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.