Of History Twitter, Imagined Delhi, and Bangalore's Many Pasts

Balabrooie Guest-House, Bangalore

I should have been a historian, or at the very least, studied history in university. I instead chose to study English Literature and Creative Writing, of which I only really enjoyed the creative writing part. I soon learned that it was one thing to read for pleasure, losing yourself in these imagined worlds but another thing altogether to study literature. I was loath to analyse and mine meanings from a book when in fact, I was more interested in writing a book myself. I didn't realise back then that being a historian would have been a perfectly viable career option or that I could have written a book and simultaneously been a historian: I could have written a historical novel, for god's sake! I now wonder whether I secretly perceived history as akin to a museum, full of glorious beauties to be admired and yet ultimately belonging to that alien planet, the past. Perhaps, my eighteen year old self also perceived historians as fusty individuals imprisoned in the past, constantly trying to achieve time-traveling when in fact, they could not? And yet, the truth was also that the courses I took in history during my undergraduate and graduate years were the ones I enjoyed the most.

I have been on Twitter for a while now, largely as an observer/eavesdropper on the incredible diversity of conversations taking place among those I follow. What has really fascinated me though in the last year or so has been my discovery of History Twitter, where I have stumbled upon the most  amazing treasure-troves of threads; historian and writer, Paul Cooper is one person that springs to my mind, whose threads are a wealth of information, his 'Ruin of the Day' thread masterfully knitting the past and present in form of the intriguing ruins across the world (fun fact: we are both alumni of the same course at our alma mater, University of Warwick!) I have also admired how yesterday and today come together, as in this piece by Sarover Zaidi on Chirag Dilli where she exquisitely wrote about love in Lodhi Gardens, "a map for lost lovers" in that wondrous green space in Delhi, where sprawling, iridescent bougainvillea trees rain flowers, the ancient tombs and mosques watch, as they have done for so many centuries.

Safdarjung Tomb, New Delhi

Looking up

When I lived in Delhi, Lodhi Gardens used to be one of my favorite places to visit in the city, aligning to my imagined notion of Delhi. For, before I moved there, I had honestly and excitedly thought I was moving to the City of Djinns, the Delhi which William Dalrymple so romantically describes and evokes in his book of the same name. I imagined myself wandering through the tombs at dusk, peeling away one historical palimpsest after another, immersing myself in the drama and beauty and pathos that was the city. However, I arrived in Delhi, fell sick on the first day, and developed respiratory issues which would greatly plague me during my two year stay - and realised  the stark difference between anticipation and reality. It's not as if I didn't explore the city at all, though. My husband and I loved visiting Hauz Khas Village: I recall the domes turning lavender at night to the beat of live music, the crumbling madrasa ruins crawling with lovers, families, and instagrammers. I spent a lovely winter afternoon at Humayun's Tomb (my favorite tomb of them all), taking around out of town visitors to Sadfarjung Tomb and the vibrant Lodhi Art District, listening to a concert one almost-winter redolent October evening at Purana Qila. Yet, as I recall these explorations, I find that all of them are underscored by feelings of melancholy or lassitude or plain physical unwellness. After a while, these tombs and buildings and histories simply did not matter because there were so many things to grapple with your today; the yesterday was subsequently of significance anymore. And we ultimately left the city, having no other choice.

I sometimes like to say that I came to Bangalore for the trees - and while that still largely remains true, I have to admit that it has encouraged me to start thinking about history more consciously than ever before. Even though the skyscrapers pile up and unattractive cuboid plastic-glass buildings spring up everywhere, I see tantalising glimpses of its recent colonial past in its bungalows, government buildings, and churches along with its much older ones in inscription stones, temples, and monuments, inviting me to unearth their stories. When I recently took a heritage walk in Avenue Road in central Bangalore, I learned about its beginnings, how KR Market used to be a pond and that the aftermath of a war saw it becoming a market, and how the founder of Bangalore, Kempegowda determined the the boundaries which once defined Bangalore. During the walk, we found ourselves inside a courtyard of Mohan Building, a building which once used to be a family home, a police station, a lodge, and now a commercial market housing silk and cotton shops; a collective of Bangalore-based artists, the Klatsch Collective subsequently decided to reinterpret its multiple layers of historical avatars through a multi-disciplinary art intervention by holding on-site installations, paintings, and dialogue last year. 

The Beauty of Space: Ambara, Bangalore

Balabrooie Guest-House

Over the years, I have come to appreciate more than ever at how heritage structures are finding new, alternative, exciting contexts in which to reincarnate. Bangalore has been no exception at this front and I am glad to see how beautifully restored and renovated mansions are enjoying a new avatar as hip boutiques and cafes and art spaces such as Cinnamon, Raintree, and Ambara and of course, the magnificent structure that is NGMA Bangalore. Yet, I am also painfully aware of the numerous heritage structures which are being demolished or under threat of demolition every day, the colonial bungalows springing to my mind, for instance. The other day, after I chanced upon and explored Balabrooie Guest-House, which was built in 19th century, I learned that it had been rescued from being destroyed thanks to the valiant efforts of local activists back in 2014. The demands for its demolition. had been made so that something more useful could spring up in its place. Does history always have to be useful? Can one not appreciate history for what it is: history?

There is no singular past just as there is no such thing as history; our many pasts are full of both his-stories and herstories. Last November, I greatly enjoyed participating in a mapping walk led by Aliyeh Rizvi of Native Place. As we walked from Cubbon Park to MG Road (the boundaries which once marked that of the erstwhile British Cantonment), we heard stories about what it once was, what it was now, and what it could become; we participated in constructing new stories about the city while reinterpreting the old, mapping a new atlas upon that of the old. And it struck me that I too was doing the same in a sense through my daily documentation of my experiences in the city on Instagram, a city which I was now starting to call home. With the exception of Muscat, I had never stayed long enough in all the other cities I had lived in to call them home - and if I forever remained a migratory bird of sorts, how could I invest myself in the city and its stories, let alone begin to narrate them?

Yet, in Bangalore, I have found myself wanting to narrate its stories of its past and people and architecture - and realise that there lies the making of a historian somewhere anyway. I place my ears against these ancient walls, like one does with shells, conjuring up the sound of the crashing waves and wind. And I try to hear what once happened inside those walls, what secrets I can persuade the matrix of stone and cement and design to reveal to me if I am patient enough - and how they will color in the blanks of a city which is only just beginning to take shape for me.

What Happened When 2016 Became 2017: Notes

The last post I wrote was about burning autumn trees. The last post I tried to write was about trees with pink flowers which I saw on a warm November morning in Delhi. It remained incomplete. But the tree and pink flowers have followed me here to Bangalore, which incidentally is my new home. The gorgeous, joy-making pink tabuleia plume the tops of trees, reminding me of cherry blossoms that I used to see during spring in the United States. I see the pink flowers silhouetted against the blue sky, carpeting the dusty sidewalks below, or simply spiralling in the air - and I smile.

It's spring in my heart.

What have I been up to in the last few months? I moved, I travelled, I did a road trip in Rajasthan (birds, mirror lakes, sunsets, haunted ruins, dogs), I stood on top of a mountain in Oman (smelling ghost roses), I climbed trees, and photographed a lot.

I didn't write much.

I visited Blossoms bookshop one cool Sunday morning and bought ten books. The first book I am reading is Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole, inhaling his words, as if I am afraid that they will evanescence into air and I will never ever know what it was like to read them, experience them.

Delhi is a blurred, hot, uncomfortable memory.

Bangalore is trees with pink blooms, trees that deserve odes written to them, rust soil, colorful kolam patterns, fresh flowers, sugarcane stalks, ice-cream hued homes, the smell of old books, streets of art, and snacks wrapped in banana leaves.

I know there is much more to it. And I am waiting to explore.

But for now, I leave you with this. Happy 2017 everyone.

Of Autumn Nostalgia, September, and The Blank Spaces Between Chapters

 

I remember the first time I saw trees in fiery autumn finery. It was late September; I was a newly arrived undergraduate at the university that I was attending in West Midlands, United Kingdom. As I battled all-consuming homesickness, cultural disorientation, and other newbie university student challenges, I nevertheless did occasionally emerge from my fog of bewilderment to briefly appreciate the brilliant theatre that these trees were putting up on display. They were in decay, true, but they appeared no less magnificent than in their glorious summer plumage. But I didn't take any pictures of them. All the photographs that I took of those initial months on my analogue camera depicted my university, my friends and the exciting memories I was making and accumulating. I experienced three more autumns during the time I lived and studied in United Kingdom but apart from a handful of pictures taken in my Oxford college's garden where bright yellow and orange autumn trees provide an arresting backdrop, it never occurred me to photograph the autumnscape for posterity.

 

 

How times have changed! Or, perhaps, more significantly, the way and how I look at nature. I made up for my earlier lack of autumn appreciation when I lived in Pittsburgh for a year and half, savoring how autumn unfurled over the months. I learned to love its nuances: the toast-crisp air, the sharp, invigorating, buttery sunshine, and a certain headiness that belongs to only autumn. I remembered exclaiming in surprised delight when the massive tree just outside my apartment window seemingly turned scarlet overnight. Yes, the summer was over, we were approaching winter - and yet, there was a promise in the air that was autumn's alone. That I could not photograph. What still vividly remains in my memories is the pleasure of walking out on a cool autumn morning, bundled up just so, literally drinking in the autumn air, the leaves crunching below your feet, so thickly, densely carpeting the path ahead that you could scarcely see the gray concrete or the viridian grass below. If no one was looking, I would take a childish pleasure in running through the leaves, seeing them swirl in the air,  like birds agitated into flight. 

 

The other day, while glimpsing these orange gulmohurs dotting the soil, I couldn't help but remember similarly hued orange leaves, as they must once more densely fall on the ground in various parts of the world while the season transits from summer to autumn. There is no autumn here, of course. The monsoons have concluded in Delhi, at least...but still, something feels different. It gets darker a tad earlier each day and the cool morning breeze makes me smile in anticipation for the mellower, delicious days of between late October-early December

Perhaps, the season reflects my current state of mind (or is it vice versa?) I  must admit that I too am in transit, immersed in a limbo. I feel that I currently inhabit the blank spaces in between chapters of a novel. The hectic summer flew past and I wonder what beckons in the newly forming season ahead. So I hibernate in the den of my words, the short stories that I am trying to write, characters who are slowly beginning to form and take shape on my pages. I don't know them and they don't know me - yet. And so we are both in - there's that word again - limbo. But I persevere, writing and writing, persuading them to reveal themselves. And perhaps, by doing so, I will migrate to my next chapter, writing myself into what is going to happen next. 

September is not over yet.

 Inspired by this Instagram post of mine

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.

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?

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?

Of 'The Girl Who Ate Books,' Bookstores, and Browsing

Last week, I finally got around to ordering a bunch of books I had been wanting to read for a long while; one of them happened to be the acclaimed journalist, author, and columnist, Nilanjana Roy's book, The Girl Who Ate Books. I had heard a great deal about Ms. Roy and had even seen her in person, moderating a panel which included Taslima Nasreen among other authors at the Times Literature Festival held in Delhi last December. Yet, it was one thing to hear of and read an author in a column and another to read their book, which happens to be a series of superlative, elegantly written essays about being a bibliophagist (and quite literally so!), house of books (in her case, her grandmother's ancestral Calcutta home, where books were scattered, stacked, and shelved in every possible space), reading, encounters with authors and poets, her own writing, sensitive, thoughtful notes on plagiarism and more. The last time I had read such a nuanced treatise and musings on reading was when I read Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, which incidentally is a book that Ms. Roy also refers to in her own.

It made me deeply think about reading: how and why I read - and of course, books which have played a central role in my life. Reading about Ms. Roy's childhood reading experiences and bookshops she frequented over the years, I journeyed back into my own childhood in Oman and how I acquired my books and satiated my voracious reading appetite. I read a lot and there were only so many outlets from where I could replenish the constantly diminishing stack of books I consumed. There being not much of a reading culture in Oman, there was only one local bookshop chain, Family Bookshop, where the limited range of books in the few branches gleamed shiny, new-smelling, and very expensive, as everything imported in Oman was. While I borrowed a huge number of books from our school library (one year, the librarian informed me, I was the student who had borrowed the highest number of books that year: 333, to be precise!), we also had the option of ordering books through publishers' catalogues such as a British children's imprint of Penguin, Puffin and an American children publishing house, Scholastic. The books arrived by sea-mail and took months to arrive and I almost forgot that I had ordered them until a huge box would turn up in our class room - and you remembered all those books, awaiting to be read. I would devour the books within hours of acquiring them before immediately re-reading them, a habit that still persists till this day with many of the books I read. They would finally be given a precious place of honor in my shrine of books, the book-shelf  - and indeed, many of the books I read as a child still remain in my bookshelves at my parents' home.

Other than that, I bought a lot of books at school fests or book sales or especially when we traveled to India or abroad, where I literally had to be pried away from the bookstores; for example, when I was thirteen and a cousin of mine took me to Borders bookshop in a suburban New Jersey mall, it took me a long time to delightedly comprehend that there was a store where you could sit down and read  books - and no one would be around to shake their head or ask you to stop reading. It was probably my most favorite store that I encountered during that trip.

What always pierced through me while browsing at the bookshops was the dizzying incredible realisation that there were so many books waiting to be read and I had gotten around to reading just a few. There is a scene in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy where the two protagonists, Lata and Kabir meet in a bookstore and Lata and Kabir's eye collide when Lata, who normally gravitates towards poetry, particularly Tennyson, is lost in the mysteries of mathematics; Seth particularly emphasizes her awe at the multiple continents of knowledge waiting to be discovered and explored. As I grow older, I have to admit that I have a disappointing habit of stubbornly remaining within my reading comfort zones; however, once I do venture out of them, I happily lose myself into a novel which delights in playing with toys of language or transplants me in a meticulously re-created historical era and ethos. A few years ago, when I was still living in Oman, a group of neighborhood ladies and I would meet for monthly book-club evenings, where we would bring our favorite books and exchange them with the others; given the paucity of bookshops in Oman, it was a god-send to discover authors and books that I would never have otherwise heard of.

I have to confess that it was not until recently when I was reading about the demise of some much-loved bookstores in Delhi that I realised I had both forgotten the act of browsing as well as the joy I derived from them, thanks to so much online book-shopping I now indulge in and which is my primary mode of purchasing books nowadays. When I lived in Pittsburgh and greedily ransacked the Carnegie Library every week to borrow books, I would still browse but didn't linger too much, always eager to rush home and start reading the books I had borrowed, knowing that I would have to return them soon. However, when I found myself in bookshops, knowing that I was going to actually invest in a book, knowing that it would be mine and which would decorate my shelves or bedside table for years to come, I would deliciously linger over the browsing, taking my time to leaf through the books. And so, when I had some time to myself weeks ago, I slipped into a bookstore and took my time walking around the store, pulling out a book or two, flipping through the pages, allowing an eloquently written passage to brand my memory. I had taken this luxury for granted, unknowing it was a luxury until it became one.

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!**

Jacaranda Journeys

Entwined

First of all, isn't jacaranda such a beautiful sounding name for an undoubtedly beautiful flowering tree? Actually, I have to be a little bit honest: I don't find the individual mauve jacaranda flower as lovely as glimpsing them collectively blooming upon the trees, the bloom-laden branches silhouetted against the clear sky or scattered en masse upon the grass below.

We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood dotted with lots of gardens, consisting of both large, sprawling and cosy, miniature ones; I discovered one such latter garden during a spontaneous afternoon stroll on a moody, cloudy, cool Delhi day. I had seen the jacaranda blooming there from the distance but I didn't realise it was more than one tree that was blooming; it was only when I explored the garden that day that I observed it was a triad of trees in various stages of bloom, one already having considerably leafed. Being the only jacaranda trees in my immediate vicinity, I was thoroughly enchanted to be caught in a quiet drizzle of jacaranda flowers as they joined the sea of flowers splashing the emerald green grass below.

Sea of Purple and Green

Ever since I have discovered that garden, it has become one of my little pleasures to stop by there during my morning walks and sit beneath these trees; it's invariably deserted when I arrive so I have the satisfaction of having the garden to myself, rendering it in my eyes a secret garden. Even if it's just for five minutes, I quietly sit on a flower-speckled stone bench below the jacaranda trees, glimpsing the flowers fluttering here and there in the air before gently coming to rest upon the ground. 

Radiating

I have lately been taking great pleasure in making flower-dot paintings and so while I was sitting below the tree one morning, I scooped up a few jacaranda flowers, deciding to abstract something out of them too. I had called it the 'Journey of the Jacaranda Flowers' on Instagram, the flowers migrating from the tree to my palm to my sketchbook. There is something so calming and indeed, meditative arranging these flowers upon the stark white desert of my sketchbook, making it bloom before inserting the bindis of dots (perhaps, you could say that I am inspired by Bharti Kher's bindi explorations to a certain extent). Once I have painted, photographed, and Instagrammed the painting, I leave it upon my desk and when I return the following day, I find that the flowers have become dessicated yet certainly not diminished in any which way beauties. And so completes the circle of spring.

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. 

Dubai Musings 1: Touching History

Old City Wall, Al Fahidi Historical District, Dubai

Do you know what it is like to touch history? Do you really think that you are touching history or just its cosmetic surface? Do you know that it is actually history? How do you know it is real and not just manufactured history? How do you know when history is history? When I touched what is the last remaining section of Dubai's Old City Wall, constructed in 1800 from gypsum and coral for defensive purposes, it didn't register, to be honest. I instead saw the wall as a conveniently interesting backdrop for a photo, rather than it being the subject of the photo. I focused upon the visual contrast of my silver jewelry, my ineptly applied mauve-pink nail-polish, and the textures of my hand-skin against the bumpy, chunky, ochre coral-studded surface. How do you distinguish between what is history and what is not? I once wanted to become a historian. Scratch that, I still have aspirations of becoming one. Yet, I think, I can't be much of one if I experience so much difficulty imagining what this place, what this space, what this wall must have looked like when its first inhabitants were once present there. I can only see its today, not yesterday. How can I be a historian if I can't imagine yesterdays? All I see is the present, an inescapable present, which clouds my vision and renders the yesterday and tomorrow superfluous, non-existent even. And wait – was I even supposed to touch this wall? But that's the thing. If you can't touch, all this is just thin winter air, a mirage, pretty much what Dubai is all about. Touching this wall makes it all real, even if faintly so.

*This short, stream of consciousness, staccato-toned vignette is the first part of my series about my recent visit to Dubai, word mosaics seeking to distill the essence of the picture accompanying the text

Musings for 2016

Nature's Gift on New Year's Day

Another sparkling new year is upon us; actually, to be perfectly precise, twelve days of a new year already upon us.

The year had just started when I started reading about many bloggers planning on resuscitating their virtually lifeless blogs and posting much more regularly, daily even. The blog, it seemed, was not dead, after all. I then thought of my blog, this aqua-blue-white space (the background being an oil-painting I made during an art class I took in Pittsburgh almost three years ago; I called it the Summer Storm) - and which I have neglected quite a bit in the last several months. I don't know if this blog is really me, anymore. I don't write like the way I used to five years ago. What preoccupied me then doesn't necessarily do so now. I find myself articulating a great deal through the medium of photography- and my nomad thoughts increasingly find a home in my Instagram account more than anywhere else. Perhaps, this blog can no longer encompass or reflect the scope of the journeys, literal and otherwise, I have taken in recent times.

When 2015 was drawing to a close, I was thinking of writing a swansong to the blog and mulling about starting another one. I sat down to write my annual 31st December journal entry, a ritual which I have maintained for many years now - and when I finished writing it, I found myself browsing through my previous 31 December entries in my present journal. It made me subseuqently think about all the journals I have kept since I was eight years old and my first journal was a blue paper-back book used to note down spellings of new, uncomfortable-sounding words. I haven't yet found the time or inclination to browse through all of those journals - but I like knowing that I can do so one day, to literally page through the ever-evolving novel that is my life and reflect upon its diverse, messy, rich, painful, happy, contemplative chapters. I would like to compare the differences between a 13 year old Priyanka's handwriting and that of her present one; I still want to read about the 6th grade gossip and what lessons 2015 endowed me with. These journals are those precious windows through which I can glimpse the nuanced transformation of my mindscapes over the years; these journals collectively represent the past, the most foreign country of them all which I can never go back to, whose language I cannot speak no matter how much I try.

Dada, Subodh Gupta (2014), National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi: Banyan Tree of Steel

        

This blog is ultimately a journal too, a public one, where I have never permitted my private thoughts entry. I read and follow many personal blogs where people ably and articulately arrange their innermost feelings but I will never be able to do that. For me, the blog is simply a nurturing, comforting, nourishing space. I like coming here to write. My first post in this blog described it as a virtual garden, that one public space which I have always greatly loved. The blog continues to be my garden. The seeds that I choose to plant here now have inevitably changed as have the color, texture, and fragrance of the blooms which spring up here. But the blog itself is a banyan tree which flamboyantly throws down its roots, whose glorious, messy, entangled beauty will become apparent only in the years to come. I remind myself that in order to access and appreciate that beauty, I must allow the blog to grow, no matter if it grows an inch one year or multiple roots in another.

So, I am still around - and shall try my best to be around more often. Let's see where this year takes me next. I do want to start a new blog though but more on that later.

For now, I would like to end with a quote I recently read in one of my favorite books, The Artist's Way: "In times of pain...I have learnt to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right." I have always encountered challenges in practicing mindfulness and being anchored in the moment. However, if and when I find myself being able to do so, I locate it in those temples of time when I am writing or creating or musing, when I literally lose myself in that alternate, parallel universe, in which the corporeal 'I' no longer exists and the creation itself is the living entity instead. This blog is one of them, those temples of mindfulness.

Hope 2016 is treating you tremendously well, dear readers...

Pinning Ancient and New Earrings: The Histories and Personal Stories of Objects

I have become a relentless pinner these days. I pin delectable recipes that I will never cook (ok, I lie, I have baked one version of a moist banana bread recipe I found there!) and fiercely calibrated outfits which I am never going to wear. I pin complex smoky eye tutorials although I still do not own a smoky-eye palette and DIY projects which I know are beyond the scope of my artistic and creative capabilities despite their helpful, hand-holdingly reassuring step by step photographs and instructions (it's a bit like seeing Nigella Lawson cook and no matter how much she charmingly conveys that her recipes are so easy-peasy to prepare, I feel that it's her culinary magic which is entirely responsible for transforming a mostly quotidian collection of ingredients into dishes that are midnight-fridge-raiding worthy and finger-lickingly good). But I nevertheless immensely enjoy it, this act of pinning. It's ultimately not so much about the pins as this admittance into a veritably magical, exciting visual universe, where you never quite know what gorgeous, strange planet or personality or plant you are going to discover. One day, I find this incredible installation artist recreating and freezing the sinuous curve of sea waves in glass. For some time, I virtually grew succulents after succulents in the little boxes on my moodboards. There are scores of hugely talented visual, design, jewelry, and book artists whom I am just learning about and from. I have even found a new preoccupation: collecting obscure words; did you know that I am a solivagant soul? And yesterday, I wrote a poem inspired by a wall-hanging called The Taste of Petrol and Porcelain.

Gold earrings, 2-3 BC,  Archaeology Museum, Istanbul

My method of pinning is a quick, efficient affair though; I usually immediately jump to another pin as soon as I have pinned one, not really choosing to linger. I don't know then what it was about these super-long, below the shoulder grazing gold earrings dating from 2-3 BC that made me pause longer than normal today. I suddenly and intuitively saw a woman with very long, very straight black hair wearing these earrings; in fact, I simply saw her wearing the earrings, I couldn't even see her face or any other features. She wore them during the day, her dress was snow-white and sleeveless. I wondered what occasion it was that warranted the donning of such gloriously extravagant, excessive jewelry; weren't her ears simply exhausted from cargoing all that weight around? The more I coaxed my imaginative faculties, the more vividly the scene came to life: the woman at a festival or a wedding or a celebration, the earrings reaching just below her bust-line, shearing through the crowds, the earrings simultaneously commanding attention yet discouraging too much intimacy, ordering a distance. I am in the middle of reading the massive tome, Memoirs of Cleopatra and perhaps the descriptions I have encountered there of her magnificent costumes and jewelry may have influenced my imaginings of this particular woman and her history. However, whatever the reasons, the earrings had firmly taken root in my mind. 

When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut and an archaeologist; apart from their spellings being coincidentally identically bookended, perhaps the two occupations were not so radically dissimilar. Becoming an astronaut necessitated you to explore the outer space, a vast, mysterious realm, which was still largely unknown, only beginning to become knowable, populated with planets, galaxies, and even extra-terrestial beings, both whose existence and finer details we were just starting to learn of and comprehend. As for archaeology, was the very distant past too not akin to outer-space? The stars we see in the sky are long dead, their twinkling only deceiving us into thinking that they still live; similarly, the still existing structures and objects that we encounter of those long extinguished civilisations remind us at once that they both flourished - and yet are no more. The earliest human civilisations are as tantalisingly mysterious as the furthermost edges of outer-space: there is only so much we can imagine after a certain point after all in absence of data and empirical information and tangible objects, literature, art, and language.

However, whenever I saw myself as an archaeologist during my childhood, I was at a site, surrounded by layers of soil, unearthing an object - and placing it against my ear and asking it to speak its story, as if it was a conch-shell telling me how the sea sounded when it pounded against the beach.** When I was ten years old, my family and I had visited the ancient city of Qalhat near Sur in Oman; we had stood in the dusk shadows of the domeless mausoleum of Bibi Maryam, thousands and thousands of ceramic pottery shards littering the stony ground around us. I recollected picking up one of the shards, the glaze still glossy and vivid - and trying, trying very hard to visualise it as an entire pot. I couldn't: I never have been particularly skilled at seeing the bigger picture. 

My preoccupation with intuiting, imagining, and coaxing stories from objects has remained till this date though. I see objects transcending mere functionality into becoming signifiers, signs, and Russian dolls of memories and stories. I am currently working on a short story collection which revolves around a chest of objects dispersed across the world from a haveli in Rajasthan, each object becoming an alternative story and narrating new ones in its new homes. I am still working on my personal text-photography project, Object Stories, where I assemble story-portraits from an individual's specific collection of much loved objects. And I delightedly chanced upon Aanchal Malhotra's project, Remnants of a Separation, in which she uses precious objects that were brought over during Partition as alternate mode of narrating the stories of that climatic historical event.

Minutes after I had pinned the ancient golden earrings, I saw these contemporary statement earrings in gold and cobalt blue. They made me think of similar ones I had received as a 22nd birthday present and which I decided to wear at a birthday dinner with close friends. In those days, I normally did not wear such conspicuously statement earrings; I preferred to over-dress my wrists or neck, rather than my fingers or ears (as I am inclined to do now) - and I hesitated before eventually putting them on, telling myself that it was my birthday dinner, after all, and I could surely cope with the attention the earrings would presumably attract. On the bus en route to the restaurant, I met an acquaintance from my college and as we made requisite small talk, I noticed him closely observing my earrings, making me feel self-conscious. "Nice earrings!" I still recall him saying as he got off at his stop. I don't think I ever wore those earrings again but they are still sitting somewhere in one of my jewelry boxes - and whenever I come across them, I am reminded of that birthday dinner many years ago.

Will someone find those earrings years later and wonder about their story? That's for future to contemplate and decide. For the present, though, I will continue to ponder about the woman who wore those ancient golden earrings, where, why, when...

 ** I highly recommend Kamila Shamsie's novel, A God In Every Stone, which recounts among st other stories the tale of a London archaeologist and so took me back to my childhood yearnings to be an archaeologist