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.

---

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.