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? 

The Curtain Rod

The curtain rod at our place keeps falling out of place. One of my greatest fears is accidentally stepping on a curtain or yanking it and hearing a crash on the top of my head with a jumble of curtains around my head clouding my vision and making me confused and disoriented. This has been a problem in every house I have lived in, for some reason. The sockets for the rods just aren’t stable—they refuse to stick with the wall.

Every time I look at the drawing room curtains at the two edges of a long rod kept in place over the glass doors, my mind starts spinning as it visualises a spinning curtain rod. The rod transforms into a see-saw, and the curtains at its two edges are engaged in a sort of two-dimensional tug of war as they both try to get to the floor.