a sent email

Dear K and V,
I'm in bed after a long day; I am tired but too buzzed up to fall asleep; my hands are dusty from organising books on my shelves yet again. There are so many particularly sensory feelings about being back, and even though I talk to both of you frequently, it is these things that are hard to share. I forgot just how hot it is, how hot and dusty and how my room has a particularly smell, sometimes musty, sometimes earthy, the air full from all the books that swelled up in monsoon from the damp walls. I want to say it's 'strange' to be back (my favourite word, yes, and one that should be banned from my writing), but the only thing strange is how normal it is to be back.

I'm astounded by how life moves. No matter what happens, no matter how much changes, it just goes on, new systems are made, we just figure out how to keep on keeping on. B-ma and B-pa are not around, and once in a while we remember, my parents read Waterlog and cry, I walk down the stairs in mama's new kurta and somewhere expect that B-ma will meet me out the door, will make a big fuss about how lovely I look. She makes no fuss, and I sigh a small sigh when I reach the driveway and remember -- but it feels like a small grief this time around. Mostly, it feels okay that they aren't around, that the front yard is bare and the backyard is portioned out into a vegetable garden, the rusting swing they used to drink chai on has been given away somewhere. It feels okay. When we have the strength, we all go downstairs, start cleaning portions of the big, dust-filled, cobwebbed house, remove a lamp, a table, a painting, find objects that still smell like them, have traces too strong to be dead objects, and then we have to go back up. This time, I found a lipstick of B-ma's that still seems to work, the glossy pink-brown she used. I found a sheet of paper on which B-pa wrote out a conversion chart between Celcius and Fahrenheit for B-ma on some travel abroad. Dad found a paperweight, a dark round bird that he remembered from his childhood. Mom found a ceramic bowl, blue and white, in a style B-ma loved but found too precious to ever display outside; it was still wrapped in paper, kept in a box. Mom has put it on one of our shelves now.

I am trying to make sense of all this, it is still big and not completely tangible yet, but I feel some kind of peace I did not have before.  All around me at home, in my room, are things I made at some point and forgot. There are paintings, prints, journals. I just found a sheaf of stories from eleventh and twelfth grade. It is both calming and scary to see this stuff. It is exciting because it makes me feel like this is what I do, this is who I am, no matter how stressed or tired or confused, I will be making, I will be writing, I will figure out ways to do this right someday. I have been doing this so long. I want this so bad. It is the surface on which I stand, on which I walk. But it is scary, too, to see piles and piles of it, so many moments from my life which I carefully recorded and then completely forgot -- it makes me think of all the others, everything I have forgotten and not even written down. Time passes by so quickly now, and I keep trying to make sense of the past, find stories I want to hold on to, draw lines from one moment to the next. All of it will pass by, though. Even this; being home and laughing in my mama's lap, my dad's skin that is starting to have that extra-soft feel of an old person, Susan didi's calm gait as she puts chai on my table, the same old plants on my terrace, the corner in which I have smoked and cried under the looming mango tree. Today, I am grateful that even though I was far, even though everything was different, all of this is here now that I am back. In some ways, it is the same. It is comforting. I feel new and old and safe, as though this will always protect me, as though I can always return here. I hate that this is not true. Someday this will break. I am grateful that even when it has cracked, even when so many parts have changed, so much is still here, waiting for me, my drawers full of the same things I left here a year ago.

Mostly, I am feeling good. Somewhere inside of me I am still wound up, still having terrible dreams and cannot sleep and back full of ache. My body will take a few days to unwind. I must be good, perhaps from tomorrow -- I must stretch, do yoga, get on the bike and get out of this house, must start writing, must start reading, must work on the paintings, get into a good work routine before the familiar complacency of this city grabs me by the neck and leaves me crying in the afternoons again. I am hopeful. I will do it all.

My body remembers this place better than my mind did. I am not surprised at any turn the car makes; every street is familiar here, even though I have spent most of my life running away from this place. It is even familiar to open the door of dad's giant Innova and climb in to a burning hot seat, the AC slowly cooling my skin by the time we reach the end of the lane. It is familiar to bathe with cool water from my mug and bucket, turn on the fan when I am in my towel so I do not sweat already. I wear the palest, lightest cotton clothes I find when I leave the house. Today, dad and I spent many hours at a government office for my learner's license, and my body remembered that too -- the grimy buildings, the suffocating heat, the rudeness and kindness of people, the systems that make sense only here. My dad was renewing his license, and we heard different instructions from each counter, new forms to fill each time, new rules that could change if he was insistent enough. The man outside the driving-rules test I had to give was pale and had arms full of tattoos; I would have been afraid of him on the road, but he was great fun, he sat with me and gave me a mini lecture on traffic signals, everything I would need to know to pass the small test on the computer I was going to take. My hindi is just fine, and thank god. I am going to start working on it; I want to be able to read better in hindi, want to start practising urdu again. It is a great relief to know that no matter how far I go, how long I am away, this is my place, and my body will remember it. It feels so familiar, like I have been here all along, like I can return at any point. I have loved the streets of dilli so hard that they will not reject me anymore, I think. I am so excited to go to Bangalore, to Goa, everywhere. Before that, I am excited to be here, in this house, and try yet another summer to be home and not be depressed, to work hard, to relax. I am excited to spend each night on the sofa looking at my shining ma, her hair in tendrils against her shoulders, her eyes the brightest things I know. I am so grateful for each day I get to hug my pa home from work, so grateful for every hour alone that I am getting here, wandering the old-new brick floors on my room, taking out a book from one shelf and placing it on another, my hands getting endlessly dusty.

I am sorry for this long, sappy email full of meandering sentences. Perhaps there will be another one later. I love you, and I love you, and thank you for listening.

april 2019

march 2019

Picture

You send me a picture

            and I suppose this is always

                        how we speak with other:

one of us on this side

            of the world, the other on that;

                        miles of cables pulsing light

between us, buried low

            undersea; a picture popping up

                        on my screen of a single tree

split into two, three, ten

            trunks, old arms and new arms

                        tangled like ours are not.

For long seconds I look.

            Monochrome and angled grace.

                        Leaves scatter the ground.

I am alone here, and

            untangled. Send me grace.

here

where I am now, it is fall. I am feeling full with so many lives, old and new, jostling against each other. there is too much to make sense of, and no time to do it in -- time wants different things from me, wants me to make and read and move swiftly, slicing through the viscous air;

                                   I cannot do it though, I plan and plan but do not know where the time goes, I inch viscously through air and arrive at the same places again, try to gather moments and maple leaves, count the colours the trees are exploding in (carmine, blood blush, ochre, terracotta, lime, chartreuse, gold), get work done in time even though it is work that gets done outside of time.

I am happy to be here. slowly I will move the right way. now that poems are real work, it is hard to share them here for the quick slick sharing of the internet. I want to hold on now to the poems, stay with them, comb them and sand them, share them with all the gentle people around who read them kindly, and work on them until they shine (in blood blush, gold).

                                   here are some words if you are here for the words. some days I will end up writing here, sharing some strange pale fragment of my life that fits nowhere else. if you are somewhere, across a sea, you can hear me. hold me kindly. I am trying to learn and be 

Half-here

I am only half-here, arms straining with the wait for newness that is on it's way but not yet here, arriving, arriving. It is this aching wait that is worth it, once one is thrown into newness there is only the living to do, no straining no aching for a slick life to arrive. This summer was the strangest transit time; but I feel as if I have been in transit for the last year and a half, with the applications and then the knowledge of change that is imminent. I will be glad for this transit to be over.

B-pa died. I am trying to write about it because I do not know what else to do. Other minutes, I am working on various art things with a zeal that eluded me for many months. Perhaps it is desperation. But at least what felt like numbness for so many months is now shifting into feeling, feeling knifing into my eyes or dribbling down my neck, but feeling nonetheless: feeling that bubbles into words or images in my hands, that I can craft or let breathe or vomit out. It still comes as a shock sometimes, the deep way in which living is connected to making for me. It comes easy as air. I must write, I must draw, I must make, and in turn it saves me from the hardest days, from the long deserts and ravines of the restless mind. I am thankful.

note if you wanna be a writer and a reader

if you wanna be a writer or a reader you're gonna have to figure out how to stay still. how to breathe in real deep and zoom the heck in, to sit for hours in narrow light or wide light and do only that one thing at a time, to not fucking scroll, to not want to run away.

yes there is space for the aleatory for the angled birds for the pipe of light for the cinnamon smell. but there is no space for a head that cannot stay, that wants to pull so much marrow out of every moment that it must inhabit many at once. no. stay here with the thing even if it is hard. know that the world wants you to glance away quickly, to be flitting, to bang against glass and then the ground, to forget all. but you want to be a moth instead, the madness and the flaming desire of the moth, to know there is limited time but we will flutter at the light with all our might. stay here in this moment if it is silly. stretch your legs even if it hurts. don't smoke and laugh every evening into a slick night. it is a good thing to work. there can be love and peace and pause and promise all within the work. don't always take what comes easy - be kind to the self, kinder than all the world, love the self hard and wildly and through all the difficult days, but PUSH push gently push quietly push warmly keep pushing you are working and living and loving well but there is always a long way to go. be slow. watch a lot. read so you lose what keeps you sturdy. when you are unsturdied and tender-boned, write.  

spring

all over, the bougainvilleas are in bloom. bursting open like white clouds, or like innards, the most vivid pink. I wonder if the bougainvilleas in my house are blooming, even though b-ma is dead and b-pa is sick and everything seems different.

Venomous

Sometimes when K.

across from me in the dark

happens to ask, or even

before she does, or if not,

I wonder how faithful 

my memory is 

to the taut silver edges of

what really happened, if

the scorpion I saw once

on that windowsill, stilled,

really gleamed at the sting

with a vicious drop of

venom: did I see it

at all?

She tells me of snakes

in the field under darkened stalks, 

and I think to tell her of 

the creature that slithered past 

just this morning, 

a glimmer of light at my feet 

that vanished at sight. 

It left the faintest taste of 

green on my eye. She waits,

but I do not say, convinced

all at once of a bond I could not break

between that silver-green baby snake

and my curious, wondering gaze.

monsoon haikus

I sit alone in

dark library innards while

outside, monsoon light.

The slugs last night were

inching along in silver;

now, only dark stains

on the college road.

The air is full to bursting.

It must rain again.