislike stuffed toys. I find them pointless. I'd much rather have a real pup warm and wriggling in my hands, instead of felt ones with cotton insides and plastic eyes.
2. I don't really like listening to much music. I find it distracting. I obsess over a few songs and listen to just them over and over again, driving everyone around me nuts. I add only about 15 new songs a year to my playlist.
3. I'm never bored if I have pen and paper in hand.
4. I used to read prodigiously. Since coming to IIT though, I don't anymore.
5. I've trained for several years in classical dance and I thoroughly enjoy dancing. Sometimes I tap my feet under the table, because I can't keep them still.
6. I absolutely love baking and plan to study pastry sometime in my life.
7. I get into my own head far too often for my own liking. I try to observe myself from different points of view and find myself an endlessly fascinating subject.
8. I'm rather self-obsessed.
9. I publicly declared my hatred for poetry, but I can still cry over a good poem.
10. I sometimes cry over poetry, songs and books, but only very rarely and in private.
11. I'm a closet drama queen. I love drama, but constantly suppress that side of myself, although it sometimes sneaks out.
12. I dislike children and don't intend to have any of my own.
13. I will however make a smashing aunt.
14. I'm a master procrastinator. If any job can be postponed, I will postpone it. I'm not proud of this habit of mine and intend to make a push to break it, someday soon.
15. I very rarely get into arguments with people. I'm not quite sure why.
16. I find it hard to not smile at people- even perfect strangers- when I pass them on the street.
17. As a child I wanted my hair so long that I would trip on it as I walked. Now, I only crave hair so short that I'd never have to comb it.
18. I've recently discovered that I really like shopping.
19. I love blogging, but constantly wonder if I'm crossing the line between honest and too personal.
20. I love making caramel and spinning shapes with sugar. I can play with burning, boiling sugar for hours on end.
21. I used to be a rather mean kid- always looking down her nose at people. I really hope I've changed.
22. I dislike puns. I've met very few puns that I thought funny. I think them pretentious.
23. I used to have the disagreeable habit of humming to myself under my breath all the time. I only stopped when one day on the bus, a lady asked me why I was crying.
24. I'm usually attracted to older men.
25. I have a horror of settling down.Maybe my views will change as I grow older but permanence or commitment of any sort frightens me.

image from cuteoverload.com

Mangoes

I am notoriously fickle when it comes to picking my favourite fruit. My favourites change with the seasons, in winter I favour crisp apples with ruddy skins and faint green veins running through their flesh, but before they have time to wrinkle at the approach of spring, I will have shifted to green, bursting grapes. But year after year, as the grapes grow brown and slowly fade away from the bamboo basket of my favourite seller, I scarcely spare a moment to mourn the loss, because mangoes will finally be in season.

Gloriously yellow flesh with the sweetest smell imaginable, through the months of May and June mangoes hold prime position in my heart. I've eaten all kinds of mangoes in every way possible. Giant golden ones eaten while sitting on newspapers so I won't get the floor dirty in Perimma's house, with the juice trickling down my arms, tiny green ones from Atthai's garden to get at which I would gobble down my curd rice with scarcely a chew, sliced into translucent pieces and eaten with a fork at formal lunches, or sliced into giant wedges and eaten leisurely during long and heated post-dinner conversations on the best way to cut mangoes, with the family.
After hearing Appa reminesce about his favourite cafe in Pune where they would serve giant bowls of mango pulp every summer to hungry young cadets, I made my first mango pulp. It was possibly the first dessert I ever made, filled with lumpy mangoes inexpertly peeled and a giant mound of garish tuitty-fruity on top for decoration. Appa, bless his heart, praised it to the skies. Since then I've experimented more and more daringly with this versatile fruit and have always been rewarded. I bake mangoes into buttery pies topped with crystallized sugar, a scoop of ice cream and my trusty toffee sauce. I cream them into souffles, light as air. I stew them into spicy jams that will make pretty sandwich cookies. And with every dish and every day, I fall a little more in love with this glorious fruit.

(Photo courtesy thailandholidayhomes.co.uk)

The simple things

I've cautiously refrained from posting much this past month, because somehow my words have been spitting venom. Put me in vicinity of a keyboard and I fall easy prey to my new found cynicism. It is so easy to criticize, so hard to praise. Even now, at a time when many things are ending and new beginnings seem far away, I find myself announcing relief instead of reveling in the memories behind or grieving at the unavoidable partings ahead. Such a state of affairs can not continue, no matter how poetic and romantic it may seem. Indeed, I loathe people who sit and criticize the world around them, wrapped safely in their mantle of superior cynicism, yet I am in great peril of becoming one such myself.

So instead, let's return to the simple things. Today was lovely. After weeks of stifling heat, there's a light breeze. Not enough to dispel the humidity, but it does contain a whispery promise of things to come. I saw clouds in the sky yesterday, timid, translucent clouds. They tried vainly to shield me from the sun. I don't need them, I have my SPF 30 sunscreen. Still, where there are clouds, there will soon be rain, I hope.

I made yet another cheat sheet today. I've lost count of how many such sheets I've made. Certainly, I've developed a skill for them. My masterpiece was a sheet for Quantum Electronics in February, in which after filling both sides of an A4 sheet almost solidly with microscopic blue writing, I proceeded to write in the milimetres between the original blue lines, in black. More wonderfully, I deciphered it all in the exam. Sometimes I surprise myself. In any case, it's good to know my cheat sheet making days are numbered. I can't think of a real life application where the skill of fitting unlimited amounts of text onto limited paper could come in handy, yet it is one of the many things IIT has taught me.

Four more exams to go. Then it will be time for lab experiments, blisteringly hot days, new faces, beach trips, ice cream cones, goodbye hugs, project deadlines, torrential rains, computer screens and a lonesome room.

Preserving Illusions

Of late, all my nights have become a haze of jumbled voices, uttering every form of profanity, filled with uneasy, drunken laughter, as I watch through rising clouds of cigarette smoke.

I don't know how I could have been so naive. Till two weeks ago, I honestly believed that a valfi was a time for memories and laughter, for honesty and closure. But this year as I watched closely for the first time, all my little illusions shattered one by one. I watched as people brought out the character flaws of their friends -things they disliked about each other but never had the courage to point out- disguised them clumsily as jokes and read them out into a microphone, on a stage, for all the world to hear. I watched as they spoke disrespectfully of friends and used words I had never heard of before and wish I could never hear again. I sat through many readings trying hard not to listen, too cowardly, too unsure, to get up and leave.

I like my illusions, I don't want to lose them. I like to believe that I would never judge anyone on the basis of three pages written about them by their drunken friends, but sometimes, I can't help but wonder if there isn't a grain of truth behind some smutty tale. As I spend more time here, as I listen and observe, I'm frightened at my own growing cynicism.

Of course valfis like I always imagined exist too. I like to think my own was one such. It was 9:30 am on a weekday morning and we had all been in our chiffon sarees and heavy jewelery for over 12 hours. We had spent the night reading, reminiscing, laughing, blushing and crying. The morning was quiet, the sun shone, but the terrace hadn't yet turned uncomfortably warm. I was surrounded by people I loved and respected. I couldn't have asked for more.

So it is that I am able to fight off the romance of an overpowering cynicism and still preserve a shred of my old naivety. Some illusions must be preserved. I still need something to believe in.

Heat

It is 3 am and I am still awake, thanks to an ill advised coffee. The heat is quite stifling. Every year I meet the Mumbai summer with fresh surprise. Every year, I can't recall it being quite this bad. I've never faced a summer quite as potent as Mumbai's before. I've seen warmer climates with higher temperatures, but what gets to me is this humidity, which makes every breath an effort and covers me in a sheen of perspiration half an hour after a bath. When you emerge from an air conditioned room, it slams you in the face like an unyielding wall.

Smells seem more intense in this dense, warm air. Yesterday A, G and I went for a walk. We saw a butta seller fanning the flames of his tiny coal stove, in the dusk. He stood in a circle of shimmering sparks as a most delicious smell spread around. Roasting corn on the cob is definitely another of my favourite smells.
A few days ago, Amma and I paused before a jasmine seller at a railway station. The buds were small and hard, but their fragrance spread around the station, almost intoxicatingly sweet.

The heat makes me languorous. Waking up in the mornings seems pointless, till the sticky warmth forces me to shift. Every movement is an effort, every thought a strain. I procrastinate and laze inexcusably and glibly blame it all on the heat. It is of course fitting that this is one of the busiest times of the year. April is here and the semester is wrapping up. Project deadlines loom, valfi profiles have to be written, exams have to be mugged for. My caffeine fix is perhaps a godsend, I can use the time to do something productive But I know I won't. Like Scarlett O'Hara I whisper to myself, "I'll think of it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day" and take myself off to bed.