Something with existential dread

When I was around eight years old we rented a new house in a neighbourhood of Paschim Vihar I do not remember. It was a yellow house with yellow walls outside and yellow walls inside. The walls were the colour of depression and darkness, the colour of the cheapest paint available in the market. 

I initially liked the house because it had two floors. None of the places we had lived in before had two floors. It was like a movie to me. In all the American shows I used to watch, houses always had two floors. I felt like I could have my own space, and that little treat countered the sombre shadow of the yellow walls. 

I do not know if I found the house depressing because of the above reasons, or because of the hopeless atmosphere in my family. My mom would work either in the kitchen all day, or work on keeping the house clean. Watching her do the same thing over and over again to a house that did not treat her well added to the despair. 

Initially when we moved in during the heat of the summer, we hadn’t installed any air conditioner. The humid heat contributed to the yellow darkness. In one room there was the dreaded black darkness. The lights did not function, and the roof used that as an opportunity to throw as many droplets of water as it could to the bed. These invisible drops and puddles were felt heavily by our bodies, who tried to fight against them.

Puddles would also sneak into this house in the form of drain water. The ground floor had trouble guarding against them, and it became a daily task for my mom to get rid of both the wet and its smell.  Each time she would clean them up, her sweat would follow a trail down her face and fall to the floor. This way the puddles made sure they stayed alive.

Every day, we hoped that the roof would hold some of the water in its arms. Every day, we hoped that the malevolence of the dirty water would stop greeting us. Every day was filled with the same despair, the same yellow darkness that the puddles reflected. 

Black Circles

In a corner one can see water seep out of a pot through the crack in its bottom. It makes the concrete below the pot darker, a darkness that slowly grows and grows and attempts to colour the entire ground black. A pupil slowly dilates, and reaches the edge of the universe. A pebble falls into the pupil, and ripples are born.

Early morning before school

5 AM each morning, I would hear the alarm on my mom’s phone ring as I continued to salvage my sleep. The vague awareness of her sipping chai and meditating using her beads would engulf me in the darkness while I lay beside her, mostly asleep. My mom’s prayers and my own dreams would form a peaceful start to every morning. Although we would be shrouded in darkness, we were still extremely visible to each other, so very aware of each other that we would get used to it and not think about it. 

5:30 AM each morning, I would hear the words “Gauri utho” in my mother’s voice, asking me to wake up. The next few words would usually be, “utho beta time hogaya”, which translates to “wake up child, it’s time”. Having to wake up that early in the morning is a nightmare for every teenager who would stay awake until midnight. Three minutes more in bed translated to three hours of happiness. But since I had a school bus to catch, eventually I had to give up and break the sticky, loving contact between my back and my bed.

My mom would then hand me the cup of milk she had heated up for me—plain hot milk with a nasty surprise of dates at the bottom that were to be consumed when I had finished the milk. Drinking milk that hot would be an ordeal for my throat and would take fifteen minutes of precious time during which I would picture pleasurable fantasies of being asleep. Usually, if the milk was a little bit less hot and I could manage to drink it in twelve minutes or so, the rest of those three minutes would be spent in my blanket. In those three minutes, I would have the best sleep of the entire day.

After that, it would be time to wake up for good. Get off the bed, go to the bathroom, change into my school uniform. During the winter, the school uniform would have around four extra layers. Normally this would have meant waking up ten minutes earlier than usual, but fortunately my school bus arrived fifteen minutes late in that season and so I would be able to wake up at 5:35 AM instead.

In the background, while I would be readying myself to go to school, my mom would be listening to bhajans or devotional songs on the radio and making the food that I would take to school. With the tabla and sweet melodies forming the background in my ears and the serene darkness of dawn forming the background in my eyes, I would go about everything calmly and quietly and so would my mom. We were both there, near each other, quiet but together in a comforting sense of home. 

When I would walk out to near the dining table, wearing my school uniform and carrying my backpack, the food on the table would greet me. My meal was in a box, cooling down before the box would be shut and kept in my backpack. My mother would leave the kitchen and walk up to me, ready to comb my hair and braid it tightly so it lasts for the entire day. When I was younger, she would also untangle my hair for me, but when I reached high school the pain I would feel and the effort she had to do for it conspired to teach me the art of untangling. So, in high school, I would untangle the hair first and then my mom would braid it. Each time she did so, she would tell me to learn it and do it myself (something I have not done to this day). 

With everything ready, it would be time to wear my shoes (after dusting them a little to avoid my mom’s scolding). We would usually leave in a hurry, owing to my three minutes of extra sleep. The walk to the bus stop started with climbing down the usually dirty staircase of Nagin Lake Apartments, a place where none of us wanted to live but to which both of us were used to. In the little parking area under the buildings, we would see every day the car that had been there since the beginning of time, standing there in an old and dusty way. In the time since we moved to that place when I was ten to when I graduated, I saw that car every day. Each day I would think, who would leave a car, just like that?

The length of the walk would vary—the initial part was three minutes up until we reached the gates of our apartment complex. Then, depending on how busy the road was, we would either cross it, or take the overly lengthy and unnecessarily curvy bridge that was built over the road. It’s extreme length and the time it would take to cross it caused us and many other people to cross the busy road for a long time, until more accidents started to happen and threw more and more people and careful stray dogs onto the long, tiring bridge. 

This long ordeal—with or without a stray dog—would eventually lead to us greeting the bus stop. It was time to wait for the school bus, say goodbye, and go to school. The magic of the morning would slowly be lifted as reality would seep in and the sky would turn the bright white of day, the bright white of rationality.

New Furniture

The sofa in the drawing room was born in my uncle’s place before I was born. The dining table joined us from the same place, from even more ancient times. The small cabinet on which the TV rests used to reside with my aunt. Most of the furniture at this house has seen more of the world than usual furniture. They feel at home, resting against a background of lightly decorated light yellow walls and dim lighting and things that don’t match.

This is why when the new bed entered the house one day, it stood out in sharp, brown contrast. The rest of the furniture looked on, confused, as the bed was brought into my brother’s room. I empathised with the older furniture. To me, the new-looking dark brown bed seemed bigger than it was. It took too much space in my head, and so seemed bigger to my eyes. Everyone was happy this piece of new furniture joined us, but none of us were used to it. 

Things were changing. The older furniture was fearing its demise. It was dreading being forgotten about, dreading that all memory of its contributions would be lost. In an attempt to provide it some comfort, which might have gone unnoticed by the older furniture, I would attempt to use it more than I would use the new and shiny brown bed. The sofa would welcome my occasional naps, and a lot of my possessions suddenly moved to the drawers spotting the TV cabinet. The sudden rush of anxiety that had entered the house with the new brown bed had now transformed into a wave of trusting calm. 

The Chai Process

Five months at home proved to be enough time to master the art of making chai. Or have I really mastered it? Only a novice would say so. I have mastered the art of making chai that my mom likes, and consistently making it that way. It is essential now to mention the criteria for judging the goodness of a cup of chai. How else can I make the judgment that I have mastered this art?

Chai is not merely a drink to enjoy the taste of. Many elements together decide its perfection. Its colour, its taste, its smell, and its texture are only some of them. While making a cup of chai for my mother, I make sure to keep all of these in mind. 

To keep the perfect texture, just the right amount of milk is needed. Too much and it can get too creamy, too less and the cup of chai approaches a glass of water. Of course, this factor is heavily influenced by your personal preference of ideal creaminess. This is the one point where coffee drinkers may relate. Personally, I prefer triple the amount of water than milk. For my mom, the ideal ratio is closer to seven to one.

The rest of the variables change depending on the amount of milk that went into making the chai. That would determine how many tea leaves you add, so that the chai comes out at a perfect level of colour and bitterness and aroma. The approach I follow is to add a small of amount of tea leaves at first, and check what colour of chai results. Slowly add more and boil until the perfect colour has been reached. A surge of excitement leading to adding too much tea leaves can result in dark, bitter chai and overwhelming regret. On the other hand, boiling it too much can lead to the same results.

If you grew up in a chai-drinking household, you just know the perfect colour of chai. It is a colour imprinted on your mind. Slight perturbations from that colour are detectable. My mind feels a certain kind of satisfaction when chai reaches this perfect colour - like a ball perfectly balanced on the top of a hill. The colour is the mark of perfection, a mark of perfect alignment. 

The colour is why intuition is the most important ingredient while you make chai. Can you tell how bitter the chai would get as a function of how much you boil it? Can you tell whether the chai would reach its ideal colour after five minutes of resting it, in case it is not the ideal colour at this point in time? Can you estimate the infinitesimal amount of tea leaves that are needed to get the chai to its perfect balanced state? If so, I guarantee that you will make good chai.

When do things seem magical?

Things seem magical when they are sort of separate from the background and stand out, seem more three-dimensional. For example, the tree visible from my window seems to stand out whenever the cloud cover is heavy. The tree finds more life running through it. Each leaf and each branch that moves reminds me of people living and swinging in the tree, living in a giant and magical tree kingdom. This entire effect increases when the tree is in particular contrast with the sky.

The Water Tank

7:30 AM each morning and 6:30 PM each evening in our old apartment were tied by a special occurrence—an alarm blaring with the voice of a woman saying, in a funnily formal way, “Hello, your water tank is full, please switch off your motor”. She would say this twice, once in English and then in Hindi, unless you cut her off in the middle by switching off the alarm. A loud, catchy tune would also play in the background, so that everyone in a five kilometre radius would know that the water tank of 95, Nagin Lake Apartments was filled up to the brim. 

While I haven’t experienced much of the morning drama associated with the water tank filling up, since I was either at school or asleep, I have fairly vivid memories of 6:30 PM in the evenings. If it wasn’t a weekend, my mom would be teaching middle schoolers on our dining table, right beside where the alarm was housed. New students would often get scared or chuckle when the alarm sounded, but slowly got used to it. Initially, my mother had to tell the kid sitting right next to the alarm to turn it off, but slowly, the students didn’t need to be told to do so. 

The alarm had been turned off, but now the motor needed to be turned off. The motor being on is what fills the tank up, and my parents would turn the motor on each morning at 7 AM and each evening at 6:00 PM. I would sit in the bedroom while my mom would teach, and from outside, my mother would call out to me and say, “Gauriiiii, motor band karde”, that is, to turn off the motor. For some reason, she would say that each time even though she knew I could hear the loud blaring of the alarm. A sense of emergency would overwhelm me, and I would run to the bathroom. The motor switch sat on the wall, and I would flip it off.

I apologise for the amount of switches and machines such as alarms and motors in this anecdote, I hope it doesn’t get confusing. My family, on the other hand, worked like a well-oiled machine whenever the water tank would have to be filled up. 

Such water-tank-filling periods would also be accompanied by other activities, such as filling up all the buckets in our bathroom with the fresh water that would be supplied through a special tap (which would have water flow through it only from 7 to 8 AM and 6 to 7 PM, when the apartments would turn their overall apartments motor on). We would do this to be cautious, just in case the water tank ran low on water early. I became an expert at estimating the amount of time a bucket would take to fill based on its size, or what the sound of more water hitting the water already in the bucket would tell you about the amount of water already in the bucket. 

In the summer, we would also have to fill our water cooler (a giant machine with a fan and a pump that cools the whole house) with water. My family devised a clever way to do so, with a pipe attached to the kitchen tap and snaking through the house all the way to the cooler in our balcony. I would handle this too, since my mother would be teaching, and sometimes with the buckets and the cooler one of them would overflow with water. I lived for the days when each of them would attain the perfect level of water, with no water wasted. Otherwise, I would comfort myself by thinking about the pigeons, who would bathe in the standing water on our balcony in case the water overflowed. 

And this is it, a bit of the story of the water that would greet my family and the pigeons twice a day. 

A 15 lb Dumbbell Story

In the middle of nowhere in upstate New York lies a small city called Ithaca. Ithaca has a chronic shortage of 15 lb dumbbells.

In the middle of nowhere in upstate New York lies another small city called Big Flats. People from Ithaca travel there often to pick up their 15 lb dumbbells.

The transport of 15 lb dumbbells is the artery that has forged a deep connection between these two cities. This 15 lb dumbbell trade is beneficial to everyone. It is beneficial to the people of Big Flats who make and lift and package the 15 lb dumbbells. It is beneficial to the people of Ithaca who use the 15 lb dumbbells for exercise when they receive them. It is beneficial to the people who transport the 15 lb dumbbells and carry them. It is beneficial to the reader of this story who, after reading about two such mundane towns, will inevitably get an urge to lift 15 lb dumbbells in order to relieve their boredom.

As the 15 lb dumbbell trade goes on, the cities get defined more and more by these objects. The cities together have slowly taken the shape of a 15 lb dumbbell. Ithaca is one end, Big Flats is one end, and the road that carries the 15 lb dumbbells joins those ends. As time goes on, this shape together keeps losing weight, trying to reach its target of exactly 15 lbs. As time goes on, the only activity the people of Ithaca remain capable of is lifting 15 lb dumbbells. As time goes on, the only activity the people of Big Flats remain capable of is manufacturing and packaging 15 lb dumbbells. As time goes on, the only thing the road joining these cities remains capable of is being used as a handle so people may lift this 15 lb dumbbell that lies on the face of the earth.

Some Magical Realism

1. People have balloons attached to their heads. I can tell what they are thinking. Doing so requires me popping the balloon that’s on their head. Some people float, and some do not. Every person is at a different height depending on the contents of the balloons. In some balloons there is pure helium. Those people slowly fade as they float higher and higher up.

2. In arguments people heat up. They heat up and evaporate, and they float up like steam. They swirl around, much like a fluid, engaged in the play of the argument. They change colour based on their character, providing a rich visual side to the convection currents.

The Sky is a Book

Every night, words start appearing when you look up. Words are written in white, words that form sentences that may or may not mean something to the people looking at them. So, it is possible to catch a glimpse of them during the day too. The reason the sky is usually spoken of as a book during the nighttime is because these words are easier to read compared to the daytime, and seem infinitely more beautiful in the shimmer of the moonlight. 

Sometimes I wonder if this is the reason people have heads that are tilted backwards compared to their bodies. Did people have heads looking in their front or looking down at some point in history, and evolved to have heads looking up? Many people have tried to answer this question, but it remains a mystery. It is hard to untangle it since the origin of the words in the sky is also a mystery. Both mysteries go hand in hand. If we can tell when the words appeared, maybe we would be able to guess the timeline of evolution.

Human beings have been able to gain at least some knowledge about these words. In particular, one human being who I will call P for privacy reasons completely transformed this field. Nobody would have expected someone like P to solve part of these mysteries. P was heavily not curious, and heavily unmotivated. Maybe that is why when she read the words in the sky, she could tell the secret behind them. Overthinking can make life harder, especially when so much of your mind is saturated by the sentences spanning the sky.

What P did was just believe what she was told. For one minute one night the words said, “We like to watch birds hit poles”. So, what led P to uncover this information about the words in the sky was her indifference. That particular night she was lying down on a cloth on the grass, doing nothing, since she did not want to or need to. 

The very interesting fact P uncovered led to chaos. Why did the words enjoy watching birds hit poles? Was that because it was inherently hilarious, or inherently disturbing? Many people wondered if the words were malevolent or just had a good sense of humour. Many people tried to answer this question by building telescopes of various kinds, in case somewhere in some part of the sky a little word would reveal this secret. Some people attempted to build poles of various heights to prod the words, but could never quite reach them. In short, a period of rapid development ensued on earth as people tried to advance existing technology to make sense of what was so interesting to the words in the sky about birds hitting poles.

Of course, this entire time, the words just existed in the sky, showing themselves in full glory in the dark. What were they thinking? Are they even capable of thinking anything other than birds and poles?

Resilient Hope

Everyone is latching on to empty hope. Hope is what matters, regardless of whether it is realistic or not. Hope is what keeps everyone going and not give up. Hope is what adds wrinkles of dreams to our minds. “This is how life will be afterwards,” everyone says. Everyone thinks it’ll all be over in a month. A month passes. A year. A year passes. Ten years. Ten years pass. It is still the same, but hope still remains. Why does hope still remain? Why is hope so resilient? People break, their resilience breaks, but hope stays. The world has changed irreparably, things will never be the same. But hope… hope does not care. It keeps going, and it keeps people going. 

What happens when hope breaks? When hope gives up? What happens then? Will we ever see that happen? I am curious about the nature of hope. I wonder why, despite little pockets of despair everywhere around the world, the sum total gives rise to hope. What makes up collective hope? Why, when we feel like the world is ending, why do we see it stay alive?