The Story of a Lotus Bud

I found it at my flower-wallah on Sunday night. This flower-wallah was the one whom I had been buying my flowers from ever since I had moved to Delhi. In all these months, I had previously never seen lotuses there; I was instead accustomed to choosing from a library of roses, carnations, gladioli, marigolds, mogra, chrysanthemums, and rajnigandha, becoming blase about their beauty in the process. The lotuses were a pleasant surprise to encounter. A few days ago, I had seen them featured in pink bloom on someone's Instagram feed. A month ago, my family had sent me pictures after pictures of pink, white, and ivory-hued lotuses while holidaying in Sri-Lanka, where the blooms lay luxuriously massed upon the tables as temple offerings or sold in street-side shops. I remembered the first time I had seen devotees offer lotuses at temples in Bangkok; they resembled pale gray green candles from the distance until I peered closer and realised that they were in fact lotus buds. I tried to recall where I had last seen a lotus; I could not remember. I thought of the Buddhist mantra I frequently chanted these days, the lotus a powerful symbol and component of its spiritual structure.

I did not have to think twice about buying the lotus buds. I don't know why I bought just one though. The first lotus that I saw was greying, its outer almond-shaped petals the color of an ageing flamingo. Please give me a new, fresher one, I imperiously declared. The flower-seller picked one out from the many buds nestling together in their current home, a greying green bucket and began to swaddle it in a newspaper sheet for me. The lotus exuded no fragrance though. For fragrance, I bought my mogras, whose scent I forever associated with summer, smelling of rain when there was none. How long will it take to bloom, I asked, after he finished wrapping the lotus bud for me. Not much time, he replied. Not much time: that was hardly any time at all! I was prepared to wait. 

I posted a portrait of it on Instagram the next day, murmuring about the multiple beautiful truths that resided within its delicately striated pink bud. I talked about the delicious anticipation of waiting to see it bloom. I was in oblivion until Subhashini gently reminded me that lotuses usually do not bloom outside of water. But of course! How could I have forgotten? Was mine a magical lotus that would bloom in air? She instead asked me to carefully open the petals to discover what lay inside. I felt as if I was being asked to go on a treasure-hunt. Our conversation took place during the night. I waited until the next morning to perform this pleasurable task. But alas! I thought I was being careful but I was not. As I coaxed the bud to open, the petals swiftly and disintegrated, detaching themselves from the stalk like the pages of a dying antique book fleeing from its spine. I was left with the denuded heart and the petals scattered around me. The lotus was no more. I touched its heart. I wished I had been more gentle, more thoughtful, I said. But there will be a next time: a new lotus, a new heart to love, new petals to read. Until then, I will content myself with a memory of eternal longing, the longing of waiting for it to bloom.

Collaboration Part 2: A Valley of Mountains Which Are the Sum of All Colors

There she sat, perched upon the boulder bordering the river, slumbering awake beneath the clear, blue skin of a sky. Headphones plugged into her ears, eyes fastened shut, the music pouring into her very being - and she was suddenly swimming in a river, the river snaking up and around and through mountains that were the sum of all colors. She was both inside them and outside them. They were the blue of a newly born river, the lime of a budding seedling, jade of a rain-washed tree, and the mauve of a decaying mogra. She did not know where these mountains were; perhaps, they existed only in the planet of her imagination, whose terrain she knew only so little of and still had so much to explore. She kept her eyes shut, knowing that the moment she opened them, the mountains would evanescence, the river would dry up, and she would be left with the indomitable gray bedrock of reality from which there would be no escape, no escape at all. And how could she let that happen?

**

This is the second part of my collaboration with my painter friend, Vidya; in the first part, she had beautifully interpreted one of my images and accompanying text through her art while here, I seek to give words to a musical dreamscape she magically evokes in this painting. 

I hope you enjoyed partaking of our collaboration as much as we enjoyed participating in it!

Poetry: My Week in a Triptych

When You Were Away

I made bread out of bananas,

scented the room with memories

of nocturnal moonlight,

and wrote poetry that I was

never going to read again.

Buying Carnations 

They inhabit a damp black cave,

primly veiled in jute purdah.

The pink is sharp and loving to the eye.

They will die soon

but I will buy them anyway.

Part of Mine

Everyone told me that

Delhi was the most ornate palimpsest:

rococo layers upon layers upon layers.

When I tried to peel them away,

they refused to be pried off -

and without me knowing it,

I had become one of its layers too

and Delhi a part of mine.

What Writing Nature Diaries Have Taught Me

The other day, I read this piece in which the writer describes the lively antics of a blackbird seeking to make a nest in the English countryside; it was featured in a column entitled, 'Country Diary' and the title made me think how many of my daily entries in my own journal have lately been largely dedicated to nature and observations about nature. All through spring, I wrote about the trees, which bloomed, which stopped blooming, the new ones that bloomed. I described my blog as a garden of sorts in the debut post and my journal too has became a figurative garden in which I write about physical gardens.

I also wrote about the birds that I saw: jade-sheened black humming birds drinking from kachnar orchids, an orange-mohawk bird contemplating the trees from our window sills, a tiny black bird which could have fit inside my palm nibbling on peepal fruit, palm doves performing trapeze-artist theatre on the parabolas of wires strung between buildings. I wrote about the sparrow that flies from our window as soon as I open it towards the opposite end; it was the World Sparrow Day sometime ago and I was sorry to hear that these humble birds have become an endangered species. I wrote about the marauding ants navigating the undulating terrain of visible tree roots, turquoise and black butterflies dancing on concrete, and of course, the street dogs, some extroverted and tame enough to proffer their handsome tapered heads for a pat while others skitter away at the sight of you, burying themselves in a damp sand hole.

Today, as I leaned out of my window, I noticed that a spider has built two webs in between the grilles and that the kachnar tree is leafing in sporadic spurts, unlike the enthusiastically blooming gulmohar or the silk cotton tree with their exploding seed-pods, cotton spheres floating in the wind before resting upon the ground, like unmelting snow. It's all a matter of looking and looking carefully; for all these years, I was looking but I never really saw. I was ignorant of the flowers blooming, birds building nests, termites constructing homes, dragon-flies shimmying in the air, and invisible armies of ants. I only became aware when I had to be, when my world collided with that of the natural one, when I once saw a dead dragon-fly flutter down at my feet or the blooming mogras' gorgeous scent called out to me. 

Now that I have begun to see, really begun to see, what will I get to discover?

Friday Poetry: The Poetry of Silent Trees

Trees

which had been silent

all this while

have now decided to speak:

their poetry blooms under my feet,

and I listen carefully,

not wishing to miss

a single

syllable.

Friday Poetry: Beauties Sleeping

BEAUTIES SLEEPING

Beauties sleeping,

dreaming of pink bloom,

unaware that they are ghosts of

what they once were,

what they will never be again.

 

Five Thoughts About April

1. I began a collaging-scrap book which is becoming a novel of my thoughts. I also painted a bit more this month, specifically expanding on my love for dots; I don't know where it has sprung up from, this inclination towards embedding the page with dots but it is a very calm, meditative process and imbues the painting with a strange, structured quality. Here is a third such chapter from my book: The Art of Cloud-Making.

2. I attended my first art event in ages and surprisingly, only my second one in Delhi after all this time living here, what with its uber-packed art and culture calendar. It was the closing ceremony of  multi-media and disciplinary artist, Satish Gupta's At The Feet of Buddha, where he presented ten sculptures, eight paintings and seventy two haikus. We heard Buddhist monks in orange robes chant, renowned Indologist, a venerable looking Professor Chandra in a crisp white kurta and dhoti talk about Buddhism, saying something which particularly resonated me that Buddha saw the entire universe in a leaf, and finally, the artist himself reciting his haikus. The giant contemplative Buddha was the focus of everyone's attention, mogras buds scenting the air all around him. We briefly chatted to the artist and he told us that it took him two years to wrought it. I have to say though  that my favorite part of the evening was hearing his wonderful haikus; read them here and here.

3. Time to blow my trumpet a bit! I wrote a piece about my love for the trees in spring-time on a whim inspired by a beautiful writing cue, participating in a writing competition for the first time in years (another first!). To my pleasant surprise, my entry was among the five winning entries for this month. You can read the piece here:)

4.  My abandoned sofa trail saw me spotting one in Mehrauli after almost a year since my last sighting in Delhi; it was unobtrusively hidden in a tangle of forest and scrub, its extremely dilapidated state indicating that it had been there for a while, almost becoming a part of the forest itself. It looked so at home in the spot, if one could say, that I wasn't tempted to extricate its back-story. This was its story.

5. It's the season of mogras once again. I bought a string or two from my local flower-seller and wrote about a poem about it, kickstarting my Friday poetry posts. The other evening, sitting inside the car and waiting for the traffic light to turn green, a man swung an entire bunch in front of us and offered to sell them for a bargain. "I need to go home and get rid of them," he succinctly told us. I had been planning to buy a couple of strings and so immediately leaped at the chance to buy a bunch of gorgeous-smelling mogra. Since then, they swayed on the rearview mirror, scented my living and bedrooms, and are now slumbering in the cold, protected confines of the fridge.

How was your April? I would love to hear!

Friday Poetry: A Country Where Many Reside

A COUNTRY WHERE MANY RESIDE

The octopus tentacles of tree roots

lie flat upon the leaf-strewn soil,

exuding tiny ink-spots of an ant-army:

crawling, scurrying, cargo-bearing

before disappearing inside

their cool, black holes 

of subterranean palaces.

Watching them reminds me that

a tree just does not exist for itself:

actually, it cannot.

That would be far too self indulgent, a selfish act.

It is a country, after all, where numerous citizens reside

and which they call home.

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.

Friday Poetry: The Season's First Mogras

 

THE SEASON'S FIRST MOGRAS

The season's first mogras cost twenty rupees:

the boy takes them out of their plastic home,

pouring them into the bowl of my palm.

In the new moon light, they are phosphorescent,

the half-open buds gradually emerging,

like teeth in a baby's shy smile.

They slumber overnight,

luxuriously curled up

in a bowl full of written water.

When I wake up,

they have already made themselves home.

I journal about the poetry of their fragrance,

which seeps into my words,

the texture of my thoughts. 

The next morning,

they are already gone,
their fragrance a distant, bittersweet memory:

crumpled tea-brown white petals

fall apart in my palms,

like a ransacked city,

the ghost of what it once was. 

** I have started writing poetry again after a very long time - and so, every Friday, I will be featuring a poem of mine accompanied by a photograph. Sometimes, the photograph will inspire the birth of a poem or vice versa. Let us see where this journey of poetry will take me. I will look forward to your thoughts about these tentative re-explorations of mine into the world of poetry!**

Creativity-Consumed

I have been feeling unwell for the past several weeks - and yet, simultaneously have never been as consumed by a desire to create as much as I am experiencing right now. Whether it's intense, meticulous outpourings in my red-notebook designated for morning pages or abstracting art from decaying, dying flowers juxtaposed with water-colors or making videos on my new phone or working on a short story about a Maharani who wants to become an archaeologist and has a cat called Holmes (he's a very clever cat), all I can currently think about is...creating. When I go outside, I become more aware than ever of the texture of bird-song, the trees blooming, budding, and leafing, the fragrance of nocturnal flowers. I find myself hungrily combing through the internet to learn something new every day, something utterly unknown and which will enrich my mindscape, planting dense forests of newnness. I suppose, I am paying much more minute attention to both my inner and external universes, something which I hadn't been doing for so long, the raucous clamor of both worlds drowning out and inhibiting this powerful desire to create. Or so I think, anyway. 

Some creative notes from this literal and emotional spring:

I have gotten into the habit of picking up fallen flowers these days and my best discoveries usually happen either during my daily morning walks or occasional dusk strolls. I found these gorgeous lilac-hued kachnar flowers below the bloom-laden kachnar tree standing across my home (it provides quite a backdrop to meditate upon while I write and gaze upon it from my study window) while the fiery crimson hibiscus was a fortuitous find below a bush. I thought they were no less exquisite in their decaying, dessicated states as they were in their just-fallen, still vibrant states - and preserved them between the pages of a sketchbook, introducing them into a minimal story of watercolor dots.

There is a large peepal tree amongst the many in our neighborhood which has been designated as a shrine, where you find miniature idols, plastic rosaries, framed paintings, and floral offerings wedged into the textured canyon grooves of the entwined tree trunks. While it receives offerings all year along, it is currently in the process of relinquishing its leaves. I found this fantastically hued leaf one morning and decided to perform a poster-color intervention to it, seeking to compete with its marbled chrome yellow, coffee-brown, and luminous green canvas.

Thanks to a birthday present in the form of a new phone, I have become completely obsessed with making videos (partly because of the excellent camera quality and also, I now have lots of memory space!) Our neighborhood was recently declared as the greenest one in Delhi and that's very much evident through the sheer diversity of flowering, leafing, and budding trees that one encounters walking whilst through it. The silk cotton tree with its flamboyant, fat red (or orange) blooms particularly stands out as it is among first of the trees to flower during spring. I captured one such video at dusk, standing below a silk cotton tree as crows feasted upon the blooms, which are now incidentally vanishing from the branches. I tried uploading the video but I unfortunately encountered technical snags so you glimpse can it over here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BC5LcYhonK_/?taken-by=iamjustavisualperson. 

Dawn Gifts and Writing to Bird-Song

Mogra from my mother's garden, freshly plucked at dawn

The other day, I awakened just before dawn and could not slip-slide back into sleep, no matter how much I tried. I am currently visiting my parents in Oman; I instead decided to go outside, wandering into my mother's garden, inspecting the sprawling neem tree, the frangipani and peepal plants, and my favorites, the mogra [Arabian Jasmine] bushes, still blooming even though it's already nearing the end of September. I have waxed eloquent about my all abiding love for mogras often enough and it's now become a new favorite game of mine to spot the buds in various stages of bloom hidden inside the bushes, a bud treasure hunt, so to speak. My mother tells me these mogra bushes growing in the garden are called haathi mogra, 'haathi' meaning elephant, the name probably due to the comparatively large-sized blooms that these bushes produce. I personally love marvelling at the intricate mint-green origami perfection of their journey of blooming as much as witnessing the actual bloom itself. 

The bloom I saw that morning though was enough take my breath away: I could not imagine a more perfect dawn gift. As I gently cradled the mogra in my hands, the apricot light tinting its famously fragrant snow-ivory white petals, I realised it had been a very long time indeed since I had voluntarily been up and outside at this hour.

I am not a morning person, period. I forcibly had to get up at 6am during my school years and the only thing that made it bearable for me was glimpsing a spectacular sun-rise from my bus windows as we drove to school every day. During college, though, I gleefully embraced my night owl avatar; thanks to my particular roster of classes which began either before lunch or during the afternoon, I was free to wake and sleep late. I was pursuing a degree in creative writing and I would only work on my assignments between midnight and three am, even later, at times. It was singularly the most peaceful time of the day, or at least, what constituted my day, anyway. Everyone else was asleep, the phone would not ring, and if I needed company, there was always MSN Messenger (oh god, how long ago was that!), where I could pop in to chat to other nocturnal kindred spirits or friends living in different time-zones. I would also often find my friend, D awake and online then; she lived in the flat next door and told me that this was the time of the day she too liked the best, whether to read or relax. I still remember those nights: the silence, the feeling that you were absolutely the only person awake in the world, the sensation of almost like being inside a meditative vacuum. Is this what space sounded like? If I became particularly immersed in writing or working on an assignment, I found myself only pausing to stop writing when I could hear birds singing. The sound of bird-song was a sign, to me, at least, that the night was over and a brand new, tooth-paste smelling morning was upon us. I would shut the computer and crawl into into my bed, finally ceasing to write, study, think. By the time I woke up, the sun was rudely poking its stubby bright yellow fingers into my eyes and there were too many other noises drowning out the birds singing.

This particular nocturnal writing routine persisted long into my working life, when I was working as an independent writer and journalist, unbound by office hours and strictures. After a while, I realised that I just could not write during the day, no matter how much I tried. I conducted interviews, called interviewees, or completed work and personal correspondence but the meat of my writing, slowly cooking words, ideas, and voices into articles or stories, only occurred in those inky post midnight hours. If I wasn't writing, I was either painting or collaging or journaling or something or the other. Now that I reflect upon it, it seems as if I was only truly myself in the night, my performance during the day literally being a day job.

The routine changed once I got a job and had to turn up to office at suitably early hours and of course, afterwards, when I got married to my surgeon husband, who would be out of the house at 6am or frequently placating an incessantly buzzing pager and phone often all through the night, shredding the night silence into smithereens (and unfortunately depriving him of a good night's sleep!). I still stayed up till midnight, however, only mostly reading though. As time went by, I just couldn't fathom writing late into the night anymore. I found myself too burdened by the day to write, its stories and events and attendant physical and mental exhaustion over-crowding my mind, making it impossible to voyage into the world of my writing. I increasingly preferred writing during the day, particularly during the afternoon, when I had yet to decide what was to become of the day, what adventures and conversations and memories awaited me, thereby leaving me free to focus on my writing.

When I was in college, our tutors recommended that we regularly read Paris Review. I eagerly consumed interview after interview of both known and brilliant but obscure writers in which the journalist usually questioned them in detail about the architecture of their writing routines. I always enjoy learning more about the rituals and process of writing - or any kind of creation, really - whether it is about the rooms in which they write or the objects inhabiting their desk - and so I loved that portion of the interviews. Many of them mentioned that they often arose early in the morning to write, commenting that it was that pocket of time during their day, wonderfully devoid of distractions as well as the fact that their minds were so fresh and well, emptied. It reminded me of a painter friend who once told me the same thing, also adding that the remarkable quality of dawn light made the experience much more joyful.

It was unimaginable to me then as a student to subscribe to a similar routine. However, as I grow older and becoming decidedly less and less of a nocturnal creature, I thought of it: writing at dawn, absorbing the molecules of purity and silence and above all, the optimistic quality of that roseate dawn light.

Dawn conversations between the tree and the clouds

I once used to stop writing at the sound of bird-song; now, I can imagine myself - just a little bit -  writing to the dawn background soundtrack of bird-song, perhaps weaving their joyousness, a contagious zest for the unblemished day ahead, into the textures of my work. 

Perhaps, I should try it some time.

What about you? Do you have a time of a day when you feel you are the most inclined to create? I would love to hear!

Fabric Stories: The Tales that our Clothes Narrate

I sometimes wish that I had been a textile and costume historian, spending my days dismantling an item of clothing's physical and historical architecture to understand its story. Whether it is the fabrics we gravitate to or the labels we choose to endorse (or not) or the color-palette of our wardrobes that we carefully calibrate over time, our clothes stories are entirely specific to us. The stories that the antique clothes therefore contain reveal much about their owners, inviting us to metaphorically unravel the item of clothing, discovering the stories hidden within its folds and threads and colors.

Many years ago, my late paternal grandmother presented my mother with an intricately patterned gold zari and purple brocade lehengha that had formerly belonged to her. Whenever I unwrapped the lehenga from its covering itself made from a thin muslin age-stained ivory sari, I could not help but gawk at the sheer artistry of the garment and muse about on what occasions and in which contexts it had been worn. Afterwards, whenever I visited fashion museums or vintage stores, I felt as if I was in a library of clothes and that there were multiple clothing narratives to access.

Patriotic Lehengha

My grandmother's lehenga was on my mind when I encountered this exquisite silk brocade gold and silver-embroidered one displayed at the India Art Fair as part of the Bangalore-based Museum of Art and Photography (MAP)'s booth. If you look closely, the lehengha is embellished with the Indian tricolor motif, a fact particularly significant given that the item of clothing dates from 1940 and only seven years prior to Indian independence. Who was the lehengha's owner and where did she choose to wear it? I fancied that she had worn it at her wedding, determined to infuse even her wedding trousseau with patriotic colors. 

Museum of Omani Dress

Similarly, when I visited the Museum of Omani Dress in Muscat sometime ago, I met its founder, Julia al Zadjali, who has spent a decade documenting, collecting, preserving, and researching Omani dress. I have spoken to her about her project several times in the last few years and it's always fascinating to hear how it has evolved over time whenever I meet her. This time though, I significantly saw the clothes in person, including an intricately embroidered Baloochi [an Omani community] dress as well as embellishments used to adorn the dresses and accompanying jewelry. What struck me on both occasions at the Fair and in the Museum was how seeing the item of dress/costume as tangible entities made me even more inclined than ever to tease out the stories contained within them.

Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni's novel, Sister of My Heart

I hope I will get an opportunity to more often and closely see examples of vintage dress this year but in the meantime, I know that I will definitely be spending plenty of time researching and writing about the subject. To kick things off, I recently contributed a long form, critical essay about the significance and representation of the sari in immigrant Bengali communities of America in Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni's novel to the anthology, Exploring Gender in the Literature of Indian Diaspora. I have always found it problematic seeing novels by South-east Asian women writers bearing covers of gorgeously hued saris (and/or mehendi-decorated hands/artfully heaped piles of spices) when the literature actually had little to do with the subject of women wearing saris. Why is the sari the only and most convenient visual, exotic shorthand for depicting Indian/Indian immigrant women? I personally was more interested in exploring whether/how the sari is depicted in these authors' books and more significantly, what it means to the characters themselves. Does the first-generation immigrant woman choose to hold on to wearing the sari as a means of reiterating and preserving home, much like the food she cooks and consumes and the cinema she watches? And what exactly does the second-generation woman feel about the garment? I also meditate upon the notion and image of the saris being wrapped up and stored in suitcases, where they are fated to spend much of their lives. The suitcases and saris are synonymous with travel and migration and when you open the suitcases and encounter the stacks of saris within them, it is as if you are peeking into another, former life, even. "Past is a foreign country, they do things differently over there": it's interesting how the country you once considered home becomes a foreign country and the sari an emblem of foreignness, rather than familiarity.

**

If you are interested, read more of my clothing-related musings here, here, and 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?

What Do I Call Home?

Goodbye, America: Pittsburgh

I arrived in Pittsburgh one icy, sunny morning on 12th December, 2012. As we drove through the city, noting that it was peppered with churches, encircled by hills, and river-striped, I reflected upon the dramatically hectic previous week which had witnessed me getting married, obtaining the US visa, and finally, flying down to the States to begin my new life. This is my new home, I remember thinking to myself, I am married. Given this significant intersection of two major turning points in my life, it's perhaps unsurprising that my memories of my first month in States are an inky blur of acute jet and cultural lag and exhaustion.

Azure Waters: Mackinac Island, Michigan

Cut to eighteen months later and I am now preparing to move to India, a country which I have always viewed through the lens of an itinerant traveller and an emigrant. As I currently travel across the States before finally bidding adieu to this yet another one of my adopted homes, transitioning through its cities, forests, lakes, and deserts, I muse about my experiences living here. Before living in United States, I had had called four countries my home: Australia, India, Oman, and United Kingdom. Having been born in Melbourne, Australia, I moved from there at the age of two and lived in Jodhpur, India until I was five years old. My parents then decided to take up academic jobs in Muscat, Oman and I completed my schooling there before pursuing my undergraduate and graduate studies in United Kingdom. A few more years in Oman working as a journalist and I eventually made my way to United States. 

If someone had asked me a month ago about what I would call home, I would have immediately said: Oman. The notion of belonging to a singular home, or rather, multiple homes had always intrigued me over the years; yet, it is here in America that I have became particularly preoccupied with dismantling and analysing the structure of my complicated thoughts about home and belonging. In the last year and half, I started to think more consciously about my roots and the relationship that I shared with them. I began calling India the land of my passport, even disputing the extent of my Indianness. During the height of the polar vortex which struck Pittsburgh amongst several other Eastern American cities, I could not help but yearn for Oman's intense heat and its sunlight. Whenever I glimpsed Pittsburgh's Allegheny river glinting in the sunlight, I would immediately become homesick for Oman's oceans and beaches. However, I was also simultaneously aware that no matter how much I yearned for Oman, its landscape in particular, I was not and never will be Omani. So then what was I...? 

Path to Serenity: A Trail in a Pittsburgh park

And so, for the past few weeks, as I travel across the country, I have become concerned with a new project: navigating the map of what lies ahead for me, figuratively and literally. As my husband and I hopscotch from one city to terrain to another, indulging in what appears like an interminable relay race of unpacking and packing suitcases, I recollect what my husband said to me the other day. “I miss home,” he told me as we found ourselves in yet another hotel room. “You mean you miss Bangalore?” I asked, thinking he was referring to the city that he grew up in and which we were returning to. “It's just a few days away from you now.” He shook his head. “No, I mean, I miss a home,” he said. And perhaps, that was the crux of the situation. As he talked about a home, I found myself instinctively conjuring up the outlines of our freshly vacated Pittsburgh apartment: the house which I had arrived in so many months ago and made it home, piece by piece, memory by memory. I thought of the balcony from which I glimpsed daily theatrical performances that the landscape and sky produced for me or walking through quiet, shady, tree-lined bylanes surrounding the building or grabbing dosas at the Sunday buffet at a nearby Indian restaurant. For the first time, I found myself homesick for Pittsburgh – and realising that for the time-being, it had become my home. 

Perhaps, the answer to the question as to what country is home lies nested between these lines. For me, my home lives in the present-tense – and so whichever country I happen to currently inhabit becomes my home. However, in Italian, there also happens to be a tense which describes an action that happened long ago in the past and yet, which is still occurring. Perhaps, it is that tense which perfectly describes my relationship with homes: I have been creating homes in whichever country that I have resided over the years and so, even now, whenever I visit them, each of them conjures up a veritable house of emotions, memories, and associations. There are many houses inside my home and I gladly inhabit them all.

**

This piece originally appeared in the August issue of The Curated Magazine and written during a time when I was just beginning to process my transition from States to India...

Of Being Nomads and Nests

This post was originally called: Of Being Nomads and Calling A Suitcase a Home...and it occurred to me that the title could very well have been the title of a poem except that it has been years since I last wrote a poem. However, given that I am currently navigating so many transitions both within my interior and exterior worlds, it wouldn't be so odd after all that I start embracing poetry once again after so long. Poetry is how I first began to see the world through words - and I am coming full circle, as if coming back to a sanctuary.  I have so many thoughts, words, memories, and visuals jostling around in my head, all like caged birds...and poetry seems to me the best way to package and present them.

But this post is not just about poetry: it is also about being nomads, becoming acquainted with the idea of nesting homes from suitcases and bare rooms and the way the air smells at dusk in different cities and countries. As we traversed across America last month and now in India, awaiting to find our new nest, I thought of the hotel rooms, friends' houses, and camp-sites that we briefly called home. And this is what I am learning about home, having mused about the subject a great deal in the past years: no matter how briefly or long you live in a place, it becomes home, whether it's for the night, months, years or decades.

As I write, memories from our travels flash through my mind, one visual layering upon another: eating tongue-roof-burning hot pizza at Patsy's on a warm, electric June afternoon in New York, watching 4th July fireworks momentarily bloom in a garden of a night sky somewhere in Virginia, peering down into the sky inside a pool gouged out of red mountains, the surreal cacti cities and broken hills of Joshua Tree National Park, and the massive azure Great Lakes in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which I constantly mistook for the sea, so great was my yearning to see it (although the one time I did see the sea on a New Jersey coast, it was during a hurricane and what an ugly, white, wind-whipped beast it was!) 

Nested

And then, in middle of this treadmill of travel, there was also this to savor: exploring a garden in a desert city in India. The garden was a self-contained green universe, as gardens are: jaundiced leaves littered the grass, over-ripe bittergourds turned orange, as if in protest at not being plucked to be cooked and consumed (and when their bellies were sliced open, they revealed sticky red seeds within, nature's toys), and tiny deep pink flower petals dreamily danced away from their parent trees, their scent fiercely staining the air- and then one morning, I found a small, immaculately constructed and perfectly preserved nest sitting beneath a tree. Had it fallen or been abandoned? There were no eggs and the owners were nowhere to be seen, save a feather lying nearby. A home in a garden; the garden a home...in my photographic quest to document the quotidian of my life, those little moments that plump our lives, it was a memory and a metaphor and a message. Or perhaps, neither of those things. Each possibility is as valid as the others.

It will happen soon enough, the nest - and so, meanwhile, I continue to wander, sights and sounds and smells aligning themselves against one another, like brilliantly hued saris in a sari shop - and when it will be time to sit down and write and ponder, I can simply reach into those memories and unfurl those moments and weave them into words.

The Submarine Life of Cacti

I am seeing cacti everywhere these days: an Instagram feed, foregrounding the frames of the TV show, Breaking Bad – and finally, in a sunlit glasshouse at the Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh. I should perhaps now amend my statement; it was after my memorable encounter with them at Phipps that I have begun to notice them everywhere. 

Having explored room after room of luxuriant, almost obscenely green, tropical bushes and trees, it was somewhat a relief to encounter the cacti's austere beauty in the Conservatory's Cactus Room. And even though I had wholeheartedly admired the bonsai trees' micro perfection, the iridescent orchids, and the cocoa tree with its fat gold pods, embryonic chocolate bars nestled within them, I could not help thinking afterwards that the Cactus Room was undoubtedly my favorite one. 

 I wonder if it is because it appeals to my inner desert girl. Until recently, I grew up and lived in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman; the majority of its terrain is indeed a textbook dune desert, although I happened to live upon the fringes of its gravel desert. There are no cacti in Oman, but the flora is similar: minimal leaves, spare sculpted bodies, and a tenacious will to survive. Incidentally, desert also inhabits my bloodline: I belong to Rajasthan, India, which too is a desert and whose landscape does happen to be dotted with spiny, gray-green cacti. This combination of genes and happenstance probably explains my simultaneous inclination for both maximalism and minimalism; having been surrounded by minimalist landscapes, I naturally gravitate towards a pared down beauty and - yet, also occasionally and intensely crave fertile, lush bursts of color and texture. 

As I roamed through the Cactus Room, I could not help but think about my first encounter with them when I was thirteen years old. It was during a pan-American trip, involving a detour through Arizona. After weeks of witnessing the glorious summer green, I felt as if I was meeting a familiar friend as the coach trundled through the desert: I thirstily absorbed the arid, fantastical wind-eroded rocks, the cerulean blue skies, and the garden of cacti. Even if the cacti themselves were unfamiliar, they looked familiar simply by the virtue of inhabiting a similar looking landscape. And in the Cactus Room, as I examined with interest this desert in miniature, admiring a succulent cheekily masquerading as a flower in bloom, I realized that these transplanted cacti had transplanted me back home...once again. 

As I photographed the cacti – round and spiny, long and tapering - I idly imagined I had wandered into a fossilized ocean, the water long having receded and left behind these specimens in its wake. When I was a child, I would often go rock collecting in Oman, which is widely recognised to be a vast geological garden of sorts. As I sorted through the rocks, I would often discover ones bearing imprints of fossilized shells or plants or marine organisms: I realized that I was literally standing on an ancient sea-bed, the ocean having vanished millions of years ago as a result of plate tectonics choreography. For years, the rocks I collected accumulated in my backyard corner, becoming a pyramid of sorts; however, although even when my rock mania died and the pyramid disintegrated, I never forgot about those submarine fossils. 

A few weeks ago, I had gone snorkeling for the first time in the waters of Florida Keys. I had swum just beneath the surface of its brilliant blue waters, cobalt blue and yellow-hued fish inches away from my face and peering down at the fecund coral garden blooming below. Growing up in Oman and regularly haunting its numerous beaches, the sea and the beach had always called out to me, defining me in a way that no landscape ever could. Even if I lived in the desert, I yearned for the sea. And yet, for all those years of frequenting the ocean, this was the first time that I had actually explored the depths of its interiors, seen and swam with its creatures and – understood it. The essence of the ocean was ultimately this submarine theater. And it was an ocean continents away that taught me that. 

 Standing in the Cactus Room, I felt a similar sensation to that of snorkeling beneath the ocean. After years of living in the desert, I had merely begun to see it as the desert, rather than composed of a mosaic of eccentric, intriguing characters and elements. But this is the thing about leaving home: you can only begin to define home once you have left it. Reflecting on the multiple homes that I had inhabited: Australia, India, Oman, United Kingdom and America, by way of birth or heritage or education or marriage, each journey and the subsequent new place I called home led to constantly recalibrating what home represented to me. Home, I learnt, was no longer just a set of coordinates on a map: it was a sensation, elusive and ephemeral as a scent but just as palpable and memorable. 

Here, in a doll-house desert transplanted in a glasshouse surrounded by an arctic Pittsburgh winter, I was conjuring up home: the desert as the ocean or vice versa. As I saw and experienced it, the two landscapes most familiar and dear to me had perfectly mashed in the cactus room at the Phipps Conservatory. As I walked around, soaking in this submarine and subterranean theater, I felt at home. 

My wanderings in the Cactus Room brought me to an enormous yellow and green striped succulent  and vibrantly hued, spiny cacti surrounding it. In my vision, it metamorphosed into a mutated octopus reigning over the ocean-floor: it looked as if it was in deep slumber with its sea-urchins and coral courtiers protectively guarding it. I knelt down, took its picture, and then left - lest it woke.

**

This piece was originally published in 1for1000; the idea is to produce a thousand word narrative inspired by a single image. In my case, the cacti that I saw at the Phipps Conservatory had greatly fascinated me and this image in particular found me re-imagining it as a group of submarine creatures....and so this essay was born! In fact, cacti have intrigued me so much that I won't be surprised if they weave themselves into more of my future writings...

What has dramatically captured your attention and become an enduring inspiration? I would love to hear!