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!

Happy Holidays

 Rooh Afza summer starry nights,

Winter sun cricket commentary days.

Colour by Memory

Another Holi is over.

As I look at the mixed colours of the flowers outside, I can almost see three little girls, Sonal, Vanita and Gowri, sitting at the edge of the flower bed and drying themselves in the hot sun on another lawn in another time. They seem sad that Holi is over but are already making plans for next year. They'll have more water and colours ready next time to throw at Babloo, Vivian, Vernon, Bobby and Uday.

What a happy thought - next year! Only 364 days to go! Next year they will all be one year older - one year closer to playing the boring Holi that Viji, Rekha, Manju and others go and play at Mamta Sinha's house, playing the dholak and singing songs.

But not as bad as Maiji and Babuji's Holi, all they did was walk around the colony going to each house with the uncles and aunties, carrying dry colour and putting only a little bit of that on each others' foreheads. 

Some doors never opened on Holi.

Maiji's plateful of ellu urundai was kept ready for visitors in the front veranda and next to it there was a plate with packets of red and green colour. Gupta Uncle, Uday's father, wore a starched white dhoti. Aunty, tiny next to him, in a fluffy white saree. Uncle had the second biggest smile - Babuji's was the biggest!

The girls would sit there in the sun until they were called home to have their baths and then eat. They knew that there'd be no more hot water baths allowed after today.

No sweaters needed, either, and best of all, they could switch on the fans in the evening.

Dear CJM

As I pressed and shaped these cookies while the oven was heating, I wondered why they looked familiar, and wasn't sure what they reminded me of - but the shape, the size and the edges were exactly like something I'd seen somewhere.

After they'd cooled a bit, I broke one into pieces and tasted it - and memories came rushing back. Memories of the 'tuck wallah' who sat near the junior school building at break time and outside at the car park (the one inside the big gates, where we never saw a single car parked, ever) when the going home bell had gone. We had junior school morning assembly there, and later, as seniors, that's where we played throwball.

I can actually see the tuck wallah, with his big, bony frame, hair and beard orange* with henna, loose pajama-kurta and small neat trunk of goodies. And the goodies, all packed carefully in packets of see through butter paper, folded and stapled at the top. He had a sort of tray with compartments and  it held all the items, arranged so attractively!

For 15 paisey, he sold a cookie like the one in the picture, packets of salted shelled peanuts, thick salted potato chips, red hot chilli potato chips and little squares of light brown or white fudge. There were small samosas, priced at 25 paisey, and I think there were veg. and mutton patties as well. The mutton patty was the 'expensive' item.

The bestEST thing in his trunk were 'sticky chips'. I'm sure none of my friends has forgotten the taste! Deep brown shiny sweet coating on cruchy pieces of chips. Oh it was heavenly, especially if you'd bought one just as the bell rang after break. You could open your desk and eat a little bit in the Sanskrit period (always the first period after break)!

The sticky chips came from the same source as the other chips - they were deep fried sun dried sliced potatoes. The fried chips were broken into little pieces and coated in really dark caramel and allowed to dry. My adult mind worked out the composition of course, those days they were just deliciously sticky and mysterious and never to be seen anywhere else.

Please write to me if you want the cookie recipe.

*I remember asking my father how some men had orange and red hair; was it because they used red coloured hair oil?

The sticky chips scholar

One of our wonderful teachers Ms Susheila Mani, with dear Sr Dorothy who was the principal when I joined school. Thank you for putting up this pic on Facebook, Ms Mani. And thank you for everything, CJM.

Waste Not...

I'm trying to define thrift in today's terms. Is thrift a virtue, or does it have only recreational value?

These questions weren't relevant when I was a child; that was the era of hand-me-downs and  re-invented leftovers. The word recycling was unknown because it wasn't needed. Everyone recycled what they could as a matter of course. You didn't buy new socks when the elastic wore out, you bought lengths of elastic and stitched them into rings big enough to hold them up. Our mothers unravelled old sweaters and knit them up again. Sewing and knitting were necessary activities, not just hobbies.
We didn't have a glut of readymade garments in our cupboards or even in the shops. Markets held goods and goodies in plenty, but they weren't exactly spilling over. Nor did we buy compulsively. We didn't shop for fun so much, or because it would make us feel better. We didn't feel deprived either. That's the way the world was those days.
Thrift isn't just a matter of survival; it involves some level of ingenuity, because you manage to make something useful out of something you would have discarded.
There are plenty of videos of handy hacks on the internet. One of them showed how to turn  an old summer top into a shopping bag. That too an environment friendly bag, a good way to say no to plastic.

The top, and the bag, below

Two days back, I was forced to recycle for an old fashioned reason : want. The New Year arrived, but no calendar came with it.
I remember what my dad had done one year in a similar situation. He turned the pages of the previous year's calendar until he found a month with thirty one days, and the first of the month on the same day of the week as New Year's Day. With his firm handwriting, he wrote out 'January' and then the year.  I thought it was brilliant, because I wasn't very good with numbers. The makeshift calendar went up on the night of the 31st.
That was how it was with my father; he changed the page on the daily calendar just before he went to bed. That simple act was hugely reassuring: no matter what happened, tomorrow would come along at the right time.
My calendar went up at noon on New Year's Day. And as it happened all those years ago in my parents' house, someone brought a calendar for us in the next twenty four hours.

Gul-e-Fanoosh and the Pitfalls of Photography

Here is an old favourite. We had a number of these shrubs in my childhood home, and they all had pink flowers. I would stand under the branches after the rain and get a little 'shower' shaking water off the petals, long after I'd crossed the age when it was alright to play with water. 

The sight of these flowers always reminds me of the end of summer holidays. Schools reopened in the second week of July, some days after the monsoon set in over Delhi. Delhi was really beautiful those days, neither dirty nor crowded, but a city of gardens.

This is the tallest Gul-e-Fanoosh I have ever seen. 

 Botanical names are rarely pretty and lagerstroemia indica is no exception. I found some common Indian names at The Flowers of India website. Gul-e-Fanoosh isn't mentioned there. It's a name I learnt from this lovely old book pictured below, which my brother Raja found in a book godown  in Siliguri.

A 'pitfall' can be quite painfully literal, as I learnt after slipping and falling into this pit of 'jabra mal' or dry leaves and cut grass.

                 

Reflections of An Evening, written 2007

In Delhi, in the seventies, we used to look out for sunsets in the monsoon and post-monsoon months of August and September without fail. In a big and dry city like Delhi, rain was incredibly energetic. It was always a bonus; it brought high spirits, and it spelt romance. Spells of rain never lasted too long, and when they ended by evening, we got the additional treat of a sunset to enjoy and remember.

Evening curfew for a young girl like me in those days was lighting-up time. As soon as the street lights came on, I had to be home. What lovely late evening twilights we had. The light would fade slowly and grandly out of the sky, lingering until the clouds and trees were dark silhouettes. In my imagination, those banked up clouds on the horizon, black and purple masses, were mountains. The return home at the street light hour was followed by prayers in the back verandah. The puja was in the store room that opened off it. The back verandah would be lit only by the fading daylight and the storeroom was beautiful in the dark. It was comforting and yet exciting, and there were many smells that filled it: the sharp smell of the scrubbed brass villakku or the smoky smell of burnt oil wicks, the scent of goodies stored in big biscuit tins, and agarbatti, which dominated, and then took over my senses with its calming effect so that my troubles -- homework undone or a test the next day-- would be washed away. Only the comfort and the safety of my parents' home would remain.

It was remarkable that one could connect to nature in such a profound way in the heart of Delhi.

That was a long time ago, and the habit of enjoying a few quiet moments gathering one's thoughts at the end of the day remains. On some evenings, the day seems to die, and it has a melancholy feel. On other days, there is only a feeling of peace. Today, I was sitting outside our house and looking at the Bhutan Himalayas, purple and black masses against the Northern sky, and I dreamed they were the clouds of my Delhi childhood. One peak stood out sharply defined, perfectly symmetrical, and in the foreground, a gulmohar leaf swayed in the silent breeze. It could have been a calendar picture of Mt.Fuji with a leaf etching in front.

It rained all afternoon after an incredibly hot and sticky morning. The thunder was deafening and it was a really dramatic, high intensity storm. It cleared the air magically. By four o'clock, the sky was washed blue and the hills stood out in clear relief. I walked down to the National Highway -- a straight road leads to it from my house - at about five o'clock, with my head turned right to see the hills. They were silhouettes; I couldn’t see the trees on them at all, but I could see the ranges layered out distinctly. Where the sky met the hills, it was a lighter blue than anywhere else; almost whitish, and luminous. The silence that settled around this spectacle made me imagine it was a pre-dawn scene, as if something big was about to happen soon.
Back from my walk, I sat outside on a swing, with our patient and undemanding dog Simba at my feet. There was a gentle breeze blowing. Birds had returned to their nests and fallen silent. A truck rumbled past on the highway, but it wasn’t an unwelcome sound.

The sound of children playing somewhere in the distance was missing today. It is a typical evening sound. Once I was among children who played in the evenings out in the open, watching anxiously for the lights on the lampposts. Then, as a young adult, I remember sitting and daydreaming on the front steps in the evening and listening to a sad song about a lonely man watching the children play. I sit alone now and the children who played in this garden when they were little have left home. Home and childhood may seem very far away to them too. The complete tranquility and simplicity of those childhood years is lost for ever, but at moments such as these, one can recapture traces of it. 

Published here in my blog in 2007

Delhi : Jammin'

I spent most of my time in Delhi on BRTC. 'Bread, Rice, Coffee and Tomatoes?' asked a friend. You wish.
BRTC is Delhi's Bus Rapid Transport Corridor. A good plan, but badly executed. It covers an almost 6km long stretch of road in densely populated South Delhi. It is supposed to be on trial. It is a trial - to commuters. Unfortunately for us, who are visitors to Delhi, it covered the distance between where we stay when we visit, and where our children live.
The idea of a dedicated bus corridor with well-built, comfortable buses that provide a regular service should have been put into practice long ago.See how good the new buses look?.
Delhi's public transport system has been in need of improvement since the 1970s, at least. Its buses have always been over-crowded, ramshackle, and irregular. Not to mention the horror stories of women commuters, or the number of people on the roads who are killed by rash bus drivers.

The BRTC is carved up into three lanes on either side of the central divider. 'These are as ugly as Kolkata's tramlines', said our friend Saumitro, 'but at least you can cut across those!' Cars far outnumber buses and two-wheelers in Delhi. They should have been provided with wider lanes for smoother and faster movement. Take a look at these deserted lanes. These are the lanes for buses and two-wheelers.

The BRTC idea is far better suited to Delhi than the Metro, says my brother.
'But how many years will it take us to learn discipline?' he adds. We still have a long way to go.

What’s worse than being stuck on the BRTC?
Listening to the bad jokes about BRTC.
However, when we saw this sign, that said, Delhi's Smart New Way to Travel' I couldn’t help adding 'Is To Stay in One Place'.
The driver of our auto rickshaw threw his head back and laughed in appreciation. He gave me a smiling salute at the end of our ride. Another day, we were saying how it would be realistic to celebrate one's birthday on the road, since no one could reach the party on time. At which that day's auto driver turned around to ask, 'Aaj aapka birthday hai?' (Is it your birthday today?) The husband said, 'Nahi, lekin aise baithhne se ho bhi jaayega' (If we sit long enough it will be my birthday soon). We were all fellow sufferers. The best crack came from one of the drivers himself. BRTC, he said, stood for 'Bahut Ruk ke Traffic Chalti hai' (I guess that would translate to But Really, Traffic Crawls. For us, who neither work nor live in Delhi, it was merely tedious. I felt for the cheerful three-wheeler drivers, who lost a lot of time - and fares - everyday. And almost forgave the surly ones who refused to take us.

Reflections of an Evening

In Delhi, in the seventies, we used to look out for sunsets in the monsoon and post-monsoon months of August and September without fail. In a big and dry city like Delhi, rain was incredibly energetic. It was always a bonus; it brought high spirits, and it spelt romance. Spells of rain never lasted too long, and when they ended by evening, we got the additional treat of a sunset to enjoy and remember.

Evening curfew for a young girl like me in those days was lighting-up time. As soon as the street lights came on, I had to be home. What lovely late evening twilights we had. The light would fade slowly and grandly out of the sky, lingering until the clouds and trees were dark silhouettes. In my imagination, those banked up clouds on the horizon, black and purple masses, were mountains. The return home at the street light hour was followed by prayers in the back verandah. The puja was in the store room that opened off it. The back verandah would be lit only by the fading daylight and the storeroom was beautiful in the dark. It was comforting and yet exciting, and there were many smells that filled it: the sharp smell of the scrubbed brass villakku or the smoky smell of burnt oil wicks, the scent of goodies stored in big biscuit tins, and agarbatti, which dominated, and then took over my senses with its calming effect so that my troubles -- homework undone or a test the next day-- would be washed away. Only the comfort and the safety of my parents' home would remain.

It was remarkable that one could connect to nature in such a profound way in the heart of Delhi.

That was a long time ago, and the habit of enjoying a few quiet moments gathering one's thoughts at the end of the day remains. On some evenings, the day seems to die, and it has a melancholy feel. On other days, there is only a feeling of peace. Today, I was sitting outside our house and looking at the Bhutan Himalayas, purple and black masses against the Northern sky, and I dreamed they were the clouds of my Delhi childhood. One peak stood out sharply defined, perfectly symmetrical, and in the foreground, a gulmohar leaf swayed in the silent breeze. It could have been a calendar picture of Mt.Fuji with a leaf etching in front.

It rained all afternoon after an incredibly hot and sticky morning. The thunder was deafening and it was a really dramatic, high intensity storm. It cleared the air magically. By four o'clock, the sky was washed blue and the hills stood out in clear relief. I walked down to the National Highway -- a straight road leads to it from my house - at about five o'clock, with my head turned right to see the hills. They were silhouettes; I couldn’t see the trees on them at all, but I could see the ranges layered out distinctly. Where the sky met the hills, it was a lighter blue than anywhere else; almost whitish, and luminous. The silence that settled around this spectacle made me imagine it was a pre-dawn scene, as if something big was about to happen soon.
Back from my walk, I sat outside on a swing, with our patient and undemanding dog Simba at my feet. There was a gentle breeze blowing. Birds had returned to their nests and fallen silent. A truck rumbled past on the highway, but it wasn’t an unwelcome sound.

The sound of children playing somewhere in the distance was missing today. It is a typical evening sound. Once I was among children who played in the evenings out in the open, watching anxiously for the lights on the lampposts. Then, as a young adult, I remember sitting and daydreaming on the front steps in the evening and listening to a sad song about a lonely man watching the children play. I sit alone now and the children who played in this garden when they were little have left home. Home and childhood may seem very far away to them too. The complete tranquility and simplicity of those childhood years is lost for ever, but at moments such as these, one can recapture traces of it.

Thoughts in a Garden

(Published in The Statesman, 22 March 2006.Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

I have begun to believe that the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who grew up in a house with a garden and those who didnt. I say this because anyone who enjoyed a garden as a child grows up to be a lover of nature.
Anyone who grew up in a house with a garden will remember the smell of a freshly mowed lawn; the heaps of cut grass, so aromatic, so tempting to jump into, and so surprisingly and painfully full of stinging insects. The garden hose pipe, with air bubbles rushing along in their race with the water. Those endless December holidays of my childhood in Delhi, when we would sit on the lawn listening to music or the cricket commentary on a transistor radio, while eating oranges and peanuts. We would chase the warm sunlight into the last corner of the garden before finally giving up and going indoors, shivering.

In the summer, we would carry our charpoys and spread out our sheets by eight o’clock to cool them by the time we went to sleep. The laburnum tree outside the house would be in full bloom then and the street lights would make the flowers look like luminous golden grapes. Oh what freedom it was to sleep under an open sky. The faithful transistor kept going, at low volume now, considering the late hour, and played sentimental hits like ‘Puppy Love’ and ‘Sealed With a Kiss’ on Forces’ Request. The summer nights were too exciting to sleep ever, and while the rest of the family awoke at dawn, when chilly jasmine scented breezes blew, I would lie there fast asleep with a sheet over my face as a protest against an increasingly hot sun.

We children were only allowed out into the garden in the evening after five-thirty, when the heat and the glare had reduced. Then it would be fun to water the plants, and to listen to the hiss that the hot concrete walk made when it was hit by water from the pipe. The smell of that water evaporating off the hot earth or flower pots made us feel like tasting the earth or at least biting into the flower pot.

One doesn’t see oleander trees now like the ones that grew in all gardens then. We children would pluck two of the long leaves and, holding the ends together, we’d bring them close and snap them back to make a loud noise. There was a lovely creeper jasmine with very dark green leaves and flowers that were whitest white on a pale green stem. We’d pluck them when they were still tight buds at five o’clock in the evening, and my mother would bind them into strings for our hair without using a needle at all. She’d then invert a katori over the neatly coiled strings, and within an hour the blooms would open, with a maddening fragrance. We had enough jasmine strings to distribute to most of our neighbours. We’d make a habit of counting the number of buds we plucked, and often it exceeded a thousand!

At fifteen, I sat with my history book open before me, supposedly studying for the Board Exam, but actually looking at the phlox, sweet sultanas, petunias, verbenas and hollyhocks that thrust themselves out of the earth so boisterously! And every bird in the world seemed to be singing in that garden of my childhood, mocking at me who sat indoors!The Delhi in which I learnt to love nature has changed beyond belief, and though I sometimes regret that I’ve left it so far behind me, I'm glad that my daughter, at fifteen, has the same distractions as I had at her age in the place where we now live. 'Ma, I cant study, there's too much to look at in the garden!' she wailed. She will pass it on, I know, this love of the flowers, the seasons, and the rhythms of life.

If you have ever lived in a house with a garden, even one tree, whether spotted out of a car window or during an evening walk ; one flower, one bush in the park, or one bird's song, will bring it all back, all the wonder that you ever felt as a child!