It's 5:30 am and I had to turn on the fan. I've been resisting turning it on for the past week, determined not to acknowledge that summer is here, sitting resentfully in the heat and willing myself into feeling cold, not hot. I couldn't sustain the fiction for very long. It is time.
Summers in Ahmedabad are a lot worse than the summers I've endured elsewhere, mainly because of the dust. The Mughal emperor Jehangir described Ahmedabad variously as Gardabad (the land of dust), Samumistan (the land of the pestilential wind), Bimaristan (the land of the ill), Zaqumzar (the thorn patch) and finally as Jahannumabad (the land of hell). He certainly visited here in the summer.

Just as I am about to leave it, I find myself developing an affection for this city. The people are brusque but kind, impatient but generous. I find that every pavement has a terracotta bowl which is filled with water regularly for street dogs. Yesterday, a man fell off his bike on the road before me. Before I could react, two autos and a car had stopped and their drivers were running to help him up. If I wish people "Good morning" though, they stare at me as if I am an alien. Every time I cross a road, I do so with my heart in my hand, praying that an impatient motorist doesn't run me over.

I've recently turned thirty, and I was lucky enough to get not one, but two birthday cakes, made especially for me, by people I love the most. One homemade birthday cake is incredible, two scare me. How did I get so lucky? Dare I get used to this? Is it possible to get them to make a chocolate one next year?

I find as I grow older though, that I have less anxiety, as does everyone, I suppose. The wonderful thing about age is that you have fewer fucks to give in general, because you realise that fucks are limited. I've been counting out my fucks every evening, like a paymaster would with a daily labourer. Losing out on a job I worked to get? Half a fuck, on loan, to be returned in the morning with interest. What to make for dinner? Two fucks, make it special. How much I weigh? Zero fucks and deposit one please, there's a loan here from your past that needs to be repaid. I was profilgate with fucks when I was younger. The mean thing someone said to me that once would've sent me into a spiral of self doubt? No way am I paying out fucks for that today. I'm not running a charity here. You're paid a living wage, aren't you? Specialise in insecurity if you want to earn more.

*Okay, maybe the job was more like three fucks, but they still need to be returned in the morning. Onward and upward!

What do you eat when you're lonely?

I've been waking up before the sun of late. I get two hours of darkness before the sun bestirs itself, which is just long enough to go from "Booyah! I'm going to get so much done" to "I'm sad and hungry and have spent the past hour reading articles on the internet and developing a crush on a YouTube singer". It becomes time to take myself off the internet and to eat something before getting to work, just at about the time the sun rises after having slept sensibly for twelve hours.

It is a different beast, this early morning hunger. It is the one time of day that I don't crave sweets. I also don't manifest the usual symptoms of hunger: the hanger, the snippiness, the hollowness in the stomach. Instead, I get sadder and droopier and send off sentimental text messages to people who are still sensibly asleep. After the third message, I know it is time to go rummaging in the kitchen.

Coffee, of course, is a given. In the summer, when even the early mornings are sweaty, I like to pour my hot coffee over ice and contemplate how mankind tries to make nature its bitch, but in winter, I like to pull on my bright green socks and fix myself a hot cup of black coffee that I sip while trying not to look at the dishes piled in the sink. Of late, I've also discovered the marvel that is nuts roasted in the microwave. I used to think that nuts needed to be roasted in a pan, watched vigilantly and tossed regularly, and still, you would be guaranteed to burn a few. Then I read an article on Serious Eats that suggested using the microwave. I was incredulous, but I tried it, and folks, I've never looked back. In the article, Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends toasting them at one-minute intervals and stirring in between, but I like to live dangerously. I microwave them on high, using the scientific technique of sniffing at the microwave door to tell when they're done. Once I smell toasted nuts with a slight edge of burning, I know I've got them just where I want them. Your standards may be more exacting. I leave them to cool while sipping my coffee and reading Lindy West. Then, I dust my toasted nuts half-heartedly with salt, none of which adheres to them. I could use oil to make them adhere, but I don't like the accompanying grease, so I simply pop a nut into my mouth, followed by a pinch of salt from the plate. It tastes perfectly seasoned.

I feel beautiful today, reader. It's a rare feeling for me to look into a mirror and to unreservedly like what I see, but today, I couldn't stop staring at myself. I admired the curl of my hair, the shape of my lips. I listened to music and danced along, reveling in the tense-release of my muscles, the grace of my fingertips. I painted my lips with sparkly gloss and watched the light reflect off them. Even now as I type this, I keep sneaking glances into the mirror, tilting myself to a forty five degree angle to find my reflection, and flipping my head from side to side to set my curls bouncing. I wish I could feel this way all of the time, that we could all feel this way about ourselves all of the time. Like we're made of glitter and steel.

I'm in a new place reader, again, for a very little while. I'm struggling to stay myself though, holding on to my routines even when they don't make sense, simply because they are familiar. When everything else changes, we crave the conventional with a fierce, illogical nostalgia, no? This is how religions calcify. If I had to start a religion it would decree that every day begin with the ceremonial brewing of coffee. We would gather together to watch in silence as the decoction dripped down the filter, drip, drip, drip. Any fidgeting would invite a fierce frown. When we finally had enough for one cupful, it would be decanted reverentially into a special mug, gold plated plated with indecipherable carvings on the outside, preferably in an imitation of the hieroglyphics of a forgotten language. It would be stirred with water, just off the boil. Then we would pass the cup around, each taking one long, sighing sip. I'd go first, because I invented the religion.
I don't know what we would believe in, beyond the necessity of coffee. Be kind to dogs, I think. That feminism simply means acknowledging equality and humanity of all the sexes, silly. Men's rights are not a thing. Saint Mindy Kaling would have a day. So would Saint Marie Curie. Ooh, Saint Raghuram Rajan. Our deity would be a dog with a mechanical tail that wagged in blessing. We would preach tolerance towards cats and the catty. Cruelty to animals will be our greatest sin. Wasting coffee the second greatest. Maybe turning down dessert the third.
What a happy bunch of sleep-deprived diabetics we will be, in our houses filled with puppies.    

Anywhere but here

If I had to describe myself in one word reader, the word would be restless. It's an irritating word. It niggles at you. You struggle for calm, breathe in, breathe out. How many times more before you can stop? Stroke the dog's fur over and over till he gets up and walks away. Do a hundred jumping jacks. Stop at 62 and feel like a failure. The phone rang, what were you supposed to do? Read three things at the same time, as the scolding in your head grows louder and louder. Write. Temporary relief.
I've been struggling all week for calm. For a plan and a routine. I invent excuses not to follow either. I make lists and cast them aside. They grow longer, the words larger, redder, screaming at me, apoplectic. I escape into the company of other people. In caring about them I can safely forget about me. But they do not understand. How could they? They have their lists too, although perhaps their lists don't yell at them in angry red words.
The words are subsiding now, tapering. They do not like being complained about. A few are fading away- they aren't important. Not right now, anyway. The words on top are darkening, deepening to oxblood and then black. That is how a branding by fire looks, no? Seared into flesh and memory.
I must go.

It's one of those slow, hot days. The kind of day when rising from a chair is sticky and requires considering and the dog pants listlessly. The washing machine is as energetic as ever, its mechanical whine sounds admonitory: "If I can spin, so can you." So spin we do, about our everyday tasks, scattering, then coming together, over desultory conversations and cups of too-hot tea.
I want to buy an orange dress, the colour of a setting sun. A few years ago, I would have phrased that differently. I need an orange dress, I would have said. After all, I didn't own a dress in that colour. The void in my wardrobe constituted a need. I have learnt better since. I do not need new dresses. I need food and clothing, yes, and love. I have a glut of all three. So my want is as desultory as my conversation today, meaningless and soon forgotten.
Reader, I've been working and baking, thinking, thinking, trying not to think. I haven't wanted to talk so much because talking crystallises thought and sometimes disproves it. I was afraid of what I might learn when I spoke.
This post, and every other post on this blog is terribly self-indulgent. Have space, will publish, after all. And the internet gives us all space and swallows our words whole. I wonder if this self-indulgence is harmless, or if it is portentous. The more we indulge the self the more it swallows us whole. And the internet is a black hole masquerading in white and colour: if it can swallow words, it can swallow selves too. We could become bodies walking the earth, carrying our souls in our pockets, in our phones. Every night, they get plugged into the walls to recharge, while our bodies sleep.

"And the soul of the rose went into my blood/As the music clash'd in the hall"

It is impossible to be lonely when you have the hills for company. Every time I look up, I grin and ask myself, "How did I get so lucky?" You see, reader, I've been living in this place with its wind and hills and butterflies. Its every aspect reminds me of a calendar we had one year, where every month was a different watercolour of a forest, each greener than the last. So June was greener than April and December so green, it was almost black. I won't be here in December.  
It will rain today; the wind is heavy with promise. It's been whipping me up into a frenzy all day, churning my clothes around me, snatching away my tea cup, spattering the grass with its contents, and then whistling away. I am as restless as it, unable to concentrate on anything too long. The rain will come and then, we will be calm.

"I wandered dizzy as a moth, towards the lodestar of my one desire"

There is a bug in my room. It is big and black and buzzes constantly. It is too heavy to reach the tube light, so instead, it hurls itself over and over again at the wall below the light with suicidal desperation.

I felt sorry for it and shooed it outside, but it returned the next time I opened the door, flew unerringly to below the tube light, and resumed throwing itself against the wall. "Fly away," I want to tell it. "The night is cool and fragrant; the sky is full of clouds and glows with a misshapen moon. Strange flowers bloom there, and snakes hiss in the silence. There are so many others to fall in love with, and a night is a long time for a bug."

But the bug cannot listen. It will be dead by morning. 

I'm lonely today reader, and not even the dog will do. It's odd, because I'm quite surrounded by books and people, and I have this screen that I'm writing on that connects me to the entire world. Yet I'm strongly tempted to fall into a decline and am aweary, aweary. I don't would that I were dead yet; that would be taking it too far. But I think I would like to sleep for a long time. It's the winter, perhaps. I went for a walk this morning and the fog was so thick that we could barely see ten feet ahead. The street looked like I was seeing it through an Instagram filter. It was lovely, and chillingly remote For all that we scream that we want to be alone, the thought of being really, truly alone, without anyone to talk to or think of, is rather frightening, isn't it?

It is Diwali tonight. I went out to the terrace to watch the fireworks. There are rockets that rise up like squiggly-tailed comets and explode in showers of red, green and yellow sparks. The houses on our street are lit up. The one on our right in a mesh of multicoloured, blinking lights, the one on our right is lined with what are shaped like oil lamps, but glow through the night without a single flicker. Our house is dark save for one lamp above the gate. We are in mourning this year.
The dog came out with me and for a while, he was kept very busy. He would bark at one rocket before being distracted by another whistling past. A thousand-shot thunderbomb finally silenced him: he couldn't get a bark in edgewise.
It sounds like a thousand drummers are all playing while very drunk. There are beats, high pitched and low, with rapidly changing patterns. The steady beat every two seconds is from one of those crackers that goes up once and explodes over and over, sometimes in pink, sometimes in gold and sometimes in red and blue. Then there are whooshes from the flowerpots and hisses from uncoiling fiery snakes. The rockets whistle. A police siren wails.
The air is heavy with gunpowder. Every so often, the fireworks reveal patches of grey smoke in the ruddy sky. It is like the largest palette ever seen: the grey blends into the black and the red while the sprays of green and yellow and blue and pink quickly disappear into the grotesque mix. There is no moon tonight; it did well to keep away. Its brightness has been surpassed, a thousand times over.
Tomorrow, the children will go back to school on streets littered with ash. 

We are waiting for the monsoon. The earth around here has heated till the water on it boils and rises and hangs in the air in a dense, humid cloud. Breathing is difficult and smells never dissipate. We are surrounded by the unmistakeable smell of rot.
It is in the flesh of the mangoes, too soft, too yielding. They begin to rot from the moment they are picked. The flesh, once so firm and turgid, putrefies into an acidic slurry. There is the smell of sweat in the streets, the sweat of thousands, walking, their heads bowed under the assault of the sun. They plod past, dimly seeking shade, and relief. We spray scents to cover the smell of sweat, and they linger in the air, too heavy, too floral... unnatural. The flowers shrivel quickly, their petals curling and turning brown, as their stems, buried in water in a hopeless effort to keep them alive, turn grey and gangrenous. Food begins to spoil from the moment it is lifted off the stove. We smother it in spice to keep from remembering that we are eating dead things.
All this is captured in the windless air, collapsing around us with impenetrable lassitude. This is it: the smell of rot, of cloying sweetness and of decay, of the sense that we can't carry on much longer, in this manner. This is how it will smell when the world ends, when the rains don't come any more.
But not yet. The rains will come this year; the satellites say so. We wait for it and count off the days. We watch maps charting its progress and listen for the weatherman. We wander about with dull, heavy-eyed hope, while the sunshine clubs our eyelids.
It is the greatest theatre known to us. First will come the clouds, then the wind, then the expectation. This will happen over and over again, working our nerves into a frenzy that goes far past the unbearable. We will come to a standstill, all our senses trained upwards in mute hope. Then and only then will the skies split apart, and bring down the deluge.

Reader, I discovered a poem by A. E. Housman today, and I can't stop reading it over and over. Discovering a piece of great writing is a lot like discovering gold, isn't it? You sift through pebbles and dust for weeks and months till finally, you find a nugget.
Read it with me?

When green buds hang in the elm like dust 

And sprinkle the lime like rain, 

Forth I wander, forth I must 

And drink of life again. 

Forth I must by hedgerow bowers 

To look at the leaves uncurled 

And stand in the fields where cuckoo flowers 

Are lying about the world.

- A. E. Housman

It is summer now, and I feel cheated by spring.

Panda treats the floor of the house like a Victorian fainting couch, collapsing on it dramatically, at my feet. He is there now, panting dully. We've shifted subtly into our summer routine, which is pretty much the same as our winter routine, just later by half an hour and with less cussing on my part.

I like routines. I like that once in place they don't require too much thought, freeing up my mind for daydreaming. I like the stability they bring and the sense of constancy, however artificial. I remember only too well just how fragile this structure is and how devastating its collapse can be. I like to think that I am strengthening it, little by little, day after day, as I read my newspaper and sip my coffee, while Panda peeks at me coyly from behind the marigolds. It is painstaking work with little apparent reward, except when I look back and see just how far I've come.

There is a wild wind blowing outside. I've spent the past hour in a sensory daze, glutting myself on words and sentences. There was Leonard Cohen (Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in) and Tom Stoppard (We are tragedians, you see? We follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means) and Rousseau (We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves). The wind interrupted me rudely, banging a door downstairs to get my attention.

It's almost midnight and there's a lightning storm on. Every so often the sky splits apart and the whole world turns silver. Panda remains unimpressed: he is fast asleep under the bed, his breath misting the tile. I crawled under there a little while ago to rub his belly. I was lonely, and the storm makes me pensive. He stared at me with his blue-brown eyes for a minute, then rolled onto his back and fell back to sleep. 

I've had a couple of not-so-great days reader, and have been reminded of my unhealthy tendency to brood. I tried everything to get out of my funk, from gallons of coffee, to strenuous exercise, to reading poetry, but nothing worked for long.

Today when I was driving back from work, I realised that I felt uncomfortably warm. That hasn't happened in months. I shrugged off my sweater while I waited for a signal to change. It was only symbolic: I had to put the sweater back on half an hour later, but I still take this to mean that spring is here. I also noticed marigolds blooming along the pavement, and they're either new, or I've been too lost these past few days to notice gaudy yellow flowers sprouting everywhere.

When I reached home I tried something I haven't done in a long time. I sang. Oh, I'm always humming and I frequently sing to my mirror with a deodorant canister as a mike, but today I dusted off my electronic tanpura, dug out my music notes, and pretended I was singing on a stage to a large and enraptured audience. Panda came to enquiringly sniff the tanpura and stayed to listen for a while.

I was pleased with my voice today. I began with the most basic exercises, singing them off the music textbook amma bought me when I was seven. It's a photocopied book, since prints of  Karnatic music textbooks weren't easily available in Delhi in 1995. In several places the print was either unclear or non-existent, so the blanks were filled in by me. My writing from back then is remarkably similar to how I write today. Large, impatient letters, in multicoloured ink. (What? I like colour. I think it brightens up the page.) I remember how eager I was back then to finish with this book and graduate to the good stuff: the varnams and the keerthanas that the more advanced students were singing. I have a deplorable sense of rhythm and because of it was made to repeat a lesson once: I didn't get the alankaras right and my teacher said she wouldn't start me on geethams until I did.

I did eventually nail them though, and I think I nailed them again today, as I blazed through them, high speed. Then I sang a geetham, a swarajathi, a varnam, a kriti and finally a thillana. I imagined the audience cheering my every vocal flourish. I threw everything I had into my performance, and then some. I waved my arms in vigorous expression, made dramatic faces, grunted praise when I executed a tricky gamakam, and eventually closed my eyes in ecstasy. When I finally opened them, Panda was gone, but I did feel much better. I nodded and smiled graciously for the thunderous applause, and then went to see about dinner.

Gaslight

Panda just came in from his walk and shook raindrops all over me.

I was thinking about gaslighting today. The word is derived from the Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight, in which her husband attempts to convince her that she is insane by altering little things around their house. However, when she notices, he insists that she is imagining it. Doesn't it seem sometimes like the whole world is gaslighting you? When the papers are filled with stories of rape and corruption and executions, and you can't hurl a brick out of your window without hitting a cynic? When you're made to feel as if any sort of idealism is foolish? But perhaps I'm being too dramatic. We don't discuss those things here. This is a place for poetry and music, dogs and books, joy and pain. Of course I have opinions: painstakingly wrought nascent ones about everything from feminism (I'm a feminist) to the death penalty (I'm against it). Maybe it is time to find a place for them.

I'm spending the eve of my twenty fifth birthday cleaning out the dog's ears. Then we'll argue, because he'll want to eat his earwax and I'll protest that he's being disgusting. He'll concede ungraciously by rolling on his back and pushing me away with his paws. And then we'll sit by the window and watch the rain together. It's a rum old world.

I have new curtains as part of my long-forgotten reorganisation drive. Dull gold with blue-green vines. I think they go with my walls. I like them. Panda likes them too. He comes barrelling through them several times a day, pointy nose first. I keep them parted for as long as I can though, in order to catch stray rays of sunshine. 

It's getting a little bit colder each day. This morning when Panda woke me up, he had to wait impatiently as I rooted in my cupboard for a sweater. It's his fault really. Sensible dogs wait for the sun to come out before they demand walks.

I miss the sun. It slipped away from right under our noses, and now it's gone all the way to the Southern Hemisphere. The rays it sends from the Indian Ocean really aren't the same thing. 

Panda was sitting in a stray ray of light from the window yesterday. It illuminated his chin and his white whiskers, turning them golden, like he'd guiltily swallowed sunshine.

He ate it up

Sometimes, reader, I worry if I'm spoiling my dog. He hasn't been eating, this past week. The vet says this often happens to dogs during mating season and that we aren't to worry. It's hard not to worry though, if your dog is visibly losing weight, doesn't drink milk, refuses all his treats and isn't tempted by even his favourite illicit cream-filled biscuits. Besides, I missed having him sitting at the kitchen door sniffing eagerly while I baked.

We tried everything. Liver stimulant tonics, exercise, the silent treatment, several attempts of me sticking my face into his bowl and pretending to eat its contents with audible relish. What finally worked was rice flour balls. On the day before yesterday, Patti was teaching me how to make kuzhakattais (which will show up in a blog post on Poppadom shortly) and we had a little leftover rice flour, which we rolled into balls to steam and season later. Panda sat up and took notice when I walked past holding a bowlful of kuzhakattais, so on an impulse I took out a ball and rolled it across the floor. Panda chased after it and ate it up. Overjoyed, we rolled ball after ball at him and he ate them all up.

Since then, egged on by Patti, I've been cooking freshly ground rice flour daily, kneading the resultant dough, rolling it into balls and steaming them. Then, once they cool sufficiently, I lob one at Panda's head, he runs after it, and then crawls under the bed to eat it. We this over and over again, till he loses interest. Luckily, his memory is very short, so we repeat performances several times a day. It has to be the most roundabout way of feeding a dog.

Last week, a girl committed suicide at the metro station I board the train from. I read about it in the papers the morning after she did it. When I went that day to catch my train I saw a small area of the pavement cordoned off by yellow tape and tried unsuccessfully to avoid looking at the dark red stain in the middle.

I tried to be nicer to the metro staff that day. When I stood waiting for my train, I stood at the point from which she must’ve jumped. The red stain was directly below. I thought of how she must’ve clambered over the railing and let go, taking care to fall head first. I pitied her, because to my thinking, suicide is a terrible way to waste a life and I couldn’t even imagine what horror in her existence drove her to it. I also resented her, for making me think about her at all. She was gone and yet we, who never knew her when she lived, we were now thinking of her. The people who were walking below when she landed before them. The paramedics who must’ve tried to revive her. The policemen who she’d left with yet another unsolved case and a great deal of paperwork. The metro guard who was now standing at the end of the platform and trying to be inconspicuous, but eyeing me warily. All of us asking “Why?” but wearily resigned to never knowing the answer.

The stain and the tape were there for a week, and I tried unsuccessfully to avoid looking at them each time I walked past. Today they were finally gone, the pavement was scrubbed clean, and people were walking over the spot, talking, hurrying, intent upon getting to wherever they were going. I circled around it, looking away, as I walked home. I looked at the pavement below my feet instead, and each pan stain on the concrete looked like a spatter of blood. 

I am Nithya, hear me roar

I'm very chuffed, reader. I fell to cleaning up my computer and I'm finding this organisation drive rather addictive. I've already created folders for all my docs (me!) and discarded any number of puzzlingly-titled notepad entries (some of them were downright cryptic). I've updated my software and even organised my thousands of Panda and food photos, updated my food blog, and finally started using Google Calendar. Now, I have SMS alerts coming to me every half-hour, worded with escalating levels of urgency depending upon how unlikely I am to do my scheduled tasks. I know you, reader, already do this and you're chuckling kindly at my excitement. I can't help it. I'm very hopeful right now that even someone as shatter-brained as me will eventually claw her way to the top of things, and maybe even hold on there for a little while.

Wish me luck reader.