Decoding The Poetry of Dreams

This week, I had two dream-related conversations on Twitter and Instagram, which led me to thinking more closely about dreams, dreaming, and my relationship with them. I have always dreamed vividly, intensely, often a series of dreams, one brilliant movie-vignette after another so much so that I wake up with a million images in my mind.

When I was growing up, I observed that while my father and I had vivid, detailed, technicolor dreams, my mother and brother on the other hand said that they never dreamed -  and even on the rare occasions that they did, the dream was certainly significant enough to warrant them remembering it. I wondered if it was rather a case of not being to recall dreams rather than not dreaming at all. Dreaming occurs during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) part of our sleep and it is interestingly enough similar to a state of wakefulness; in fact, it is considered to be a vital part of our sleep cycle so for those who saying that they never dream, it may well just be not remembering them.

 I certainly remembered all my dreams and would share them soon after I woke up in a bid to hold onto them; if I couldn't share them, I would write them down at the back of my personal journal, paragraphs after paragraphs of individual dreams. When I was in sixth grade, I obviously felt the volume of my dreams was demanding enough to require a separate journal. (I was an intense sixth grader: I remember asking my mother if I could convert to Buddhism after studying it in social studies and writing long impassioned poems about karma and fate!). I recall selecting a notebook with an adorable picture of kittens on the cover and filling it with dreams after dreams in pink, turquoise, and jade-colored ink. I stopped keeping the journal after a while but continued transcribing my dreams in my journals. Even now, after so many years, I still recall one of the most beautiful dreams I have had till date: I am standing on a beach, looking out on the sea at night only to see a full moon rise in the sky, scattering its pearl-white beams upon the water and the boats lying nearby. The sky is a deep soft blue mauve and

When I grew older, I was no longer interested in merely transcribing my dreams; I was interested in analysing them as to what they were trying to tell me. I understand that many scientists do feel that there is no meaning to dreams but I still stubbornly believed that dreams were a gateway to my subconscious, that unexplored, uncharted terrain, which saw and understood the bigger picture of things. Why was I constantly fighting with a girl who looked like me in a yellow dress? Why did I frequently find myself unable to run? I would consult a book of dream symbols and then later trawl through the myriad dream interpretation sites online to understand what my dreams could be telling me about myself. Was the fight an internal battle within myelf? Did the inability to run represent a lack of self confidence?

There is a diversity of modern scholarship and research done into the world of dreams along with the age-old Freudian and Jungian schools of dream interpretation.It is widely agreed upon that dreams are definitely important for one's emotional health (again, even if you do not recall dreams, it is assumed that your mind still dreams). What I have understood is that it is the mind's way of processing the vast amount of information it gathers from various stimuli throughout the day. I have often found it bizarre and amusing as to how I will find myself encountering persons or places that I have not thought of for months or years and suddenly will experience meeting or visiting them in my dreams. Our minds are these incredible libraries and repositories of all our memories, thoughts, associations, and yearnings and it is actually staggering to think that there are galaxies upon galaxies of narratives that the mind can fabricate from vast amount of material available to it.

Although I do occasionally consult dream symbol websites and their ilk, I have come to believe that the only person who can decode your dreams is - you. If dreams are poems that your mind writes, then only you will be able to mine the meanings from their words. Only you can make sense of what the subconscious via the medium of dreams is seeking to communicate to you. Only you can know and appreciate the meaning behind the layers of symbols and associations and jigsaw them together into something you will appreciate and understand.

I still dream intensely, lushly, profusely but the trouble is I cannot recall the majority of my dreams these days. The terrible habit of immediately reaching for the phone as soon as I wake up means that the series of images in my dreams are replaced by the ones I see on my phone. I can't even remember them a few hours later, let alone thinking of writing them down in my journal later that day.

I wish I did take the time out to remember them regularly because I feel that our subconscious mind is a storyteller, mentor, and therapist and more; it advises, it whispers messages, it soothes, it entertains. Sometimes, I see the core truths of my life so seamlessly weave into a pattern in my dreams and I find myself thinking as to why didn't I realise it before? My dreams are the only space where in fact these core truths can manifest. And then I wake up and find myself searching for those truths, those utter moments of clarity - but they have vanished and only traces of that truth linger in my mind, like brilliant shards of a vase found in ruins and which can no longer be reconstituted into what it once was.

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

Balabrooie Guest-House, Bangalore

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

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

Safdarjung Tomb, New Delhi

Looking up

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

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

The Beauty of Space: Ambara, Bangalore

Balabrooie Guest-House

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

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

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

Poetry: My Week in a Triptych

When You Were Away

I made bread out of bananas,

scented the room with memories

of nocturnal moonlight,

and wrote poetry that I was

never going to read again.

Buying Carnations 

They inhabit a damp black cave,

primly veiled in jute purdah.

The pink is sharp and loving to the eye.

They will die soon

but I will buy them anyway.

Part of Mine

Everyone told me that

Delhi was the most ornate palimpsest:

rococo layers upon layers upon layers.

When I tried to peel them away,

they refused to be pried off -

and without me knowing it,

I had become one of its layers too

and Delhi a part of mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of A Collaboration: Rose Gold Skies, Jacaranda Trees, and Dreams - Part 1

I have always loved the idea of collaborations: multitude of ideas mashing and meshing together, divergent skills and perspectives merging into a hugely textured confluence. Even though I don't know that much about Hindustani classical music, what I am familiar with is the notion of jugalbandi. I had always sought to perform an artistic jugalbandi of my own, what with my writing and someone's art. I was curious to see how someone would respond to my work and vice versa and what new doors of thought and looking would the jugal-bandi open into my work and hopefully, their own too.

When I initially started following Vidya Gopal's Instagram account, she was @spink_bottle for me for the longest time; however, we soon began exchanging comments, notes on IG, and emails, seguing into food for thought conversations about creativity, productivity, what we were reading, and whatnot and - it all recently and happily reached a 'shall we collaborate?' moment.

But first, a word about Vidya's truly beautiful water-color and ink illustrations; if you cast even a mere glimpse, you will find yourself swimming through thoughtful, whimsical, colorful painting studies about flowering fuchsia bougainvilleas, dreaming, eccentric women, budding Tendulkars, coffee drinkers in a cafe, gulmohar petals migrating from hand to paper and so much more. These paintings collectively could form a lovely painting novel of sorts, as we encounter a brilliant school of characters and their environments, becoming familiar and fond of their quirks and foibles, all expressed through the medium of illustration. For so long, I must confess that visual art had been purely about the dramatics and technique of aesthetics for me; however, Vidya's story paintings have compelled me to much more strongly consider the sheer story-telling element as well.

Our collaboration therefore resulted in us responding to each other's work through our respective modes of expression. This is the first part of our collaboration and Vidya chose to depict a jacaranda tree I had photographed few months ago silhouetted against a rose gold sunset sky, interpreting both the photograph and the text which I wrote to accompany it. I will leave for you to think what you will of this superlative work of hers below; as for me, it simply made me very happy to look at a painting which gorgeously captured in essence both the sky and the jacaranda tree as well as the addition of the dreaming, langurous girl (me?!), which so powerfully marries my words and image. 

 My image and words

I dreamt of a jacaranda tee last night; it was blooming in a planet galaxies away, in a world where the color of the night was the palest, softest rose-gold. I stood on my tip-toes to touch the velvety mauve blooms but before I could do it, the dream evanescenced and I was left with nothing but the memory of a sky and purple on my finger-tips. 

Vidya's response

Thank you so so much, Vidya and in the meantime, here's hoping that I will do justice to your lovely paintings!

Watch this space for the second part of our collaboration:)

Friday Poetry: The Poetry of Silent Trees

Trees

which had been silent

all this while

have now decided to speak:

their poetry blooms under my feet,

and I listen carefully,

not wishing to miss

a single

syllable.

Friday Poetry: Beauties Sleeping

BEAUTIES SLEEPING

Beauties sleeping,

dreaming of pink bloom,

unaware that they are ghosts of

what they once were,

what they will never be again.

 

Five Thoughts About April

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

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

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

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

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

How was your April? I would love to hear!

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

THE BIRDS WHOSE MUSIC 

INVISIBLY PERFUMES THE SPRING AIR

I discover today that the birds

whose concerts richly, invisibly perfume

the still, warm spring morning air

are called Indian treepies.

They flit from the kachnar tree

to the neighboring gulmohar,

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

from a muddy green universe

to a bright green one.

The jade-sheened glossy black humming bird no longer sups

from the kachnar orchids,

which became pod earrings when no one was looking -

and the crows have found elsewhere to feast upon

now that the flamboyant, plump blood-red

monstrously beautiful silk cotton flowers are fat green pods

of future flowers, leaves, roots, and branches.

Only the sparrow traverses

the invisible trapeze-rope in the air,

metal grill to metal grill,

its clay water bowl empty and parched

like a summer desert.

Jacaranda Journeys

Entwined

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

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

Sea of Purple and Green

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

Radiating

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

Creativity-Consumed

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

Some creative notes from this literal and emotional spring:

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

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

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

Musings for 2016

Nature's Gift on New Year's Day

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

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

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

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

        

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

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

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

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

Dawn Gifts and Writing to Bird-Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn conversations between the tree and the clouds

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

Perhaps, I should try it some time.

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

A Boat Ride on the Ganga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

May means:

Reading

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

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

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

Painting

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

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

 Exploring

Qutub-seeing

Diwan-i-Am, Red Fort

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

How is your May coming along?