Home

Sometimes in Delhi on a summer afternoon

I'm a child coming home from school

Home - where the laburnum-tree-lined road ends at the park

Home, to Maiji's cooking; on Fridays, sweets and a library book

Coming home

To the women in the peechey veranadah

Annapurni grinding rice on the big stone

My sisters knitting colored squares,

Winter-sunning themselves on the back steps

Golden oldies playing on the transistor

Vividh Bharati and vivid colours

Going Away

There was a time, I used to leave the house without a thought.

Pack food and clothes and gifts; put trinkets/valuables away,

make provision for the dogs, leave money to pay for milk.

Then climb into the car and zoom off, spirit free,

filled with excitement, shivering, a little jittery

And those mumblings of quick prayers for everyone's health and safety,

and many wipings away of unreasonable tears.

Now, even more unreasonably, I linger in the bathroom,

staring at my half-used soap, the nightclothes behind the door.

I miss myself already. She's gone. 

I look with absent eyes.

The everyday lipstick that I won’t be taking with me tomorrow,

the to-do list (under a magnet) on my cupboard,

inside, a saree bought in 2018 awaits 'a suitable occasion' to be worn;

and one I stopped wearing years ago but never threw away,

because it was a gift from my mother.

A bag of blouse-piece fabric waits for the good tailor I never found.

My ongoing knitting projects, trunk stuffed with bags of wool,

my diary, its pen-cum-bookmark, the writing on the pages.

They all tell of my presence - and my absence – in each room.

Reassuring, these signs of unfinished business: they say, “You will be back”,

and yet somehow these days, each going-away has become more difficult.

Not Fade Away - kolu photo 1978

Memory's a funny thing,

It lives inside my phone.

Bright clear pictures;

names, dates, faces,  

places, all stay saved. 

Maps, files and folders

Make it easy to be older.

My salvation, really, this outsourced mine of minds.

This forty year old black and white photo's corner-bent

Blotchy in places, fading, and maybe a stain or two.

But oh! It's all so clear now that the mind's eye is unblocked

Live streaming images, people's laughter in your ears.

 

 

The Waiting Blues

This work of art by my very dear friend Sangeeta Mahajan goes so well with my lines below. You can view more of her photographs on Instagram @fotografistudio_brisbane

An aging face stares out of the mirror
with eyes that burn from looking too long

You're so tired, you're confused,
You've a boarding pass to nowhere
And you're in the wrong queue

You've dropped your coffee cup again, now
See the loneliness seep into your bag and shoes

You saved your luggage but you've lost your way,
Unravelled more than you knitted in a day

But when they come, you'll let go
When they come, oh they'll free you when they flow,

Yes they'll come, they will come, oh they'll come, when you need them then they know

Sometimes tears, 

Sometimes tears,

Sometimes tears are your best friends.

A Date with the Equinox

Geographer at heart

 I’ve been meaning to write about the equinox for some years now. The weather: maximum and minimum temperatures, rainfall, dates of the monsoon, eclipses and so on were of great interest to my father. All of us, his children, inherited his love of natural phenomena, and of observation. The little box in the bottom corner of The Statesman - Babuji's favourite paper - gave us all the relevant weather data for the day, including the times of sunrise and sunset.

Southbound

Navaratri/Durga Puja 

With climate change, we don’t seem to have much of temperate weather. Seasons change overnight. One misses all the ‘tween seasons; especially ‘September-October weather’ - ‘full sleeves weather’ as 'my old friend and confidante Mademoiselle Kitty' reminded me. It’s the stuff of dreams and memories now.

In Delhi, the excitement would build slowly. The wind changed direction. Fluffy clouds filled the skies as the monsoon withdrew. There was the scent of harshringar/coral jasmine late at night, or the smell of leaves burning in the park as I walked home from the bus stop after school play rehearsals, late in the afternoon.

The first time we stayed back after school was for an extra Geography class with Miss Sophie Baretto, who said we were lagging behind and must get through 'Rotation and Revolution' quickly.

The school buildings were deserted except for us girls of Six B, sitting in our newly constructed second floor classroom, with its new green blackboard on which chalk pieces squeaked and broke in two. Miss Baretto drew a diagram with four earths in different positions around the sun on four days: March 21, June 21, September 23 and December 22. One single line from the sun in the centre touched the lines representing the equator or the tropics on each earth.

That afternoon we learnt about the earth’s tilted axis and how that gave us summer and winter, the longest day and longest night, as well as the marvel of the Equinox, when day and night were equal all over the world.

Pic by Viji - with whom I visited the dear old school in May - 43 degrees C that day!!

Some years ago my brother Raja – upon whom was inflicted the indignity of collecting me after Miss Baretto’s extra class – Raja and I started noting down sunset and sunrise timings of the days leading up to the autumnal equinox. We thought that it might not occur on September 23rd at all, since our October evenings were much darker than December evenings. 

The equinox, or 12/12, occurred about a week off the date in Delhi. That same day, in Dibrugarh, Assam, I was two minutes short! That is, my ‘day’ was 12 hours and two minutes long. Imagine our surprise when the next day gave us a reading of 12 hours and one minute, and the one after was 11 hours and 59 minutes. Had we bypassed the equinox?

You gave me the answer 

On September 23rd, the sun rose at 4:59 and set at 5:05. The weather app on my phone says day and night will be equal tomorrow, that is on September 28th. But just yesterday, I read that this is called the 'Equilux'. Most appropriate, since it enlightened me! Raja found an article that explains it all clearly: https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/equilux.html

'Daylight is good at arriving at the right time', wrote George Harrison, and it will continue to do so for some time. Season's greetings to all of you!

Gowri

September 2022

Here's one WhatsApp image I actually liked - from last year, as you can see!

On The Verge

Even on very bright days such as these

She looks into an abyss and she sees

Old age and death - inevitable,

 both, and infinitely sad.

You cannot choose. And so you think: 

As long as I'm alive and growing old,

I will see others die, while I remain and grieve.

Survivors have to live with being bereaved.

One more gone and one more gone

And after all these years you miss someone -

What would they have thought of this,

And what would he have said to that?

You dream - a chance of meeting up again?

A dying hope, a deadened wish, a dead end.

Yesterday's Song

 Pieces of sky coming down with the raindrops, 

Clouds form: shining mirrors on the grass. 

They settle down until the sunset's fingers reach down and pull them back up again. 

Shower's over, show is done. Shower's over, Sunday is gone.