July

So when did July arrive and when did it decide to disappear so quickly? For the longest time in my life, July was synonymous with holiday or at the very least, anticipating some sort of travel. I can only think of two or three Julys which I entirely spent in one place (usually, Oman), going about my daily life while simultaneously wishing every day that I was on a plane or train or car and heading somewhere.

This July was fortunately no exception though; I have just returned from a hectic five day trip to Bangalore, where I joyously glimpsed numerous gorgeous trees (Bangalore trees, you have my heart), colonial mansions turned into hip contemporary spots, beautiful fresh rangoli decorating the thresholds of homes everymorning, winding roads, overdressed sari shop window displays,  the famous Bangalore weather, and finally, consumed a lot of goodies from Bangalore bakeries and an authentic bene dosa from CTR in Malleshwaram. It was such a good dosa that I doubt that I will be eating one for a while in Delhi without remembering its Bangalore counterpart's finger-licking buttery, goldeny goodness!

However, my two most favorite memories involved visiting National Gallery of Modern Art and spending a very happy three hours discussing everything under the sun and its beautiful, beautiful spreading, giving, warm trees with Vidya, turning our so far virtual friendship into a face to face one. I also spent a peaceful twenty minutes wandering around the gardens of the gallery before she arrived; it was especially such bliss to be in the proximity to this enormous, spreading, long-limbed rain-tree,  whose formidable presence dominantly permeated the whole garden and yet, there was such serenity to be found standing beneath it. 

The other memory involved visiting a quaint little second-hand bookshop, The Select Bookshop at Brigade road; my husband used to buy a lot of books from there when he was growing up in Bangalore and I was charmed by how the book-shop owner greeted him, asking where he had been all this time. Having either shopped from chain-store bookstores or ordering books online lately, I had only heard of such bookshops, where the owners knew your name, thoughtfully recommended books, and took the trouble to find them for you from the depths of the crammed bookshelves. Vidya had also recommended the bookstore to me when I had mentioned wanting to visit another famous Bangalore bookshop, Blossom. It was so calming to stand there and browse through the books whilst soaking in in the wistful-making smell of old books and thinking of the journeys they had travelled when espying years-old inscriptions written in them. I even spotted a book edited by one of the first persons I had followed on Instagram many years ago! Needless to say, I left the bookshop, armed with several new old books that I cannot wait to read.

July has also seen me making my Guardian debut. I am happy to share about my first piece for the Guardian; it is an insider's guide to Jodhpur, where I wrote about its architecture, music, food, green initiatives, art, and more. Writing about cities and that too one of my most favorite cities in the world? I couldn't be more glad! Have a read here!

My other published writing this month was about how collaging and scrapbooking has helped me write better; there is something so orderly about assembling your otherwise scattered thoughts into a jigsaw of collage and watercolor before proceeding to sit down and write.

The rains have poured down this year, walls of rains sheeting down throughout the night until dawn, accompanied by sauna-like humidity, which I am not too terribly fond of. However, all is forgiven when you glimpse how incredibly green everything is! The trees have shed their summer skin of dust to reveal a brand new green being beneath. I have reveled in clicking the green, the rain-drop jeweled flowers, the redness, the greenness, the pinkness of it all. What I especially loved chancing upon was how I found a beautiful, intact, yellow-hued white plumeria bloom only to see that someone had made an arrangement out of few upturned plumeria flowers. Those serendipitious discoveries make my day, honestly speaking!

So this has been my July so far. How has yours been?

Of Nature's Stories, Land Art, and Morning Altars

The first time I chanced upon the idea of nature/land/earth art was when I glimpsed sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist, Andy Goldsworthy's work in The Clothes Horse's blog. I was simply enchanted by the notion of abstracting stunning site-specific art from natural surroundings, putting together fallen leaves, branches, twigs, flowers, seeds, and fruit, rocks, pebbles, and feathers into art that entirely and literally emerges from and connects to the earth, seamlessly integrating itself into the environment.  I have been lately been pinning a ton of land art on my Pinterest and have discovered examples which left me breathless and marvelling at the artists' ingenuity and creativity, such as swirling twig waters around a boulder, stone paths in forests, and stone sculptures silhouetted against the sky. Here's a gorgeous Andy Goldsworthy in which he arranges numerous stones in graduated shades of gray to form an existential black hole of sorts in the vast universe that is nature.

After seeing scores and scores of incredible land art works, I wondered if I too could create miniature examples myself; a little bit of researching led me to realise that I had been partially doing it with the fallen flowers, seeds, seed-pods, and fruit I found during my morning walks. Having photographed the trees and plants, I found myself engaging with the gifts that they left for the earth - and for us to discover. I sometimes arranged what I found in a simple pattern or grid format, displaying the diversity of what I had found; it reflected both the species growing in my immediate environment as being season-specific, such as summer displaying a great deal of gulmohur and laburnum, for example. This earth art below below depicts the various stages of a gulmohur bloom that I found in one of my favorite neighborhood parks: bud, budding, blooming, bloom, and flower itself.

Yesterday, after posting a picture of my walk finds: a peepal tree leaf, bougainvillea, gulmohur petals, and a branch of lime green neem fruit on Instagram, Day Schildkret of Morning Altars liked it and which fortuitously led me to explore more of his work. I was intrigued by what he is doing: creating gorgeous, intricate morning altars, foraging from his surroundings to create the most exquisitely detailed works. It celebrates the ephemeral and the deeply rooted, nature with all of its bountiful glories and its cycles of death, rebirth, and growth. Here's one of his morning altars dedicated to spring below:

Inspired by his morning altars, I decided to create one of my own today morning. In the park, it was quiet except for the birds twittering and the sound of plum yellow neem fruit plopping on the ground; this was the background to which I created my first altar wrought from bougainvillea, laburnum, and gulmohur flowers and champak and bougainvilleas leaves. It celebrates the joy these nature's morning colors gives me and to brighten my day ahead, the little joys that I derive from these nature gifts and compensating for potential challenges and disappointments that may lie ahead in the day. Of course, I do wonder what will become of them once I leave...will nature find a way to make its own unique installation out of them?

I enjoyed the process so much that I ended up creating two more earth art works later today from found champak flowers, leaves, and neem fruit:

This activity gives me much peace as well as making me aware of the healing, restorative, and creative powers of nature; I find myself contemplating and appreciating nature's diverse manifestations much more closely. In this age, when we are battling climate change, habitat destruction, species' extinction, and many other depressing stories of environmental degradation, it powerfully drives home the message that we can no longer take nature and stories for granted for it may potentially disappear one day; let us hear its stories and more importantly, strive to conserve and preserve them.

Have you ever made impermanent art? I would love to hear!

Friday Poetry: The Birds Whose Music Invisibly Perfumes The Spring Air

THE BIRDS WHOSE MUSIC 

INVISIBLY PERFUMES THE SPRING AIR

I discover today that the birds

whose concerts richly, invisibly perfume

the still, warm spring morning air

are called Indian treepies.

They flit from the kachnar tree

to the neighboring gulmohar,

a kinetic, musical long-tailed blur of tan, white, and brown

from a muddy green universe

to a bright green one.

The jade-sheened glossy black humming bird no longer sups

from the kachnar orchids,

which became pod earrings when no one was looking -

and the crows have found elsewhere to feast upon

now that the flamboyant, plump blood-red

monstrously beautiful silk cotton flowers are fat green pods

of future flowers, leaves, roots, and branches.

Only the sparrow traverses

the invisible trapeze-rope in the air,

metal grill to metal grill,

its clay water bowl empty and parched

like a summer desert.

A Boat Ride on the Ganga

I have never been much for rivers, I have always claimed. The first rivers that I saw were the wadis in Oman; they weren't technically rivers, I suppose, pop-up rivers, really, which birthed into existence immediately following the rains and then, swiftly vanished a few days afterwards. In any case, I imagined rivers to be like the way I saw them for the first time in atlases: silver snakes laboriously crawling across the pink, green, and yellow-hued landscapes, in manner of the Nile or the Amazon or the Mississippi. 

I kept on bumping into rivers nevertheless. I remember taking a dip in the Ganga's icy, gray waters at Haridwar many years ago as a child. I saw the Thames, Danube, and the Rhine. I sat by the Charles river in Boston one spring afternoon last year with an upset stomach, an unread Marquez, and feeling lost. The river prettily gleamed in the fading light but I derived more comfort from the weeping tree standing next to me, which reminded me of a kind elephant. And then, of course, I lived in a city of rivers, three rivers, to be precise: Pittsburgh. I recall spending one warm autumn night by the river, the city's glittering skyline reflected in its mirror-calm waters; I trailed my fingers in the water, saw it silently embrace the rocks clustered upon the bank. Yet, in all that time I lived there, I could never bring myself to appreciate the beauties and complexities and gifts of the river. Perhaps, I had lived by and loved the sea for too long; I was too accustomed to its exciting tumult, its mercurial color palette, the beach's unique universe, and the vast infinity of the sea, as it married the horizon.

Sometime ago, we took a boat ride on the Ganga in a place called Garmukhteshwar. It would be a new moon night the following day and which would attract scores and scores of visitors, the boatman told us. There already seemed to be so many people around, many of them bathing and immersed in the water: women, fully dressed in saris and salwar-kameez, their heads still nevertheless covered, men, children, young, old, middle-aged, everyone. I saw an old lady set a bowl stitched from dried leaves and containing marigolds and pedas into the water as an offering. People were also filling up large white transparent plastic cans that they had purchased from river-side stalls with the holy water.

I didn't bathe or buy or worship the water; I took a boat-ride instead.

We shakily stepped onto the boat - and the boatman lifted his pole and began the journey.

It was hot, very hot; the heat had bleached the sky almost white.

The river meanwhile was the color of soil: it resembled liquid earth. This was the Ganga. When I placed my palm upon the river skin, it felt like lukewarm tea. The boatman strenuously ploughed through the water. I asked him how long he had been doing it. Ever since I was a child, he told us, I usually take up to twelve people on the boat but there are only two of you today. I thought of one of my favorite books, Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy in which the characters go for boat-rides upon the Ganga in the fictional city of Brahmpur. In one scene, as the city burns following terrible Hindu-Muslim riots, a couple still nevertheless goes for a boat-ride, saying that you can't set fire to water. 

If I accidentally leave the boat unmoored at night, it will travel downstream - but there's usually someone to find and bring it back to me in the morning, the boatman says, affectionately, glancing down at both the boat and the river. 

I gaze at the heat-enshrouded horizon: the river merges with the sky in the distance until it is difficult to distinguish where the sky begins and the water ends. I am starting to understand a little bit as to why you might want to spend so much of your time on the river: there is something comforting being on this strip of water in the land, the river arguably not as overwhelming as the sea, whose vastness can be simultaneously beautiful and frightening. Perhaps, the best way to appreciate the river was to be within it: I had been looking at it from the wrong end all this time.

Around us, as the sun traced its arc in the sky, the river quietly flowed, as it had done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

**

River-reading: I have so enjoyed following environmental photographer and journalist, Arati-Kumar Rao's evocative pictures and words as she documents the Brahmaputra river basin and powerfully drives home the significance of rivers over here

May Ramblings: Memoirs, Water-Color Experiments, and Exploring Delhi's Many Cities

May means:

Reading

Late to Tea at Deer Palace along with some fresh mogras and a postcard of the Grand Canyon

I have always enjoyed reading memoirs and this was a beautifully written one of an Iraqi family and the trajectory of its political and economic fortunes before eventually being displaced from their homeland and spending their lives in exile; the author, Tamara Chalabi minutely documents her family's history while contemplating the currency of the notion of Iraq in her life, both as a mythical abstraction derived from her family's many stories about their homeland as well as as its contemporary political status today. I randomly picked it up at Daryaganj's Sunday Book market, where every Sunday morning the pavements are lined with book-stalls, selling best-sellers, obscure novels, M&Bs, vintage Vogues, Christies and Sotheby art catalogues, coffee-table books, you name it. What I found most amusing was the book-store where best-sellers were sold for 100 rupees per kilo while Mills and Boons were 99 rupees per kilo! I discovered 'Late to Tea at Deer Palace' over there (I must confess it's romantic title and the aqua cover definitely influenced my decision to purchase it) and read it in the course of a weekend. While I have always been interested in Middle Eastern politics and history, I must admit that the quotidian minutiae of pre-war life in Iraq, under Ottoman rule and then, incorporating the cosmopolitan changes which swept the city following the arrival of the British was what intrigued me more. I loved reading about the costumes, wedding rituals and ceremonies, the dishes cooked and prepared, and superstitions which were wholly unique to that culture and age along with something which is personally close to my heart, the fluid idea of home and homelands.

As someone who has always preferred writing expansively and at length, it's heartening to see more and more long-form reads popping up everywhere  -  I unsurprisingly love the site, Long Reads, where I have had the pleasure of reading some excellent essays and articles. Two of my recent favorites were this Rebecca Solnit essay,  a superb meditation about the meaning of travel in our lives and this Judy Blume interview which I read today. I read practically all Judy Blume's novels while growing up and loved the candour, wit, and the freshness of her voice as she tackled that bewildering and challenging world of adolescence, in which there are so many questions and very little by answers and consolation (especially if you lived in an archaic pre-internet world, as the interview mentions;) Two of my favorite novels were Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself and Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. I would now like to read her novel for adults that the interview mentions too.

Painting

Migrating Moons: combining water-colors along with paper collage, something else which I am fond of

When I was ten years old, I took a weekly water color painting class for two months with one of then Oman's most well-known water color artists, Lynda Shepherd. I would go to her house on Thursday afternoons, sitting on a long white table along with several other girls, learning the techniques of water-color painting. I distinctly remember her teaching us how to expertly paint a sprig of bougainvillea and also, drumming into us shadows are not just inky black: they are a cocktail of multiple colors. I recall wishing to paint an ochre-hued wall of an Omani fort; however, she in turn asked me to render it in a palette of cool gray, mauves, and lavenders instead, the space appearing as if it had been painted in situ just before dawn, the literal grayland between night and morning. I painted in water color for many years afterwards, filling up sketch-books with my illustrations (the bougainvillea in my house garden, the Rajasthani kathputlis hanging on my bedroom wall, and recreations of photographs) before discovering oil painting in my second year of university. I almost exclusively painted in oils ever since then before a sudden impulse led me to purchase water-colors a few weeks ago. I still keep on treating them as oils though, ha...and while I honestly miss the sheer joy I experienced while mixing the color in oils,, there's something undeniably so crisp and instant about water-colors too: it's like taking a Polaroid of your thoughts.

 Exploring

Qutub-seeing

Diwan-i-Am, Red Fort

 The heat notwithstanding, the arrival of family in town meant we did a bit of Delhi sight-seeing: Qutub Minar and Red Fort, two of the places that our niece especially wanted to see because she had read about them in her textbooks:). The Minar was fabulously grand and dominated the area which was filled with tombs, mosques, and ruins, trees and monuments, botany and history, merging together. Red Fort was also a place which I had been wanting to visit for a while. As a child, we would travel to Delhi from Jodhpur by an overnight train and arrive in the city at dawn; we would go past the Red Fort, the saffron morning sunlight making it look redder than ever. I earlier used to exclusively associate it with the Indian Prime Minister's 15th August address; afterwards, as I studied more about Delhi's history, I began to appreciate its vital historical and architechural significance (William Dalrymple's portrait of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Ali Zafar and him conducting court during the 1857 uprising in The Last Mughal was especially haunting) . Of late, I had seen its photogenic spaces featuring in many an Instagram feed I follow so I was glad to finally see it in person; however, as always, I often wonder what it would be like to see a historical place in seclusion, imagining as it was, rather than with hundreds of tourists milling about and well, rendering it hollow and devoid of back-stories and histories. Well, I too joined the click-crazy brigade that day, eagerly snapping photographs of that gorgeous, impeccable arch symmetry in the Diwan-i-Am along with its other miniature pavilions and landscaped gardens. This was the Delhi of my imagination and which had colored and shaped my anticipation before moving to it...but as time goes by, I am learning that the city is a hydra-headed creature and this romantic, tombs-monuments-historical Delhi is but simply one of them.

How is your May coming along?

Photo-Story: Of Trees and Old Monuments

Wherever I go, I find them again and again, the ruined monument and the tree growing alongside each other, seemingly content in the other's company. The tree may be significantly younger than the monument and yet, you can intuit a quiet, beautiful rapport between them, regardless of barriers of age and character. The monument must tell stories to the tree - and how many stories must it have! - and it communicates them to us through the rustle of its leaves, a storyteller narrating what the stone cannot share.

**

Speaking of trees, I had the honor of interviewing one of India's most iconic photographers, Raghu Rai and talking about his recent exhibition of tree images in Delhi recently; it was a pleasure to glimpse his photographic forest and hear about his creative processes...have a look at the piece here

Making Notes From My New Desk

I am finally writing on a proper desk after a considerable length of time; we bought it in a furniture market called Panchkuyian, where I told the shopkeeper that I wanted a desk where I could write a book. I had had my heart set on something a bit vintage-y and antique-pretty but settled on a more functional desk for the time being instead. When we finished paying for it, the shopkeeper wished me luck for my thesis. "Book," I said a little wryly, thinking of my long-vanished academic persona and that the last time I wrote anything remotely resembling a thesis was a good many years ago. "All the best for your thesis," he repeated. Thesis, it is.

I like a desk which has acres of space but isn't too empty; there should be a few objects populating it, adding color and character and whimsy to the deskscape.

Here are the objects:

Yellow

There is an old passport-sized picture of my husband taken several years ago, a postcard of a mad crazily patterned turmeric yellow door I picked from up an art gallery, a blue glass cube I bought at a Cambridge street market, two silver floral appliques from Jodhpur (I don't know why I bought them when I can't sew to save my life - perhaps, to use in a painting?), an intricately gold patterned and red-interiored square Persian jewelry box, which can't fit on my dressing table and has migrated over here, my journals (the ones I write in anyway; the empty ones share shelf space with my books), and a miniature art painting of two impressively dressed storm-colored elephants propped upon against the window.

Two Elephants

This painting has been wrought in the Udaipur school of miniature painting and I bought it from an artist called Mukesh at Dilli Haat, which is increasingly becoming my one-stop shopping location for traditional handicrafts, fun fabric clutches and bags, and my new sartorial obsession: palazzos (*so* ideal to wear in the heat!) The painter also painted a tiny black red caparisoned elephant on my thumb-nail. I have never been much for nail art but this was one was literally so and I spent the next few days admiring the snazzy little elephant on my nail!

Explosion of a Sunset

I experienced a sudden urge to revive my water-color painting skills this summer so my pen-stand contains three brushes, a pen (which works), and a faded dark pink rose, which I still haven't got rid of, thinking it will somehow find its way into one of my Instagram stories. So far, it hasn't.

I love the fact that my desk sits against the window; even though the view consists of faded puce-colored apartment facades, air-conditioners, a couple of trees, scores of birds (pigeons mostly) either flying across the sky or dancing or fighting on the grilles veiling the window, there is nevertheless still always something to see. I don't need a moodboard or a TV or a laptop wallpaper: I have my very own window screen.

My visual notes so far:

I see pigeons having a drink from the round black stone bowl of water affixed to the corner of a balcony.. 

There is a plucky little peepal seedling sprouting from the roof of one of the apartment buildings. If the day is clear and I see it at noon, I can see the plastic glossiness of its brand new leaves.

The chipmunk-like squirrels constantly run up and down the branches, nibble at the leaves, or have a snooze.

The kachnar tree whom I write about in my previous post has lost all its leaves and flowers; it sits there baldly, bit embarrassedly, a winter alien in this summer clothedness.

A woman in a purple salwar kameez and hennaed hair comes out to hang clothes on her balcony; she shares visual space with a fuchsia and white bougainvillea, numerous plants in blue and white ceramic pots, and marigolds.

I love writing at my desk. It also reminds me of this great Jhumpa Lahiri piece in which she writes that when she became a writer, her desk became home; there was no need of another. I wouldn't go as far as to say that but there is no doubt that it has swiftly become one of my most favorite spots in my house - and needless, even prosaically to say, I am getting far more writing accomplished here than before.

Care to share your desk notes? I would love to hear!

Wah Taj: Making Notes On Re-visiting India's Most Iconic Monument

Taj

I first visited the Taj Mahal exactly and coincidentally seven years ago. I was trying to pursue a writing residency at an arts-organization in Delhi and while I ended up falling ill and not really accomplishing much writing, I made some wonderful friends and initiated my explorations in and around Delhi, unknowing that I would eventually come to call it home one day.

These explorations also included an excursion to Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, both places which I had been wanting to visit for ages. For many years, whenever I happened to mention that I was from India, I was invariably asked along these lines: Have you ever visited the Taj Mahal? No? But you're Indian and you still haven't been there yet? If I was asked the same question now, I would probably reply, India is much more than just the Taj and no, it doesn't make me more or less of an Indian if I haven't visited it. However, back then, I always felt a bit embarrassed that I had yet to experience one of India's arguably most iconic monument, as if the failure to do so questioned my Indian-ness, as if I wasn't Indian enough.
 

It didn't help that when I arrived at the Taj with my friend, the guards at the entrance refused to believe I was Indian and in fact, asked me three questions to prove my Indian identity. Our tour-guide had already beforehand hinted at the possibility of me having to declare my Indian credentials and even told me the three questions. I still doubted that it would happen and when it did, I felt irritable and bewildered. I can't remember the other two questions that the guards asked me but I do recollect the question about the name of the then Chief Minister of Delhi. I knew that anyway and authoritatively told him, Sheila Dixit. Still, as I was finally permitted entrance and we walked towards the Main Gate, I felt a weird displacement and which, perhaps, in hindsight, may have contributed towards the gradual erosion of Indian-ness I have increasingly experienced over the years.

Gateway: one of the doors studding the Taj facade

All that vanished from my mind when we encountered our first glimpse of the Taj through the magnificent sandstone portal; it was akin to seeing Amitabh Bachchan in flesh after only having seen him in cinema and photographs over the years. And yet, as we wandered through the garden, around the platform and inside the crowded tomb interior, I felt, well, a little disappointed. I wondered if it was because I had expected too much from it. I am generally wary of subscribing to hype, whether its about books, films, personalities, stores, Aamir Khan's movies, cupcake bakeries (yes, I am looking at you, Magnolia) or even one of the world's most beautiful monuments. In fact, I instinctively develop a resistance to anything the moment it is hyped, preferring to experience it once the hoopla has faded away. Whatever the reasons, I afterwards told everyone who cared to listen that I preferred Humayun's Tomb, whose mausoleum architectural style was in fact what influenced that of Taj Mahal and which I would discover later during my Delhi wanderings - and  that it was Akbar's doomed fossilised city in sandstone, Fatehpur Sikri which truly captured my soul during that Agra visit.

All this was many years ago though - and when we landed in Delhi last October, I found myself wanting to see the Taj again. I got the opportunity when we went to Agra on a spontaneous trip last weekend; my husband had yet to see the Taj and as I proprietorially talked about it on our car journey there, he joked, it sounds as if you personally constructed it. We stopped en route at Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna only to learn that all the temples there were closed due to the lunar eclipse that day. We instead indulged in some of the most delicious samosas I have ever eaten at a roadside stall; afterwards, lugging our samosa-filled bellies, we sped to Agra, the full moon in the sky initially appearing as if someone had taken a bite out of it.

The Taj is open five nights a month around or on full moon day but only a limited number of visitors are allowed inside it and that too if they have booked in advance. We thought of getting a glimpse from a roof-top hotel restaurant which had advertised the Taj's visibility from its location. Only during the day, the manager informed us when we reached there. We sat by the window, ate exquisitely spiced Awadhi biryani, and tried to abstract the Taj from the area of fleshy black darkness where the Manager told us the Taj stood.

The next morning, we first paid respects to the greatest of Mughal emperors and Shah Jahan's father, Akbar the Great's tomb at Sikandra. In contrast to the vast, sprawling complex and the impressively ornamented tomb facade, the tomb itself is an extremely spare, unadorned affair, something which Akbar himself had wished and accordingly designed so. There was nothing else in the tomb chamber apart from a few yellow and pink flowers and a handful of rupee notes and coins lying upon the tomb. Pigeons roosted and cooed in the intricate fret-work windows set high up in the walls. Say something, our guide suddenly spoke up. We said our names aloud; they first vibrated before reverberating, our names and voices co-mingling with each other.

Waves of Arches: Akbar the Great's tomb, Sikandra

Ever since we had arrived at the tomb, the guide had been telling us that even walls have ears in the tomb. We politely listened to him, half disbelieving until he took us to a canopy of arches and asked the either of us to stand and face the corners of the arches' pillars - and speak. Even though my husband was some distance away, I clearly heard his voice travelling through the matrix of stone - and he heard my delighted laughter seconds later. These cleverly designed and constructed walls certainly could hear...if only they could have spoken! I thought of all the stories they must have to share and we, yearning to hear. Outside, deer and black buck brunched on the rain-nourished lawns; I smelt the fragrance of roses meters away from the rose-garden. Inside, Akbar reposed within his bare beautiful chamber.

The sky was spitting rain when we approached the Taj in our car. As we parked, a passerby told me to put my lipstick away as it was amongst the objects banned at the Taj. It turned out it wasn't. When we finally arrived at the Taj, owing to Sunday and the long weekend, it was virtually impossible to navigate walking inside the Main Gate without being pushed or blocking someone's phone camera, dozens of them held aloft in the air. But no amount of people or the heat could ever mar that mirage-like first appearance of the Taj through the arch of the gate. Even though the skies were cloudily moody or perhaps because of it, the Taj appeared distant, a floating illusion-island. 

One of its Many Faces: A shot of a facade

We stood in queues that snaked all around the perimeter of the exterior to enter inside the main tomb interiors, each of us in rich anticipation at fully experiencing the monument, whether it was for the first, second, third time. I spotted that someone had freshly autographed the wall with cherry red lipstick (so much for not banning lipsticks). There were people from all over India and the world. We overheard a woman sounding as if her boyfriend had just proposed to her. A newly married woman with the red and white bangles almost up to her elbows told her husband that she wouldn't go inside the main tomb if it was too crowded; her husband smilingly agreed. Four Buddhist monks in maroon inspected the onyx flowers inscribed upon the exteriors. Inside, the crowd streamed around the island of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal's tombs; people took selfies in front of them. When we emerged from the main tomb, grateful to freely breathe once more, I noticed that the lipstick vandal was at it again. He wasn't the only one. When you peered closely at the walls, you realised that so many people had previously chiseled and layered the ornamented white marble surface with their initials as well as that of their lovers. In presence of this enormous, breathtaking ode to love, who could resist leaving behind an imprint of their own love, entwining themselves forever with this magnificent intersection of beauty, history, and love? 

Soaring: one of the four minarets

This time, as I drank in the Taj, I forgot about all the hype surrounding it or even what I thought of hype itself. I allowed myself to erase all the innumerable photographs I had seen of it too: I replaced them with the pictures that my memory took of it instead. I leaned over the balustrade to look down at the Yamuna, a truncated version of itself, still slowly, silverly flowing past the Taj. I thought of Shah Jahan in house arrest in the Agra fort during the last eight years of his life. Was he reduced to seeing the Taj from a tiny window, his magnificent monument and memory to his love circumscribed within a square? From the distance, it must have looked even more beautiful, unattainable, and dream-like, much like the memory of whom he had lost. 

 

When I turned around to face the Taj again, the sun was playing hide and seek with the clouds, drenching the Taj in silhouette.

I read the poetry in stone and smiled.

Tree Stories

Spreading, Bangalore (2015)

When reading this article today, I learned that it was International Forest Day on March 21st; this article incidentally happens to explore the politics of trees in Africa, which certainly made me pause and consider the way trees shape and influence our landscape in multiple ways.

Embrace, Fallingwater (2013)

I have previously blogged about my fascination for trees; I once again wonder if it stems from the fact that I grew up in Oman, where I mostly saw trees as gnarled, hardy, antique characters dotting the desert scrub or insulated, almost snobby clusters of exotic tree species, rather than grandly massed in forests? When we lived in Pittsburgh, I especially grew to love walking upon nature trails which wound through densely wooded parks during heady summer days; the urban drabness receded into the distance and I found myself enveloped in a leafy, green-light filtered world, hearing only bird-song and unique musical notes that only rustling leaves are capable of creating.

Telescoped Time, Sequoia National Park (2014)

Before we left the States, my husband and I embarked upon a month long cross-country trip where we visited several National Parks in the American South-west (aside: I really should blog about that epic journey one of these days!) One of the parks was the Sequoia National Park in California where we encountered some of the world's largest and tallest trees. As you wandered amongst groves of these giant sequoia trees, many of which were thousands of years old, you couldn't help but wonder: who and where exactly were you in the the grand scope of the Earth's history and existence? My personal perception of time and space were greatly telescoped, scaling down my trivial concerns and worries; I similarly felt that way when I was sitting by the sea. It was an undoubtedly powerful experience to be in the company of these august tree giants, who stoically and solidly continued to grow, as they had done for many a millennia - and I remember feeling both fulfilled and yet, a little depleted when we reluctantly left the park and returned to the identical monotony of a Californian freeway.

The Architecture of a Leaf, Delhi (2015)

I guess it is why I feel so strongly about the necessity of large and multiple green spaces in urban environments; you need such spots in which to escape the soul-sapping demands of urban life, no matter how temporarily, in order to contemplate, recuperate, and relax. Indeed, when I am in the presence of old, venerable trees, with their spreading branches, labyrinthine roots, and serried leaves, I feel that they radiate a contagious calm, which immediately envelops you in its fold. 

I recently read about and spotted Jahanpanah Forest in Delhi the other day and which I would quite like to explore. In the meantime, as I write, I see the tree outside my apartment window filled with soft red flowers; the tree neighboring it has sprouted feathery green leaves, which provide accompaniment to the parabolas of the chocolate-hued seed pods limning its branches. There are plenty more trees to encounter in my neighborhood, including the huge peepal tree behind my apartment whose leaves' shadows dapple my walls, drop gifts of leaves in my balcony, sing along with the rain, and seemingly protectively curtain me from the surrounding world. 

We Barely Know Each Other, Delhi (2015)

Speaking of protectiveness, I would like to bookend this post with another article and also, a wonderful story about tree canopy shyness; I thought it so perfectly illustrated the innate beauty, dignity, and wisdom of trees.

Do you have a favorite tree - and tree story?

Art speak: Avinash Veeraraghavan and Pieter Schoolwerth's Fragmented Selves

It's been quite a while since I last spoke/wrote in the 'art' language and I got the opportunity to do so when I recently reviewed artists, Avinash Veeraghavan and Pieter Schoolwerth's works at Galleryske, New Delhi, which is tucked away in the capital's Connaught Place. I loved Avinash's intricate memory-maps and the idea of Pieter being inspired by a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, of all objects. 

Now that I am in arguably India's museum and gallery epicenter, Delhi, I am looking forward this year to discovering new artists, engaging with stimulating art and of course, writing all about it:)

Read the review below...

Avinash's mind/memoryscapes

Currently showing at Galleryskye, New Delhi, Avinash Veeraraghavan and Pieter Schoolwerth's works, “We Don't See What Things Are, We See What We Are” and “Your Vacuum Sucks” interrogate the notion of multiple subjectivities and fragmented selves. 

Avinash's dense, intricate visual collages are mind/memoryscapes dotted with personal signifiers as well as documenting the explosion of signs and symbols one constantly encounters nowadays. They embody the essence of his work which Avinash says could be read as a celebration of the immensely hybrid and cross pollinated cultural times we live in. “It is a comment on our identities' heterogeneous nature today, which makes it more and more difficult to group people into singular categories of nationhood or culture,” he says referring to his fictional maps, Ithri Folami, Elorio, and N.E Dara. “On the other hand, it's also a forcing together of contradictions and opposites that is the nature of the world we live in,” he says. Erupting with profusion, texture, and image, when the works are seen from a sufficient distance though, there is an unity even to this fragmentation, everything seemingly connected to everything else. “My journey was an imagined glimpse into the connected nature of things,” he describes. 

Fragmented Selves

Avinash wrestles with the notion of a fragmented self through his masks, overlaid one another, which refer to the absence of the concrete, singular 'I'; rather, it is a collaging of parts, pattern, and habit. This jigsawing of multiple selves nevertheless contains the latent and omnipresent awareness of everything ultimately all falling apart. Decay razors through the works' visual and psychological fecundity. “There has been a kind of exhaustion at the end of my journey...both in terms of the body as well as psychologically in terms of structures one held dear and to be true. The decay in the narrative is the inevitable entropy of ageing and perhaps, even an acceptance of one's limitation,” he says. The artists mentions that this body of work is a part of a larger body and narrative that has been his practice in general. “My work has been generally rather autobiographic and often quite opaque to the outside reader. I have attempted with this show to open up the story a bit to make it a bit more universal and accessible,” he concludes. 

The Tangled Inspirations of a Vacuum Cleaner

A malfunctioning vaccum cleaner led American artist, Pieter Schoolwerth to remark, “This vaccum sucks'! “If it didn't suck it wouldn't be a vacuum. In other words, performing the function of 'sucking' is precisely what creates its identity, yet if it doesn't work properly it still possesses and maintains this same identity - it sucks. There is only one end result in the use of and experience of a vacuum. And the fact that this word can be used both to designate a everyday appliance as well as a larger model for the abstraction of social space (as in “I feel like I’m living in a vacuum”) made this linguistic conundrum intriguing,” he distils the genesis of his work. 

 His explorations of the terrain of vacuum resulted in a film, Your Vacuum Sucks (in collaboration with Alexandra Lerman) in which the lead character has been digitally erased from the image. Appearing as a hole, a shadow, or a mirror of his properly embodied friends and coworkers, he engages in a series of exchanges in which he attempts to negotiate the nature of his existence, whereby he is present to others entirely through his own visual absence. “I have long been interested in how the ever-changing forces of abstraction in the world effect the task of representing the human body. This ongoing investigation has caused me to think about how one forms an idea of another’s bodily presence, and how to represent the compression of space and time that is such a familiar part of day-to-day communication,” he says 

Collage of Thoughts

Schoolwerth presents the video in conjunction with paintings and collages, commenting that he has come to feel “that presenting a dialectic of still and moving images can do something different than painting can do by itself.” He also explores the idea that video might be able to open up a new space for painting, a newly destabilized space-less ground zero of sorts in which the body of paint itself could be liberated. 

**

This review originally appeared in ArtSlant over here

Essay: Homesick in the Homeland

Yellowing

When I step outside, the soles of my shoes noisily crunch upon scattered yellowing leaves; I pick one up and twirl it around and around, my eyes idly locating the point where green becomes yellow, life blurs into decay.

However, these leaves are not fall leaves; in fact, I am living nowhere close to a place where deciduous trees flourish. I am in New Delhi, India and these are faux fall leaves only in my eyes. It is as if they have fallen and turned yellow simply to assuage a curious kind of yearning and homesickness I am experiencing for the last place I called home, the United States.

A year ago, I was standing in my Pittsburgh apartment balcony one morning, awe-struck in admiration at how the tree outside had seemingly turned blood-red over night. In the clear, sharp autumn sunlight, it gleamed deeply and brightly, the sidewalk below thickly carpeted with fallen red leaves. I remember scooping a few up and decorating my living room with them, mirroring the fall landscape outside. These days, as I glimpse one stunning image after another of fall foliage on social media, I can't help but reminisce about and miss America even though I am now technically in my homeland.

Perhaps, that is what lies at the heart of the matter: I am in my homeland...but not my home.

Having been born outside of and spent the majority of my life away from India, I and indeed, many of India's Currents readers are very well accustomed to being familiar with what it is to be nostalgic for the homeland. It is ever-present in the food we consume, the cinema that we watch, the clothes we wear, the compatriots whom we gravitate to, and the shrines, religious or otherwise we build within our home, in our quest to accept and reconcile with the fact that we are ultimately not in our homeland.

Even though I lived in India only as a small child and that too very briefly before moving to the place I would (and still call) home for the next many years, Oman, I would nevertheless find myself missing its sheer presence every time we returned from there post vacations. When I moved to the States, I would find myself acutely yearning for my home-town, Jodhpur, of all places, especially during the artic winters. Glimpsing the snow-blanketed landscape and nature at its most minimal, memories of the buzzing streets, vibrant festivals, iridescent clothing, and food would almost obsessively invade my mind. Even though technology allowed me to somewhat fulfill these above mentioned yearnings, it was never enough. To employ a food metaphor, I could recreate India in my plate but it was as if a mechanical, unfeeling had wrought it.

And yet, after I had arrived in India few months ago and began the gradual process of calling it home, I found myself in a peculiar dilemma; up till now, I had always essentially perceived India as a vacation space. I would arrive here, spend a few hectic weeks travelling around the country, and then, as vacation neared its end, inevitably begin missing Oman or wherever I happened to be living then. It was time to go back, I would tell myself. However, this time round, I realised I was no longer on a holiday: I was here to stay.

When I arrived in my new home, Delhi, I began to anchor myself to the notion of permanently living in India, as opposed to being a migratory bird. It was then I began to realise how much I missed the States. What also struck me was how the very things in India that used to delight or provoke curiosity or stimulate my attention made me almost blasé; what I had once yearned for was now omnipresent for my consumption, any time, any day. It slowly dawned upon me that I was in the curious situation of being homesick in what was ostensibly my homeland. The truth was that it never had really been my homeland: it was merely yet another new home in the caravan of countries that I had inhabited through my life.

Would it ever feel like home? I asked myself.

Nature's Child: Street-art in Shahpur Jat

A few days ago, I started to see how my question could be answered. I found myself at Shahpur Jat, a residential area in South Delhi, which was the subject of a pulsating street art festival earlier this year. My interest in street art had begun in Pittsburgh itself and I was now eager to experience street art in a Delhi urban context. When I arrived at Shahpur Jat, the almost-winter sun was disappearing into the dusk air. As I wandered through the narrow bylanes, excitedly spotting and admiring the fun, quirky, iridescent murals, I was simultaneously aware of an atmosphere entirely specific to the area. I passed by crowded biryani and tea and samosa shops, cute boutiques, peanut sellers roasting peanuts, fish for sale, and children and puppies alike playing in the streets while their elders sat outside rainbow hued doors and gossiped. 

Shahpur Jat streets

The deeper I explored the maze of lanes, shops, and houses, I felt as if I was transplanted in a similarly vibrant network of gullies in old Jodhpur, which I had so often missed when living in Oman or States. In fact, at one point, I glanced up to see an ochre-hued house draped with freshly washed carpets – and that sight immediately took me to Oman. 

An Oman-looking building

I had come looking for art in Shahpur Jat – but what I did not anticipate finding was home.

I moved to the country of my roots...to put down new roots. While it will be time before I can truly acknowledge the home in my homeland, the project focuses on looking with your eyes open, rather than remaining lost in the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia. Also, significantly, knowing where to look. And one dusk evening, as you are wolfing down warmly roasted peanuts and smelling woodsmoke in the air, you will start thinking, that, yes, perhaps, this place could be my home, after all. 

**

This essay originally appeared here in India Currents

My first story on Medium: The House with the Mint-Colored Walls

I love the idea of Medium and have enjoyed reading many stories that have appeared on it; in fact, I always look forward to its weekly digest every Friday, which features the best from the week. I thought it would be a great platform from where to start sharing my stories as well and so here I am, reproducing the first of my stories. And given my constant preoccupation with homes these days, perhaps, it's appropriate that my new house with its mint colored walls was the focus of my debut story. 

It's bit of a long read so sit back and enjoy...

**

Pink and Mint

The first thing that I saw when we walked into the apartment was its mint green walls.

We had just arrived in New Delhi two days ago. Since June, we had moved from Pittsburgh, traveled across the United States, and divided time between Bombay, Bangalore, and Rajasthan before finally making up our mind to come to India’s capital city. I was both utterly exhausted of being a nomad for the past many months and apprehensive about calling Delhi home. Actually, more precisely, calling India home.

Apart from annual holidays to the homeland while growing up in Oman, I had never previously lived in India before. I was becoming increasingly disconnected to the idea of calling it home over the years. In fact, the label itself was becoming a complex abstraction for me. Was the home in homeland actually home? What was home anyway? I could worry about the semantics of home later though. Right now, I wanted a house: a nice, comfortable house, where I could anchor myself and start fleshing it into my space again.

I fell sick hours after landing in Delhi. On our first night, we went to a mall where there was an indie rock concert going on in a huge open-air court. I remember sitting on the edge of a white marble planter, simultaneously listening to the crowd sing along to the music and feeling a dreaded itchiness invade my throat. Every time I had previously visited Delhi, its notorious dust and pollution had not been my friend. The following morning, I woke up to find that the itch had snowballed into a cold: my eyes watered continuously, my nose was on fire, and I had little desire to do anything but remain under the covers for the next day.

I couldn’t, of course. I had a house to find.

Our apartment was the second one that the real-estate agent showed us in what would be a long succession of potential homes. Seeing the green walls after a day of battling a burgeoning cold, consuming cold, dessicated sandwiches, and dodging dusty, traffic-clogged roads was like stumbling head-first into an oasis. I wanted to camp out on the sofa itself, refusing to budge further. Afterwards, once we were done with visiting the other apartments (good, terrible, and ugly), the only one that remained with me was the green wall apartment. In the morning light, it would be mint-green, I thought, by dusk, it would assume the shade of pistachio ice-cream. I like the green wall apartment, I told my husband at dinner that night, as we listened to three college-age musicians sing Bob Dylan, let’s take that one.

**

The Tree Whose Name I Do Not Know

We arrived in the apartment. My cold became a fever — and I spent the first week in our new house, ensconced in the bedroom, either staring at the ceiling or the windows bracketing me. On one side, the shadow of a massive peepal tree and its spreading, embrace-like branches and numerous leaves dutifully dappled the balcony while the other tree — whose name I still do not know — was framed within the window, like a minimal black and white photograph. During the day, their leaf shadows stenciled and overlapped one another upon the green walls, the walls fluid canvases. The leaf-shadow dance lulled me into sleep; the green soothed and calmed me.

The house swiftly became a welcome sanctuary after all those migratory, mobile months.

**

We are still in the process of turning our house into a home. In fact, we are still befriending the city, understanding its costume, its dialect, when it sleeps, when it wakes up, the art of razoring through its traffic jams. We potter about in the house, migrating from one room to another, wondering where the guest room should be, what color flowers will look good against the mint.

A river of traffic flows behind our house. We hear people’s conversations, dogs fighting, and ambulance and police sirens. I was accustomed to a soundtrack of silence in all the places that I had previously lived. This is the first time my ears are constantly negotiating the overwhelming barrage of sound, the sheer plurality of it; my mind is learning how to filter, distinguish one sound from another. However, I don’t miss the silence quite as much as I miss peering above into the nocturnal sky, glimpsing the dense population of stars studding its surface. Here, in the city, like any other city, they are just as invisible as they are during the day.

**
 

Our landlord’s art work meanwhile still dots the apartment walls. In the living room, you can see camouflage-hued tapestries of Paris, a bright bird water-color, an Ancient Egyptian god and goddess in dialogue, and a mountainscape sparely executed in oils. I have decided that these works will continue to hang there on the walls until we discover and introduce our own to them. In any case, they are strangers no more; our daily engagement with the works has made them familiar to us.

There are three paintings though that that we have decided to never remove as long as we stay in the apartment.

These paintings are portraits of three distinguished women hanging upon one wall in the living room. I call them distinguished simply because that’s exactly the sort of air they exude. I have no idea who these women are. I don’t even know the names of the artists who painted them. What I do know is that these portraits define the house as much as the walls themselves. And like the tree window-photograph in my bedroom window, I am content to see their framed selves on the walls.

One of the Distinguished Ladies

What is remarkable is that each of them wear an identical expression of contemplation in their portraits. They look as if they were mulling over a problem or a puzzle or a query — and were about to unpack their thoughts to the artist. The thoughts would quickly spill out, raw, unadulterated, like paint gushing upon a palette from a newly pierced open tube. Yet, the women would just as swiftly incorporate them into the bigger picture, the larger idea, connoisseurs of both the macro and micro. These women are constantly editing themselves, their thoughts, striving to be better, fuller, richer persons. But they wouldn’t bite back their words, that’s for sure. If they have something to say, they will say it.

When we say goodbye to the house with the mint colored walls, I already know that we will miss these three ladies. In the next few months, we will be constantly overlaying the house with our presence— paintings, photographs, furniture, objects, books, our conversations — and by the time we leave, the house will have become an alternate version of itself, a new draft, so to speak. Perhaps, by that time, I will have even figured out how to solve the mathematical-like conundrum of learning to call my homeland home. But what these walls and admirable ladies will remind us of will be those initial paint-strokes, those first words on the computer-screen, a freshly new time, when blankness was exciting, when anything could become everything.

**

You can read the original version here...and in the meantime, why don't you too think about sharing your stories there?