To sip a little bit of 'soothe'

-

 Taking a break for a couple of hours before getting back to work. Have been losing my cool with Papa and really not liking it. Anyway, when it burns like this, thought I would list a few things and memories that soothe me:

1. Chat with my friend, J. With the weirdest suggestions of movies, jokes that she forgets the punchline of, songs whose lyrics she bungles up without fail, travel destinations that I will gladly go to with her, even if I don't know where they are.

2. The one cup of coffee that my father makes for me.

3. How Ma and I would go to Taj Lands end for white jasmine tea and coconut cookies. We would go in the evening, sit by the window and look at rains lashing at the city. The palm trees would sway with such fierceness that you think they would slash the pink and purple evening sky. Slowly the lights in the atrium would come on. The piano man would come, smile at us, and sit down and play.

4. A baby's sweet powder-puffy head and chubby cheeks and firm and happy grip.

5. White, satin sheets.

6. The slice of almond and walnut vegan cake from a teeny bakery in Pondicherry, where the owner had sketched out a rose for me on the napkin.

7. Goa. The solitude at Anjuna, the gypsy-wanderings in Pandolim, the quirky little sewing college in Panjim, the carnival-type music playing in buses, the gorgeous sweetness of dodol, the beaches, the forest, the rest, the rain, the sea, the light, the splintered treasures of shells and starfish, the sense of long ago...Goa.

8. Watching my mum sleep when I worked through the night. Suddenly she would wake up with a start because she always had nightmares. And whenever she saw me, even in that lost dreamy state, she would smile. And I would pat her back and she would go off to sleep again.

9. The late night walks in Bandra with Az. And then we would catch a rickshaw and zip around to Juhu beach and have an icecream.

10. Tears that flow out when you are full. Just squelchily full of loss, longing, and love.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more