Written snapshots

In creative writing class, we discussed an essay by Margaret Atwood where she points out that one can never actually meet the writer of a book one has read and loved. By the time the book has been edited, published and distributed, the writer has moved on. He has evolved and grown older and changed into someone else.
It's a fascinating thought isn't it? That every piece you write is like a polaroid snapshot of you, as you are then and never will be again.
I've realised lately, that the written word is my favourite method of preserving memories. So, I've started a new blog, here. The whole point of the new blog is written snapshots, of everyday moments that made me happy, that I want to squirrel away. The point of Colours is different. I wondered once, why it was I blogged. I know now, that the point of Colours at least, is analysis. It's a place to capture a few of the hundreds of little epiphanies that happen to us each day, thoughts that are often felt rather than voiced. Ans while my new blog is about chronicling experiences, Colours is and will always be a place for thoughts and for watching them change.

Dust to Dust

They're scraping the old paint off the hostel walls today. I was here when they were painted the last time, transformed from dreary blue to shocking pink. We were outraged then, pink for a girls hostel was such an annoying stereotype. That pink faded from shocking to mildly surprising and then to inoffensively pale. The walls are now a rather depressing pinkish-white, pockmarked with holes and covered with the scrawls of students over the years- timid vandals seeking to leave their mark here in some small way.

I left my mark too: my name scrawled in pencil in painstakinly miniature cursive, next to my door. It's an obsession for me, doodling my name. I scrawl it everywhere, on the backs of notebooks, in pools of sauce on plates and this once, on a hidden corner of the wall. K used to tell me that I must have an identity crisis. He said it half-jokingly but he might just be right.

The labourers scraped my name away along with all the others. All our small rebellions. Now they are a fine layer of powdery pink dust all over the floor, flying up in clouds and marking our footsteps as we walk past. By night, it will all be swept away.

One month late, but still...

This post should have by all rights, gone up on August 7th. But what with Convo and the flu and a whole other bunch of other circumstances, it didn't, and Ravali's birthday went uncelebrated here on Colours. We celebrated in other ways, with orange cake, pink champagne and a silver tiara with green feathers (it was certainly colourful) but I wanted to give this bestest of friends and my most avid reader, a celebration here too. So here it is, one month late.

Ravali turned twenty three today. Twenty three isn't a particularly significant year. She was old enough to vote five years ago and could have been legally drunk anytime in the past two. But birthdays are after all, a time to sit back and think about the time past, a comma, so to speak, in the sentence of time when you take a breath, take stock and change your tone.

I met her four years ago, in our tiny, pink walled room. We sat facing each other on our beds. She couldn’t stop talking, I stayed mostly silent. We were both very nervous. We were exceedingly polite to each other, those first few months, but our conversations rarely went beyond common courtesies and tepid gossip. We had our own concerns and problems and the fact that we shared a room didn’t seem reason enough to share them.

She decorated her side of the room with a pink coloured poster of a bunch of chubby babies and insisted that everyone who entered the room had to sign on their favourite. I thought her crazy but signed on one anyway. The baby I signed on made me laugh, ducking away like it did behind a pink bucket full of pink roses.

There were always people in that room, friends of hers, arguing loudly, gossiping and sharing. I used to tire of the noise and of cleaning up after they left, but I never told Ravali. It didn’t seem polite. Then slowly, I was drawn into their conversations Her friends became mine. The noise became pleasant. She does that.
A vast number of her friends are mine now, wonderful people whom I might have never known otherwise.

We grew close slowly. I don’t quite know how. We shared secrets and stories. She took me to the hospital and stayed with me when I had a high fever but was terrified of doctors. She would clear my bed and smooth down the covers for me to collapse on when I returned in the wee hours of the morning from music practice. She would scold me when I didn’t study and coax me out of my sulks. She would attend every tiny performance I ever gave and always cheer the loudest. She often shamed me out of my own miserly tendencies by her sheer generosity. She always gave her possessions, her time, and her sympathy freely, to anyone who needed it and I learnt a great deal, simply by her example.

We’ve come a long way from that tiny pink room where we had our first awkward conversation. Four years of giggles and tears, of moments of high drama and those quietly shared, of conversations on everything from movies to mathematics. Four years of life that I shared with her in a way I’ve never shared with anyone before.

Our lives are changing now, very fast. We pause on days like this and take stock. When I pause and look around, I'm comforted to see you there, right by my side.
Happy Birthday Rava.

Singin' in the Rain

I just spent two miserable weeks fighting off the flu. I don't know if it was swine flu or just a run-of-the-mill influenza. As the doctor at the IIT hospital informed me (a little too cheerfully for my liking) they were all the same.
Whichever it was, it certainly wasn't pretty. I worked my way through stages of sweats and fevers and feeling too hot and then too cold and not being able to keep any food down and losing my voice. But worst of all, the world looked depressing. I'm generally an annoyingly cheerful person, A compares me to the character Alec Baldwin played in his guest appearance on Friends and I have to admit, there are some similarities. But through watery eyes and racked by the shivers, the world looked unrecognizably bleak.

Today though, I popped my second-last antibiotic pill and sang an only partially husky version of "Singin' in the Rain" to my mirror. It's good to be back.

Rain

The rains are finally here and sitting in office is becoming harder than ever. You see, our garden is calling to me, and it is never so insistent or alive as when it rains. Gnarled trees thrive on those grounds along with prickly lemon bushes laden with gleaming fruit. There's a fish pond with tiny black fish swimming about busily in circles and pale lilies with the most glorious perfume. There is a family of cobras that you can sometimes see disappearing into bushes and brightly orange pomegranate flowers that look like miniature traffic cones.
All of this will be singing today. The leaves will collect little pools of raindrop till they droop with the weight and spill their bounty on the earth, then they'll spring back up and collect some more. The fish will swim about even more madly in a wild game with the pattering rain.
The earth, oh, the earth will smell so lovely today, and the gravel will get all crunchy and the soil brick-red. And the trees will swing wildly in the wind and do their best to look intimidating. And the grass will gather all the rain, beaming an electric green, and squelch delightfully when walked on. That big, blowsy red rose I saw yesterday will be battered by the drops till all the weak and drying petals fall off and only its pure red heart remains.
All this will be happening, while I sit in this air conditioned office and try to listen for the rain.

Morning Song

This morning, as I washed the sleep off my face, I heard the children singing their morning prayer. Our house shares a wall with the Army School, and at around seven thirty every weekday, you can hear the children sing. Six years ago, I was one of them.

In all Army Schools and Kendriya Vidyalayas around India, we sing the same song at morning prayers. It is a bhajan whose words have been carefully scrutinized for secularism. I first learnt the prayer in Jammu, where I’d transferred to the Army School because it was the only school at any reasonable distance from out house. Prayers were scheduled at 7 am and so K and I would leave home on our cycles at 6:40. I had inherited K’s old cycle, which was a miniature boys cycle, perfect in every tiny feature. I had however refused to learn how to ride it until it was painted in baby pink and K would wince every time he saw the desecration.

Winter mornings in Jammu were bitterly cold so I'd wrap myself in layers of sweaters, a scarf, gloves and woolen socks. Still, the wind would find a way in, whipping the tails of my scarf about and stinging my face to a hectic red. I would race to the school, to get out of the wind as soon as possible, determinedly pedaling my pink cycle as the wind tore at my pigtails.

I'd park my cycle and rush to the classroom, where my friends would be waiting. We would hold hands and try to get warm. The boys tumbled each other outside, the exercise keeping them warm while we girls shared our warmth and traded gossip. No matter how icy I was after that cycle ride, there would always be someone to rub my fingers and bring back the circulation.

Then a bell would sound and we'd all troop out for the assembly and there we would sing our bhajan to irregular beats on the PT drum. We would sing lustily in an effort to distract ourselves from the cold. Then we would recite our pledge, cold red fingers stretched ahead in a salute. Then there were excruciating readings of the news and the "Thought for the Day" before we were finally commanded to stand motionless during the national anthem.

I don’t think I ever really understood what we were singing then. The song is carefully chosen because it never takes any one God's name. Instead it asks a pretty generic God for gifts of knowledge, love and patriotism. The tune was a little tiresome, each stanza sung in exactly the same way. Our voices uplifted in chorus, were hardly melodious.

That school was built from modified barracks, with asbestos roofs and no flooring. After reading about how asbestos can be carcinogenous, I used to anxiously examine my skin for lumps. I was rather hypochondriacal those days. A line of termites spread over the walls of our classroom; the boys used to poke at them with compasses in an effort to gross us out. Snakes were common and their appearance in classes made for fervid lunch hour discussion.

That was the first government school I ever went to. Till then I had been to an elite kindergarten school and a public school where the children were rich and everyone spoke English. In Army School. I made friends with many people far less privileged than I. Looking back, I was often thoughtless and vain those days, but those friends still stood by me and accepted me for what I was. It was cold, sure, but there were always smiles and pleasant voices to warm me up.

I've learnt many songs in many schools: Christmas carols, patriotic tunes, catholic hymns, complex classical pieces and even Irish drinking songs. But the song I'll always associate with my childhood is that monotonous bhajan I sang on a stony field in Jammu, as my feet turned numb with cold.

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.