Chasing shadows

It's May, that paradox of a month when it's green and just the right amount of pretty on the other side of the globe and all we are left with is a big, blazing, burning sun that never shies away from showing off its summer might. Unfair!

As I sit at the kitchen table and watch the morning sun flood the apartment in rays of gold, many things scamper and skid through my mind. Off late, I have been chasing shadows a lot, of all shapes and kinds. Some go years back in time, when the sun was mellow and seasons were a part of life, and some very recent whose bodies are too patchy to give a name to them.

In such times, I came across Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows — the heroic story of a woman, spanning decades and their history, who wears the scars of her past on her skin, literally, and carries their ominous shadows across the length and breadth of the world. Hiroko Tanaka, a brave, resilient Japanese woman, miraculously survives the horror of the 1945 Nagasaki bombings and trails her journey across the world, mapping her life through the troubled territories of Delhi, Istanbul, Karachi, and New York, in turn witnessing more death and disaster brought on by man upon man. Battling her own ghosts, she sees it all — the waning years of the British Raj in India, the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, the rise of terrorism in Pakistan, and finally the harrowing episode of 9/11 in New York. She sees it all, living and losing through each of these catastrophes. But what pestered me through the pages is this nagging question — whether the shadows just announced themselves wherever Hiroko arrived, or it was she who kept chasing shadows relentlessly all her life?

Some people have a reputation of casting shadows wherever they go, after all. Just like some carry a legacy of brewing storms in picture-perfect calmness.

February blues

Soon February will become another forgotten page in the year's calender. Like the confused, short-lived spring that's happening at the moment. Like the fast-fading flickers of a mellow spring sun that doesn't know whether to shine or sleep. It'll be summer soon and we know how those go when one's living in the tropics. I'll be left with nothing much to share here except sun-dried rants and sultry silences.

In the meanwhile, basking in the spring mellowness, I'm taking a break. Or I was, before my editor hunted me down last evening for some issues that 'needed to be addressed'. A good, long break it was from everything—breathing quiet moments of 'just be', soaking in the quotidian, taking a sip of the everyday beauty which, in moments of worldly preoccupation, we often ignore. For a fortnight, it has been mostly books and tea, and lots of sky-watching—something which I'm very good at, if I may say so myself. It's fascinating, observing the ever-changing canvas of blue everyday, dotted with somersaulting birds and wind-propelled, moody nimbus. And the best part about watching skies is being able to love the blues, for there are these happy kinds too.

It was after a long time that I came across a brilliant read, one that grips you from page one. Having a thing for Irish literature and after many recommendations, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox lived up to every inch of its reputation. Not essentially uplifting like the fluffy, cheerful clouds I stalk, but Maggie O'Farell's claustrophobic Edwardian world and its people will slowly and surely pull at your heartstrings. And Esme will stay with you for a while, long after you're done with the book.

Of books and writers

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and the sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” 

~ Ernest Hemingway

It rained yesterday, a good, earthy summer rain. It has been raining now and then since the last couple of weeks - the first moody spells of the year that have washed away the lifeless, sun-baked stagnancy off one and all. I hope they'll wipe the dusty panes of my mind too, and let me see the world more clearly so that some calm can be restored in my writing/blogging hours.
And so, somewhere between waiting for it to pour while grumpily editing a convoluted manuscript and the echoing persuasions of "you should write more often" from friends and family, these strikingly illuminating words of Hemingway happened. They further took me down memory lane, to a good ten years back when I had to present a paper on Hemingway's short stories as part of the semester-end evaluation for our Modern American Literature course. As an ode to his bizarre, very shortly-written short stories (there are some that are barely a page long), the title of my paper chuckled, 'The Difficulties of Reading Hemingway'. Being someone who worshiped Hardy and Keats and tried to emulate their romanticism, I wasn't too enthusiastic then about his curbed expressions and economic usage of words. Literature meant to describe, to paint a world laced with words. I remember the awkward look of our professor, who was quite the proverbial taskmaster, when very emphatically I ended my talk with how the great writer of his times finally shot himself in the head. Yes, I was that thoroughly tired of his brilliance that apparently the whole world got, but me. In stark contrast, over the recent years, I'm amazed at the candour that I find in his writing. The very understated style that once annoyed me now astonishes me - the art of saying so much in just a handful of words. Not for nothing they say, you don't read a book once. As you grow, so does its world and the characters living inside it.

PS. My current reading stupour comes from Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul. A plot that skids between two completely different geographies - Istanbul and Arizona (peppered with bits of San Francisco as well) - and houses at least thirty characters of which about fifteen carry the narrative forward, it's a whirlwind of a read. At times I felt the urgent need of drawing a family tree so as to not lose track of who was where and when. But like I have said here before, the element that tugged at my heart amid this chaos was Istanbul - its charming cobbled streets, the call of the simit seller, the greedy seagulls hovering over a ferry on the Bosphorus, and the history that coats almost every building of the city. There lies the pull of the novel. So yes, go for the atmosphere and for a detailed critique of the general Turkish attitude toward the Armenian genocide.  

March musings

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."

~ John Didion

March.
When the other side of the globe looks forward to signs of change, to pearly sprouts of spring hopes, this side has begun anticipating the reign of a brutal sun and the imminent decay of anything and everything. Life and Death, spinning the wheels of the world.

A few days back, an Instagram friend asked me to which place did I belong and if I still lived in the US since my posts are pretty random without any chronological coherence, and the quirky hashtags #upperleftusa and #northwestisbest are used a lot to caption them. My answer was: "I live in Hyderabad now, my second time in the city followed by an earlier four-years' stint as a student though I belong to the coastal state of Odisha... and yes, we were in the States for almost five years". To this the friend replied: "You belong to so many places!", and that got me thinking.
I do after all, don't I? I even belong to places where I have lived only for a week, places that I've just been to as a tourist. Maybe belongingness comes easily to me, it's the uprootedness that I have a problem with. And in the process I have given shape to absent spaces, claimed certain parts and people of those places as mine and in turn, made them a part of my little world. How effortlessly I belong to each one of them, ever so easily like wearing a new skin, partaking in their joys and miseries equally. And therefore, I cannot help but mull over these geographies from time to time, be it the fate of the people or simply the changing seasons.

These days I go back to Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City a lot, a book that I started reading some six months back and have been deliberately procrastinating to reach its end. It's so sensually rich in nostalgia and so brilliant is Pamuk's rendition of his city, that one immediately feels his aching love for the much-fabled streets of Istanbul. An acute sense of loss and melancholy hangs like a light but omnipresent fog throughout the memoir which is beautifully laced with black and white photographs of the city as Pamuk has seen and known it. One sentence that often comes back to me from the book is: "Life can't be all that bad," i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a walk along the Bosphorus."

Which is my Bosphorus then? The beach and the mango trees that I call home? Or the view of the misty Cascades that I know as home? Or the disarming smiles of the Himalayan faces amid whom I feel most at home? Or the dusty streets of an old city that I had once proudly boasted of as my second home?

   

Farewell October

It is winter suddenly. The indifferent autumn air has given way to colder nights and desiccated days. Roadsides are dotted with carts of bhutta (roasted corn) sellers. The thin wisps of sooty smoke rising from a makeshift fire-pit clouding the vibrant yellow and green of the corn cobs. The domestic scenery includes bottles of thick shea-butter lotion, pairs of socks, and curls of steam rising from teacups. A sudden lull drapes the evenings, which come quite early now, and time appears to freeze after a point. It is that time of the year again when food and festivals surround you for a good three months, out of which a month ends today.  

It is also the time when I enjoy my reading hours the most. Perhaps it's the quietude, perhaps it's the enveloping bubble of coziness. Once again I ended up being moved, almost driven to a state of emotional numbness by one of my most favourite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri. That there's no end to her brilliance, we all know, but her latest release, The Lowland is much more than just a novel. Interlacing history, both personal and political, and the much-explored themes of marriage and the parent-child relationship of her narratives, she builds the plot with a deftness that could only be hers. At once engaging and disturbing, it has moments that make you put down the book, sit back for a while and sometimes, suddenly burst into tears of surprise. There are lines in it which command that kind of an emotional commitment from the reader, that carve out a certain you. There are people in it who might be you or me, their defeat ours. There's a remarkable shift in Lahiri's prose - no more the lyrical, graceful style; this time she keeps it crisp and very much to-the-point, and perhaps that is why it hits you harder. 

Writing this post immediately after an hour of having finished reading the book, leaves me somewhat rattled. May be I'll attempt a coherent evaluation sometime else. Today I just want to remain lost in those windy, deserted beaches of Rhode Island and dwell upon the unintrusive, lifelong love that a father nurtures for his daughter. That and the newness that the change of season has ushered in.  

May yellow

As May unleashes its fury and the mercury climbs up to a dizzying 46 degree Celsius, the heat and the long wait for the monsoons are all one talks about these days. I, in the meanwhile, am fixated with the colour yellow - it's like everywhere, the quite obvious representative being the malevolent and monstrous ball of fire hanging in the afternoon sky. Though not my most favorite color from the mood-lifting spectrum, I tend to associate yellow with the childhood summer vacations - may be it's something to do with the ubiquitous presence of mangoes and the unrestricted freedom from the shackles of schoolwork. So as the sun continues showering its flames of vengeance, I cannot help but arrange these postcards of different yellows in my head, some vibrant and the others mellow, some seasonal and a few born out of idle musings.

Mangoes, the golden-yellow summer delights! Wherever you look, there they are - heaped in small carts lining the roadsides, dominating the fruits section in supermarkets, pulped and candied in thin, long strips, sliced and spiced in tempting pickle jars, and so on. One wonders if they'd still be such a rage if they weren't seasonal.

The full-of-hopes-yellow cover of A Thousand Splendid Suns, a tale equally, if not more heart-rending than The Kite Runner. It officially stamps me as a Khaled Hosseini fan and coincidentally, the end of May will see the release of his third novel which has already been pre-ordered online.

Yellow trumpet flowers paving the sun-beaten, desolate streets, cheerfully reminding one of the brighter aspects of an Indian summer. One could do well with a leaf or two from their book of resilience and steadfastness.

And finally, my pair of miniature yellow Bavarian clogs, which has stirred the travel bug in me that was lying dormant for a while. Gripped by a major bout of hill nostalgia, I long for a bit of the proverbial mountain air, where colorful prayer flags flutter against a blue, blue sky and the reverberating gong of a monastery makes the hills come alive. Sounds like the perfect daydream to be lost in for a while!

Curfewed Night

Life has gone back to its old, mad rhythm after the twin bomb blasts took Hyderabad by a storm some ten odd days back. Many must have forgotten about it already. Such is our sense of reality and our collective consciousness. But for a day, or may be even less than that, the city had come to a standstill reeling under a red alert. On the evening of the blasts, an anxious father after watching the news, calls up and asks about our whereabouts when to my utter disbelief, I don't know a thing, blissfully engrossed in the now-real-now-surreal world of Murakami. After confirming the details, I immediately call the husband, who on his way back from work answers the phone with the same bothersome nonchalance that I had answered my father's nervous queries with. The blasts happened some thirty kilometers from where we stay, in the bustling pockets of the city, and we being on the outskirts, the so-called 'techie area', had absolutely no inkling. It felt like living on another planet.

Later in the night, amid the helter-skelter of blame games by the police and the politicians, our lack of emotional involvement bothered me. Living in the same city and being unperturbed by something as intense as this is a very uncomfortable feeling. This got me thinking about Kashmir, a land that has been throbbing inside me ever since our visit last year. A perpetually conflict-torn valley that has magically escaped the attention it deserves not only by its own country but also by the whole world. There's Iraq, there's Afghanistan but quite intriguingly, there's no Kashmir (or the Indian-controlled Kashmir, if you must). The gullible Indians, continuously force-fed by the grandeur of Hindi films and the sensationalized media, have never bothered to look beyond the veil of its enchanting beauty. And by Indians, I don't mean I am any different.

This was Kashmir for me before we found ourselves there one fine November afternoon last year. Golden valleys resplendent with almond blossoms in the spring, midnight-blue lakes carpeted with lotuses in the summer, Mughal water gardens bathed in a russet glory in the autumn, the snow-peaked Himalayas glistening in the winter sun, beautiful people beaming with the obvious pride of one's land ... This is how the Kashmir of my mind looked and this is how it had been painted for me since my childhood - through celluloid where the hero would woo his heroine in the backdrop of a sylvan landscape; through my father's tales of his visit to the valley in the late 1970s; and much later, as a constant noise blaring from the telly regarding the Kashmir conflict.

But all this changed after that vacation, and it was about time as well, after I bought a copy of Curfewed Night in my desperate quest to unearth the real Kashmir and most importantly, read something that was written by a Kashmiri. Basharat Peer, a Kashmiri journalist-cum-writer, in his simple yet compelling narration, tells many crushing tales of the terrible beauty that this once legendary paradise has morphed into. In this haunting memoir, we come across the unfortunate people who have been treated as mere pawns by both the army and the militants. Peer, through a poignant portrait of this terrible situation, takes us to these people and the devastating truth they live with everyday.

I am never too comfortable discussing politics or its related aspects. I find it too vapid and meaningless. But today I've tried to dance on its promiscuous frills. I have tried to understand the fathomless pit of misery that Kashmiris have been pushed into since the last two decades. I have tried to feel the endless threat of living under terror and uncertainty, and of being trapped in never-ending curfews. For the scores of unfortunate Pandits who flew the valley in flocks, abandoning their paradise overnight, I have tried to understand that numb feeling that settles in when you don't know where you belong to, when the word 'home' is just a large, gaping wound that will perhaps never heal. 

After receiving this much needed education, I went back to our vacation in Kashmir. I tried not to look at the photographs and my ramblings as a tourist, and all I could gather was this nugget of emotion from our daily conversations with our very amicable cottage owner in Srinagar - "How do I get the last fifteen years of my life back?"

Hill fever

"I go to the hills when my heart is lonely
I know I will hear what I've heard before
My heart will be blessed with the sound of music
And I'll sing once more..."

Wanderlust. It all came back with a morning watch of that darling of a film. Once again that desperate longing for the hills. The itch to sniff the piney mountain air. Where the sun is honest and the people simple-hearted. Where windows open to silent, sagely peaks. Where serpentine roads climb in a moody fashion. Where life does not mean getting gagged by work and expectations ...

While I pine for all this in my heart of hearts, I have been cooped up for a few days with a stubborn throat infection that just refuses to leave. And bouts of feverishness make it even more worse. The hills, the pines, the people - all seem far, far away. It's a terrible feeling, to be at one place and to leave one's soul languishing in another. Much more terrifying than that is to be surrounded by people and yet feel the most crushing pang of loneliness, because nothing they say makes sense to the world inside your head and vice versa. So for now, I'll have to do with Prajwal Parajuly's The Gurkha's Daughter that brings eight colorful tales from the Himalayan foothills to my arid Hyderabad doorstep. The debut of a brilliant 27-year-old, the simple yet deeply humane stories, not for once fail to mesmerize with their tender storytelling. The aroma of steamy momos, the reverberating serenity of the gompas, the ubiquitous prayer flags framed against the blue backdrop of alpine skies, the omnipresent Kanchenjunga, the murky waters of the winding Teesta - I see them all in the faint yellow of the afternoon light streaming through the bedroom windows. As I had seen them, wide-eyed and hypnotized, in a freezing winter of 2007. So yes, the hill junkie is satiated for now.

And whoever came up with the honey-ginger-pepper tea for such sore and croaky times - may you be blessed forever!

November surprises

November always takes me by surprises, like these tiny lilac flowers cascading down from the otherwise plain, undemanding basil. I had never seen one flower, or in fact knew it did, before this. With the winter on her way to making an elegant comeback, the days have begun to shrunk. That strange yet delicious coming together of torpor and restlessness is back, and nothing like these quiet little awakenings to kindle the winter woes.

Then, there's a tiny yet overwhelmingly mulish part of me, that takes almost a century to finally acknowledge greatness that has long surpassed its peak. Of course, it's not the first time I'm regretting this, but with The Kite Runner the regret almost leaves me gasping. After two days of sleepless reading punctuated by stifled whimpers (yes, I do that), I am yet to come out of Khaled Hosseini's stunningly devastating world, a world that is so tenderly painted with love, hopelessness, and loss. Loss of everything, almost. What tugs at my heart is the one line - "There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood" - and perhaps there, in those heartrending, resigned words, lies the soul of the novel.
I won't say much about my afterthoughts, mostly because I realize I don't have words that would express the deluge of emotions pirouetting inside me, and also because I don't want to say goodbye yet. I can still see Hassan's carefree smile, the one sugared with unwavering love for 'Amir agha'; I can still smell the warm naans that Ali brings from the bazaar; I can still feel the cold crunch of snow under the zealous feet of the kite runners; I can still see Baba and Rahim Khan enjoying their black tea amid swirls of smoke rising from their cigarettes; I can still imagine the colours of Kabul before its war-torn, harrowing doom; I can still see Amir endeavoring all his life 'to be good again'. And I can still hear Hassan's heartbeat humming the only song of his life...

"For you, a thousand times over."

Rewriting, retelling

It rains this afternoon. It always does at this hour, when all is quiet and half of the day lies decaying, paving the way quietly for the other half. Searchingly, I run to the windows, for a glimpse of the rain-fattened sky, or may be a full-bodied, leafy tree to watch the drops do a dandy dance in the shaky caress of the drunken leaves. A rumble of thunderclap and I wake up from my wishful thoughts - my windows open to the neighbor's bedroom walls and my balcony offers only more concrete and broken vista. Devoid of any scenery, I make do with the familiar fragrance of wet earth that fills every corner of the house.

This obstruction in my rain-peeping brought back mellow memories of an always drenched place, when not so long before I would watch the rain drizzle on the dark pines from my patio that gave way to a magical peek of the cloud shrouded Cascades. All this, of course, seems to be a far fetched dream now or at best something like Coleridge's blurry fragment.
But this sudden burst of uncontrollable nostalgia surprises me. Was I not the one who would relentlessly complain of the sodding rains then? Was I not the one who would vent rain-soaked rants here, there and everywhere? How, then, did the once annoying rains become so dear today? Of course, I am moulding and mending the unpleasant bits of past to suit my precarious present. I am beautifying the once desolate, rain-beaten landscape into something romantic. And nostalgia is always romantic.

As luck always has her own way of mocking you, she couldn't have shoved a more appropriate read my way - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Just a hundred and fifty pages, yet it manages to turn you round and round as if the whole time you were on a mean, never-ending roller coaster. Tony, the protagonist, takes us on a flashback journey, primarily a solipsistic one, where we meet his mates and their youthfully pretentious, philosophical takes on life. The plot thickens when the most "clever" of them, the Camus-quoting, always serious Adrian commits suicide. Justifying the title, Barnes makes sure we sense the end after a major twist, only to be further distracted by his unreliable narrator. Tony weaves people and plots from his foggy memoir that spans more than four decades, while all the time the reader sits on an edge doubting the selectivity of his memories. What we remember as the truth and what really is the truth are two very different things. With his patchwork of additions and subtractions, permutations and combinations, he finally arrives at the truth. One that could never be retold.

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."

~ Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Eat, Pray, Love

"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

This was one confusing read for me, apart from the occasional nuggets of wisdom like in the above quoted lines. I swung between hatred and love and then sometimes it was just unadulterated disenchantment. Now before I plunge deeper into my regrets, I must confess of being somewhat of a literary snob. Almost a decade of studying and a year of teaching literature has done this to me. But I did stray many times and found pleasure being on the other side, my most favorite being Bridget Jones, for I could actually identify with so many of her blunders.
Coming back to Elizabeth Gilbert's journey, I finally fell prey to it despite the years of resistance, ever since its stellar release. The reason - having watched the movie Eat, Pray, Love for the second time recently, and being once again moved by Julia Robert's brilliant performance (when has she ever been dull?!). My other reason for picking it up - I hoped it would have a cure for my personal disillusionment with life at the present moment, and that I would get to mend certain aspects of my writhing and wringing world. But this was one of those rarest of times, when the film adaptation stirs you more than the book itself. May be it was the superficial tone or the effect of too many bad, needy jokes, but a large part of it felt like reading out of the diary of a troubled teenager often obsessing over something as trivial as her first pimple.

Having said that, no one can take away the writer's courage and faith for embarking upon this remarkable journey, both physically and spiritually. Kudos to her for learning the daunting Sanskrit scriptures and mastering the art of meditation, which, I am sure, many of us Hindus haven't dared to and probably never will. But I just failed to make a connection with her predicament, or to get inspired from her experiences. I even went back to Goodreads to check out a few more reviews and was relieved to find that nothing was wrong with me. Well, not here, at least.

And when I was too distracted by the overwhelming self-love in the book, I chose instead to stare at this Buddha bookmark and draw from the pool of serenity cascading from that eternally radiant face.

Monsoon and after

It has arrived, the monsoon, and with what frenzy. With the temperatures taking a huge plunge from the maddening 40Cs to the refreshing 20Cs and the city washed off its accumulated dust and summer sins, everything sparkles in a nascent, green light. A huge, huge sigh of relief it is. This much-awaited and welcome change has also brought some odd guests along - waterlogged roads, traffic delays and the most annoying of all, the common cold. It has been raining achoos all over and in my case, it is accompanied by a horrible sore throat as well. Home delivered pizza, lazily boiled soup and ginger-clove tea is what I have been living on for the past two days.

There is also the old, trusted cure of books, the very smell and feel of them and Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha it is this time. Devoid of chronology or coherence (and sometimes sense too), initially all one gets is the feel of listening to a little boy ramble on about his adventures with his friends. But then slowly it grows on you, this beautiful chaos, and flashback by flashback you get it all. Ten-year old Paddy's colloquial, naive first-person narration, the abusive relationship between the parents, and the reader's humored confusion, all remind me of Francie Brady's life in The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (a must-read, by the way).

For some reason, I have always enjoyed Irish literature, its characters in particular and the resigned manner in which they go about their lives. There's a subtle yet sublime stoicism in them that I admire, one that caters to my present sour mood quite well.

A word about the pictures in this post:

Unable to lug the gigantic SLR around in this weather and my cold-ridden state, I finally tried my hands at Instagram, and viola! I am absolutely in love with the fact that one could just work wonders with one's mobile phone. Now the very hip and happening Urban Dictionary defines Instagram as - "Every hipster's favorite way to make it look like they take really classy pictures when really they are still using their phones. Yeah, you might really look cute/old school/vintage/retro, but it's still a cell phone picture."
Whatever the purists might say, I am all for this instant fun. What say you all?

Chocolate croissants

Chocolate croissants
freshly baked
with the side of a good read
flashes of sun and rain
blue and blur
words and chocolate
a mosaic of thoughts
much food for a tired brain

Achoo!

Yes, I'm bug bitten! A nasty, mean cold bug it is, that has reduced me to a somewhat non-human like form - a head as heavy as a boulder, eyes droopy like a flower's wilting petals and a glacial meltdown for a nose. Try imagining that for a face!

Thank god for the small comforts though that a cold brings with it. My most faithful masala chai (ginger-clove-cinnamon-pepper) which is a panacea for all kinds of wear and tear, a snug blue woolly scarf and the good old Vicks VapoRub.
To read I have Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, although it is a tad difficult to do so with a blurred, watery vision. But the old world setting put together with the rolling English countryside is compelling enough to make me trudge on through the pages of this great piece of literature. Even though the butler's unwavering emotional self-restraint makes me quite uneasy at times, despite all that grand Englishness there is to his character. Even though I can't help sneezing through most of Ishiguro's brilliance. Achoo!! There I go again...

A day in Austen's Bath

Sprawled on the bed like a complacent cat, I soak up the elusive winter sun, one that shows up after a week long snow and icy rain. The humdrum buzz of a late Sunday afternoon drones around. I like how the sun rays peep from the window blinds and create a pleasing pattern of light and shade. And thus I continue with my recent bout of Austen comfort; both the books and the movies as well. A bit of Austenite, I am.

"I'm half agony, half hope", sighs Captain Wentworth from the heart-tugging pages of Persuasion. No particular reason for the choice but the autumnal Jane Austen just suits best to my current brooding, wintry mood. So I scour the murky lanes of my mind and lose myself  in the grandeur of Austen's Bath.

I tread carefully in my fine muslin gown, for it is muddy at this time of the year; what if the dainty lace gets all slushy and ruined. Oh and the dear, dear paisleys! How they cheer me while a gush of wind threatens to sweep away my bonnet. I pass through a thronging crowd of red coats; I try to spot that familiar, agreeable face. Just then a carriage drives past me in the most uproarious of hurries. Naturally, what follows is an utter embarrassment of confusion and a rampant exchange of hands and fabrics. Oh, but I did carry the parasol in a very lady-like manner.
I wander along the Georgian wonder of the Royal Crescent, dash in and out of the enticing lace and muslin stores, sip tea in the Pump room. Ah, the quintessential Englishness!

Season's first

Snow! Yes, our part of the city received a very generous amount of the pristine, powdery sheen over the weekend. Just when I was beginning to worry if we would have to go back to India empty-handed, without a chance to watch the familiar soft white fluffs blanket the stubborn, wintry ground. But there it was, magical and eternal like every other first. It felt new despite our two rather harsh winters spent in the East Coast. It was welcoming even if the slushy roads were not. And it was heartwarming, in a very childlike cluelessness, in spite of the plunging temperatures and the ticklish chattering of the teeth trying to spell brrrr!!

This morning as I stood on the patio shivering, enjoying the Narnia-like landscape, it felt fantastically surreal. Like a vintage oil painting, the scene reminded me of James Joyce's 'The Dead' from Dubliners. A man who has just learnt of his wife's romantic past is shaken by the suddenness and the intensity of the moment - that her dead lover is perhaps more alive to her than her emotionally frigid husband ever could be. He contemplates this ugly truth standing by the window watching the snow fall quietly, while a slow but heady storm wells up inside him. This passage is perhaps one of the most poignant piece of writings that literature has ever seen where Joyce, the master storyteller shines throughout.

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” 

~ James Joyce, 'The Dead'

Swirls and more

A lazy, overcast day. Rain falls now and then, stubborn and whimsical. A few more deadlines make a beeline into my ever piling 'to do' list. Of course the procrastinator in me idles. A Thanksgiving dinner menu does its usual rounds inside my head. Scouring the internet for something new, unusual. Distraction knocks. This time it is a lone lavender sprouting up from the pot, framed against a backdrop of resplendent orangish leaves. Despite the frost it still flowers in tiny, fragile bits. And it is almost December doing its annual dance upon our heads. 

Pleased and brightened, I think about something warm and quick for tea. That would keep me glued to John McGahern's Amongst Women. The life of a domineering, embittered Irish Civil War veteran amid his ever fretting daughters and wife. Absent sons, scarred relationships, confused priorities. Absolutely engrossing and dramatic. Suddenly my mind rings like the oven timer - puff pastry! Impatiently thawed, smeared with ground cinnamon and sugar. Rolled and cut up into cutesy swirls. Fifteen minutes in the oven and out they come all cinnamon-y and crunchy. 

As I hunch back to my sluggish self with the book and a hot cuppa, I see the rain climb down the window panes. I know it will be back. 

The Olympic Peninsula

Who says one needs a long, meticulously planned getaway to weave memories of a lifetime? Just a ferry away from home and a couple hours of drive through cozy little port towns with a distinct native American charm, and there you are - the breathtaking Olympic Peninsula. The surprises included glacial lakes, snow clad mountains, temperate rain forests and beaches with haystack rocks. All in all, a tiny world in itself, bursting with natural beauty. And what did I bring home back - forever. 

The guardian-like towering totem poles thronged the way... scores of Indian legends carved on fragrant cedar barks... a day by the side of the serene Lake Crescent... lazing under a mellow sun, amid wild flowers with Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach... sighing over buxom rhododendrons, preening in the morning light... gazing dreamily at the floating marshmallow clouds... a drive down to Forks, the Twilight town in the late afternoon... once a quaint little lumber town, now all 'dazzled by Twilight'... how things change... Rialto beach, dramatic with the scores of bleached driftwood... contemplating the ocean's endlessness through the giant hollow of a log... spectacular haystacks stand high in the green waters... the day ends with a beautiful cedar planked smoked salmon... a drive up to the majestic Olympic mountains the next morning... snow, still there in patches, like a tattered blanket on the ground... baby bear spotted on our way down, bewildered by the sudden attention of cars and cameras... an idle afternoon walk in the old growth forests of the Pacific northwest... the forest trails paved with tiny blue forget-me-not flowers... resolute brooks gurgling through mossy rocks... sailing into the sunset on the evening ferry... gulls flapping their wings on the golden waters... watching the mountains blur into distant shadows... home, hale and hearty.

Sandstone diaries

It had been quite a while since the ardent mountain lover in me craved for a place very unlike the blinding green, dewy fresh and effortlessly charming state of Washington. I longed for some place dramatically different, one where nature has taken surprising turns, one that would sooth my eyes and quench the thirst of my soul. In short, a place that had a distinct character and oodles of it. We looked no further since it had been sitting stubbornly on the top of our must-do list from a long time - the American Old West. Rough and tough, and mesmerizing like no other. Stay with me, dear readers, for I must ramble on for quite a length, whichever way I can, to bring to you my sandstone diaries.

Though we visited a handful of the scores of canyons and cliffs that the old, wild West boasts of, I shall restrain my narration with the two highlights of our trip. Our caravan started in the Bryce Canyon National Park of Utah, the spectacular home of the legendary hoodoos that date back to the prehistoric times. Sculpted from sedimentary rocks by the perfect harmony between air, water and wind, they stand with a fixed and aimless gaze as if stupefied by magic, just like their legend goes. The Native Americans believe the hoodoos were people who were stunned to stone by a wicked Coyote. One can almost see this story come alive in their vacant expressions and mystifying orderliness as if actually punished by a cruel taskmaster. A very striking allusion that scurried past my thoughts were spells from Harry Potter - 'Petrificus Totalus' and 'Stupefy' - which when used correctly, petrifies or stuns the opponent. One just needs the proper wand of course!

The rocks that redden here, whiten there and are orange elsewhere are a sheer delight to comprehend. The unique hollows and arches, bridges and hammers, are just a handful of the popular rock formations of the Bryce Canyon. The natural bridge is probably the most majestic spot in the entire park where an arched hollow of sparkling orange gapes at you with a colour coordinated background of dark green pines. Its cave-like structure reminded me of the "cave of swimmers" from Michael Ondaatje's much acclaimed novel, The English Patient. A weaving of part reality and part fiction, it is a historic and spiritual journey of finding oneself - in life and love, as well as in the abysmal vastness of the Sahara desert. It all came back in flashes to me - the red sand, the arid topography and above all the enigmatic rock paintings. I could not help but compare the novel (particularly its brilliant, must-watch movie adaptation) to my experiences. Like its lost hero Almassy, I too, could feel reality loosening its tight hold of me. Or was it I who lost sight of it amid all that hypnotic beauty?  

Before I digress any further, there was more amazement in store for us. When the last rays of the setting sun kissed the hoodoos, they turned a magical pink. Under a stretch of lavender sky and with their bride-like blush, the landscape oozed drama and grandeur. Of course I couldn't have enough of the camera and behaved like an unruly child to the hilt. And of course the husband had a hard time managing me!

The Antelope Canyon in Arizona comprises the second half of my sandstone stories. Glued to my thoughts ever since we had been to the Grand Canyon three years back, we did not consider it worth paying a visit due to a fatal combination of ignorance and lack of time. Like the traveller who broods over an incomplete journey, I lamented our decision when I later saw some breathtaking photographs of what happens to be the most visited slot canyon of the American Southwest. Therefore it had to happen, one day or the other, come what may!
Located on Navajo land, a trip to the Antelope canyon is always a guided tour where the guide is a Navajo local. Since we opted for the photography tour, which is also an hour longer than the normal one, the guide was just the man we needed to show us the best nooks and crannies. After a fifteen minutes ride in the back of a rickety mini truck, through a desert of red sands and being thoroughly sand-washed, there we were - the upper Antelope Canyon, which the Navajo call 'Tse bighanilini' meaning the place where water runs through rocks. What looked like an ordinary cave from outside, turned out to be the most astonishing experience once we entered it. That something this spellbinding actually exists was beyond our comprehension. The wavy patterns on the walls created by flash floods looked as if a thousand magical fingers, in one fleeting moment, have run along them. A curve here, a twist there and the countless illusions the moody patterns create made us forget the muggy suffocation from the collective effect of the sand, the crowd and the outside temperature of a good 100 degree F.

The most prized moment for which everyone waited with skipped heartbeats was the appearance of the entrancing light beam through the openings on the ceiling of the canyon. That was a moment of lifetime, surreal and fragile, and to some extent divine too. Yes, all at the same time. Enveloped in a rapturous murmur of sighs, time and space froze into eternity. There was a strange and haunting silence, when one could hear only nature speak. A thousand shimmering grains of sand danced in that ray of light, as if once it is gone the trance would break.
Sandstone of every possible earthy tone - orange, rust, brown, chocolate and sometimes even a faint purple - greeted us from every inch and corner. In actuality the elusive beams of light play this colour trick but when surrounded by all that splendor and nature's glory, does it really matter? The brochure we got while purchasing the tour ticket read, "It was and still is a spiritual experience". It couldn't have been more true.

It has been a fortnight since our return home but the stories keep coming back, in images and sounds. How a palimpsest of worlds dance in front of my besotted eyes and how I keep shuttling between the past and the present. Just like that! I might have just left a piece of my heart etched on the canyon walls and my head wandering in the dreary, dusty desert paths.

Now that I've actually said much more that I had planned to, I must end this rumination with a befitting quote from The English Patient.

"I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission, but signs of pre-occupation."

And for those of you wanderers who are wondering how the roads look like, here is a fine glimpse -