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.

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

Making Notes From My New Desk

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

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

Here are the objects:

Yellow

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

Two Elephants

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

Explosion of a Sunset

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

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

My visual notes so far:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beneath a Starlit Sky: Thoughts on 'Highway' and Travelling in Rajasthan

Seeing the Light: a still from Highway

In an early scene of the recently released Hindi film, Highway (dir: Imtiaz Ali), we find its heroine, Heera (Alia Bhatt) stumbling across cracked earth beneath a star-studded sky. She is trying to escape her abductors, who ironically, have allowed her the freedom to attempt an escape. She is alone, petrified and stranded in an unfamiliar terrain.

Something powerful however happens beneath those starry skies and within the chamber of the desert's vast, unrelenting dark emptiness; Heera seems to experience an existential crisis of sorts in which it appears that she has absolutely no idea of her identity. Who is she? Why is she here? And what precisely is she escaping from? And more importantly, what is she escaping to? She eventually returns to her abductors, sobbing and barefooted having left behind her black ballet flats. The shoe analogy continues on in the movie, as we eventually see her in a different pair of shoes and - indeed, Heera appears to have shed her acquiescent personality and adopted another, embarking on a real and metaphorical journey, one that significantly could not have been possible had she still be donning her posh ballet flats. To further extend the shoe/costume analogy, as she transitions from one costume to another, she willingly sheds the garments of her former life for this new one. 

As I watched Heera run beneath the starry sky, I was reminded of a new moon night on a recent vacation in Florida. Given that so much excess light contaminates our urban night-skies, it was a veritable luxury to sit beneath such a clear celestial canopy. As we lay on the beach and examined the sky, using a phone app to identify the individual stars and planets, the sky was no longer just a mass of stars: it was a literal universe of stars with their attendant histories and identities. It struck me that while daylight inevitably conceals the stars, they are increasingly becoming invisible even during the night itself. One of my most vivid memories of that Florida vacation is the unadulterated clarity of the starlight and the pure silence of the sea at night. Thinking of the starried night sky in Highway, it made me revisit memories of my own Indian travels. Was I simply experiencing the outlines of the journey rather than being aware of and appreciating its specific details? 

As Heera contemplates the salt-encrusted earth in another one of the film's early scenes, she mentions that she did not know that she could journey to places as she is currently doing, so accustomed as she is to defining travel through a series of luxury hotels, restaurants, cars and tours. As viewers, we may not necessarily identify with the nature of the journey she embarks upon, both its interior and physical aspects and of course, the chilling circumstances leading to it – what her journey did compel me to do was to meditate on whether I have ever experienced the real India? 

As the film navigates the artery of roads in my home-state, Rajasthan, I remembered the countless road-trips I have taken in Rajasthan myself: yet, they were singularly focusing on one destination to another. I never stopped en route at villages: the huts, the people, and the animals simply flashed past me, as if I was scrolling through the busy homepage of a social media newsfeed. How much of the state and its character was I experiencing? What, indeed, was I experiencing of my country through my travels? 

Waiting for Rain: a still from Highway

The insularity of the comforting, almost soporific existence that Heera leads in Delhi implodes with the event of her abduction; she experiences life pared down to the simplicities such as the gorgeously shot scene in which she stands atop a damp desert dune moments before the clouds will rip apart and rain while her bemused abductors stand at the foot of the dune, obviously understanding her need to stop and reflect. As viewers watching the film, we are privy to being both, witnesses and participants, in Heera's growth; we travel with her through the land that she assumed was home and yet what she knows very little about. 

As a member of the diaspora, revisiting the homeland is always enmeshed in many issues: what are we returning to? This is a home, not the home; this is the home of our heritage but not necessarily the many other components that make us up. So, when we are visiting and travelling through the homeland, the issue primarily becomes as to what notion of home are we expecting to encounter: the ones that our parents and relatives have narrated to us through their stories and anecdotes? The images we see in books, magazines, and the internet? The ones that we significantly encounter in the great visual medium of movies?

I took this image in the courtyard outside one of my favorite Jain temples in Rajasthan just before dusk. Even though there is nothing decidedly pretty/post-card-y about this image, it best encapsulates the spirit of Rajasthan for me

Often, when in Rajasthan, I am unsure whether I wished to experience the Rajasthan that I had abstracted from my imagination, which in turn was inspired by all that I read and saw – or engage with the one that actually surrounded me, pretty at times but decidedly unglamorous and steeped in harsh realities on most occasions. 

Heera's route to discovering her country and herself in the process occurs when the trajectories of her life completely and dramatically veer away from the solidly established path she was walking upon. She literally steps upon the less beaten path, getting a glimpse into the many painful stories and realities that fill the lives of her fellow travelers. 

During my India visits, I often travelled on the AC coach in train-journeys; one distinctive feature of the coach was that the windows were yellow-hued, offering a sepia-tinted view of the vistas that flashed past: it was literally an exercise in nostalgia. 

When I next visit my homeland, I must make a conscious attempt to liberate myself of nostalgia and what my imagination demands and desires from me; I must see my country, my homeland, for what it is and relate to it as it is. It is time to shatter the tinted glass – and see what lies beyond it. 

Sometimes, it is not always necessary that you get a burst of inspiration and enlightenment in broad day-light; on some occasions, a sky full of stars can illuminate you a great deal more. 

*****

This piece originally appeared in India Currents 

Photo credits:

Highway stills: various internet sources

The Story of a Sketchbook

"Every moment has infinite potential. Every new moment contains for you possibilities that you can't possibly imagine. Every day is a blank page that you could fill in with the most beautiful drawings." 

John C Parkin

I have been keeping a journal since I was eight years old. I remember the first entry I wrote in that journal: it was about a Thursday morning walk exploring the nearby hill and consuming my mother's delicious home-made halwa for breakfast. When I was thirteen years old, I discovered Anne Frank's diary, which had a seminal influence upon the journals I kept afterwards in my middle and high-school years; whenever I re-read her diary (and which moves me more and more with each subsequent reading), I also bemusedly recall how I imitated the manner in which she wrote and described situations in my own diary entries without of course being fully aware or empathetic at the time of the hugely grave and devastating circumstances in which she was writing. 

A few years later, when I was studying Sylvia Plath's poetry in school, I read her journals whose raw, visceral quality then seared my thoughts much more intensely than her poems. Influenced by these diarists and others, I regularly journaled and so accumulated quite a collection of diaries growing up and in present day: most have faithfully transcribed my innermost thoughts and feelings while I have on occasion also kept a dream diary (yes, during my early teens, I thought my dreams were fascinating enough to merit a diary especially dedicated to recording them!), one probing philosophical and existential issues (I wrote that during my middle-school Buddhist phase;) and my writers' diaries, more of notebooks, really. 

I used to read about writers keeping notebooks stuffed with short story/novel plots, inspiring quotes and passages, amusing anecdotes, and observations and writing mentors also recommended that I develop the habit of writing in one too. I kept a couple but they remained largely empty, whether out of laziness or my inability to commit my imaginings to paper, preferring to store everything inside my head and later weave them into my writings. I began to scrap-book instead, literally pinning images cut out from magazines as visual references/influences. For past several years, though, I have diligently kept a daily diary which is more of a planner/to-do list but I do jot down interesting encounters/experiences in it too - and of course, the camera roll on my phone functions as a visual diary. However, I do occasionally reflect that it would have been helpful (to me at least!) to chart my growth as a writer and note down how and what exactly was igniting my creative consciousness over the years: books/writers, art/artists, social, political, and cultural issues.

A few weeks ago, though, I was in conversation with an artist friend about art and she then showed me her sketch-books containing quotes, sketches, and designs - and it was fascinating to get a glimpse into her artistic mindscape. I had previously seen other artists' sketchbooks, both online and in person - and it seemed like such a rich way of capturing the growth and evolution of one's thoughts and creative journey. My friend then generously gifted me one such sketchbook and I pondered what to do with it. It was one thing to admire a sketchbook but another thing altogether to furnish it with your artistic outpourings.

What would they be?

Yellow

She inscribed it with her distinctive art:

Inscribed Art

I have never been much of a sketcher and I kept on musing about how best to do justice to the book when an idea struck me; I could fill it up with both a combination of art and the colors/moods/influences currently shaping me. Apart from also adding favorite quotes or passages from books, I thought of sprinkling the pages with an impromptu colorful collage as well. 

Rainbow Dreams

Let's see what the future blank pages will yield...watch this space:)

Have you ever received a special gift which has particularly inspired you?

Photography Experiments: When Objects Meet Paper

Many years ago, when reading an interview with an Indian woman artist, I recall her saying that she was a magazine junkie and that the reason why she especially loved magazines was because of all that visual stimulation they provided - and which specifically nourished her visual soul. Upon reading her words, I realised that what she had articulated was exactly how I would have done so in regard to myself, explaining as to why I so particularly gravitated towards magazines and also helping me figure out that well, I was just a visual person;) Unlike the surfeit of visual options at our disposal these days in form of the internet and a smorgasbord-like array of online and print magazines, growing up in Oman, I could only access and rely on a limited selection of magazines for visual cues in cookery, fashion, interiors, and make-up, for example. I would spend hours at the magazine section in bookstores or stalls, swiftly browsing through multiple magazines even though a stern sign above explicitly discouraged from doing so. I remember being specially enthralled when I discovered bookstores during my late teenage years in which you could sit down and read as many magazines you wished to do so to your heart's content!

With passage of time, having both written for many magazines as well as having worked in one, my magazine mania persists although I have become much more sensitive to a magazine's design and visual elements, whether it's finding a page layout too cluttered or excess white space or jerky flow of text and images. However, in the end, I don't allow too many technicalities to dilute my enjoyment; after all, what ultimately really intrigues me and cements my affection for a magazine are the quality of  the visuals that leap off its pages - and in this context, fashion magazines and their infinitely varied fashion shoots have particularly been this magazine connoisseur's visual delight what with the crazy mashing and meshing of multiple layers and pairing of photography, styling, fashion, and stories.

Lately, though, I have started to think about 'intervening' in these magazine fashion shoots, questioning their permanence and whether or not you can alter them? After years of being a spectator, what would it be like to participate within these stories? I began exploring the notion of introducing what I called external interventions into the image - a piece of jewelry or even a bindi - and then, photographing it. How would that combination of photography, paper, and object subsequently appear?

Well, why don't you have a look below to find out?

The Power of a Bindi

As I was flipping through the February issue of In Style, I paused upon this image of Sarah Jessica Parker contemplatively studying this striking Gabriel Specter mural. My gaze lingering upon  the half-revealed eyes and the upside down rainbow, an idea struck me: I impulsively fished out a blingy orange bindi from my bindi stash and embellished the image with it to add further drama. As I had borrowed the magazine from the library, I wondered if I should let the bindi remain on the page? I wonder what a subsequent reader would make of it; would they be tempted to add embellishments of their own - or would they leave the image as it was, any library property being sacred? Belonging to that school of thought myself, I eventually removed the bindi...but I could not help thinking of the library books which I borrowed during my university days; I was always amused to encounter the notes/comments that readers would scribble in the margins - how subsequent readers would then respond or enlarge upon the points, the marginalia commentaries becoming yet another critical conversation in the text. Ah, the secret conversations of library books!

Purpleblueeyes

This image formed a part of a beauty editorial; the dramatically contoured cobalt eye make-up along with the matching nails made this iridiscent image a perfect backdrop for my silver and amethyst ring.

Desert Rose

There's nothing quite like the pleasure of soaking in the beauty of a rose bouquet in full bloom; however, I find it difficult to relinquish them even when they have begun shedding their petals and becoming wan, drooping versions of their formerly radiant selves. I find myself bidding farewell to them by preserving one of the roses within the pages of a heavy tome as a reminder of the blooms which once invested my home with such beauty and grace. This sepia-pink dried rose is from one such bunch I bought in June last year - and I thought it would be a whimsical and surreal idea to transplant it into a sinuously rippled monochrome desert.

Journeying into the World of Words

Autumn Poetry

I can't remember what it was like not to write. What I do distinctly remember are the first lines that captured my attention and drew me into the world of words: they described rivulets of water streaming across a parched desert. As I read the words, vividly visualising the shining water and the dry, cracked earth, I thought to myself: I want to write. Too. 

My first poem was published in a children's supplement of a Dubai-based newspaper, Khaleej Times when I was eight years old. I was living in Muscat, Oman and the newspaper used to be delivered a day after its publication to our home. As we scooped up the newspaper and took out the children's magazine from its folds, I can still clearly recollect my little brother and parents' excitement on seeing my name in print for the first time. The title of the poem was quite simply My Little Pie. 

While other children participated in soccer tournaments, played in the band, or acted in theater productions, I wrote. My mother has still meticulously and lovingly preserved all the lined pads and notebooks in which I furiously wrote poems, mock-interviews, stories stylistically similar to my current favorite author (Ann M Martin of Baby Sitters Club and Judy Blume, for example), and journaled. My father would gift me yearly diaries that he did not happen to use and I in turn would fill up the pages with philosophical notes on whatever intrigued or puzzled or bewildered me. When I was in the sixth grade and studying Buddhism, I became so deeply drawn towards the religion that I must have written countless poems about karma and suffering and whatnot. Yes, sixth grade, folks!

Two of my books: Silent Moments and Into My Own World

By the time I turned thirteen years old, one of my mother's relatives and a poet himself, suggested that I get the poems published given the huge number I had already written; in fact, I had such a huge bank of poetry that I eventually ended up publishing two more poetry books in 11th and 12th grade respectively. As an extremely reserved child, for me, poetry was an outlet which enabled me to record, comment, commiserate, and express myself in a way that I otherwise would not have been able to. While many of the poems were entirely based on visual observations, quite a few of them also delved into my interior feelings growing up as a teenager. Now, when I look back on them, they also help reflect those junctures of my life in which I was passionate about the environment or Buddhism or even Bollywood. Perhaps, if blogging had been around when I was growing up, I would have blogged. Back then, though, what I could not verbalise otherwise I would do so through the medium of my poetry. 

However, a funny thing happened when I started university and began studying creative writing. One of our first tutorials was about writing poetry and also, what exactly was a poem and how a poem could be so much more than just a string of lines arranged upon a page. However when it came to my first assignment, I was in severe panic mode: there was just a day left before the deadline and I still hadn't come up with anything radical. One sleepless night later, when I woke up and absently glanced out of my window, I observed that the ground was strewn with fallen fall leaves – and I suddenly thought of the Bollywood film, Mohabbatein (2000) in which Shah Rukh Khan urges his students to pen their feelings upon...fall leaves. (Chalk up to SRK for inspiration!) I ran outside, picked up several leaves, scribbled down drafts of a self-conscious ode of being an autumn leaf, carefully inked it on my chosen leaf, and sealed it in a sandwich bag – and ran to the department just in time to meet the deadline. Yet, this was the first and last time I experimented with the structure of poem; afterward, I became so hooked into writing fiction that I entirely gave myself to short stories and it has been a long time now since I have written a single poem. 

Yet, I still write: I cannot imagine a life without writing and it will always remain my raison d'etre, the reason to be...it is still the first and most interesting way I make of my world (photography is increasingly come a close second though!) There is still nothing like experiencing the joy of assembling words together to re-create an experience or conjure up a character from thin air, as one is using individual ingredients to cook or bake an incredible dish. Whether I seek to reproduce an interviewee's thoughts or blog about an amazing holiday, writing is my bridge to the world – and it was my venture into poetry which taught me to do that. Will I ever write poetry again? Never say never!

**

This piece was originally published in Brown Girl magazine here

Essay in Jaggery journal: Finding Home in Madonna Inn

Lighted Up, Madonna Inn

It happens sometimes: I enter a space and find myself instantaneously transported to past selves and worlds. It had been an idyllic January day; my husband and I had spent the entire morning and afternoon cruising down the Pacific Coastal Highway, which offered wholesome views wherever and whenever we looked. My camera slideshow revealed one postcard-perfect picture after another: foam-flecked jade seas; ancient, regal cypress trees; cerulean blue skies; and finally, an icy, fiery sunset at a beach where a family of elephant seals had congregated to celebrate the day’s conclusion. Newly married and having moved to the United States just a month ago, I was still dealing with the residue of cultural jetlag; this holiday was a perfect break. 

As we sped through the darkness en route to Santa Barbara, I marveled aloud at the visual treasures the day had offered us. In search of a caffeine and sugar fix, we stopped at Madonna Inn, having heard much about its quirky interiors and rooms. As we walked across the parking lot, I could still smell the sea in my hair and hear the wind swirling around me as if I was inside a conch shell. However, as soon as I stepped inside the hotel, the day’s postcards vanished from my mind. Surrounded by hot pink walls, ornate gold mirrors, massive chandeliers, and rainbow grapes, I found myself in a much-frequented haunt of my childhood: the interior of an eighties/nineties Hindi film.

 In an essay entitled “Home Stretch” in Elle magazine (June 2013), Courtney Hodell pertinently writes about the significance of a house/home in her life: “a house and its objects are a cup to contain our liquid, uncertain selves.” The objects that adorn our coffee tables and the art that hangs on our walls collectively contribute to transforming our spaces. They are unique to our personalities—spatial fingerprints. We perform many selves, donning different personalities for different people and occasions. The interiors of our homes are the theaters for these performances, and we rely on props in form of books, paintings, and knick-knacks to present this gamut of protean selves.

 My fascination with these performative spaces began during childhood, growing up in the Persian Gulf during the late eighties and early nineties. My family subscribed to a daily Dubai-based newspaper, Khaleej Times; it came a day late across the border, and my brother and I used to fight over who would read its children’s magazine, Young Times, first. They also published a weekend magazine, which came out on Fridays and was simply called Weekend, featuring a motley assortment of syndicated articles from British women’s magazines, columns chronicling the Dubai social scene, and ghost stories. I spent many hours poring over the sections on home interiors, for both their visual appeal and the stories of those who inhabited these spaces.

These columns usually featured homes deemed outstanding in terms of layout, design, and decor/styling in United Arab Emirates, usually belonging to expatriate residents. I studied the photographs and read about how the owners assembled the variegated objects and paintings and furniture to create their homes, which often appeared to be portmanteau versions of those they had left behind. I wondered if our home would ever be featured in that column. Which stories would our rooms perform through their accessories—my mother’s Rajasthani miniature paintings, framed vintage family photographs, sculptures of Hindu deities, Czech crystal bon-bons? I closely inspected how people chose to dress up their homes. I created portraits of their lives from the contents of their rooms, inventorying all the journeys they took before coming and setting up their homes there. 

The houses I visited generally bore a trademark Persian Gulf look: brocade upholstered sofas, Arabian carpets, plenty of crystal and glass, gold accents. They tended toward excess and lavishness, the extent of which varied depending on personal tastes and inclinations. These homes were my address for familiarity, just as the homes depicted in the eighties/nineties Hindi films we watched were immediately familiar as well, despite my distance from India. The Hindi films claimed citizenship in the country of Kitsch: sprawling bungalows, mismatched furniture, carpets, wallpaper, paintings, and faux metal knick-knacks. The sets did not aspire to authentic representation; rather, the goal was to create a fantastical, escapist reality, far removed from the mundaneness of ordinary lives. The more I reflected upon it, was it not a similar case with the homes I encountered in the Middle East? The rooms emulated Bollywood as an ode to the homeland, while the décor, the ambience, and general visual appearance were carefully cultivated and curated to reflect an aspirational Middle Eastern lifestyle. These houses were ornate and grand, an interesting coexistence of nostalgic narratives of home and interpretations of the current life away from home. The constructed excess of both the homes in films and the ones in which we watched them contributed to and, indeed, constituted my understanding of interior design at that time. 

Hindi films from the nineties arguably did not distinguish themselves in most aspects of filmmaking, and aesthetics and design were certainly no exception. Anyone who has watched Bollywood film from that era can testify that detailed attention to art direction was a great rarity, barring a few exceptions, such as Yash Chopra’s Lamhe (1991). In that decade, set design was, more often than not, incidental to the narrative, a mere backdrop. It was not until Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) that Karan Johar, the auteur of aesthetics, fine-tuned art direction. His singular attention to visual elements in his filmmaking made design as much a matter of priority as the appearance of Kareena Kapoor or Kajol. Later films follow this trend: in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002), critics observe that the director consciously constructed operatic backdrops in consonance with the film’s high-octave notes. In an interview with leading Indian women’s magazine Femina (July 2002), the film’s costume designer Neeta Lulla revealed how she meticulously calibrated the color palette of Aishwarya Rai’s saris so that it would mesh with the film’s vividly colored sets. 

As Hindi films increasingly subscribe to the grammar of authenticity and/or conscious kitschiness in productions such as Dabangg (2010) or Himmatwala (2013), Hindi television programming seems to have assumed the baton of theatrics instead. In recent years, Hindi-language television producers have spent significant amounts of money on recreating rural Rajasthan, urban Gujarat, and miniature villages. Often, while watching shows such as Gulaal or Balika Vadhu, I wonder what it would be like to wander the sets of these shows. Each sought to recreate so accurate a cultural milieu that it was impossible to distinguish the ersatz from the authentic. 

Can watching these television shows and films assuage feelings of homesickness? Do new immigrants adorn their surroundings with as many reminders of home as possible, creating a shrine of nostalgia and yearning? When I first left home and moved to the United Kingdom for my undergraduate studies, one of the first things I did was drape a lime green and maroon embroidered Kashmiri shawl upon the chair of my bare, matchbox-sized room. The shawl had belonged to my mother when she traveled from India to Australia many years ago to pursue her graduate studies, and now it injected the room with color, my mother, and home. 

When I was growing up, I engaged with India through the sense of home created from Hindi films. Sitting in my living room in Oman, I conjured up notions of how my homeland and its people looked by peeking into the sets of their living rooms and bedrooms. Though I visited India annually, the first days back always seemed tinged with a cinematic unreality, as if I was no longer a spectator and had stepped inside a film. As my body adapted to the change in time zones, I felt my mind reconciling to the truth that we were in the depths of real India, not the manufactured one in the films I had been accessing all this time. 

The Internet revolution has brought us closer to one another than ever. The same nostalgia is perhaps no longer applicable since I can Skype with my loved ones every day. If I am homesick for the sights and sounds of my country, I experience it through audio-visual clips; if I am hungry for comfort food, the Indian grocery store is just around the corner. The homeland is no longer so remote. Perhaps only now can our homes be tabula rasas, liberated from becoming shrines to the past. 

As I walked around Madonna Inn, I intuitively viewed it through the prism of the familiar. It was maximalism, theatrics, and kitsch; it could easily have been a bungalow uprooted from a Hindi film or the Gulf and transplanted to California. I had not expected to return home in this hotel thousands of miles away. For that brief moment, I had fallen, Alice-like, through a black hole and tumbled into a fantastical, yet familiar, land. 

**

This essay was originally published in Jaggery Issue 2

The Season of Kites: A Kite Falling

Flying High

Often, while writing at my desk, my eyes straying towards my six month old kite painting sitting there, I have begun to sense that it has been waiting to speak to me for some time. The painting itself is quite simple: a cut, stringless fuschia-bodied and yellow and turquoise ear and tailed kite flying/suspended in a monotone blue sky above a tree-top full of paper pieces of kite. I didn't paint the kite; I instead glued a miniature paper kite from a bagful that I bought from a stall in New Delhi onto the canvas. The pieces of kite in the tree too are from one half of another paper-kite that I mutilated in order to adorn my painting. I cannot recall what it is that I did with the other half: it presumably sits alongside the other intact paper kites, marooned and wingless. I call the tree in my painting kite tree.

 Late last January, while visiting Jaipur for a literature festival, I used to see these kite-studded trees wherever I went. I recognized the kite remnants as leftovers from the mid-January festival of Basant when Jaipur ritually climbed up to the flat-topped house roofs and participated in kite-flying contests. Those kite-trees still retained that spirit of festivity and celebration and seemed unwilling to relinquish this unseasonal cargo of theirs, this blossoming of mutated rainbow-hued flowers. These kite-trees figure amongst my most memorable memories of that particular January in Jaipur: translucent blue glass morning skies, melted butter sunlight, and those happy, fecund trees.

It was sometime ago when I came across an article referring to the kite-eating trees in the comic strip, Peanuts; those trees sounded carnivorous, a pirhana-like sounding avatar of the scarlet-faced Venus flytrap. My Jaipur kite-trees and the one in my painting were not hungry: they rather accepted the kite fragments into their fold with outstretched arms, as that of a mother, affectionately feeding the kites' illusion that they were still aloft. It was akin to snowflakes starring a black coat, allowed to briefly retain their original and inherent individuality, rather than falling and congealing into the faceless floor of snow. You would not demote beauty into detritus by mistaking those snowflakes for dandruff; how could you then mutilate maternity into Medea by conflating those kite-fragments as objects of consumption?

 I am focusing on the tree although I know that it is the kite in the painting which seeks to say something to me. Let us train our gaze towards it. My kite appears an Icarus, his feather and wax wings silhouetted against the sun, supremely confident in this moment of aerial triumph. And yet, if you peer more closely, my kite is not as much airborne as it is falling and in possession of the knowledge that it will ultimately bypass the cushioned security of the tree. My kite is falling. My painting is a photograph of a kite falling. And I am sitting here and watching it fall, unable to do anything. 

 When kites fall in my part of India, telephone, electricity and barbed wires often disrupt their descent to earth; it is common to see kites ensnared in knots of wires, gradually turning into shish-kebabs of fried paper and wood over time. Otherwise, they fall flat on their faces and are instantly submerged in anonymity, becoming as non-descript as the nearby discarded wastepaper. At their luckiest, the kites will glide down onto lawns of house gardens; their prospective owners, the neighborhood boys will then cluster around the main entrance gate, unguently calling out to whomever they see to fetch the kites; sometimes, people of the house oblige, sometimes, they don't. The boys immediately squabble if and when the kite comes into their possession, fiercely arguing over who is legitimately entitled to acquiring this prized trophy of a furiously fought sky-duel.

Spot the Kite

I saw a kite fall this July. I was standing outside in my uncle's garden, contemplating whether to write in my journal or finish reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The air was sepia-colored, the clouds melted burnished brass, and the atmosphere thrummed with the kind of anticipation akin to that before a theatre performance. I finally sat down on a three-decade old viridian green metal bench, having abandoned both the book and journal for gazing hypnotically up into the blanched pink evening sky. There were kites too in the air: black rhombuses hovering parallel to each other, their strings pencil lines across the firmament. A baby cried; the music store next to the bakery across the road was playing a popular Hindi film song from four summers ago, instantly transplanting me to a similar evening then, redolent of the familiar odor of unwatered dust, growth, and the charged, electric finale to a deadening, hot, dull day. It was as if today had never existed and yesterday was static. I found myself holding my breath, afraid that if I exhaled I would never recover what I had just so serendipitously discovered. 

The dog heard it fall before I did. It started barking and bulleted from the house and onto the white marble verandah. The baby had stopped crying and I saw that a kite had fallen amid the stumps of the recently amputated lime tree. In the diminishing dusk light, the kite was pale-colored and sickly and I instinctively knew that no one would come to fetch and fight for it. It was destined to remain in that armless embrace until the sun and monsoon rain bleached and sheared it away into becoming a skeleton once more, returning it into the form from which it had originally grown. It had fallen and how: an ignominous descent for it remained in the limbo of falling and yet not having actually parachuted to the ground. It was a kite ghost: never to be trampled to mutilation, never to be worshipped as a trophy, and never to glamorously electrocute itself in dramatic pyrotechnics on electric cables. I wished then I could say that it was a beautiful sight, the fallen kite and the newly-turned kite tree. I could not, though, no matter how much I tried to photoshop tragedy: the kite was now merely a flat diamond shaped piece of paper and the tree, reduced and atrophied.

 I think I am beginning to understand what the kite in my painting is speaking about to me and why. It is asking me where it is falling. You are just part of a painting though, I should respond, there are no brackets to your story; the painting is the story in itself and like every other spectator, I too wonder where the kite is falling. This is the way I should respond. But I cannot. What is the use of starting to narrate a story that you cannot complete? Does not the story-teller have the right to know the ending of his story considering he is its very first audience? I am the story-teller in this case and I must find out where the kite falls. Unlike Daedalus, I could not warn the kite of the dangers inherent in the pleasure of flight; unlike Daedalus, though, I can surely narrate it the story of its fall. 

***

Note:

Come January and I reflect upon the many wonderful winter trips I have taken to Rajasthan during this month in the past. What with the festival of Makar Sankranti coming up, which marks the arrival of spring and witnesses many an iridescent kite dotting the sky then in Rajasthan and Gujarat, for example, I was reminded of this piece which I wrote several years ago. It was interesting to revisit it, both in terms of nostalgia as well as the writer that I was and the literary and stylistic sensibilities influencing me then.

P.S I unfortunately do not have a picture of the painting I write about in the essay. I still have these paper-kites though and some of which I have used to adorn my home, which I have depicted in this post. However, what to do with the remaining kites? Perhaps, it is time for another painting.

This essay originally appeared in Blood Lotus literary journal's Issue 8, March 2008; read it here

Installation Lives

Reading this article made me recall my first encounter with installation art in the Delhi-based artists' centre that I visited several years ago - and how my fascination has endured since then...

Fallen leaves...

I arrived there at 7am on a warm April morning; the scorching Delhi summer heat was yet to make itself felt although majority of the trees in the garden-museum complex were in various stages of leaf-fall, their branches sorely depleted of leaves. I was experiencing a curious confluence of autumn and winter in what was otherwise spring!

Perhaps, notes about the trees that I jotted down in a journal that I kept during my time there will more accurately capture the atmosphere then:

"[Here] the various types of trees baking their leaves and then, dropping them on the porcelain-like cracked earth, making the place appear like one giant kind of installation art. I have never been to a place before where even falling leaves from a tree can be a work of art. I can even see leaves falling! If I try hard enough, I can even hear them fall. 

Trees shorn of leaves look so severe, classical, streamlined in nature (pun intended!); new leaves really do soften them, like a person whose make-up has just recently been washed and cleansed away."

Wish Tree - Installation Art

In midst of the sea of denuded trees, I did not notice that particular tree until much later in the day though; during the evening of my first day, after I had had unpacked and made myself home in my quaint little studio, I took a walk around the place, exploring my surroundings. One of the first trees - or rather, works of art - that I stumbled across was this wish tree although I did not pay it more attention then. I entirely assumed that it was present in the garden-museum complex in the same capacity as that of a little shrine on the premises and that it held similar ritualistic significance; the presence of the gold and silver-leaf covered stone with a goddess' piercing eyes painted upon it [as commonly found in goddess' temples and shrines] further contributed to the effect. It was only much later that a fellow artist told me that a resident British artist had created this tree as a piece of installation art and gifted it to the centre (if my memory serves correct). But I did not know then that it was a work of art; as it happened, I briefly folded my hands and inspected it for a short while before finding myself drawn towards the other art works dotting the place.

However, after having learnt that it was in fact 'art', rather than an actual 'wish tree', I was nevertheless surprised to find flower offerings placed in close proximity to the tree; someone had chosen to accord the tree a reverential status and the boundaries had blurred to such an extent that I myself could not help but treat that space as a sacred one. The tree was no longer performing as a wish tree; it had in fact become a wish, or sacred, tree.

There is a strong sense of theatricality to such installation art pieces; they are telling stories while simultaneously and dramatically transforming the environment in which they are placed. In other words, the space which installation art pieces inhabit become theatres and the art pieces performers; if you, the spectator, were to step inside that space, you too would be a performer, participating in the narrative, becoming a part of that art-work. The art-work and the spectator/participant share an inter-dependent relationship as in the contours of their relationship ultimately motivate how the narrative moves ahead - and the art work is perceived. For me, it is almost  excitingly akin to being part of a film - and yet, you are the one motivating your performance because you are deciding which part to play and what narrative you choose to fit yourself into.

I was in such awe when I discovered this review of multi-media installation artist, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's show, The House of Books Has No Windows; these were intricately, meticulously, and fabulously constructed examples of installation art, deriving inspiration from varied sources such as cinema, music, and even Kafka. For me, this art was not necessarily something that I would want to engage with on a daily basis; rather, the experience would be all about witnessing bold, extravagant story-telling through exaggerated performance art, momentarily suspending me in an alternate reality. I would take away a chapter of that story with me, having left the exhibition; I would leave behind a piece of me embedded inside that story. We would both shape each other over the time...

******

Over the years, I realised that I too have been narrating stories albeit through different media: poetry, short stories, and image-text pieces. I have articulated stories through articles; I have presented stories in form of blog-posts and photo-essays. I would shortly like to embark upon a novel.

Yet, what compels me now is the possibility of merging the written word with such examples of installation art; I would find it thoroughly exciting to embark upon a project in which the text merges with multi-media to create a stunningly narrated story.

And now, I turn to you, dear readers: if you are so inclined and have been working in similar projects, would you be interested in a collaboration art-work? If you do...drop me a line and I would love to hear from you. It would be wonderful to give birth to innovative new art forms through the medium of this blog!

Stone Poetry: Jiyuseki's Stone Sculptures

I am a collector of sorts: I pick up newly fallen leaves and make them book-marks, I collect feathers (peacock, Indian roller-wing, sea-gull, and pigeon), finding them homes in clay bowls or once again, books. Sometimes, I collect anything that catches my fancy. For many years, I kept in my possession a tender green pine-cone I found nestled at the foot of a pine-tree in a Rhine-side German town when I was eleven years old. It constantly shuttled from one surface to another in my room and I reluctantly threw it away only when I was going to university and had to prune my life of all those extraneous possessions that I had accumulated so far.

When I was little, though, I collected shells...and rocks. Oman's incredibly rich geological heritage meant that I only had to walk some distance from my home and find a huge array of different kind of rocks awaiting me. I possessed such a mania for rock collecting that I would return home with my loot of the day and write up detailed reports with accompanying meticulously water-colored sketches and drawings (yeah, I was a geek:) If blogging had existed then, I would have surely begun a blog to document my rock discoveries! Having exhausted text-books and library books about rocks in those pre-internet days and wishing to move beyond the igneous/sedimentary/metamorphic paradigm, I even sought out geological experts to show my reports and learn more; bless their souls, instead of dismissing me, they provided me books which were infinitely more sophisticated and technical in their breadth and scope of geological knowledge. I probably understood and absorbed little but I was fascinated to the point that I was even seriously contemplating becoming a geologist when I grew up.

And so I grew up...yet, that carefully maintained pile of rocks in my backyard eventually diminished before entirely disappearing altogether. While I still do occasionally collect shells, I cannot think of the last time I embarked upon a rock-hunting expedition or brought a rock home.

Handbag

Yet, when I stumbled upon these incredible stone sculptures wrought by Japanese artist, Jiyuseki, I could not help hearkening back to those childhood days in which I found myself interpreting my surroundings through the language of stone. Jiyuseki's works reminded me of the reasons as to why I gravitated towards rocks: they were undeniably solid and impenetrable, and therefore, seemingly forbidding...yet, they were also simultaneously so beautiful through their colors, patterns, and textures. Furthermore, akin to a tropical fruit which may look non-descript on the outside, an otherwise dull-appearing rock would reveal gorgeous interiors within upon slicing through it. 

Popsicle

Mining the language of stone to the fullest, these works are examples of stone poetry indeed. I love the fact that these sculptures celebrate the sheer solidity of the stone form...and yet, also transform it into something friendly, fluid and open to interpretation; it is reminscent of the manner in which wind, sunlight, water, and other chemical processes collectively combine to carve rock surroundings into natural sculptures, reminding us that rocks are not so indomitable, after all. 

Bread Roll

It has been a delight to discover these stone sculptures, jogging my memory cells of a childhood mania that I had almost forgotten about. These sculptures are also something that I can  imagine adorning my work-desk, keeping me company while I write or muse or contemplate; they would be objects of beauty, inviting admiration, function, paper-weighting my clutter, and curiosity, eliciting attention.

All images courtesy Jiyuseki