Entryways.

Every now and then, you're privy to a life of someone close to you that didn't involve you. Your parents' before you were born, your brother's at school once you both decided to never go to the same school again, your friends' before you were introduced to them. And the odd beauty of inside jokes and references is not only that it makes the newcomer slightly awkward, slightly apologetic for being there, but that it also tells you that lives are intensely private. You can not know everything.

Of course the very politics of using inside jokes in a group with some new people for the night, the right to assume, either that everyone is on the same page, or that the one or two who aren't can afford to not know, ever, is another story.

It's like a younger me once wrote, so succinctly: There are some circles you will never get into. For everything else, there's a book.

How

How does one confidently chart out a plan to marry someone, to go from loving them at Point A, and intend to go to marriage, at Point B. I've been so used to nothing working out in life, especially when you make a plan, that something as simple as applying to Universities next year and actually getting through and getting in and moving to another country seems like it's risking too much attention from Fate.

How. How does one retain any faith in planning to get from Point A to Point B and then actually get there?

Barter

I find that as you grow into your years, there seeps in a quiet resilience, you don't need to look at your resume any more to know or remind yourself what your strengths are, what you bring to the table. You do it without the cue cards, it comes as hands-on experience.

You often wondered if everyone eventually comes down to "take it or leave it", and it turns out, you needn't. You might not need it, so you may leave it, and naturally so, but it'll always be a particular brand you're never getting from anyone else again.

Pick your battles wisely, kids. That's a cliche that'll stay.

The Mathematics of Language

The mathematics of language, he says to me, so casually, like tossing the day's mail from the postbox on the table with the car keys, without much thought. Unbeknownst to him, my heart wants to do something that tears through our haze of lived reality, out of ecstasy, cry out to God in the possibility of the thought that that knowledge could also be mine someday, that I could watch an artist work out what he wanted his art to be, and if there was no God, I'd invent him all over again, just to cry out in irrecoverable glee. 

Sometimes you need to hurl things into the horizon, out of the stratosphere, into the darkness of space, outside our bird's eye view of life, precisely in the hope that there is someone to catch it. This is why we invent God. 

Madeleine

I happen to think that Madeleine is the world's prettiest name. For anything. Or anyone.

Madeleine.

Madeleines.

Madeleine with tea.

Madeleine curled up in my lap in the afternoon sun.

Madeleine writing letters to people on pretty monogrammed stationery.

Madeleine with a fine bone china cup with a chipped edge, something she took from her grandmother.

Madeleine with biscuits and books.

Madeleine with sparkling red gumboots making her way through a downpour in the city green to the electronic music playing in her iPod.

Madeleine smelling of lemongrass and orange cake.

Madeleine with ticket money, diaries and pens.

Madeleine living the life I want to, somewhere.

The Trip (Part Six)

Although they don't look older than when I first saw them some 20 years ago, it turns out Surya uncle and Jai aunty have been married for 21 years now.

I ask her if it becomes harder, instead of easier, to live with someone as each year goes by. She thinks about it for a second. "I think, after a few years, there comes a point where you realise, living with someone else, learning how to compromise again, attune yourself to someone else's daily wavelength, is just too much work," she tells me, with a laugh.

                                                               ***

I ask him, another time, if it gets boring living with someone for so long. "Nah," he dismisses it scornfully, "we have our own lives. We have common interests so we grow together, but I have a busy, fulfilled life of my own and so does she. Aur kya chahiye?"

                                                              ***

I look at these two, and friends like Inayat and I am assured that it is possible to come back to your country after living outside. To travel the world, study in a wonderful foreign country and want to return and work in your own. That there is resolution, there is will, and there is homecoming.

The Trip (Part Five)

Turns out, it is in the middle of a family holiday, in the midst of a carrom play-off in the living room, hearing my dad talk about politics where the realisation occurs to me, so quietly, so unceremoniously,

my father's political views are not my own.

The Trip (Part Four)

These smaller city sounds. The bird song piercing the heavy lime and dhoop scented early mornings, the sound of the milkman on his cycle, some chai brewed with mint leaves that are grown on their terrace. These are to be found in the city as well, but that is an active seeking. Here, it comes to you on its own, like a wild animal which has decided to approach your vicinity after having decided you mean no harm, you're safe. I write, undeterred by conversation humming around me, in a quiet nook of the garden.

Surya uncle shows us his new office space that they're building on a plot of land in the same tiny colony they're now living in. While listening to different people talk about their professions, it's their casual, off-handed knowledge that I love the most, coming in and mopping up after them like bread to pasta gravy. So I learn that this office space is being made completely devoid of cement. The bricks are made of limestone and brick dust, and the binding between the bricks is chuna, not cement.

"Is it as good as cement?" Amma asks him from the car's back seat. "Hmm?" he asks, distracted by some detail that is blind to us, I imagine, in the construction of his office, "oh, it's better! Limestone gains strength over time, right. It becomes stone."

Back at home that night, he takes us around the house, showing us the rainwater harvesting tank on the terrace, the tiny terrace garden growing spinach, mint, coriander, brinjals on the third floor, the air chutes that bring cool outside air and the scent of jasmine and lemon grass permeating everything. He explains how the house doesn't get hot even without an A.C or in peak summer. "It's because when we say it's hot inside the house, what we really mean is the building is hot. It's the building that retains heat. With this garden, the top of the house has a cover of soil, and the rainwater tank, the solar panels and wind-catchers also add to that. That's the whole thing isn't it? When we switch on A.Cs, the A.C is cooling the building, it's making the walls give off their heat, but it feels like it's cooling us. When you build a house that doesn't latch onto heat, you don't need A.Cs at all".

The office is going to use the same minimal carbon footprint method that this house has. Natural air-conditioning, rainwater harvesting, no cement, their own terrace garden (which is by the way, tended by them, there is no maali here, they fight ignorance at a discipline by teaching themselves it). As we drive off from the construction site, the office behind us soon becoming a speck, he mentions, "Apart from the municipal water connection, we're trying to think of ways with this office of going completely off the grid."

The Trip (Part Three)

Of course they have Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space on their bookshelf. Of course it is an old edition, dog-eared and well-thumbed.

The Trip (Part Two)

The Buddhavarapus, my father's side, are a generous, gregarious clan. Historically, we were brahmins whose realm was outside the repositories of traditional, Vedic knowledge, outside the temple and priestly services. We were ministers in the courts of kings, accountants, clerks. Individually though, we're mostly shy, mild-mannered (but privately, and famously temperamental) folks, but when they come together - this clattering, stumbling wave of family, especially in times of death and mourning - they're a hive mind of comfort and laughter.

My father's family was a lot less well-off than my mother's when they were growing up. He tells me about how they used to save their rotis as kids, hoarding them, unsure of when they'd get to eat them again. It wasn't all through their childhood of course, just that he knows the feeling of going hungry -- something my brother and I don't. It's because it was a joint family, mostly of unemployed young men at the time, a victim of their own ill-fitting education and the times. Ironically, it is the niyogi brahmins (which is what the Buddhavarapus are, apparently), who emphasise upon the necessities of modern education, eschewing the power  and tyrannical jurisdiction over knowledge that is typified, and by now caricaturized, of this caste. And in a family where the contours swung wildly to accommodate as many relatives as possible, averaging around 20, it was only my father's father who brought in any money as a prosecutor for the CBI. (He would hold that job down for 50 years.)

My mother's side - Kuchibhotlas - were more educated, fragmented as they were into more sustainable models of nuclear families. They're extremely private, tending towards reticence. Brilliant economizers, deft at "making do" with the money they have. Where my father's side are hearty, unafraid spenders who value the feeling of a good (spontaneous) buy over the permanence of money, my mother's side is frugal, but lenient. While they never had any money to spare, my mother says they didn't go hungry.

"Amma could afford to cut corners because there weren't so many mouths to feed," my amma tells me.

                                                                         ***

Interesting then, that my brother and I have in us, like an evolutionary trait, ingrained a sense of respect towards food. Hours spent agonizing over wasted food on plates have been scribbled guiltily inside diaries, whispered as confessions to parents. So I end up eating, and this is typical, everything on my plate in the train. It gets mistaken for gluttony, but it really is an unconscious anxiety of leaving food on my plate. My stomach is full, but there's a little bit of dahi left. I don't want it to be carelessly splattered around some train track somewhere. It is food. It is a luxury.

Another habit, I notice with surprise and bemusement, is how my father and I clean up and organize table clutter post meals, especially when being served outside our house. We polish off our plates, stack the spoons and plates and cups together, go around the table collecting wares, organizing them in neat piles that can be picked up easily by whoever is serving us. Unlike my mother and brother, we find it unbecoming and disrespectful to throw rolled up, used tissue papers in dregs of gravy, little balled up representatives of our power over their service.

"So I've noticed," my dad says at the end of one such meal, "we're one of the few people in this restaurant, if not the only people, who look a waiter in his eye and smile when refusing or accepting whatever they're serving us."

                                                                           ***

Having grown up in a family that believes in cooking more portions than necessary at any given time, especially when guests come over (there should always be enough food), it always makes us a little awkward to eat at a house where the portions appear small. The serving bowls are tiny, so each of us quickly, mentally calculates and approximates how little to serve ourselves so that no one is stuck with the horror and ignominy of finishing the food. Unsure, I suppose, of whether this is all there is, or there is more of each back in the kitchen. The balance is nerve-wracking. What is supposed to be a comforting meal becomes instead one of calculations to avoid any embarrassing moments. What if one of us asks if there is more daal? What if we're eating this sparingly, but there is a lot more food inside and we're only making our hosts distraught at how little we're eating?

Back at home, you see, it's the visual of huge portions that we use, as symbol, as sign, as signifier, to convey this: do not approximate, this is feeling, not mathematics, eat till your heart bursts.

So when we eat our meals at Surya uncle and Jai aunty's, we're a little thrown off by the portions placed on the table. The Raos begin their mental maths.

"This rice and atta comes from Jai's mother's farm," Surya uncle tells us while signalling the house help to refill all the bowls with more food.

Turns out the rice and atta have been grown using minimal to no fertilisers. Turns out it was only the appearance of frugality.

The Trip (Part One)

(For Jeeves)

14.8.2014

The first thing that strikes you as you step out of the Ahmedabad railway station is how easily this could be any other town. Indore, Jhansi, Nagpur, Amritsar. Of course, what I really mean to say is that it could be any b-town. It is bustling, but not robust.

The clouds have followed us from Bombay, the dark grey trail of clouds first making their presence felt as we move from one local part of Bombay to another in the Shatabdi, then mutating into a threat over the shamrock green fields that border the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. These are the things one notices in fleeting glances: a vermillion umbrella moving against the neon green; cranes lazing indifferently around cows in what seem to be paddy fields; a fakir standing at the open door of a matchbox house built on the railway tracks. I assume the lady of the house (for at that ripe afternoon hour, it always is) has stepped inside to gather leftovers from a previous meal to give him.

All photo credits: mine.

 Varun and I sit and watch the streaks of fierce green pass us by. "What I really want, are endless fields of weed," he says, looking out of the window. I tell him quite seriously that the trees we're looking at are in fact "weed trees", and the farmers are waiting for the overripe weed fruit to fall on the ground, so they can dry them in the sun and make weed. He guffaws delightedly through my flawless performance, leaving a fond shake of the head for last. I suddenly dearly miss the days when he would have believed that story, retaining a goggly-eyed devotion for whatever came out of his sister's mouth.

I notice a man and a woman with their young son in the the seats in front of me on the train. The kid is about seven or eight years old and hyper active. He keeps yelling out any communication required of him in a decibel that his parents are now attuned to not even register as yelling. The man is hands-on with the kid throughout the journey, over-compensating almost. He tries doing things for the boy that border on the unnecessary and stupid even. The mother, like all mothers, deals with the kid with a detached patience. Mothers perfect the art of running on minimum energy input. She has decided this, this 8 hour journey, stuck with her yelling child is not her battle. Not today.  So obviously, I make up a story in my head.  The man - the husband and father - clearly over-compensates for some absence in his son's life. Maybe an army man then, or someone who works in another city or country. I feel a little happiness purr inside me, for having observed this little fact; of knowing their secret. It is only at the end of the 8-hour journey that I have another, equally plausible alternative. Couldn't it be, per chance, mayhaps, that they weren't husband and wife? Her brother, maybe? I take the knock on my head and learn my humility tables all over again.

This is also the first time, on a train to Gujarat, that I realise that I don't like the sound of Gujarati. My visceral reaction to it is irritation. The Gujarati man-boy in his cargos and paunch-hugging red t-shirt sitting behind us can be heard telling someone on the phone, "Haan please mereko resume update karne mein help dena padenga. Kya hai, bluff bhi karna rahenga toh thoda limit mein na," in perfect Bambaiyya hindi.

                                                                    ***

The house of course, is beautiful. It's exactly what I love about and in houses - intimacy. It's built on a modest plot of land, the area that say a log cabin at a resort somewhere would take up, but three floors and a terrace up. Surya uncle and Jai aunty are old family friends, having known us since our days in Ahmedabad, which we left in 1996. He's an architect, Telugu. She's a graphic designer, Gujarati. The two of them, hitting 50 now, met at UCLA while studying in America. Jai aunty now lectures in colleges (NIFT, A.U, CEPT) and runs an NGO that teaches fine arts to women and school kids. She's slender, waifish, tall. A straight, beautiful aquiline nose and grey-green eyes. Her soft-spokenness a perfect foil for Surya uncle who is almost military-man like with his impressive mustache and devotion to fitness. Jai aunty hasn't aged a day since I saw her last, almost 20 years ago.

Everything about their house is a perfect reflection of them. There's a zen garden outside, the curtains in the house are made from old, worn sarees. Not brand new curtains that are supposed to look like old sarees. These are sarees she's owned and worn. Each window is a living receptacle of her touch and memory. A small fish pond with lily pads has tiny fish sized like little tadpoles. "These fish feed on larva, so they keep mosquitoes away," Surya uncle tells us. There's an expensive high-end bircycle hanging on a huge peg at one end of the garden area, its tyres muddy. Nothing here is a simulation, it is the thing itself.

Every thing in this house and outside it is exactly where it's supposed to be because there are such few things in the first place. It encompasses what they're about so well. There is no TV. All the wood used in the house are rejected pieces from shops/sellers because of various non-uniformities. The flushes in the house use waste water from their washing machine. They've designed the house in such a way that there this a wind-trap on the terrace that funnels air into every room in the house. An elaborate network of chutes that trap the outside air, as a result of which, like magic, like physics, they work as natural air-conditioning.

The books however, are endless. They're on every floor, every nook and corner, threatening to call mutiny. On careful inspection of their old editions, one is reminded immediately of college libraries. Literary theory, architecture, occult, philosophy, business, gardening, farming, music, fiction, dance, photography, ecology, urban landscape and policy wrestle for space on their shelves.

When I spot Pradip Krishen's seminal book on trees hiding behind some tomes (not the one pictured above), I am not surprised. As I struggle with my urge to pick up every book and cuddle with it on a ready mattress, I decide this is what my house will be too. These are the things it will, it has to represent. I pick a few books to peruse for the day.

As I walk downstairs with them, I notice a book on their bed - one of them must be reading this in bed - Natural Capitalism, says the title. It makes me smile. But of course they do.

 Just after our lunch, Surya uncle and Jai aunty excuse themselves to go back to their work day. I listen to him explaining the mechanics of the flush while I'm drinking a glass of water. I can hear Jai aunty tell my mother they prefer not to have processed or packaged ingredients at home - they grind all their spices themselves, or use them whole - in the background. I seem to have hit the glass ceiling of wide-eyed wonder and amazement for the day. There is no space for me to take any other information in.

Just as he's leaving for his car, I place my glass down to shut the front door behind him and he tells me, off-handedly, which you have to understand is what makes this, "Oh, the water we're all drinking? Rain water".

Compass.

I haven't stepped out of my front door in the last two weeks.

There really is nowhere to go. I want to take a bag, pack all my documents, whatever little money I have that is mine and just go somewhere, anywhere that will give a job and live on my own.

For the first time in my life, all options look the same. The happiest option, the saddest option, they're all level. Each of them is followed by a voice in my head asking me "Oh, and then what? And so what?".