Photo-essay: Flower Memories and the Language of Fallen Petals

Rain-washed

It is spring in Delhi. I see a tree top feathered with pink flowers from my window; the other day, a rain-storm neatly plucked the flowers from the tree and scattered them all across the street. When I picked up one of them, I observed that the pink petals were actually more lilac-hued; one petal was covered with warm violet markings, as if a child had absently decided to wrought Magic Marker art upon it. 

Red

 Another tree outside my apartment has sprouted fat, flamboyant orange and red flowers; I see crows snacking upon its buds in the mornings. These trees are the tallest and most majestic of them all; they also happened to be the first to begin blooming. In fact, I first saw their flowers fallen on the green grass, rather than on the branches. Afterward, the earth below those trees would become so densely carpeted with the blood-red flowers that it was almost as if a flower massacre had taken place. 

Pittsburgh 

I have to admit that I only became so interested in the business of blooming trees after I moved to Pittsburgh from Oman two winters ago. There's something about being transplanted in a new country which compels you to be minutely aware of both its cultural and physical ecosystems: in case of the latter, its landscape, flora and fauna, and the visible, tangible transition of seasons. As I began to adapt to my new home, the trees outside my apartment balcony were my personal markers of the changing seasons; I first saw them winter-bare and snow-adorned before budding and eventually bearing leaves, flower, and fruit. 

Magnolia-Stars

The other day, a Pittsburgh friend wrote to me, mentioning it was a lovely spring morning. I could easily conjure up the scene: the air's promising, scented warmth, the tulips poking their heads through the soil, unmelting snowflakes of cherry blossom limning branches -- and a magnolia-filled tree blooming in a churchyard. Before coming to the States, I had rarely seen magnolias; I made it a point to find out their name upon discovering this beautiful bloom. I wanted to populate the landscape I now called home with familiar faces, rather than faceless ones -- and that included the foliage which grew and bloomed around me. 

Boston 

Watching the pink-lilac flower tree, I find myself thinking of the magnolias I glimpsed in Boston one spring afternoon last year. I was eager to visit the city where so many beginnings and histories nested, in the country to which I would shortly be bidding adieu. I took the T to downtown one afternoon. In addition to experiencing the city's elegant, history-drenched prettiness, I also yearned to see the sea, which I terribly missed in Pittsburgh after years of having lived in a sea-country, Oman.

 I examined a map-imprinted signboard on the top of Beacon Hill and figured out the direction I would need to walk in order to meet the sea. However, although I proud of my map sense, that day I failed to realize that I was heading away from the sea and towards the river instead. I was completely unaware walking past the stately, beautifully proportioned homes, richly anticipating the sea with each step. 

After a while, I paused and gazed into the distance; the street appeared seemingly endless while the sea was nowhere in sight. I asked a passerby for directions. "You are by the river," he said kindly. "You are a long way from the sea." 

Lost & Found 

I eventually found myself on the river bank, unable to summon up the energy to walk all the way back to the sea. I sat on a stone bench beneath a kind weeping tree and watched the sunbeams dance on the river surface. I took out a book of Marquez short stories that I had brought along with me; I stopped reading after only a few paragraphs and examined the stone-colored waters lapping the bank’s edges.

I was lost. Yet, I knew it was much more than just losing my physical bearings; I felt a strong sense of displacement, as if I had fallen off a grid and did not know how to put myself back in or -- where. I began to wonder if the feeling had to do with the truth that I had been playing dodge-ball with all this time: I would eventually find myself in yet another new country, a country which was officially my home but felt nothing like it. I had endlessly discussed the transition with my husband, family, friends...I had even written about it, thinking words would be the best ships with which to navigate the sea of confusion and fear churning inside my head. This afternoon, though, as I watched the river slowly inch its way towards the sea, it was as if I clearly saw the move and its solid implications for the first time, rather than the abstractions I had been drowning in all this time. 

Sunshine of Magnolias

I started walking back to the T -- and it was then I encountered the avenue of magnolia trees in full, thick, unbearably beautiful bloom. It was as if I had stumbled upon a river of magnolia blossom: creamy pink, pale yellow, almost white, almost red. Petals constantly drizzled down upon the brick ground. They were entirely another entity altogether up on the trees; here, scattered, broken, they formed the hieroglyphics of an arcane nature language. I did not attempt to translate. I simply soaked in their beauty, consoled in a way that only nature was capable of doing. 

Flower Memory I

When I stood up, a fat butter-yellow petal detached itself it from a branch, whirling around in sunshine before resting on my shoulder-blade. I opened the Marquez and placed the petal upon a bed of words. Many days later, when I opened the book, the petal was tea-brown -- but in my eyes, it remained freshly yellow, a postcard from a day when flowers had gifted me with respite and hope amidst a sea of lost-ness. 

Delhi 

I have been living in Delhi for almost five months now. I am only just beginning to understand its languages; some days, I speak it somewhat fluently, even enjoying doing so. Some days, it metamorphoses into Greek, and I long for the comfort of familiar tongues. I wake up feeling homesick, not knowing if it is the seas of Oman that I yearn for or Pittsburgh's summer-green woods. 

However, once again, as in America, I find myself watching the trees outside my apartment. I learn that the fat red flowers belong to the silk cotton tree and the pink-lilac one is kachnar, a type of an orchid. I become familiar with their blooms, watching them fall in the air before eventually gracing the ground with their presence. 

No matter where I journey, despite the multiple lands I may call home in my lifetime and all the different languages and landscapes I must learn to speak and inhabit -- nature and its quiet rhythms will always be teacher, guide, and friend. 

Flower Memories II

 The fallen flower that I find goes inside a book too -- and it will also become a memory of my new home, just like the magnolia petal from Boston represented a home from my yesterday. We carry the chapters of homes and the passages in between as flower memories inside the books of our lives.

**

This photo-essay originally appeared in The Aerogram here

Fabric Stories: The Tales that our Clothes Narrate

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

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

Patriotic Lehengha

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

Museum of Omani Dress

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

Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni's novel, Sister of My Heart

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

**

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

Essay: Homesick in the Homeland

Yellowing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would it ever feel like home? I asked myself.

Nature's Child: Street-art in Shahpur Jat

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

Shahpur Jat streets

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

An Oman-looking building

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

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

**

This essay originally appeared here in India Currents

What Do I Call Home?

Goodbye, America: Pittsburgh

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

Azure Waters: Mackinac Island, Michigan

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

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

Path to Serenity: A Trail in a Pittsburgh park

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

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

**

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

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