the only constant is change
memories from twenty years ago, unbearable change, six years of writing, a miracle, short memoirs, dinosaurs, and deer of Rajasthan
Dear Reader,
Thank you for joining me. I hope your week was sunlit.
Continuing the stories from where I left in the last newsletter.
Oh, that was a sambhar deer in the Ranthambore National Park near Jaipur.
I told you about the nilgai, the shining grey and blue animal that is the largest antelope in Asia. I saw it in a forest in the middle of Jaipur. The city was a few-day halt on our long journey from my parent’s home in North India to now in Goa.
After Jaipur, we took two safaris in the Ranthambore National Park. It is about four hours drive from Jaipur. I won’t share the details of the safari here, for I am sharing their pictures below.
I want to begin from Kota, the city we stopped in overnight after Ranthambore.
I studied in Kota for three years. I did my senior high school there while taking the tuitions for the entrance test to the reputed Engineering university Indian Institute of Technology.
That was twenty years ago. And it had been nineteen years since I visited or spoke to a family at whose house I stayed for a year. I was a paying guest during all my time in Kota.
Initially, my partner and I didn’t plan to visit any of the families I lived with. We slept, woke up around eight, and had kachori for breakfast. While driving out of the hotel, he said show me a bit around the places you knew. So we drove towards a location marked as the new premises of my old school. I attended the same school for the three years. The old one wasn’t even marked on Google Maps. But somehow near the new one, which is also shut now, I saw the backside of my old school building and recognised it. We had to go around a bit though.
My school, or more commonly known as coaching classes, was now a dilapidated building. Empty. Gates closed. Two guards sitting inside. Patches of paint falling from everywhere. My teacher, the founder of the school, was taken away by covid. Their house, next to the school building, lay empty too. His son shifted the school to a new location but it didn’t work.
What was once a happy thriving busy neighborhood was now silent and even a bit eerie to me. No students with shoulder bags, no signs of to-lets, not that many cafeterias or food tiffin centers that were then called messes, no crowds of children coming out of the school. Nothing.
I showed my partner around the classes, took him upstairs, and reminisced about the class room which lay locked and where our professor used to give most of his Mathematics lessons and then drive his wheelchair down the short ramp leading out of the class. The ramp was now grimy, covered with some garbage, and cobwebs were all around.
We also went to the rooftop where the cafeteria was our daily desperate morning hangout. Most students would leave home without breakfast, and then by the end of the first class, the hunger pangs would be so unbearable that I would rush to the terrace with a friend and only after some samosa, kachori we would be down.
Sir didn’t begin the class without me and my friend. We were a few girls in the big class of 80-90, and we always sat in the first row. It was easy to tell we weren’t there. And then when we arrived, he joked that if you two had your breakfast, I would like to begin.
That was when I didn’t need a coffee or tea to begin my day even though I might have slept late the previous night. Nothing was needed to concentrate in the lectures.
What times!
As I roamed in the streets around the school sensing a familiarity that I couldn’t put my finger upon—yes there was the park which I crossed to get to the building, the water coolers inside which now lay rusty and dry but next to which my father and I had once stood looking up at the list of students who had been selected in the school: my name just a few inches up from the bottom of the list, the scorching heat—I walked towards a home I had lived in my second year in Kota. I remembered that I had to walk 5-7 minutes only from the backside of the school to reach it.
Within five minutes, my partner and I had crossed the blue house with the circular balcony projecting out of it. That balcony stood out even back then. Now the house was full of plants. Pots and plants hung every which way. The flowerpots hadn’t left much space on the ground floor, and sure enough, my room stood at the far end of the home. That was the only paying guest room on the ground floor next to the family’s residence. Upstairs, around ten more girls lived in some shared and private rooms.
“This seems to be it,” I said to my partner. We crossed the house and strode further to make sure that there wasn’t another one similar to my memories. There wasn’t.
After turning around, I walked to the gate to show him my room which was just a closed door now. Then instinctively, I opened the gate and walked in, partner in tow.
As we stepped towards the main door of the family’s residence, a man came out. He was the father of the family and was referred to by all girls us, “Uncle.”
He asked, “Yes?” looking at me with questioning eyes as I kept moving towards him. His frown deepened. Later inside the house he told me he was puzzled that who is this person who is walking inside without stopping or saying who she was or what she wanted. They had seen us on the cctv and that was why he had gone out.
I still continued towards him and held his hands. As soon as I grabbed his hand and looked at him, he recognised me. “Priyanka,” he said with a gush of laughter.
When I lived in his home nineteen years ago, every night he used to come and knock at my door. He would take my hands in his, wish me good night, and say that I was still hard at study and so on.
I would like to believe that he remembered the touch of my hand before he recognised my face.
And thus, we were taken in.
Aunty, their son, his wife, everyone recognised me immediately. Breakfast was made and ordered. Laughter rang through the house. Old memories wherein it was emphasised how focused I was and how little attention I paid to what I wore were laid out. My old room which was now merged in with the rest of the house and is now a guest room was shown to me and my partner. A couple of hours passed just like that.
Everything remained the same, yet so much had changed.
Or to say, so much had changed, yet everything remained the same.
One of the guards at the school had thought of me as a past student while I was still getting down from our car and hadn’t spoken to him. He later asked me the year of my study. When I told him 2003-2006, he said with glee that he had just joined in 2003. I chuckled that back then we used to go to our professor’s house for breakfast sometimes. Now it lays so desolate and quiet that I can’t believe it is the same house. He shook his head and walked away, smiling.
The guard seemed to have accepted the fate of the school much more easily than I could. Or, perhaps, as he had seen the changes gradually from so up close he had been able to take them for what they were.
He had been at the same place for the last twenty years while I had gone around the world. Yet, in that moment, I wanted to be him, whilst knowing how impossible that was.
Sadly, I don’t have any photographs from Kota. I had left my phone in our car. But, hopefully, this image from Rajasthan would do.
Do you remember where you were twenty years ago? What were your goals?
For this week’s letter,
Some of my writing,
quotes I love,
things to read,
things to watch,
and
travel tips.
Article from the Week,
6 Years of On My Canvas
When I speak about the blog, I mean this life that I have led as a self-claimed writer, blogger, reader, traveler, job quitter, black sheep of the family, the unmarried for the longest time, and stubborn woman who is said to live by her whims and fancies and is often sentimental. I will pick up details from her journey and what she found on this path she decided to tread upon without encouragement, push, or support from anyone.
Inside I have shared the learnings, challenges, and joys from the past six years as a full-time writer.
Read the update now. Or Pocket it for later.
The Big Lessons a Little Family in Pondicherry Taught Me
The title says it all.
Look at the story now. Or Pocket the inspiration for later.
Quotes I Love
‘I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home -a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.’
—EB White
"You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason?
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still."
— Sylvia Plath
Uncle Jan rightly said: the devil is never so black that you can't look him in the face.
H.E. Bates (I could be wrong here)
“The worship of the East for mechanical things seems to us deplorable and shallow; but seen here against so naked a background, the glamour of the machine, of something that gives comfort without effort in a place where bare necessities themselves are precarious, and every moment of ease comes as a boon and a miracle; seen here by the fire in the tent that swayed in the cold night, the light that sprang at will from the palm of my hand did indeed hold a divinity about it — a Promethean quality as of lightning snatched from heaven and made gentle and submissive to the uses of man. So their eyes saw it, more truly, perhaps, than ours, who buy the thing as soulless glass and wire.”
Freya Stark.
She wrote down the above lines when the members of a remote Persian tribe exclaimed loudly upon seeing Freya lit her torch.
We always seemed to have achieve impossible feats in the past. The trick is to not look back, it is in the belief that we can do anything we set our minds upon.
Yours Truly
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been reading short stories, books, articles, and so much more. I can’t possibly list all what I have read in the past week so I’m putting down the things I found most relevant and worthwhile.
instead of books I have been reading some heartfelt short memoirs,
1. We Had No Woman by Ronit Plank — A daughter longing for a mother, longing for anyone to become her mother. This one hits hard.
2. A Darkness to Slice Through: A Night With my Grandfather by Gary Smothers — A tale of leaving things behind and making our peace with them.
3. The Long Way to Home Base by Jodie Dalton— Memoir of a young broken heart that finally finds home.
4. How to Cook for Your Mother by Marian Rogers—An essay on cooking for the mother, which here was all about celebrating and crying over what was lost.
5. Little House in the Redwoods by Sherry Shahan—When a grandparent holds her children together.
What I’ve Been Watching/Listening
that’s worth mentioning
This week I saw the dinosaur series: Jurassic Park and Jaws, weirdly enough. My partner and I were laughing out loud that other guests in this guesthouse in Goa would think who are these weird people next doors watching these screaming roaring destructive loud movies every night. Well, one got to do what one got to do.
And for all adventure lovers!
In the last newsletter I shared the pictures of Jaipur, and it’s imperative that now I put out the photographs of Ranthambore National Park, the forest reserve I visited from Jaipur.
getting into the forest with a guide in a forest jeep
langurs welcomed us
now this is what I call a forest
rufous treepie. Looking at us from above.
The dry landscape of the park
love this picture of the forest. As the grass isn’t that high and trees stand apart, we could see upto quite a bit of a distance. Rajasthan forests were unlike the ones in Southern India where one can’t see beyond the path through which the forest car drives. The foliage and vegetation in South India is much more dense.
awaiting
Do you see what I see?
How beautiful!
a sambhar deer busy at eating. The guide said he would put a lot of grass and branches on his head as decoration to woo the female deer.
Another one. Ranthambore had a high density of both spotted and sambhar deer.
a roadside eatery, or as it is locally called: dhaba, Rajasthan
a Rajasthani thali we enjoyed. Lentils, spicy garlic chutney, spinach fry, sev-tamatar: a local preparation of tomatoes with a snack, salty fried green chillies, salad, jaggery — all with millet and corn chapatis. delicious.
Thank you for reading.
I hope you enjoy your weekend :)
Let me know what you think about this letter. Press reply.
Yours,
Priyanka
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