Heart still heavy. There is sadness but also relief about a few things. Here are some things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Bargained for more time for a project.
3. Figured out a goal to be committed to for next year.
4. Got a basket of pink roses for a neighbor's mum.
5. Encountered some deep resistance in my heart. That is truly a painful experience but if one must be thankful, then one must be grateful for the sticky parts too.
6. Went for a walk to Carter Road. It's done up really well. And then went to Mount Mary.
I sense some pain and tightness in the center of the chest. I will pray on that later but here are a few things I am grateful for today:
1. Papa is well.
2. Cook made nice khichdi today.
3. Some dialogue opportunity was set up for work. One lives in hope.
4. Had a nice walk today. Saw an interesting site of teddy bears hanging outside Panchsheel on Pali Hill.
5. Went for a massage.
6. Found a couple of interesting goals to explore.
7. Went to Tim Hortons for a coffee with my neighbour. That was nice because the plan was sudden.
8. Managed a quick workout in the gym.
9. Sent off an invoice. It will be a while before it gets validated and cleared but at least one step is done.
Despite tough incidents that occurred during the day, I am still here. And for that we are happy.
The way my tree is lit just fills me with so much cheer!
Here are all the things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well. He actually called me today to talk. That was nice. He sounded healthy.
2. Worked out in the gym today.
3. There was a rather complex revision to be done to a script which I did today and sent it off.
4. Went for a bike ride with V and had coffee at Barista. His bike is a tad high for me and I think I get my thigh stretch workout from trying to climb it. But it was lovely sitting at Bandstand watching the afternoon sun play off on the sea. Then we went to Carter Road for a bit and watched the birds circling the sky. In a day of agitation, there was some bit of stillness and peace. That was nice.
5. Had some nice vegetable and soya cutlets with pitla. And bread, butter, jam soaked and softened in three tablespoons of milk. Yummy in my tummy!
It was a painful day. Heart was unduly heavy. But it looked up some towards the end. One way or the other, lived through it.
Here are all the things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Had money to go out for a treat. I think this is a special thing...to have some means where you can allow yourself an indulgence to feel good.
3. Managed to go to the gym today.
4. Had a quick call with a client. There's a fair amount of rework involved in here. So that's painful but here we are. Things are not very clear yet but hopefully they will be better later.
5. Had tasty food all throughout the day.
6. Went to the Mount today. It was lovely.
It has been a harrowing day. And the callousness of some people is such a bummer. But got through the day. We are in the middle of the last month of 2025. I am wearing a shiny belt and I think it looks quite snazzy. But it has been gruelling - very very tough. There is just so much anger in me that I am trembling - maybe anger, maybe nervousness. But it's okay - whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So...in that hope...onwards.
Here are all the things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Had a nice carrot paratha today.
3. Had made some tea for myself. It was perfect.
4. Managed to wake up in the morning and go to the gym.
5. Quite happy with the selection of my outfit.
6. A lot of haphazard work happened but it happened.
7. Tried out some interesting prompts now.
A very, very difficult day. But I was uo to watch the sun rise. That was beautiful.
Here are all the things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Really enjoyed my morning walk.
3. A very painful few hours regarding something. In the spirit of radical acceptance, I am thankful for the excruciating restlessness.
4. Went to a friend's place. Had a soothing time.
5. Another friend asked about me. That was sweet.
6. Came across a really pretty white flower this morning. It's apparently called Sea-poison. It only blooms at night and falls off when the Sun comes up. That comlete ephemerality is gorgeous! It feels surreal to share space with an existence like that.
Okay, so a lot going on and things are too much. And never ending.
Anyway, I just woke up from a nap. Want to make myself a cup of tea, change, and just center myself. How much living happens in a day? There is a lot about the nervous system that is just waiting to accost me. Then there is the Christmas shopping to get through. It is overwhelming now. When does it end?
Running a house is a full time job. Running two houses is even crazier. Anyway, it is what it is. At least one remains grateful for what one has.
So here are all the things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Had a good conversation with him. Sometimes I ask about a really tough time that we had been through as a family. There have been lots of tough times. There will be several in the future as well. But I asked him today what life lesson he had learned through that rough time. He said that you can't outrun destiny. Many times, I get exasperated by my father. But he is so calm. And he really has been through a lot. Maybe it is true. That what is fated will happen.
3. Some other disturbing news came to light. I am listing this as one of the things I am grateful for because I feel that true evolution is moving beyond good and bad and truly embracing everything that comes your way. Like it is best for you. I am not there yet. But this a step in that direction.
4. Passed through Hill Road today. So cheery it looked.
5. Had good lunch.
Today was an interesting day. Here are a few things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well. Spoke to him.
2. Cook made an interesting dessert with Greek yogurt, cocoa powder, berries, and Stevia.
3. Enjoyed going to Bandstand with a friend.
4. It was really nice and chilly! On the promenade my friend decided to goad a couple of little boys into a race. So cutely, they started running readily! That was precious...to see their happy, shiny, smiling faces.
5. Started reading another book. It's non-fiction. But...will stay the course.
6. Enjoyed writing about the last book I read.
7. Managed to overcome laziness and go to the gym.
I feel the same way about finding an author you like or reading
a book that alters you forever. Like I remember the empty office past midnight in
my second job. I came across ‘Catcher in the Rye’, printed out the story, read
it, and dropped it off at my boss’s table with a note suggesting that he read
it. I also remember the pink box pleat skirt I wore in college when I first got
my hands on Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ and read it on a rickety bench at
Bandra station. Or the printed blue quilt in my room that I would clutch to
help with the tide of emotions when I read Alex Hailey’s ‘Roots’. Or the swirl
of grey and lavender above buildings when I first started reading Salman
Rushdie’s ‘Shame’.
Yes. You remember.
And I honestly didn’t think I would come across a writer
that would make a memory so vivid until I came across Claire Keegan.
So late in the day is a short story/ vignette about a man
who is reminiscing about the woman who has broken up with him. We follow him on a regular day as he gets to
work, avoids chatty colleagues has strange memories triggered off unsuspecting
cues, and the story ends on a note that makes you want to hold his hand and lie
to him that it will get better.
There is such a tender twist to this story that you don’t
even realize how much it tugs at your heart until you have closed the book and
gone about your week – and then one Sunday night, as you brew your tea, you
think of something that you trace back to the novel and nod. For me, it is these
two lines and the general foreshadowing around it:
“Then a line from something he’d read somewhere came to
him, to do with endings: about how, if things have not ended badly, that they
have not ended.” And
“You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes
down to it?’
‘So I’m a misogynist now?’
‘It’s simply about not giving,’ she said.”
The character’s misogyny (actual or perceived) may be at the
center of things – but it also a compass to how we label, how we may sometimes
just call a man a ‘jerk’ and move on but ay never be aware that maybe if
someone had just given him another chance with a stronger, more open heart, he
might have changed.
But for now, it’ll be sadness
and solitude for the character.
So, what was I doing when I met Claire Keegan? (And isn’t finding
an author you can connect with the same as meeting them?)
I’d just traveled back from town by train. It was a
reasonably peaceful ride home and the evening sky was just getting that shade
of metallic blue with a few stars peeping out. Autos were hard to come by and I
decided to walk home. Thought I’d pick up some grilled sandwich on the way.
I saw this bookstore I had heard a lot about: Fictionary.
Entered it. Towards the back, there was a small coffee shop. There were lots of
books – and none of them were management books. Mostly fiction and narrative
non-fiction. I was supremely heartened by that. Then I perused a few books.
There was a beautiful edition of Dante and something else by Hume. And then, I
came across this slim little book.
Claire Keegan is an Irish writer. The only other female
Irish writer I had read in college was Edna O’Brien. Her memoir of growing up
in Irish countryside – the innocence and viciousness of simple living – was outstanding.
There’s a story in there about Brien going to church after a particularly rough
day, when she doesn’t quite know how much longer she could endure it. The nun
(or priest, I forget) tells her this: “Trust Him when thy have dark doubts.
Trust Him when thy faith is small. Trust Him when simply to trust in Him…is the
hardest thing of all.” (This is why
I read fiction – it’s like panhandling for gold. You find thigs you can save up
for a rainy day when life has dried up.)
Getting back to factionary – I associated Keegan with Brien
in my head. I pulled the book out, sat at the café, and read it through. It’s a
short book but it nestles in you – the grief, the pain, the silence, the
requiem for joy…
But one remains grateful for discovering an author you think you’re going to love. They remind you that you can still…feel.
Today was a heart-heavy day. Carrying some grief around. It hurts now. But even so, a few good things happened.
1. Papa is well. He came over today. That was a good surprise.
2. Had broccoli and paneer today. Some hefty protein intake there.
3. Had a good banana shake.
4. Gave some mulberries and protein bread to Papa. He looked happy, if not a little sceptical.
5. Some work that I was expecting to come my way hasn't. Important to give thanks for things that don't live up to expectations either. Maybe then there will be equanimity.
It was a peaceful, happy, hummingbirdy day.
Here are all the things I am grateful for today:
1. Papa is well.
2. Went to a friend's house for coffee where I saw a little bit of this series, "Queen of the South." The woman playing the lead has an interesting, stern face. White granite...it reminded me of.
3. Had tasty food. Cook had made a nice pulao today and I treated myself to some yummy baked and flaky savouries.
4. Enjoyed some kombucha with my neighbours.
5. Went for a walk up Pali Hill tonight and traipsed up to Carter Road. It is such a beautiful, luscious experience! I love this place so, so much!
There's serenity. There's sophistication. There's music. There's conception of something. There's completion of everything. Pali Hill is where my heart melts in love and peace.
I wish I could take this month off - it is so sweet and dulcet and lush.
Anyway, here are all the things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well. Did not speak with him but no urgent calls from home. So am assuming that is okay.
2. Cook had made really tasty aaloo sabzi today.
3. V took me for a ride on his new bike. It's really good-looking - like something Batman would ride. It was tough for me to get on and off though. I hit my ankle and it hurts now - but it was lovely going for a round at Bandstand and getting a coffee at Barista.
4. Neighbor got me really yummy gaajar ka halwa.
5. Made some headway in my reading.
6. Went for a lovely walk to Carter Road and then ricked it to Mount Mary again at night to light a candle. I love the Mount.
7. Bandra is just such a pretty beautiful place. I love it so much!
(Picture courtesy - From pexels)
I’ve noticed how so many of the contemporary Japanese
stories have a diaristic-feel to them. Sure – there are plots (sometimes very
grave and outlandish ones), there are characters you love or abhor, settings
that draw you in, details and contexts that set up the foundation for your flight
of fancy so essential in fiction – but there is the quiet feeling I get of not really
being important or necessary to the equation. The writer would have written
about this world and that person, would have rhapsodized about this season or
mulled over this sorrow, whether I (the reader) was there or not.
MS Ice Sandwich is a lot like that but it is written with
such measured grace that you know that it was written for a reader.
The novella is narrated by a young boy (unnamed in the
story). He lives with his mother and grandmother (dad’s mom). His father died
when he was only four years old. Mum runs a salon and also does some divination
enterprise off and on. Granny is unwell and lays sleeping in a room. But our
narrator is very fond of her. His school friends include a young girl, Tutti, who
whops him on the head whenever she sees a crow. (The rules of the ‘game’ are
that you can bop the head of the person in front of you when you see a crow. It
so happens that this little girl always does this when she sees our narrator.)
One day, at the supermarket, our boy sees a young woman
selling sandwiches and is captivated. She looks unusual and wears dramatic blue
eye shadow. Something about her face is not quite symmetrical but she is so
calm and confident as if she deserves to be regarded as the stunning cool goddess
she imagines herself to be. This is the boy’s reading of her. (“Ms Ice
Sandwich’s eyelids are always painted with a thick layer of a kind of electric
blue, exactly the same colour as those hard ice lollies that have been sitting
in our freezer since last summer. There’s one more awesome thing about her – if
you watch when she looks down, there’s a sharp dark line above her eyes, as if
when she closed her eyes, someone started to draw on two extra eyes with a
felt-tip pen but stopped halfway.” Elsewhere in the book, as the boy
mentally serenades Ms Ice Sandwich for actually packing an egg sandwich with
perfect, ballet-like motions, we get another description of her. Ms Ice
Sandwich has really short hair, her head looks just like an onigiri rice ball
with a sheet of nori wrapped tightly around it.”)
The boy is smitten. Her peaceful anchorage in a sense of self
seems to contrast with our young narrator’s jumbled adolescent identity. (There’s
a description of how he feels when he’s looking at Ms Ice Sandwich: “I’ve
never seen the middle of the ocean or the edge of the sky, but maybe the kind
of breeze that blows in those places now comes blowing in out of nowhere and I
feel it wrapped around me.”)
Then one day, the boy encounters a fight between a patron
and Ms Ice Sandwich where the patron calls her ugly, smug, and accuses her of ‘doing
something to her face’. The boy is young and does not really know about plastic
surgery or the like. The patron then storms off after yelling that Ms Ice
Sandwich will never get married.
Then it so happens that the boy stops going to the store and
later he finds out that Ms Ice Sandwich has left working there.
It’s not a big story. It’s not even a particularly deep one.
But it is so gentle and caring – like someone turning you down with kindness.
There’s a part in the book where this boy (who counts his steps to go to the
store to see Ms Ice, now has to come home straight from school skipping his
store visit). He sits and sketches Ms Ice Sandwich on the kotatsu table
in his grandmum’s room and tells her about his love, even though she is
sleeping. Sometimes he looks up and wonders about her grandmother’s mortality.
He observes the hierarchy of the fifth and sixth graders in school. He listens
to his mum as she explains the ‘spirit levels’ of human beings. We meet him and
Tutti on a movie night at her place where she introduces our boy to Hollywood
through the movie ‘Heat’. He tells Tutti and Ms Ice and how besotted he is with
her. He doesn’t understand the catch in Tutti’s throat when she later says ‘goodbye’.
Only we know that someone’s heart is just a little bit broken.
We see a young boy in an ordinary world trying to make sense
of it through the central pivot of an extraordinary character he has
encountered – one with blue eye shadow.
The book is not tragic but it does leave you with some wistfulness.
With all kind of understanding, there is a bit of trade-off of innocence.
It’s like that line in a series called ‘Wonder Years’, where
the protagonist – also a young boy – ends an episode with this line, “We don’t
blame each other for getting older. We forgive ourselves for growing up.”
 |
| Veni, Vidi, Vici...softly |
Okay I am writing this quickly so that I can get on to my other reading and writing.
1. Papa is well. I did not talk to him today but there were no urgent calls. So that is good.
2. Cook made very tasty sweet potato fry today. I tossed it with some chill flakes and red salt. Very yummy.
3. My Christmas tree is looking so lovely! Touchwood! I feel blessed and blissed out.
4. Got immersed in a great book. I really can't wait to get back to it.
5. Enjoyed kombucha - the natural/ original flavor from Atmosphere - along with some zero calorie lemonade.
6. Enjoyed a super game with some fellow instructional designers. It was a word association game called Codename. That was fun. And my team won! Both times!
7. I made tea. It is so, so good!
8. Someone shared this poem with me on WhatsApp...
I met the moon for coffee
It was Friday night I think
When she watched me hardly sleeping
And invited me for drinks
We found ourselves a table
In the middle of the night
And the constellations twinkled
Like a thousand fairy lights
She asked me how I’d been
As she poured coffee from a pot
For she said she’d watched me
Waking up at midnight quite a lot
I said my brain was far too full
My mind was always on
And when I woke it felt as if
I was the only one
The only one who lay awake
Whilst I sat on my bed
With thoughts that raced at lightning speed
Around my busy head
The only one who watched the clock
Tick one and two and three
Who laid awake and worried
Whilst the world was fast asleep
My thoughts were stuck in orbit
And I couldn’t pull them back
As they preferred to swim against
A sky so vast and black
The moon said simply nothing
But she opened up a book
And I saw it was a diary
So I took a closer look
And listed there were names of people
All around the world
And all the thoughts and worries
That the moon had overheard
Just then, my eyes were drawn towards
The name that was my own
And that was when the moon said
“See, you shouldn’t feel alone”
And then she pulled me close
Using the night sky as a blanket
And said “I know you sometimes feel
So lonely on this planet
But when you cannot sleep,
Get up and watch me from your room
And you’ll see so many others
Having coffee with the moon
- Poem by Becky Hemsley
So much is changing. Or rather, brimming with change. I am thinking of doing some or one of those meditation exercises from No Bad Parts where you have to connect and talk to your difficult parts. Today I am feeling triggered by someone or rather something. Maybe I will sit in the glow of my Christmas lights and do this from tomorrow.
I would like three ot four days of luscious peace with some friends just coming over once in a while...and reading, writing,, eating, etc.
I think I need to figure out a way to live without constantly bracing myself for imminent disappointment. Will get there soon enough.
Here are all the things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Managed to go to Vashi and visit the temple.
3. Read some stuff.
4. Worked out even though I was feeling lazy.
5. Enjoyed Bruno Mars, "I think I want to marry you."
6. Heard some news that makes me grateful for being here and now. That realisation is truly a blessing.
7. Cook had made yummy soyabean cutlets and greek yogurt with thinly sliced strawberries.
8. Took a really cute picture of this building near my house. It looks like a cabin in an enchanted forest. You do stumble upon magic sometimes.
Here are all the things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Cook had made really tasty tomato soup today.
3. The besan chilla and namak ajwain parath were also good.
4. Managed to go to the gym today.
5. Survived the day.
Here are all the things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Went to meet a friend in his shop.
3. Had a good day at work. Completed an assignment and shared it with the client.
4. Passed on a lead to a friend.
5. Ate the whole large packet of jalebi tonight. Have been eating a lot. Could be disregulated sleep. But still, grateful that I had it.
6. Enjoyed a cup of Americano at Tim Hortons.
7. Help turned up today.
Did not work out today and there was s lot of eating. So there's that but now I have to start off trying to get more regimented. Really tired now and need to write this post to keep the chain going.
Here are the few things that I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. Got some clarity regarding a few things. Am working on something and the project set up leaves a lot to be desired. Now I see how important it is to arrange information for vendors, be a project manager who can actually be on top of things, be available for a quick call, etc.
3. I finished reading No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. Towards the end it felt quite strenuous. But I managed to do it. So am glad. It also made it a little clear to me that I must read more non-fiction. Gosh! There's so much to read and so much to write about.
4. Wanted to go out with a friend but dropped plans. I realise that I need to now get really militant about my spending. I feel that if I can tide over and tackle this period, I will be able to cross a pretty big psychological hurdle.
5. Managed to reach the bank and get the work done.
I got into a bit of a squabble with a friend. People should just inform their hosts of their dietary requirements, etc. I was trying to find out and my friend snapped at me. I snapped back. Oh well. It should be an interesting stayover.
Anyway here are all the things I am grateful for:
1. Papa is well.
2. I made a Rajma for lunch and a quinoa khichdi/ pulao with BlueTribe vegan sausages for dinner.
3. Attended my BookClub's chat. Was fun.
4. Ordered for a couple of books. Grateful that I have some money to buy them.
5. Went for coffee with friend of mine.
