Winters In South India

So here's my little something to the chilly months ahead of us.

As I start talking about winter you might think that I am one those fool proof Delhiites or a Kashmiri or perhaps a rich brat from a cliff facing cottage in Shimla. It so happens that I am not any of the above mentioned and nor do I fit the bill of a typical north Indian who has seen the extremities of cold.

But of course, if I am not a person right out of the capital then how can I talk about the cold. For a person who has never lived in the north, has spent her life in six different cities of South India and is presently a hostelite in pune, winter should be something alien right?

Don’t our dear north Indian friends keep bragging about their chilly winters, with freezing days and arctic nights?

Often we hear them describing the taste of “garam jalebis” or how we need to wear layers of clothes and how you can’t see anything at the distance of five meters because of the fog.

Jealous though I feel, I think winter is not something you can enjoy only when you are bundled up under tons of wool or when the water turns to ice in the tap. Having lived all my life in Southern India I wouldn’t say that I missed out on the winter fun.

 Hyderabad, with its cozy mornings and unsettling coolness, the pleasant evenings with it’s by the by winds that I spent on Necklace Road are something that I can never forget.

As a young kid I remember going for evening plays in the Cubbon park of Bangalore wearing a thin sweater and still enjoying the longer evenings.

 The wintry mornings that I spent on the beaches of Chennai, inhaling the salty air and sipping the coconut water may not be the usual winter routine but is a treat in itself.

Mumbai may not be freezing as such but the cold air that stings your face in train travel which makes the vada pav even tastier is a different winter all together.

Tell me, is it necessary for the weather to be ice cold for us to relish the taste of hot momos, to enjoy a long sweat less run, to feel lazy in your bed or get excited to wear a nice smart jacket.

Isn’t winter just another mood of the weather?                                      

Not depressing, nor exactly happy. Perhaps that time of the year when the climate is lost in its own reverie. It’s the time when the year looks back at its younger self and realizes it has to come to an end.

I think we can all enjoy snuggling up in our own warm blankets and eat through the suddenly grown appetite without the temperature boasting off a minus sign ahead of it. Sitting in my hostel room with a stationary fan, wearing a warm hoodie, with the mercury levels decreasing and enjoying whatever “thandi” South India has to offer I feel the taste of garam chai or the aroma of hot coffee would be the same even if the weather men don’t predict zero vision for the night. 

Inconvenience Regretted

Once I was walking down a heavily dug up road that had been like that for well over six months. The workers had dug up most of the road for some municipal work and showed no signs of patching it up anytime soon.

Ironically they had their usual 'Inconvenience Regretted' board placed on the pavement.

The state of the road showed no regret and thats when the idea of this scribble came to me. It's not much just a little sketch of the road and that board with a slight change.

The board somehow makes a lot more sense to me now.

Not your average assignment.

The place smelt of burnt wood and ashes, there were trees everywhere and way too many crows.  The ground was damp with rain and scattered with leaves and twigs. A never ending silence enveloped the place broken only by the cry of a crow or human.

It was peaceful yes, but with a certain unpleasantness that did not quite make it peaceful.

As we approached the parking lot the first person we came across had an earthen pot covered with a white cloth in his hand. You might take a guess at what was in the pot. But once you know where we were standing you won’t need a guess.

The pot had ashes, ashes of a burnt human body, a dead body.

And we were standing in a Hindu Crematorium.

And what took us there, an assignment. To improve our observation skills two of our teachers decided to divide the class in pairs of two and each team was sent to different places for observation.

My teammate and I got the queerest one, a crematorium. A place where we had no reason to be and where it could be considered rude to poke around just like that.

But there we were, confused and out of place and wondering how and why we got here. Where do we look and what do we observe in a place where the dead are sent on their final journey. As we went ahead we saw that unlike the Hindi movies where the dead bodies are always cremated in an open ground and the mourners are always in white, this place had neither the open space nor people clad in white.

It was like a place specially built for this purpose, the whole process of cremation itself was institutionalized. There were long, high sheds that had chambers to place the dead in, pile it up with wood and then burn it. The workers were busy preparing for a funeral or cleaning up after one. Their duties were mundane, their job saddening but the complete absence of emotion and their immunity towards it was startling.

And you can’t even blame them for that attitude. For us as first time spectators there was a lot to feel for but for them this is their income. Dead bodies, ashes, shaved heads and swollen eyes they’ve seen enough to not feel anymore.

Barely ten minutes in the place and a procession of people walked in. Six people ahead were carrying a dead body heavily laden with flowers. We could see the feet of the body, it was a man. A troop of fifty or so people followed them. Only a handful was in white.

I looked at my own clothes, too bright for a place like this.

Death, I suppose, numbs the heart and head to not be able rationalize for a while. In white or not they had come their heads bowed and eyes uncertain.

Surprisingly enough there were not many tears or howls. The ones who performed the last rites looked too shaken to show much emotion. I guess the idea of comprehending with a death takes time to sink in.

One of the workers was busy preparing for the cremation. The pundit who had come with the procession was reciting mantras. The flowers that had been all over the body were thrown away unceremoniously and lay there discarded. The last rites were performed and the flame grew higher.

We watched standing away from the crowd who had now lost interest in the funeral and were giving us stealthy glances wondering if we were reporters or artists.

I stood looking mesmerized not by any beauty but by the fact of life. That person might’ve meant so much to so many people. Hours before his death he had a name to be called with but now he was only a dead body.

The flames grew higher and the crows were swarming in at the dead. We looked away and did not say much on our way back to the parking lot.

There were some people who were feeding the crows with some kind of dish. It is said that if the crow eats the dish then the dead person’s wishes have been fulfilled. These people were all in white and teary eyed. It had sunk in.

Death, the word itself has so much certainty. It’s final, decided and inevitable. You can’t run away from it and nothing can help you do that. When questioned in class about what my experience was like, I had no way of describing it.

It was peaceful like death should be but it was eerie like the idea of death is.

The Bucket List

When I grow up, when am older, when I am a big girl so on and so forth.

Bucket lists, consciously or not we've all made them.

The weather is hot, I am highly bored and have nothing else to do so I guess I’ll be jotting my bucket list down for my own record.

I want to go to the Harry Potter Wizarding Park. I want to visit Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, have Butter Beer and Bertie Bott’s every flavored bean, fly on a broom and walk in the forbidden forest.

I want to go to Green Gables in Canada. For those who have read or seen Anne of Green Gables, this would make sense. I want to live on Prince Edward Island and walk in the woods.

After reading ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘The Colour Purple’, going and living in Kabul and Africa have been on my list. It may be because of the way the authors have described the places but ever since I’ve read them, the two places hold some level of fascination for me.

When I was in my 8^th standard I had been in NCC- Air Force and like any other starry eyed kid, I wanted to become a Pilot. I don’t know if I can ever become one but I would love to learn flying for sure. I want to do Sky Diving and Bungee Jumping. I want to take a dip in the Mediterranean Sea and come face to face with a shark. All of this under controlled circumstances of course, there is a lot more on list you see.

Once in a plane, on my way to Bangalore I had been flipping through the magazine the airlines provide. I read about this little country called Andalucía, near Spain. The country so charmed me that I'd love to go and live there for a while.

I've always wanted to travel the world. One of my most farfetched dreams is going to every single country on the map. Even if it is for just a day or even visiting the airport will do.

I want to be able cook good food and play some musical instrument. I’ve always wanted to play the guitar but never came around to learn how to do it.

I want to have a house of my own and I’d want to design that myself.

I want to open a spa of my own and design a whole new experience for people. 

I also want to start up a boarding school along with my father in a little town where my parents were born.

I want to own a fancy car and a beach house, a little cottage on the cliff side and a cozy little summer house. I know for a fact that it might take me two lives to earn money of that sort to own all those things. Which is why I sometimes joke about catching some big fish and marrying him.

I want to learn horse riding, go river rafting, adopt a little girl and do PhD in literature.

I have no idea how many of these things I might be able to do but I guess the one thing that I want the most is what I’ll be writing next. I believe that of all the things that I want to do, this is something I can surely manage.

I want to live in a house of my own where there are books stacked three deep in the shelves. Where country music is played all day long and Kishore Da sings through the night.

Where the air smells of good food and the fridge is full of chocolate. The gardens are full of lilies and the path lined with Gulmohar trees.

The mornings are spent in the verandah having coffee and reading the newspaper. The evenings on the porch sipping wine and talking of good old days.

The place is full of squishy cushions and comfy armchairs.

Where there are footsteps of friends and family and the walls are lined with framed sepia photographs.

Where there is love and laughter, happiness and sorrow, confessions and celebrations, moments of retrospections.

And that little house tops my ever growing bucket list.

To Being Young

We are young, we run free

Stay up late, we don’t sleep

Got our friends, got the night

We’ll be alright.

I have no idea why but I’ve been hooked to this song for the past two days now. One of the reasons could be my fast approaching birthday. Come Monday I will be celebrating my 19^th and last teen birthday. With all my friends rushing into their twenties I am one of the few left behind in their teens.

One of my friends told me how our lives would have changed completely by the end of this decade. We’ll be earning, have a house of our own, some of us will be married and some might also have kids. But I suppose the decade that passed by has been equally life changing.

Teenage, what crazy years they have been!

From being silly at 13, bratty at 14, queer when 15 (not just by appearance), a little excited about 16, growing wild in 17 and 18 and finally a little grown up by 19. I am sure it might’ve been different for everyone but mostly by the time we reach the big twenty we all have some sense knocked into us.

We've all quite literally evolved in this decade from being little monkeys to young adults. It has changed us enough to look back at our old pictures and videos and feel nostalgic and highly embarrassed at times. All those old school pictures with friends and teachers, the annual and sports day videos that our parents took with great excitement, the certificates that brought so much pleasure and report cards of school that we laugh at now had been a source of continual terror back then, I realize we’ve all come a long way.

If anyone ever came and told me in my high school that I would one day laugh at the various tactics of telling my marks to mom or showing my dad a diary note then I would’ve thought that the person is simply pulling my leg or being very rude.

Though now when I recall certain incidents from school I do wonder why, had I been that stupid.

At times we did something which made us feel how grown up we were and could never understand why our parents found that so funny. Well now I do know why they found it funny because coming home with a traffic policeman because the bus driver left you behind was hardly sensible, nor was adding salt to an extra sugary tea an example of quick thinking. But those were pre-teens when we did not take offence for being laughed at.

And as we moved into our teens it was sort of in vogue to argue with Mom and Dad on every single topic under the sun. Even if at the end of the argument we don’t get our way through we simply had to defy whatever they had to say. By the time we reached the last few years of high school we were convinced that our parents had a lot of catching up to do.

And suddenly when we made it to college as freshmen and had absolutely no idea about how things worked outside school, Mom and Dad gained back all the sense of superiority because well we were back to being the youngest. 

I am a little excited, a little nervous, a tiny bit scared and every bit confused about the years ahead of me. I just hope that a decade later I will be able to laugh at the years gone by and say
 “What an idiot I’ve been”.

Because if I manage that I’d know I’ve had some memorable times.

The Shoe Rack

Happy New Year folks!

I haven’t got loads to tell today. I’ve just got this old piece of my writing which I’d like to share.

This was written during the Video Film making module of my course. I wanted to make a short film based on this but I haven’t been able to as yet. I wish I could say that the video is coming soon but for now all I have is the script.

The Shoe Rack

It’s a regular college day, the regular crowd, regular classes and regular mess food. I am sitting by the stairs, staring out of the window. I am staring outside at nothing in particular. There is the playground, the busy street, the pavement full of cars and kids. As I carry on with my aimless staring my eyes focus on the kids playing on the pavement. They are all the kids from a nearby slum. Sitting up here all I can see is their shrunken heads and naked feet. Those naked feet have somehow caught my attention. I look back inside the college building and without meaning to my eyes stare at the shoes of every passerby.

Some walk by wearing sport shoes, some strut around in them. There are those who rush by wearing comfy floaters and there are those who walk around at leisure in them.
There are some who seem to be dragging themselves in their slippers and there are some who have socks teamed with them. There are also fleeting glances of those who are running with time in their pointed shiny formals. 
Just as I am following a pair of Kolhapuris tumbling down the stairs the tick-tock of a stiletto draws my attention. I look up at them cat-walking down the stairs accompanied by a pair of stocking and boot clad legs. There are then the glimpses of the trendy All Star Converse in the variations of blue, red or black.

Two pairs of feet are huddled together, the feminine mojdis sitting a step above the Reebok sneakers. The occasional but in vogue osho slippers also make their way around.
You then have those sudden striking experiments of footwear. A brightly coloured bally or a loud gladiator. You might also find shoes that don’t exactly look like shoes or a weird looking sandal. 
The old school chappals and leather jootis also have their fare share. I look down at my own feet snug in a pair of the rubber jootis you get these days. All of them feet are moving in front of my eyes.
Slowly they all become a blur to me. 
And then a silent pattering of naked feet comes into focus and I stare at them hurrying down the stairs with some unknown purpose. I follow those feet trying to place their owner but before I can come down to any understanding they are gone.

It is said that you judge a person by their shoes.

What if they don’t have any?

My mind is drawn back to the street children playing down stairs. They all look the same to me, little shrunken heads and naked feet.

Again, you judge a person by their shoes, What if they don’t have any?