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.

May flowers

Yesterday, while buying some flowers for a friend's housewarming, I came across two little girls with eager smiles and deep, searching eyes. As I stood inside the florist's air-conditioned shop, they were watching me keenly through the glass doors of the shop standing in the scorching sun outside. When the florist took the selected flowers out to chop off their stems and other straggly bits, the girls rushed towards him, pointing to the blood-red carnations in the bunch. I could tell from his hesitating smile that he had politely turned them down before stepping inside the shop to give the finishing touches to the bouquet. After I paid and was almost on my way out, I noticed the girls were still standing there with their faces pressed to the glass door, their gaze lingering longingly on the fresh-cut flowers in the buckets. Already late and a little bothered by how muggy it was for a day so bright, I rushed back and grabbed two yellow gerbera daisies, tossing a twenty-rupee note to the shop assistant. When I handed them each a daisy, the girls' puzzled faces lit up instantly breaking into broad, beaming smiles — a sparkle that outdid even the blazing noon sun. "Thank you, madam!", they chirped together in sing-song voices. I smiled and asked them to pose for a picture which they quite enthusiastically did. 

As I slammed the car door shut and turned on the air-condition, I realized how little it takes to make someone happy. A kind word here, a warm smile there — and that's how the world keeps spinning day after day, everyday. I also realized that, perhaps, in this unexpected exchange of smiles, I ended up being the happier one. Sure, they took the daisies home but I came back with a memory and much more.

In the wake of the very recent Nepal tragedy*, it is these little gestures of give-and-take that one must remember to share. Thousands of lives smothered under the rubble of now lost spaces, centuries' old temples and stupas battered into incoherent halves, priceless heritage pounded to nothingness, and villages 'flattened' beyond recognition — such horror of horrors!
Whenever the world is struck by a disaster, which, sadly, is so often these days, and I'm overwhelmed by a crumbling sense of doom, these lines come back to me again and again:  

"Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell".

~ Hermann Hesse

*If you are interested to contribute to the Nepal relief efforts, here is a list of the organizations that are are soliciting donations. 

A summer of bouquets

"... When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table ..."

~ T.S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Last week, on a quintessential summer afternoon, we set out on a picture-taking long ride. As the mocking, piercing late-afternoon sun gradually began melting into a warm, golden twilight, things took a mellow turn. That is when Eliot's timeless poem struck me, when the sprawling, bougainvillea-laced roadside, draped with the pinkish-gold sheen took our breath away. We have always admired this green, wooded patch of about ten kilometres, a road that leads to my alma mater, the University of Hyderabad, but come summer and it turns into a different world altogether. Therefore, only passing by it and admiring nature's patchwork isn't enough; one has to capture their kaleidoscopic glory, the gorgeous pink-and-yellow embroidery of the bougainvilleas and the laburnums. A fine summer bouquet, I call it. Who would believe there's this huge concrete, IT jungle that lies coughing and panting right next to it!

 
The other bouquets, and none too pleasing as the above, that are looming large in our days is the hullabaloo of an upcoming move to a new city in June. This May marks the exact two years since we wrapped up our lives in Seattle for a much-debated return to the home country and now it's time to move again, to go through that uncomfortable process of leaving the old and adopting the new. And this time, unlike Hyderabad, it's an entirely new city. There's a world out there that doesn't know me and whom I don't know. Despite its claims of being the best city to settle in India for nomadic hearts like us, if you have been reading me for a while you probably know how and to what extent change bothers me. I am a creature of habit. To the core. But hopefully, with friends who go back a long way and with scenic getaways within hours' drives from the city, this time it'll be different. Hopefully, this time I'll be less complaining and more appreciative of my surroundings. Hopefully, this time I'll have a tree by my window and can watch the sky puff and roar when it rains. Hopefully.  

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!

Indian summer, for real this time

Sunday, 2:00 pm. Hungry. Dash into the kitchen. Boiled noodles tossed with some quick, spicy stir-fried vegetables. Gobble it up. Run back to the air-conditioned bedroom. Read a little. Scribble some lazy notes. 5:30 pm. Hungry again. Oh, just make yourself a cup of tea and grab some crackers. Or may be, just water would do?! Even a walk to the balcony could prove fatal. Just stay inside. Till, ummm ... June may be?!

When in India, it's really hard to disagree with T.S. Eliot's take on April, but only as far as the first line goes. April is the cruelest month of the year and if anything can come close to or aggravate the agonies it unleashes upon us mortals, it's the following month of May. Funny now, and how very like me, to be remembering this vengeful season last year, in another world and almost at this time, all sloshed with nostalgia and heartache. The tricky concoctions homesickness and memory brew!!
When almost all my friends in blog land are singing odes of a spring tinted with cherry blossoms and azure days, I, in the tropics, have morphed into a sluggish ball of restlessness and edgy emotions. Like my Ma says, "It's all because of the heat!" That's right, whatever goes wrong in these two months, we have the weather to blame for. Whoever you call, since meeting friends and entertaining takes a backseat till the rains say hello, has got a bit of summer woe to share, the regular rigmaroles being the loss of appetite and dehydration, and how it's a nightmare to cook the simplest of meals in a sweltering kitchen. Although modern living does help one to a certain extent, one eventually has to get out of the air-conditioned cocoon sometime. And the monsoons are a long, long way from now.

The only element of cool serenading our home is provided by the opening fronds of the potted palm, perhaps the only living creature to brave the fury of the sun and to tell the tale as well. The new, nascent green just gets into the head spreading its cool glow to my parched heartland, and the dainty dance of the sun on the tender leaves somehow makes the scorching 42 degree Celsius appear less brutal. Another green star, this one is!