Loops

On an aimless Sunday evening, old Hindi songs play on the radio. The Sunday is constant and unmoving in time, time which seems to have no definition. Older songs usually have a very different atmosphere. One marked by reduced quality, which over time you start liking. It is a sad and calming atmosphere. Along with the radio it watches you seated on the sofa, doing nothing. They both watch you, the radio with its two big eyes, and the atmosphere which has eyes everywhere.

There are some places which are the most packed with atmosphere. The mountains with a calm and serene lake, lacking all things superficial and making room for genuine human connection. An evening in the busy streets of your favorite city, where the amount of people add up to no people at all as they all lose their individuality in front of the city's character. The process of doing something you love, without any thought of what your goal is. All of these are the same in certain ways.

When you are walking in the mountains, the most beautiful feeling is to convince yourself that walking is all that exists. It is the most enjoyable thing in the world, and also the only thing. Drowning in it contributes to the otherwise thin atmosphere. I used to think that I love mountains because of the exhilarating view. A much more enjoyable part is exploring them with your own two feet.

An aimless Sunday evening is the opposite of walking. There is no activity. There is only hopelessness. A sense of nostalgia and uncertainty about what you are feeling. You are trapped in a tent. It is raining outside and you don’t know when it will stop.

Many such Sundays pass. In the house there are multiple rooms with radios in them, and some of them are tuned to the same station. They play the same song. Sometimes one is slightly ahead of the other. Some of them are tuned to different stations and play different songs, some filled with more despair than the others. The radios make a desperate attempt to walk towards a more memorable atmosphere.

In one room there is a radio that plays the same song over and over and over again. A Sunday that lasts forever, that does not know what time is. I walk and walk and walk, oblivious to the existence of anything else. 

On dealing with others' suffering

It is easy to be affected by someone's suffering. 

To not hit the peak when you are a little bird.

But we shouldn't forget to also collide with the happy moments that the one who is suffering chances upon.

We shouldn't forget to share those happy moments with them.

Everyone suffers. Some suffer more and some suffer less.

But everyone has moments where they are truly happy. Where their eyes shine and their mouth just can't close, either out of excitement or wonder or relief.

Everyone suffers. But isn't it better to define people by their happiness and not their suffering?

Some questions about humans and injustice

Why do people not speak up?
Why do people not speak up when they see injustice happen?
Why do victims of injustice not let other people speak up?
Why do victims of injustice support those who make their lives hell?
Why do people not go where love is?
Why do people support the bad?

Why do some people hurt others?
Why do some people want to hurt others?
Why do some people feel no guilt on hurting others?
Why do some people see others hurting and feel nothing?
Why do some people keep hurting others again and again and again?

What is the price of peace?
What counts as “too much” injustice?
When does the final straw arrive?
What is the breaking point?

(Incomplete) Bubble Number One

In Bubble Number One, people’s sensitivity is extremely heightened and extremely short-lived. It towers above you if you look at it, its peak completely out of sight. It also stands extremely thin, owing to the small time interval it lasts for. Despite having this kind of sensitivity to what happens around them, people continue to very mildly feel the effects of events long after they have occurred. It is unlikely, however, that people detect these feelings.

A baby born into Bubble Number One is overwhelmed when it opens its eyes. It feels an extreme sense of wonder, an extreme feeling of helplessness, and an extreme urge to say the word “bub”. Because of how sensitivity works in Bubble Number One, these feelings come and go again and again, in intervals of milliseconds. To avoid the consequences of this, doctors cover the baby’s eyes and ears with a piece of cloth. Whenever a doctor has forgotten to do this, consequences have included the baby experiencing an immense amount of confusion. Such confusion shapes the baby’s brain into a very pointy cone. Consequences have also included a drastic decrease in the baby’s sensitivity, so that instead of an extremely tall tower, the sensitivity takes the form of a very flat plateau.

Bee is a person who faced such a consequence of the lack of cloth covering. Bee’s sensitivity is flat. This means that Bee does not feel a lot. However, what she feels is long-lived, and will continue to exist beyond her death. Her interactions with other human beings are akin to a ball bouncing between the tip of a pencil and a wall. Whenever a person in Bubble Number One feels short-lived and extremely heightened anger at Bee, they are unable to forget it and keep feeling it again and again. This is because Bee reciprocates with long-lasting anger, which then makes them feel their sharply peaked anger again. And so the ball that is anger keeps bouncing between Bee’s and the other person’s sensitivity.

The same can be said of other emotions.

For this reason, Bee lives in a hut far away from all other human beings. She lives in a hut that lies exactly at the confluence of two mountains. To Bee, it looks like one mountain bumps into the other. She empathizes with the mountains, which means that she exists with a constant feeling of bumping into someone else. Such a feeling defines Bee’s gait. While walking, Bee comes to sudden stops every few seconds, as if she just bumped into someone. Since her emotions are very mild, this peculiarity is hard to notice.

The only other living presence in Bee’s hut is her cat Fish. It is hard to tell how the emotions of a cat in Bubble Number One works. In Bee’s presence, Fish’s activities include meowing, eating, sleeping and going for occasional walks around the hut. This is fairly normal for a cat born in this Bubble. Fish has never met any other human being residing in Bubble Number One. One of the emotions felt by Bee is a low hum of worry for Fish. Bee does not know how Fish will react to meeting other human beings. Another emotion felt by Bee is a low hum of curiosity about how Fish’s meeting with other human beings would go. 

These two emotions reside on a racetrack. Bee’s actions are determined by the relative amount of these emotions. Ever since Fish was born, the low hum of worry has always been in the lead. When the worry is far ahead of the curiosity, Bee remembers to wake up before Fish each morning, making sure Fish does not wander far away to regions with human presence. She makes sure Fish is beside her when she sleeps. 

Sitting in a bus and reading a book

I am in a bus from Emptiness to Emptiness, seated by the window exceeding me in size. It is completely green outside—the trees are green and get slowly greener as we cross the places where it recently rained. The ground is green and the sky seems like it wants to turn from its rainy grey to a rainy green. My eyes are glued to everything outside. It is hard to look elsewhere. 

In my hands is the book my best friend gave me for my birthday. It is about a 22-year old in Tokyo and then Greece and her unconventional relationships, and very surreal. The sentences aren’t overly long, and the people in it interact in interesting ways, so it is hard to put down. I’m not sure where to look. My mind keeps nudging me to read ahead and see what happens and finish reading so I can start the next book I want to read. But I’m not sure where to look. It is so beautiful outside.

I keep looking outside to my left, then down at the book in my hands, then outside, then at my book, based on intervals marked by paragraphs and chapters. Tokyo has started transforming from a city full of glass and concrete to a place filled with green. Slowly I reach a state where I cannot differentiate what is outside and what I imagine as I read my book. The city scenery is spotted by vague spots of green. 

It starts raining more and the sound of the rain evens out all differences between the imagery in my head and the imagery outside. The book disappears from my hands and the window disappears from my left as I see myself in a dull green-coloured darkness full of stories.

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Every time I write something surreal, I seem to choose various elements from my environment and see them and the images representing them merging.

Falling asleep on the couch while reading a book

It is dark. Not very dark, though. It is the kind of dark that greets you just before the sun sets and the lights wish to be turned on, when you sit to the side of a window in a dark corner and not right in front of it so that the dark seems darker and the light seems brighter. The dark corner is a brown couch and you are sitting on it, contorted to fit in as small a volume as possible, with a book in your hands. 

The darkness is not alone. It is interrupted by clouds of thought that seem to come out of this brown corner. The book gets more incomprehensible as the sun sets and your eyes get wearier due to lack of light. Single sentences are easy to parse, and each sentence seems to lead logically to the next, but when you look back you do not remember what you just read, or who Ila is or who Tridib is and who Ila was listening to or where the nonlinear storyline just took you. All you recall is the feeling of being in the book, of sitting beside a lake in Calcutta, of the atmosphere of a pub in London, of an old grandmother dealing with a non-crocodile (yes, that is a well-defined feeling).

The sleepier you get the more your feelings get defined by situations in the book, with no thread tying them together in a linear and obvious way. You are still highly aware of feeling those unconventional feelings but you feel them for a second and then they are forgotten, followed by another stronger feeling that is doomed to also be lost from memory. The sleepier you get the more the lights on the ceiling ask you to turn them on, but that would mean escaping the dreamy and non-logical reality that your book has created for you. That would mean choosing to comprehend the book in a cold, systematic way instead of walking through its pages and experiencing the atmosphere it creates but not quite forming a coherent picture of what it is about. 

As the sun dips below the horizon, it becomes hard to distinguish what is part of the book that you are reading and what is in your thoughts, lying on a tangent that your mind decided to take, or part of some dream that was just born in your head. As the sun dips below the horizon, the clouds of thought make your surroundings dimmer and dimmer and dimmer and dimmer and dimmer...

The Florist

Lata’s soft touch wakes me up in the morning, like all the mornings following our marriage ten years ago. The roughness of her fingertips and the gradual change to her soft palms provides character to her hand. The roughness is born in the daily chores of the household. The softness is carried by love.

It is love that wakes her up before me each morning: love for the birdsong at dawn; for the air breathing through our windows, cool before giving birth to an unbearable, warm one; for the calm that fills each quiet morning. I tease her sometimes, telling her how she would rather live alone, without me. She replies laughing, indicating that I’m not one to argue. The calm my nature is so attached to was the reason for her marrying me.

The scent of rajnigandha blossoms greets me as I grasp her hand and pull myself up from our bed. As I turn their scent over in my mind, a voice inside my head repeats, Rajnigandha. White. I have made a habit of repeating the names of the colours of the flowers I know, each time I sense them. That is the best way to retain them in memory.

After chanting our morning prayers and sharing a cup of hot chai together, Lata and I busy ourselves with the tasks of the morning. Our home slowly welcomes the fragrance of mint and cumin. Mint and cumin—the scent of the morning. It brings to my mind memories of a shared breakfast, of cool lassi comforting my tongue, of the feeling of soft, ghee-laden paranthas on my fingertips. I try not to associate the morning with the worries of getting to work. After all, isn’t my work about the beauty one could sense in the world?

I grab my walking stick, some coins and a bundle of 10-rupee notes. Lata grabs her dupatta and the keys to our house. I hear Lata insert the key into the lock and listen to it turning.

Gripping my stick tightly, I start walking. My walking stick is, perhaps, the object I am most attached to. It foretells puddles, careless people, open potholes and stray dogs. What it can’t foretell is how business would fare that day.

I was introduced to the trade as a child. On some mornings I would tag along with Appa to where he sold flowers on the side of the road. The explosion of scents would make me curious. “Appa,” I used to sing to my father after exploring a flower with my little hands, “which flower is this?”. He then proceeded to tell me all he knew about that particular flower. “This one is the gulab, or the rose. The one you’re touching is red, but we also have white roses. And yellow ones too. They’re the most popular so we always need to ensure that we have enough, particularly during festivals.” I used to smell each flower, and Appa would ask me what I felt about the scents. Did it smell fresh, or rotten? Like a cool, wintery morning, or a colourful summer garden? I had a knack for differentiating and remembering those smells—lilies, hibiscuses, little lotuses, heliconias, and a number of other flowers that are Delhi’s favourites.

With a garland of marigolds around my neck, I used to act like a saint. “My blessings are with you and your flowers,” Appa would have to listen often. With a fatherly laugh he would follow with his words, “I don’t need blessings from any other saint now that I have yours! Treat that garland with care. We sell a lot of those each Tuesday, heave them in a cart to the temple where people buy one for Hanuman.” I remember when I learnt how to form a garland out of loose marigolds. My hands felt like craftsmen, identifying the center of their stalk and pushing a thread through it. Slowly I could attach the sharp, piercing thread to the cold metal needle by myself. This became a daily ritual. In a few months, I started crafting new designs, feeling the positions of flowers with my hands. I judged their placement based on the way the flowers would pull on my various fingers differently, depending on their weight.

The most beautiful garlands I fashioned, however, were for my mother’s picture, hung on the wall beside the pictures of Lakshmi and Krishna and other gods. Amma passed away when I was five. I don’t remember a lot about her except her soft and round face, the comfort of her arms, and the fragrance of sandalwood that adorned her. Each night she used to sing me to sleep with bhajans or devotional songs. Even after her demise, her good friend from childhood kept visiting to ensure that me and Appa fared well. Our families agreed that when I grew up, my marriage would be arranged with her daughter. And that is how I met Lata.

I clasp Lata’s hand tightly as she walks me to that same place on the side of the road where Appa used to announce his special flowers of the day. The pavement has become more crowded in these few decades. Other florists have set up camp, contributing to a busy and flourishing flower market in an obscure corner of West Delhi. We share an unusual bond of friendship. Despite the day-to-day competition, we understand each other well. If one of us doesn’t have the kind of flower a customer wants, we refer that customer to another one of us who has that flower in stock. That is what I do today when a customer expresses that they want something I cannot give them.

“Bhaiya, don’t you have the plastic flowers, the ones that last long?”, asks a woman who wants to buy some fake roses for an event at her office. “All these real roses, they wither so soon without water. And you know how letting water stand in a vase brings all the mosquitoes.” I do not know how to respond. Fake flowers are my weakness—the only way I am able to differentiate between various flowers is the shape. I tried selling them once by remembering the positions where different colours of the same flower were kept. However, people would move them around while looking at them and choosing. Eventually, I had to decide not to sell plastic flowers unless I hired a helper.

The same synthetic perfume is sprinkled on all those fake flowers. Why would people want to buy a flower without its characteristic scent? To people, what makes a flower is how it looks—its colour, the shape of its petals. A longing builds up inside me as I think of the many traits they overlook. The scent, the texture of the petals and the stems as you touch them, the sound you hear when you run your finger across their frames—those were the only features I could see.

Sickness

Winter breaks last two hundred years. During those two hundred years, I am not allowed to go into the room at the corner of our apartment. I call it The Other Room. In The Other Room, there is a sickness. The Other Room is where He resides. His memory has faded. His eyes are glued to the stock market all day. The stock market is active from 9 am to 3:30 pm, but for Him it lasts twenty four hours, two hundred years.

Sometimes She enters The Other Room. I hear shouts, I hear Him refusing to break contact with the computer screen, where the stock market lies covered in sap. I sunbathe in the balcony. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to forget about. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to run away from, but the sickness has stretched a month to two hundred years. Time stretches and so does the sap that lies on the computer screen. Slowly, it fills the entire room.

A Rebellious Rock

That Round One From Uphill’s day has been eventful so far. Someone just skipped him across a stream from one bank to another.

That Round One From Uphill is a rebellious rock. Most rocks do not like being skipped.

They like staying fixed in their little homes amidst the mud, and try their best not to morph into the near-flat shape ideal for being skipped. That Round One From Uphill grew up with different ambitions. Leaving his fate to human hands, according to him, was a way to see more of the world outside of where the stream takes you.

On that eventful day, a human considered That Round One From Uphill’s flat shape to be ideal for skipping. And luck was on That Round One From Uphill’s side—after eight skips he reached right across the stream.

So his name wasn’t a curse after all—his parents thought naming him That Round One From Uphill would be an antidote to his flatness. Contrary to the rock civilization’s beliefs, names do not determine destiny, thought That Round One From Uphill.

Rocks like to name their offspring names formed of sentences, so that they could be translated into any language. For humans, these names seem very long, but for rocks whose average lifespan is half a million years, they just take a millisecond to pronounce.

Goodbyes and Flights to America

The actual flight to America starts two days before the time on the boarding pass. It starts with the nostalgic silence between me and home that both of us are overly sensitive to. It starts with the scent of various snacks being prepared in the kitchen, to ensure my proper nutrition in the week after I reach. It starts with the cooking of all of my favourite meals. It starts with increased pressure on me to pack and to buy the remaining things that need to be bought before I leave. At various points throughout those two days I fight back tears multiple times. I feel guilty about leaving for a place so far away and causing everyone sadness. If they see me cry, they will be sadder and more worried. 

I count this with the flight because it is harder than the multiple component and extraordinarily tiring flight itself. The more flights I take, the more used I get to hard goodbyes and accepting harsh truths. 

The actual flight is an incubator for paranoia. It involves sixteen hours half asleep in darkness, spotted by meals and a sleepy layover where I try my best not to fall asleep on a bench, riddled with caffeine-induced hallucinations. It is the perfect environment for all of life’s stresses to pop into your mind with a louder volume. Over the years I have started fearing flights. Over the years I have also learnt not to participate in any anxiety-inducing events in the days preceding a flight. 

My life has consisted of a total of seven flights to America. One through London, one through Reykjavik, one through Frankfurt, one through Moscow, one through Tokyo, two of them direct flights. Each of them has made me more used to saying goodbye, something I have a lot of trouble with and so put a lot of effort into. Sometimes I wonder if I say goodbye too much. It is nice to let the people I know that I really appreciate their existence, and saying goodbye is one way of doing that. It is also the most painful way of doing that.

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?