Category: Blog

Cooking Coincidences

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Today, for lunch, without any prior discussion – I cooked cabbage curry at home, my mum made cabbage curry at her house, and there was cabbage curry at my grandparents’ place too. This isn’t the first time this is happening – it occurred sometime last week with carrot curry, and I think some other day as well.

I wonder how these occur

In my mind, I imagined the cabbage Gods pulling us all towards that vegetable. I’m fairly certain we all cooked it the exact same way: mine with the least amount of salt, and my grandmother’s with the most. Mine with the most amount of spice, and my grandmother’s with the least. I could replay the resistance with which I combated the urge to cook and finish the cabbage, I wanted to eat aloo fry again – but I countered all those forces and reached for the leafy thing, chopped it up and cooked it as rapidly as I could.

Cooking coincidences like these feel like they mean far more when they happen within the family. In a lot of ways, it felt like a small reminder of where I get my passion for food from. Not literally, but in terms of the food I’ve first eaten – the food I’ve loved all my life. I could go eat all the pasta and pizza in the world, but I know I’d want to come home to Indian food occasionally. Palya is a reminder of that emotion.

Hair Maintenance

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This is the longest I’ve gone without cutting my hair. I’ve explored my relationship with haircuts on this blog, here, for example, but it’s only when you don’t have the ability to get a haircut that you’re able to truly define what the haircut means to you, and what, in a sense, it’s always meant. As a child, my father instilled in me very early on that I ought to have neatly cut hair. At University, I often relied on my benchmates in class to confirm whether my hair was long enough to necessitate the solo trip to the barbershop, and sitting through episodes of a Gujarati sitcom I did not want to enjoy but enjoyed anyway. The frequency with which I had my haircuts dropped from one every month to one every alternate month. My haircare routine was simple. Oil my hair once in a week, maybe twice, when it was longer, and shampoo every alternate day – to help with general cleanliness.

The shampooing felt necessary because of how much I sweat at college. There’s a humidity in Gujarat that just doesn’t exist in other States I’ve visited, and every two days I felt unclean if my hair wasn’t shampooed – because it began to smell, or something of the sort.

Now, this long hair I’ve now grown, which somedays, feels like a mane because it’s grown out the sides and the back, and merges into my beard when I grow that out, needs so much extra maintenance. It refuses to sit in place and behave the way I want it to. The thing I’ve learned about why haircuts are necessary, for me, isn’t just the practicality of having shorter hair. It’s also about being able to let go of this weight that grows on us month-on-month. It’s the same with nails. Each time you allow them to begin growing afresh, you allow yourself the opportunity to let go of all the stuff that’s burdened your head for months past.

Now? Things are a mess.

Calling Old Friends

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I love keeping in touch with people I’ve met in my life, because it’s difficult to look at any of the friendships or relationships I’ve had in the past and say “my life would be better without that person”. I think I’ve been privileged and fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful people – people I’ve had disagreements with, fundamental disagreements, people I’ve hurt, people who have hurt me, but all wonderful people with their hearts in the right place. So thinking back to friendships I no longer have access to is sometimes a painful thing. When my brain decides to meander along to that place, I often find it resting on my school friendships – because at the end of Grade 12 I felt like we had all just become one big blob of friends, but that vanished soon after. In a lot of ways this feels magnified in my head. My brain enlarges small issues, something I’ve been working on, and I’m sure this is one too. A small change in the way we kept in touch somehow magnifying that we weren’t friends, or as close anymore.

Yesterday I was thinking about three people I hadn’t heard from in ages, so I messaged them this morning and had short phone conversations with one of them. That’s what convinced me I had blown everything out of proportion. It felt like nothing had changed at all. We’d just gone our own paths, having stopped for a while to meet each other along the way, but taken different turns after meeting – with different destinations in mind. Those roads aren’t that far apart that you can’t find the space to meet again. Phone conversations feel like the best way to do that, even if you just recall how you met the last time. I think I want to do these sort of catch-ups more, even if I’ve derided the practice in the past. Maybe it’s just a result of the conversation today, and maybe it’s just the circumstances – but calling old friends and hearing from friends with whom I went to school will always occupy a special place in my heart.

Taking Pictures

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I’m not great with photography. Not in terms of it being a hobby, or a profession for me, but in terms of how I respond to requests for photographs, or when people ask me to take photographs generally. I’m usually okay with it, but I rarely take photos of everyday life, or of things I see around me on the day-to-day. Photographs for me, are reserved for trips I go on, or when I meet people I usually don’t meet. Special events, in essence.

This morning, while cleaning the house, I stopped at the wooden cabinet that contains photo-albums from when I was younger – these carefully compiled archives of regular moments of us as a family. I didn’t do anything “special”, I was just a regular baby-child, but my parents had captured every single moment. Or at least it felt that way. Each photo had a neatly-worded caption under it, and it felt like I could point to a photograph and my parents would tell me what transpired on that day in history. Of course, advances in technology have rendered hard-copies of photographs and physical archives a little moot in today’s world, but for that time, wow. It was incredible to look at how much effort went into compiling these, because they would have to put in a request for negatives to be developed into photographs and then select photographs from that pool to figure out which ones made the album.

We’ve got so much technology at our disposal today that I have an archive of most (if not all) photographs I’ve received since 2013, because everything’s just steadily backed up to the cloud. Today, though, after seeing all those images, I was looking back to photographs from University, to see if I could find some I’ve taken of my friends and I. I realized that there was a disproportionately low number of photographs – most of the photos I have from the past 5 years are just to commemorate things I’ve deemed special. Spending the last month in lockdown and recognizing University life’s come to an end, sometimes I wish I had more photos of the mundane. The dirty bathrooms, the dusty hostels from the first days I went back to campus, the room on each day. Just so I could look back on everyday of my life and point to something I wanted to cherish.

This blog makes it easy for me to do that with words, but I think one of the things I want to be doing more is taking more photographs. I was explaining this to my parents today. A large reason why I didn’t take photographs was because I felt they would take away from the experience of living a moment out in first-person, because I’d look through my phone or camera lens to capture it. I prefer, in that I’m more comfortable with words, so it always felt easier to describe the things I’ve seen or done using words. I guess that only conveys some of it though.

Stories are nicer when you can tell them using multimedia, to really engage with people’s senses, so to speak.

For me though, I want to be able to capture every day a little better. So starting today, I’m going to be trying to take a photograph a day. This was an ambition of mine for the newsletter as well, just so I could sneak in my perspective on things. This is just something I want to enjoy though.

I’m not going to “set-up” shots. I don’t think I want to do that as much. I’m just going to take a photo of one thing I find interesting each day. Maybe along the way I’ll learn a little more about photography too.

Let’s see how this experiment pans out.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 29/30

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Oof, penultimate day – and another year will now go by without writing any poetry at all (but a lot of reading, I would hope). Today’s prompt is to write about a pet. I do not have one, but I love pets. I thought this was a great opportunity to write a humorous haiku:

Tamagotchi

I wanted a pet,
So bought something virtual,
It broke in a day.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 28/30

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Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.

Gosh, today’s prompt is a doozy. So many rooms to pick from.

A-201 

The bedroom was to the left of the hall,
Its door right behind the tiny desk I called my office,
You wouldn’t have considered the possibility that 3 slept in the room,
But for us, it never felt too little.

Straight ahead from the door was the attached bathroom,
A small alleyway to the right led you to the rest,
A large king-sized bed to stretch out your legs,
White cupboards lining the walls to store clothes, books, the very best.

Originally there was a large, Alder Hardwood Table,
Resplendent in the light that hit it,
A Windows 98 Desktop computer rest comfortably there,
“Tell Me Why?” played on the VCR mounted in the right corner top,
On a small black television that I watched from the bed.

Soon, however, my parents wanted me to be independent,
So one summer, when I was in India – a remodelling was done –
The computer table disappeared altogether, the VCR did too,
I came back to find a bunk-bed in its place: capacity – one.

I’ve played cricket in the space between the bed and mine,
Chipped off edges of walls with tennis balls,
I’ve hit my head on the edge of the bed with a towel on my head
(Ruining my kindergarten photo no less),
And hurt myself in that house countless times.

However if I search within myself to find, really
Find the person I am,
It seems to me it all started in that room, because
Today I have a room with a bunk-bed, with cupboards underneath,
I keep my books neatly organized, stacked, yet, food in the room,
I do not eat.

The royal blue on my pin-board matches those old cupboards well,
And the wood in my room is Alder too,
You may leave houses and rooms, it is evident –
But they will never leave you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 27/30

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Today’s prompt is to write a poetic review.

Curd Rice 

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways –
I love thee as the perfect palate cleanser
Between courses in a meal,
The ultimate finale to them all.
I love thee as my meal itself,
With tadka, with pomegranate,
Or the simplicity in plain serving,
I love thee on plates,
In bowls,
And from banana leaves,
In English,
In Kannada,
In Tamil, and Hindi – even in tongues I don’t speak,
I love thee across continents,
Europe, the Americas, and
Africa too
I’ll find you to in Antarctica if I had to,
Mosaranna, I love you.

GloPoWriMo 2020: 26/30

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I don’t quite enjoy today’s almanac questionnaire prompt. I’m also in the mood to write haiku, so that’s what I’m going to do. Since I recorded a piano cover of “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton: An American Musical (see here), this was the only thing that felt appropriate.

King George III

My loyal, royal
Subjects will be back to see
They belong to me.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 25/30

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It’s difficult to put a prompt like today’s into words, so here’s the hyperlink to the original. As is the case with most poems that ask me to do more than one thing, I find it easiest to try to incorporate as many as I can without taking too much stress.

10 Seconds

In a ten-second span a lot goes through my head,
Its’ incredible to me how I can sway from joy to
Angst, to sadness, to
Dread,
Yet what I admire is the tenacity of the brain – to
Find the small spots of yellow in a
Palette that can sometimes feel grey.

 

GloPoWriMo 2020: 23/30

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It’s a little sad that’s we’re down to our final week of GloPoWriMo already. Another 7 poems and we’re done for the year. Today’s optional prompt asks me to write a poem springboarding from the shape of a letter in the alphabet.

P

Like a proud windsock,
Or a hoisted flag,
A cutlass, unangled,
A scimitar with a handle,
Portable paper fans,
All of these represent the letter P,
Initially just a box in Hieroglyphy.