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.

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

The Books that I Missed Re-Reading

When I visited my parents' home a couple of months ago, my mother presented me with cartons full of my old books and shoes that I was unable to have shipped over to the States when I was living there. I had been able to bring quite a lot of my clothing to the States but the books and shoes, alas, no  - and I have to admit that I missed them all. I spent a happy few weeks re-reading my favorite books and of course, sorting out and slipping into my shoes (I always feel that shoes/clothes which I haven't worn for a while and  subsequently, find tucked away in the back of a closet or bottom of a carton after ages become new in my eyes once again!)

I am in the process of re-building my library here in India and I am adding the books that I have so enjoyed reading over the years to it. For me, re-reading books not only makes me appreciate them anew in each encounter but it also contributes to the cache of memories that I have accumulated of reading them. The act of reading is as important as the books themselves.

Here are a few of my favorites: 

Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters

This is Manju Kapur's first book and I must say that it remains my favorite one after having read two more of her subsequent works. Even though I usually don't judge a book by its cover, I would like to make an exception for Difficult Daughters though (at least, of the edition that I happen to have). The front cover features a sepia-toned image of a young, wistful looking woman while the back meanwhile depicts a similarly-hued portrait of a grave bespectacled man. I am always curious as to the extent to which an author's biographical details seep into his/her work and I recall reading somewhere that the novel was based on the author's parents and their love story, the portraits presumably being of her parents. Regardless of whether that's true or not, the novel is still a compelling reading of a young woman, Virmati growing up in a traditional Punjabi Hindu household in Amritsar prior to Independence, forsaking tradition for illicit love and pursuing higher education in the backdrop of the Indian independent movement and soul-shattering horrors of Partition. I remember reading it for the first time on a hot summer night at my grandmother's home in Jodhpur; there was a power cut and my family was gathered in the room where a single tube light flickered, the fan feebly cut through the air, and we could smell rain and night flowers from the garden outside. I have read the book many times since but I still remember that night and how oblivious I became to everything as I became further and further involved in Virmati's story.

Kamila Shamsie's Kartography

I was in a bookshop in Heathrow, searching for a good book to read for my flight back to Muscat when I spotted Kartography. I had never heard of Kamila Shamsie before and had also been wanting to read a new Pakistani literary voice. I picked it up and began reading the first page - and the second - and then, the third before realising that the departure time for my flight was swiftly approaching and it was a good twenty minute walk to the gate. I bought the book and started reading it even before the flight took off. Arriving home and in any case, too jet-lagged to immediately fall asleep, I stayed up into the early hours of the morning to finish reading it. I have since then read and loved everything that Shamsie has written but this novel too remains my favorite of her works. She brings Karachi to such tremendous life in the book, her voice heart-breakingly gentle, fiercely protective, and affectionately teasing towards her clearly beloved city; as the book's name tells us, she is a cartographer of multiple Karachis and Karachiites and their stories. 

Ahdaf Soueif's Map of Love

I bought this book in my university bookshop and somehow, waited to read it on my flight home for Easter holidays (I am beginning to see a pattern here!) After reading The Map of Love, I scoured bookshops and libraries to lay my hands on everything else everything she had written: In the Eye of the Sun, Aisha, and Sandpiper. It was partially to do with her writing as well as the fact that I have been an earnest Egyptophile since I was eight years old and been longing to visit Egypt for years. I have mostly read about her depiction of Cairo in her writing though and she presents it in all its untidy, grand, ancient, colorful and chaotic glory. The Map of Love is really about two parallel stories of Amal, a middle-aged woman in Cairo who discovers the chest containing letters and objects belonging to a 19th century English woman, Anna, who had come to visit Egypt following the death of her husband only to fall in love with and marry Amal's great uncle and an Egyptian Nationalist, Sharif Al-Baroudi. A  couple of years later, I wrote a paper during my graduate studies about British colonial women's travel writings of accessing the zenanas in India. I have to admit that The Map of Love and Soueif's presentation of Anna's wanderings into Egypt and what she makes of this exciting, strange land planted a seed in my mind about the dramatic, transformative possibilities that travel  afforded for Victorian women in the 19th century.

I couldn't bring A Suitable Boy back with me this time round but that is one book I religiously re-read every year; it is akin to a literary pilgrimage for me. I first read it in my last two months of school, manically studying for my exams and alternately dipping into Vikram Seth's superb albeit gargantuan saga of four Indian families in newly Independent India - and it has never failed to enchant me over the years. The book perhaps deserves a post of its own and in the meantime, if you haven't read it already, please do so (the length is a tad intimidating but once you get into the thick of things and have sorted out one branch of the family tree from the other, I promise that the pages will just fly by). I am meanwhile eagerly anticipating the release of its sequel, A Suitable Girl in 2016!

Do you like re-reading books? Which ones do you find yourself returning to over and over again?

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...

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

Wrapping up 2013 - and welcoming 2014!

Judging from the last post and the several others I have dedicated to it in this last year, it would seem that I did precious little apart from Instagramming;) Well, I browsed through my blog archives and did a little bit of flashbacking to see what I was up to in 2013 - and it turned out that there was plenty of travelling, rekindling of creativity, whether it was writing, photography or painting, meaningful interaction with fellow creatives, and absorbing all the incredible sights of the multiple, diverse worlds that I happened to access throughout the year.

Here are a few vignettes:

February:

I began to discover the city which I have called home for the past one year via a delicately blooming cluster of magnolia trees and bold, beautiful eye-sculptures. 


May:

Spotting bio-luminscent bacteria, swimming in impossibly clear seas, and photographing deliciously hued tropical blooms and ice-cream colored houses in Puerto Rico = the best holiday ever!

 I discovered the joy of merging painting and collaging!


June:

I pursued photography and more specifically, photo-essays and was featured in The Aerogram.


November:

I wrote a lot more non-fiction, exploring the intersection of fashion, style, and personal narrative here and here.

December:

I mused about what it is like to create a home, object by object, thought by thought...


All year-around:

I had the opportunity to interact and meet with some fabulously talented international women artists while guest-blogging for International Museum of Women's blog, Her Blueprint, such as Mona Kamal, Tulika Ladsariya, and Haleh Anvari (work featured above).

Wonder what 2014 will have in store?:)

 In the meantime, here's wishing each and every one of my readers a very Happy New Year! May 2014 bring you all that you aspire for and that you enjoy every moment that the forthcoming year has in store for you, like blooms of breathtaking beauty encased in buds limning tree branches...

The Stream of Consciousness/Poetry: Boxing Memories via Instagram

Multiple Memories, Pittsburgh

On a recent long-haul flight, I ended up re-watching the Hindi film, 'Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani' and something about the opening scenes snagged my attention. The leading lady, Naina (Deepika Padukone) is reminscing about a life-changing trip to Manali she took several years ago and once she eventually finishes flash-backing and drifts back into the present, we find her surrounded by keepsakes she has preserved from that trip. It got me thinking then about how I too once upon a time used to similarly and carefully preserve objects - notes, cards, gifts, trinkets - which had great sentimental importance and store them in pretty boxes...and more importantly, why I no longer do so anymore. Coincidentally, soon after I landed home, I received a message from friend and fellow blogger, Khadija, telling me how many things she had recently donated and how she finds that she doesn't seem to attach importance to these objects anymore. "I don't want things anymore," she told me. "Suddenly, they have no meaning and are just taking up space."

Leafing Through, Pittsburgh

I was quite a bit of a collector during my childhood and teenage days and I must say that the habit still persists; I continue to collect fallen leaves or feathers and will often place them in bowls or dress up my coffee-table with these found treasures. Yet, these objects increasingly hold ephemeral significance for me; as soon as they cease to fascinate me, I do not have any compunctions in bidding them farewell. Unlike earlier times, when I would bring back home a pinecone or a pebble or a shell as a physical, tangible reminder of a holiday or experience and steadfastly hold onto them, I am now finding myself shoeboxing memories, so to speak, in written/visual form. An object can easily shatter or be misplaced or simply disappear...a visual and written record is more durable and permanent, and ultimately, much more effectively bottle the mood and spirit of a moment or a journey. Suffice to say, I would prefer to photograph the object and memorialise in it in that fashion, rather than keeping the physical object itself!

Raspberry-Lime, Pittsburgh

Looking Up, Warwick Art Centre

And so I have taken to recording my experiences - whether its daily quotidian (eccentric flower-bouquets, garlic bulbs, a lady bug) or preserved-in-amber worthy (dramatic sunsets, clear, jade Puerto Rican seas) - in a daily diary and for the past one year, particularly via Instagram. What with my phone being my third-eye, constantly observing and documenting whatever catches my fancy, Instagram allows me to specifically curate these moments. If my phone camera roll is a stream of consciousness, Instagram becomes poetry, streamlining and condensing these moments into intense, singular experiences.

In addition, it has made me even more sharply and vividly aware of the river of sights that streams past me every day; what I earlier may have been oblivious to re-presents itself in form of quirky visual messages instead. I am learning to distil beauty from the mundane and create dream-like stories from a family of otherwise merely sundry individual objects.

Chopsticks, Pittsburgh

Morjis, Muscat

When I cast an eye on my feed for the past eleven months, moments brilliantly leap out to me, like a fish arcing from water at dawn. They are safely stored away in this virtual chocolate box of memories, allowing me to re-experience nuances of these special coordinates of time as if they happened just yesterday, rather than long ago...

How do you preserve your memories? I would love to hear!

Vanishing Mountainscapes of Muscat

Mountainscape at Fanja

As I was nostalgically browsing through photographs of a family visit we took to Sifah village during my recent trip to Oman, I thought of the serpentine road that thrillingly twists and curves through mountains, hills, and lagoons before finally bringing one to Sifah's serene shores. I have previously been to Sifah and it was a joy to re-encounter the journey, each turn revealing a memory-worthy sight: numerous goats slumbering beneath a 4WD, a sprightly green-plumed tree with exposed cat's cradle of roots, a surreal fashion marriage: a woman dressed in leopard-spotted Omani traditional tunic, magenta trousers, and three-inch heels, and...the undulating mountains, grazing the cloudless blue sky. And indeed, now, when I am thousands of miles away from the terrains of familiar, when I think of Oman, the mountains  immediately catapult into my mind: boldly, starkly, and distinctly.

While I undoubtedly yearn for the sea, what I now realise is that while I had to make a trip to experience it, the mountains formed an integral part of my immediate visual landscape. If the sea was a volatile, temperamental entity, the mountains were constant and consistent in their there-ness. Whenever I rose in the morning and went up to my bedroom window, the mountains loomed in the distance, chameleon-like changing color over the day before entirely disappearing in the black of the night - to comfortingly appear once again the following morning. Wherever we drove, the mountains were omnipresent and so unrelentingly variegated that I became blase about such beauty in our midst. Just as one would trace patterns in the clouds, we would discuss about what animal or character an unusually shaped mountain resembled. Whether one was ascending the mountains or just wandering around at their base on a hot summer dusk, it was a raw, primeval experience, life's grievances and issues appearing so petty and trivial in face of such silent grandness. 

Jabal Shams

How much I took this geological gorgeousness for granted! It never once occurred to me that it too would fall prey to the scourge of erasure. A couple of posts ago, I had spoken about losing valuable architecture landmarks, which served as reflectors of their time and era. Even before I had left Oman and moved to the States, I had been witness to mountains in Muscat area gradually being cut away in order to make room for constructing apartment buildings, homes, and offices. Eight months later on, I have been further saddened to see the extent of the destruction of this valuable geological heritage. The mountains bore visible wounds, where they had been severely gouged away and in rare instances, they were on verge of disappearing; the effect was visually unpleasing as well as jarring. 

Local media and concerned environmentalists have generated sufficient debate about this subject; it was their efforts which made me pay attention to an issue that I encountered on a daily basis but whose ramifications I had yet not yet acknowledged. I recall reading a phrase which mentioned that while one can potentially regrow forests,* it is not possible to do so with mountains. When you are swiftly slicing away a mountain, you are cutting away a millennia's worth of geological narrative: the movements, shifts, and transformations which resulted in the mountain being of the texture, color, and shape it is. When you excise it from the landscape, you are erasing a visual marker as well as a geological time-capsule.

Jabal Shams again

For me, mountains along with the sea and distinctive architecture constitute Muscat; its particular topography and terrain specifically shapes its identity and individuates it from the assembly-line faux Manhattans in other parts of the region and world, even. Urban spaces are dynamic and arguably need to be so; however, it is my earnest wish that changes and development occur sustainably and not at the cost of diluting the essence of any place.

May the slumbering geological giants rest in peace...

*This is an opinion post based on my recent observations of Muscat*

** Studies have indicated that regrowing a forest requires many decades and it may taken even longer for the surrounding landscape to regain its native identity - rampant deforestation thus translates into entirely reshaping the natural character of the land

Nourishing the Past: An Ode to The Indian Grocery Store

Before I moved to the United States, I had little idea of the archetypical Indian grocery store.

 I grew up and spent my early adult years in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, where there was a substantial Indian immigrant population; over there, it was almost akin to India...not-quite India, as I like to think of it. Apart from the matter of India physically being a mere two hour flight away, it was always readily available in abstract: home-made paneer, liquid idli mix, and Alphonsos in supermarkets, freshly made dosas and chaat, smell of sandalwood at temples, the latest movie releases and vernacular magazines and newspapers at bookshops, and saris displayed in stores. If you hungered to speak or hear your language, you could hear bits of it swirling around in the air, intermingling with the intense heat and scents and becoming part of the atmosphere. In my case, it was Hindi and for many years, I attributed my failure to learn Arabic to Omanis' legendary friendliness. On learning about one's lack of Arabic, Omani shopkeepers, taxi-drivers, and acquaintances would immediately begin conversing in Hindi or rather, Hindi purloined from Hindi films that they religiously watched and worshipped. 

Being part of the Indian diaspora, you are constantly wondering what constitutes home: what exactly does it represent to you? Whenever I would return to India after summer vacations, I would be terribly homesick: I missed the noise, activity, and energy that I had left behind in India and which was conspicuously absent in tranquil Oman. Sometimes, during those initial days while I navigated the cultural transition from my homeland to my adopted one, a warm twilight or the way the air smelt would trick me into thinking I was back in India. And yet, that moment would pass as swiftly as it had arrived – and I was back in Oman, a place where India was just almost within my reach.

During my university years, I moved to United Kingdom, where I studied in the Midlands; the gray skies, unrelenting rain, and the biting cold aside, I realised oddly enough that I had not been transplanted in as alien a land as I earlier thought I had been. When I woke up in the mornings, I could hear Hindi songs on the radio-stations. The cab-drivers spoke Punjabi and I often spotted women in saris and salwar-kameez walking around town. If craving for India became particularly acute, I could take a twenty-minute bus ride to the city's desi-town: there, I ate over-salted samosas, got my eyebrows threaded (in four minutes, flat!), rent out Yash Chopra DVDs, and window-shop the familiar bling-bling of the bangles, bindis, battuas, and outfits on display. In short, I would happily consume my idea of India before returning to university life. For some reason, I then never paid much attention to the grocery stores selling desi products though; I walked past them, only occasionally wandering in to purchase frozen paneer.

My journey looped me back to Oman once again and it was only a few months ago that I got married and moved to Pittsburgh, arriving in the dead of winter, surrounded by skeletal-limbed trees and acres of snow. There is nothing like the unending inkiness of an artic winter evening to make you indulge in a bit of soul-searching and I once again started to think more deeply about where I had come from – and this new place that I was going to call home for the next couple of years Much has been written about the crucial role of food in recreating and indeed, keeping alive the notion of the homeland amongst diasporic communities. It was only then I discovered – and appreciated the presence of the Indian grocery store in my midst.

As a newly married woman, turning to food to conjure up home and family when missing them became particularly acute (and not to mention, feeding my husband!), I realised most importantly that I would not have to make to do with substitutes. Sure, the land that I had moved in was unfamiliar and still alien to me; however, the food was not. Unlike Ashima Ganguli, who has to create an approximation, an ersatz version of the snack she so loved in the opening pages of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, I could precisely reconstruct a dearly remembered dish because of the readily available ingredients at the store. My experience as an immigrant woman greatly differed from women of earlier times, when migrating to different lands was almost tantamount to moving to a different planet, being transplanted in a vastly alternate cultural reality. Speaking of travel, writer Suketu Mehta mentions that for diasporic communities, music is the cheapest airline home; in my case, a perfectly made bowl of kadhi-chawal did just the trick! 

It wasn't just the process of purchasing and abstracting the food though; it was also the site, the Indian grocery store, which became equally significant for me. Unlike other places where I had previously lived and called home, this was the first place where I found myself most searchingly interrogating the Indian-ness that nestled inside me: what was it like to be an Indian living abroad? Like Hindu and Jain temples in the vicinity, which were both literal and metaphorical shrines, the Indian grocery temple too was a shrine to that Indian-ness – and upon entering the store, I found the waves of familiarity it radiated comforting and warm. I heard Hindi film music from different decades playing on shuffle in the background as I sorted through packaged paneer, parathas, naans, and rotis. I leafed through bundles of coriander, radishes, spinach, and green onions. I examined the numerous kinds of dals, rice, and masalas on display. If I so wished, I could buy Jain mithai or Dabur coconut oil or steel katoris. Samosas warmed in the grill; behind the counter, the hydra-headed Indian pantheon beatifically looked down upon me in all their divine iridiscence. 

Back home in Oman or even where I lived in United Kingdom, I had never been aware of a sense of longing for home or feeling so displaced from it. Yet, here, at this critical new juncture in my life, I found myself more sharply questioning my place in the scheme of things: what was the flavor of this new city? What did its people think about? What was this country, United States, that I was living in? As months have passed by, I find myself telling everyone that I am settling down into my new home. Yet, what does 'settling down' mean anyway? Isn't there a ring of stagnancy or even static to that statement? For those of us belonging to disaporic communities, ours is a nomadic existence, leapfrogging from one culture to another. Sometimes, it happens when moving from one country to another; other times, it occurs within the orbit of our daily existence, moving from our intimate spaces to the public ones outside. 

 For me, each country that I have moved to and lived in, however briefly, encases an embryonic home – following the initial period of acclimatizing to the place, I have set about incubating and nourishing it into existence. In this merry-go round of movement and transitions, though, you need something to anchor you down in order to stop and reflect and connect; for me, as I swim through the sea of multiple new experiences, I have found myself that island of India in the Indian grocery store. 

And so, a few days ago, finding myself hungry at lunch-time, I found myself walking to the Indian grocery store that coincidentally happened to be nearby and treated myself to a couple of samosas. Sitting outside beneath the brilliant, cloudless blue sky and feeling cherry blossom petals drift down upon me, I contentedly munched on my samosa, feeling my two worlds cheerfully and happily intersecting.

***************

This essay was originally published in the August 203 issue of India Currents magazine; you can read the article here

Images courtesy: various internet sources