togetherness
Indian blackberry, work dissatisfaction, points for life, experience and art, four of us, Kerala poetess, and journalism under threat in India
Dear Reader,
Thank you for being here. I hope your week has started well.
At my parent’s home in North India, where I have been for about a month and a week now, everything happens but nothing ever happens. My parents, my partner and I live the same routine every day, yet every day is different.
I wake up around 6, even though I have been trying to get up at 5. My parents are up and about by the time I rise. I shower, get dressed, and make a cup of tea. Then I sit on my desk and write. Or so it is. Some days I speak a bit with my mother while walking around the house before bathing. Many mornings, with the cup of steaming tea in my hands, I look down at our lush garden from the balcony. Or, I go down into the garden for five or ten minutes, to soak in its coolness before the day would warm up the earth.
From 7, I work until 1 or 1:30 with breaks in between for breakfast, which sometimes my partner hands to me in my room. Or I get up to make breakfast. Or prepare something for my father who doesn’t usually eat what we all three eat. Sometimes, I also go out on the road to move our car from one spot to another. We have a lot of parking space but not a wide enough driveway. At times, I have gone with my father to buy a water air cooler and other times with my partner to the car service station. Someone had banged in our car parked on the road. Otherwise, on most days, I write, read, or edit. Still, work doesn’t seem to be getting over, or moving at the pace I wished it did.
I blame my concentration, focus, this searing heat, the neighbors, my mother, the loud music in the neighborhood, mosquitoes, lack of sleep, my partner, my father, everyone and everything. Yet it goes at its own speed, or so I think.
What to do?
Then I read through the notes to follow on my sticky pad. These are my words of magic, wisdom for life, things to remember, methods to pursue.
***
Points for life
Appreciate your partner more
You don’t owe anyone anything
Sit enough hours and this will happen
Meditate
Suffused with fun
Happy in where we are
Much for what we worry about, never comes to happen
There is a lesson for you in all this—let go
Be kind to yourself
Pass over the baton of responsibility to deadlines
Believe in the power of little by little, slight edge, keep doing the things working in your favor, find what works against you and remove those habits.
You are learning
Forget everyone, laugh at everything
This sunshine, as long as it is there how can I be sad
You are as oldest as you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be
Don’t explain yourself to anyone because they won’t see you as you are
Don’t scream fight self-pity or cry for whatever someone hasn’t done for you or done against you. Get yourself out of your quagmire and do what you have to do. (Where the crawdads sing)
Work with routine, rest happens
Quiet the voice always explaining things to you
When you feel lonely, work
Everything else will change be forever unpredictable undependable but the more time you spend with your work, the friendlier and more loyal it would become. When everything else disappoints you, you can find solace in work. It behaves in a predictable way—it will root you.
countenance, don’t change for anyone
don’t fight
take photographs of the little things every day
free run
you are special, always remember that
Word by word
Don’t worry about anything. Just do.
No one is a villain. No one is a background voice either. Don’t judge anyone.
Points for life
***
I try to calm down. I breathe. I fill up another glass of cold water. I stare at the screen harder. I go at it.
And then I write this in my journal.
***
It’s good Sagar(my partner) went with father to shop grocery for his mind would be distracted. Plus it isn’t bad to do these things. Since morning he has—this is a glorious time for Mom can’t cook and the boon it has brought upon is that Sagar is learning to make rotis properly, learning to prepare ingredients for things, and he is also deep frying for the first time in his life. He was scared, holding the wok with his left hand using a cloth.
I said to him, “This won’t turn over. Don’t worry.”
Mom replied, “But there is no scope for mistake. If he does something suddenly, it might turn over.”
And I thought—experienced people can teach better to everyone.
Whosoever is experienced holds an art with them. They learn the rules, practice and practice, and now they change the rules and do their job innovatively. So is art that then? The ability to mend rules, innovate methods to do better, and be able to do with a meditative rhythm that comes with decades of practice. The rhythm you might have felt radiating from an experienced cobbler, welder, or even a stone sculptor—like the one we saw that day outside Ajanta caves. So is that art then? Are they all artists? I think so. It is a blessing to watch such a person at her job, a pure bliss to learn from an experienced person. Like the one who was roasting coffee in Fathima coffee shop in Kodaikanal. He is the one who comes to the shop to oversee coffee-roasting and grinding once every week.
So Sagar is off now, after making koftas and sweet pooda with the sugar syrup left from gulab jamun—my inventive mother reusing everything she can.
What a privileged life we have, all four of us right now! Being with each other, cooking and eating together, resting in this cool breezy garden-fronted home, watching squirrels run amok on the jamun tree, listening to the cuckoo that sits upon it, talking, discussing matters, waking up when the sun comes out or before dawn, helping each other out—we all need all of us, all of this is bliss.
***
In the middle of the chaos, there is love, peace, patience, silence, understanding, cooperation, support, well-being, and togetherness.
Do you live alone or with family?
For this week’s letter,
Some of my writing,
quotes I love,
things to read,
things to watch,
and
travel tips.
Article of the Week,
A Happy Poetess From a Village of Wayanad (Kerala): Day 3, Episode 3
In a village in Wayanad (Kerala), the host's middle-aged daughter, who is an MSc in Chemistry, shows me her poems and tells me we can be happy even when lonely.
Read the full story now. Or Pocket the narrative for later.
Please note:
Find the first piece of this series here: Finding a Home in a Village in Wayanad (Kerala): Day 1, Episode 1
Second here: Life in a Tea, Coffee, and Betel Nut Village in Wayanad (Kerala): Day 2, Episode 2
Quotes I Love
Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“All of the answers are within us, but such is our tendency toward forgetting that we sometimes need to venture to a far away land to tap our own memory.”
Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage
Life like a rocket flies
Mainly in darkness, Now and then on a rainbow.
Voznesensky
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
Richard Powers
The journey demands my attention, forces me to focus on the now, and makes me let go.
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.
Minister ‘called for tea’, read headlines with ‘sarcasm’: NYT journo recalls her time in India—A report by the people-funded news channel Newslaundry on how foreign journalists were treated by the Modi government.
Emily Schmall, the Delhi-based South Asia correspondent for The New York Times, who was invited by the Indian government for what seemed to be a “friendly invitation for tea” said in a recent conference, “Journalism is under threat in India.”
Schmall added that beyond “reprimands”, the government “punishes those whose stories it doesn’t like with short-term visas that make renting an apartment or even buying a cell phone service, all but impossible.”
Origin of a Species by Nilanjana Roy— A heartening account of the first Indian to publish a book in English. From this article, I learned much about the history of Indian English Writing and about life itself.
My passage to England was so unlike the swashbuckling approach of a man I had started to adore, across the passage of centuries. I wished I had half the resilience of Sake Dean Mahomet, the first Indian writer to attempt a full-fledged book in English, and the intrepid founder of first a coffee house and then an unabashedly Orientalist spa in Brighton.
Nilanjana Roy
A Slow Walk Through the Nilgiri Hills by Sneha Thomas—The narrative slowly ambles along the mountain town of Ooty, revealing its history, hidden beauty, and quiet, despite the over-development and crowds. When I visited the town in March this year, I walked a lot in Ooty, explored the town, went off the beaten track into the deeper woods of the botanical garden, and spent time around a church overlooking the city and the hills. I wish I had walked along the train tracks too and done so much more, as mentioned in the travelogue.
The vibrant green of Monterey cypress, the delicate greenish-yellow of Maidenhair, the sombre green of Himalayan cypress, and the mellow autumn tints of maple trees–in the tranquillity of the Arboretum, which feels like a closely guarded secret, I begin to feel a profound sense of belonging, surrounded by these silent guardians of history.
Sneha Thomas
What I’ve Been Watching/Listening
that’s worth mentioning
I have seen Heeramandi, a Netflix series on the lives of courtesans based in pre-independence Lahore. The scenes are grand, the way of life of the courtesans, some of whom are great dancers and singers, exquisite, and some of the performers and scenes commendable. But the story lacked depth at many points, characters were incoherent, and motives and events were too cliched and not convincing. One can see the series for visual entertainment, not intellectual.
And for all adventure lovers!
some more photos of my home and the city.
Thank you for reading!
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I hope you have felt some togetherness in life too, even if in loneliness :-)
Let me know what you think about this letter. Press reply.
Yours,
Priyanka
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