#notfullyformed

[travellingwithmyself]

Three stories of inbetween emotions.

Yellow Cotton Candy

Children chased one another, some rolled on the grass, a few flew kites, and I wondered why us adults paint a grim picture of children today and their missed childhood.

Perched I was on the window of Shish Gumbaz at Lodhi Garden with a book on me as these scenes played out in front.

Our eyes me briefly. He had on him a packet of chips, while I was relentless to find inspiration through the poetry volume purchased earlier that day. A short time after we were sitting beside one another. He climbed his way through to reach where I was. There was something so confident about him that I instantaneously was nervous. Butterflies fluttered with knowing him being seated so close to me. To be immersed with a book or deeply engaged on one’s smartphone, is a modern day hint to not be disturbed. It did not stop him.

I closed the book and watched him dust his palms which were red and soiled. He had the most luscious eyelashes.  He asked my name and I was a girl again. – A girl who was shy and introvert. Without an eye contact I introduced myself to Shahid and we shook hands.

He began to narrate quite vividly how the door next to the window I sat was haunted, and I mustn’t be near it once the sun drops down the horizon. I was muchly amused at his imagination and the effort put in to make an impression, to portray himself as Mr Know-It-All under the garb of a concerned citizen. More stories as these followed and what started as a question-answer segment turned into a conversation. We spoke of our whereabouts somewhere in the midst. He lived with his family at a residential complex near Lodhi and I was born and raised in Bombay.

“Are you a Hindu or a Muslim, Charu?” A question similar - about caste - I have been asked often travelling through different and remote parts of India for leisure and at times for work. Although being asked by a thirteen year old had me fumble for words. In a shabbily constructed sentence I responded, “I do not follow any religion or believe in any God”. He smiled and said Okay. Respect children for who they are, and they’ll reciprocate. There was something endearing of the question he had. Endearing because, while he was made aware of his identity, the worldly finesse to identify a person’s ethnicity based on their name he was not yet introduced to.

Immersed in thought, I was pulled away by Shahid’s playful voice. He wanted to know if I be interested to play with him. We raced, then we raced again to explore a few more Mughal structures simultaneously exchanging our lives during these competitions. He talked about school, I of work and both of us of our friends. He lit up as he shared his dream to see and trek to the North Pole. He loved to climb and explore mountains and hills and exclaimed how the view from there be spellbinding. He then began to talk of his family and how all of them had to leave their home and homeland Afghanistan five years earlier. He was eight. The journey from his home to the big city of Kabul was memorable as he alongwith his brothers was seated on the roof of a bus. I listened as he drew upon his memories with childlike enthusiasm and longing. All the while using hands to animate his feelings and at times without words coming out of his mouth; in a way his gestures were ready to express but words yet to pace up.

The language of pain and longing is different for different people. I wonder then why are we so possessed to flatten those experiences with uniform words, phrases and lines.

It was dusk. With light on a decline every passing second, I was still perched on the window of Shish Gumbaz. I notice Shahid circumnavigate as his brothers walked and conversed. I walk again the cement path which led me to the Gumbaz. Missing was a good-bye. A man selling cotton candy passes by, and as children perform a gesture to form and seal the bond of friendship, I purchase two yellow ones. I hurry back only to be greeted with Shahid’s older brothers. As brothers do they teased him for talking to a girl, and he was now shy to see me. With an enormous smile I hand them one of the yellow cotton candy alongwith my good-bye.

--------------

The Neem

Have you ever looked at a tree and felt inexpressive, silent, confused of what you are feeling, knowing well the churn of emotions your body is experiencing?

There’s a Neem tree seen from the window. It giggles in monsoon, sheds with autumn and lush in summer. It’s crisp during morning, cooling with mid-day and glistens till sunset. Each morning as I wake up to Ma’s voice only to go back to sleep again, for the briefest time in between I catch a glimpse of the Neem. And as I gaze, a sea of emotions rouse. Unable to determine what I’m feeling, I calm them and resume with slumber. Each day. And thus far, I am unable to gather what is it I feel and why is it I feel what I feel. “We do language”, said the extraordinary Toni Morrison. Yet, I have no vocabulary for this brief moment every morning.

Sometimes as I gaze at it later during the day, I imagine, feel and think the Neem is trying to have a conversation, help me with my inability of words. I am unable to understand it though. Often I suspect, humankind’s transactional attitude towards nature is the reason for this incapability: to have trees around because they are natural air purifiers, are pleasing to look at and be amid than genuine love, care and remembering them. The humankind has distanced themselves from nature even after creating one – an urban oasis, so to speak.  We call them ‘the greens’, ‘green cover’ as that’s what they have become for us. A pleasing soothing green to look at, greens which we need to survive, not to connect with.

Time and again, I feel the strongest urge to have a vocabulary for those fleeting emotions from mornings’. And at most times, I’m happy to be unable to express. Because to express can lead to categorising them. There also are rare moments when I feel it can lead to what Hermann Hesse described as ‘an incomparable joy’.

Till then, I wait. Patiently. Still gazing at the Neem each morning. For the language to come to me, for I to hear the Neem. 

-------------

City, you...

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” - Anaïs Nin

This was how my relationship with the city I was born and raised in was and, still somewhat is. The city, which many from literary circles see as an ongoing poetry, knows that I have not been fond of her. Yet, she cares. Each time I was back from a journey, she would and still does embrace me with warmth.

I haven’t grown fond of her, but something has changed. I do not feel the claustrophobia I once anymore. I do not all the time feel the need to get away from her. Now, well, I want to see what she offers if I stay put. The in-transit feeling which I was perpetually surrounded with makes very little sense every passing day. 

No! I have found no home in you, you island city, but I most surely have made peace with you. I do very much possess the intense and overcoming desire to roam, somewhat akin to the manner in which poet Nissim Ezekiel roamed, whether to move on to another job, another place, another manner of writing; though for the recent time that has passed, I am able to find stillness and calm with you, you city with swarms of people – within the tight lanes that become pitches on Sundays’ for a game of cricket, the wires resembling vines which run through and are the markers of old neighbourhoods’ and well-lived bazaars where an alienated life seems an unlikely possibility, the time worn eateries (or Hotel as they are called) where the roars from electric fans drowns out the chatter of diners and to share a table with a stranger is a norm, also the quiet gentrified cafes with sky and sunlight peeking through them, perhaps to check how things are, or the soothing knocks of raindrops gently reminding the change of season; the gulmohar carpeted tarmac of summer, the jamun painted concrete canvas of housing societies, the mesmerising ballerina spin which the leaves perform during autumn before they become the colour of earth, and sitting by the promenade to the sound of the waves alongside thousand others, several among us laughing hard, some feeling loved, each of us gently and animatedly making a memory of the day we’d. My intimacy with you exists between these spaces, you city of vernacular monsoon.  

(Photoshot  - Nandini Pai, Bambai ki ek angdaai leti shaam)