The new view

It rains everyday. Sometimes in thunderous downpours but mostly in soothing lullabies. And when the dark clouds puff and rumble their way down, the coconut trees dance with a new-found greenness. For my green-deprived eyes, this is sheer visual poetry and much more when I realize that all this is happening when I'm still living in a big, bustling city. In India.
Of course there are the ubiquitous sky-hugging buildings too, that stand so assertively punctuating the green patch. Those rectangular dots of concrete, when strung together, that map the oxymoronic facade of this city. But on my side of the world here, unmindful of the cacophony of an always-on-its-toes city, the trees win. And so does the sky.

Buddha's little island

"In the end
these things matter the most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?"

~ Buddha

An early Sunday morning. The now-autumn, now-winter nip in the air. The sun, a big orange ball, slowly climbs the rungs of the pale, fog-clad sky. A quick halt at a roadside chai kiosk to stir the groggy sleepyhead in me. The eager shutterbug in me tries to capture the elusive curls of steam rising from the tumbler. Yes, that's how roadside tea is served in India, in tumblers of thick glass. I kind of like its rustic touch, which opens a little window to a very dear childhood nostalgia of the many five-hour drives to grandfather's place. So, toward a blue, blue lake we head. Framed by rocky canyon-like formations and terracotta-hued pebbles on its bank, the waters glitter under the rays of a rather cruel January sun. On a raucous motorboat, whose foam seats smell like a pungent combination of rubber and metal, we sail forth to a tiny historical Buddhist island. Neat, landscaped gardens greet us through a flight of stairs guarded by tall inscribed pillars. Some trees wear a surprising autumn crown. The bright yellow of the leaves and the sapphire blue lake in the background make a dazzling contrast. Lovely prayer flags, yet again. Fluttering radiantly in the green breeze, they sprinkle their calm and good wishes all over the place. A rusty Buddha, missing an arm, stands inside a brick barricade, humbling all by his towering presence. A heady combination of serenity and well-being enshrouds us as we leave the island at the departing call of the motorboat.

These past ten days I have lived and loved well. More than that, I have been fed well, most of the times to the brink of my nose. Letting go of such wholesome goodness was hard, very hard. The reason - my parents! Need I say more?!

I watch

"Some of us look for the way in opium and some in God, some of us in whisky and some of us in love. It is all the same way and it leads nowither."

~ Somerset Maugham


I, instead, watch...

the slow yet sure death of my miniature roses. But look, how elegant they look even when robbed of every tiny atom of life.

the cloud of perfumed smoke rising from a bunch of incense sticks as it tries to climb the flimsy rope of my Buddhist prayer flag. How funny all of this seems, me being the confused believer sometimes and the resolute nonbeliever most of the times - I don't light the incense sticks ritualistically but love the feel of their faint floral scent wafting throughout the apartment; I don't chant the mantras but I love having prayer flags around for their mood-lifting colorfulness.

a late January sky pregnant with moody nimbi, framed by plumeria or the champa, as it is locally known, the quintessential floral ambassador of the tropics.

a neighboring apartment's terrace garden chockablock with colourful pots and bald plants, red dominating the colour riot.

my cup of tea, which grows cold from way too much meandering. Not the tea, but me. And this breaks the rut, as I must get up for a desperate run to the microwave.

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...

Stormy

A rather strange legacy follows me wherever I go - snow storms! They somehow make their way onto my nomadic trail, be it any part of the country. As I write this, snow falls moodily; furious now, gentle the next moment. The Pacific Northwest is witnessing a storm of historical proportions, so the weather news says. We have been trapped in snow storms before and therefore know the nagging anxiety it gives rise to. This time, fortunately, it does not look that bad and I sincerely hope it stays so.

Although being cooped inside all day does not feel exactly uplifting, I try to sneak out and take some pictures now and then. Perhaps the only bright side of the picture.

It's time for a hot steaming cup of ginger tea, my third since the morning. There couldn't be a more perfect day to drown oneself in that warm, gingery aroma. Hope there's no storm in my tea cup now!

Snow blossoms; verb or noun, who cares as long as it is beautiful. An old, favourite mug that I had long forgotten till a rampant search for 'something with snowflakes' was conducted. A futile attempt to catch the ethereal flurries before the greedy rains lick them all in a day or two. The freezing landscape dressed in a soft palette of grays and whites. A strange reverberating calm.

Plummy goodness

What does one do with a couple of unused plums? And oodles of boredom? Whip them up together with eggs, butter and flour and let them be friends inside a temperamental oven. The result - a warm and beautiful plum cake for tea, especially for the overcast, drizzly late afternoons that we are beginning to be threatened with. What's worst, they are here to stay. Just brew a fine cup of chai, preferably ginger or cinnamon, and a damp autumn never felt half so good.
Oh and yes, don't forget to invite the birdies. For I've heard a tiny dollop of birdie gossip makes this cake perfectly plumtastic!

For the interested and curious:

Plum cake 

serves 6

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup butter

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 plums, pitted and sliced into thin long petals

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9 inch round cake pan.
In a small bowl, cream the butter with the sugar. Then beat in the eggs and the milk.
In a larger bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Make a well in the center and pour in the egg mixture. Whisk gently till the batter is silk-like fine.
Spread the batter evenly into the greased pan. Arrange the plum slices attractively over the batter (I prefer it the free-spirited, whirlpool way!).
Bake for forty minutes or until a toothpick when inserted comes off clean.
Transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool before serving.

That Steve Jobs is no more, still hasn't sunk into me. There are some people whom you don't need to know personally to feel that strange void once they are gone. May the man who changed the way we live today rest in eternal peace. In his own words, just "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".

My summer of love

Humans have an inscrutable tendency to keep returning to things of the past. For me, summer is one of them - the summer of childhood, the summer of love and sometimes just the nagging sultriness of the season. With summer there comes a bundle of green memories that stir one to the very soul - the old and stubborn habit of recollecting tiny fragments of the past like a child gathers seashells on a seashore, and in the due course giving birth to a myriad of unexpected emotions. Memories that one loves to revisit, sometimes relive too, despite the inevitability of fate. Despite your own faults. 'Pleasing pain', the oxymoron is called.
Just like I keep returning to one of my most potent elixirs - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which is pure, unadulterated poetry in the guise of prose. A truly vintage read. If only there was a man like Florentino Ariza made of flesh and blood, and love, that walked this earth. If only love could actually transcend age and years, and hover on flapping its wings for an eternity of fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. That's how long he waited for Fermina Daza. Despite his six hundred twenty-two affairs of heart, very carefully in the dark whirls of his being, he had preserved his soul for her. I know it is magic realism at its best, but then what is life without a dollop of magic?!

Like the book, I must keep returning to my baking too, to keep my senses up and about lest the world discovers these fleeting moments of delusion and kick a good laugh out of them. Hence the return of the orange cake - classy and summery, yet light as fluff. Oozing with the love-like aroma, tangy and sweet at once, and laced with the orangeness of the zest, it is summer personified. And it's perfect companion - ice tea packed with fresh mint leaves and a hint of lime.

Summer sure fell on my lap like the elusive fruit from heaven!

Musings of a snow lover

When the trees stand fearless with their stoic naked bodies and the furry friends rest in their snug little homes you know winter has arrived. On soft baby paws marches in the snow,

that magical time of the year, that untamed high of the spirits. Like every first that we cling to so dearly and in that strange unexplained fashion, the season's first snow too feels exhilarating and quite ironically, life-giving. I am a lover of snow, of the dark desolate beauty that it ushers in on the fringes of its pristine white blanket. I am a lover of seasons and their moods. One must search for and embrace the beauty in each, although the fragrance of spring and the colours of autumn remain the undisputed winners.

Few years back when I had watched the soul-stirring Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, I had nourished a very fond dream - to romp around on a frozen water body in the true bohemian spirit of Clementine. The dream took a vivid turn when we came to live by the shores of one of the five Great Lakes, colloquially known as the Third Coast of the United States.

When we first arrived in Ohio, we were greeted by many a proud tales about Lake Erie, which by its 9,940 square miles of surface area is a mini sea in its own rights. Come winter and the lake almost freezes in chunks and is also the major cause for which the Clevelanders receive the wrath of Mother Nature - copious amounts of the "lake effect" snow.

So when the sun finally showed up with a long haggard face after days of overcast gloom, it was time to visit the frozen shores of Lake Erie. And viola! The scene before us was too surreal to believe at the first glance - the forlorn scraps of snow on the sands, the wintry look of the deserted beach and most of all the frozen still shores. The vast stretch of frozen water crystals sparkled like huge pieces of uncut diamonds when the rays of a feeble winter sun fell on them. To be Indians and to have had only heard of such miracles before, we stood there in speechless admiration marveling at nature's handiwork. And to walk gingerly on that frozen chunk of an endless lake felt like a different world altogether - something like both living and dying in that one moment.

Snowy day blues can be rather stubborn, hence I resign myself to a vista of chaste flurries that fall in gentle white fluffs by the window, with a hot cup of my signature ginger tea. During these few ruminative moments the world feels like a perfect place, sane and unprejudiced. For one who has very rarely succeeded in resisting temptation, sometimes I just grab my coat and go for a walk as the tiny flakes waver around me like thousands of unfurled dreams. Surely, heaven must be something like this. A part of me also feels like Jadis, the wicked White Queen of Narnia! Whatever, despite the plunging temperatures and the shiny red reindeer nose, I am always game for a little snow walk in my weathered boots and a warm heart.

A whiff of nostalgia

Strange, how a certain place grows on us and then goes on to become a part of us, of the intricate web of 'who I am'. Most of the times this gossamer bond is formed due to pleasant people who go on to make sunshine memories. But there have been occasions when the tidings were a little rough. Still, I find myself so much tethered to that place, to its lanes and bylanes, to every one of its facade. A strange sense of sadness and loss overcomes me while leaving a certain place, even if the stay would not have been of such a conclusive duration that would define my emotions. It is not the coming change that worries me, but the leaving behind, the little somethings that I shall no more be able to hold as a part of my everyday life bothers me. There is always some bit of memory or a piece of my surrounding that I cling on to dearly as a remnant, a precious fossil of all these places.
A few days back I stumbled upon a quote by the French poet Anatole France which did help me to understand my predicament to a great extent: "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." And so I yearn for this dead life, one that has long shut its doors on me.

Most of the times I nurse my nostalgia with a characteristic scent of these dead lives. I have read somewhere that this tendency to associate memories with a definitive smell is called associative nostalgia. Isn't it strange how we decide to preserve certain memories in the backstreet of our minds? The world may not care twopence about them, but you do. I remember my childhood in so many ways - the festive air swollen with incense and the latest Hindi film songs during the pujas, the comforting scent of Nivea creme which used to come in a round blue tin box back then, the smell of old, yellowed books in Bapa's room. My inexperienced hostel days in Bhubaneswar take me back to the evening summer breeze that made its way through the windows to my study table where I would be fiddling with the bulk of A History of English Literature, knowing not what to do with the scores of literary heavyweights mentioned in there. Sometimes the graduation days also remind me of the fresh roasted bhutta (corn on the cob) in the rainy evenings or the citrus Elle 18 perfume which I loved to wear to my morning Honours classes. When I remember my days in Hyderabad, the city of love for me, I get a whiff of the old world charm from the ittar vendors along side the bylanes of Charminar. At other times the addictive elaichi chai (cardamom tea) of the university canteen does the trick. It is as if I live and relive these fond moments in these aromas, hence making them immortal and exclusively mine. The mention of Seattle brings back the characteristic dewy, dreamy scent of rain and pines. Our apartment in Redmond, the little Microsoft city neighbouring Seattle, reminds me of freshly mowed grass and a dish washing soap of water lily and jasmine fragrance. The minimal amount of time that we spent in the bay area of California contributes to my nostalgia bank as well. I would often admire the intimidatingly beautiful redwood trees during my solitary evening walks, and later would try to recollect their woody smell.

Jagjit Singh, with his voluminous range of ghazals that perfect such sombre moods has sung the most apt lines on the lingering fragrance of memories:

Shaam mehke tere tassawur se,

Shaam ke baad phir saher mehke...

(The evening is fragrant with your thoughts,

After the evening, the dawn is fragrant as well...)