The Beach and Me

You know, I lived in a city with a beach for six years, and practically never visited the waves. My parents used to take me sometimes when I was a kid, and we would be one tiny family amongst thousands on the huge crowded beach. We would eat roasted peanuts and ice cream. My dad would chaperone my brother and me in the water, and my mum would watch from the shore.

Two trips I made last month have made me realize that I want to live in a city with a beach - or at least one that's close to a beach. Definitely not a landlocked city like Delhi. Where would I escape to, away from the dust and the grit of ordinary life?

Mountains? No, mountains are not for me. I like them, but they're too imposing to be calm and peaceful.

My parents used to have a thing for deserts. I've been to Rajasthan at least four-five times, thanks to them. Even when they took me to see mountains, they chose a desert - Leh. Leh, beautiful Leh. The name itself is so romantic.

I think I could sit for hours on a beach, just watching the waves. I don't even need alcohol, unlike a lot of my friends. A quiet beach, golden sand, noisy waves. Maybe a book - to hold, to read maybe a few sentences of, but not to get lost in. I used to daydream about owning my own island, complete with golden beach and palm trees. Considering global warming, I guess it's not that remote a possibility now, except for the beach and palm trees part.

Did I tell you about the time I lost my glasses to the Bay of Bengal? It happened in Puri last month. Early morning, the last day of our stay there. Only the die-hard beach fanatics were up early. Meanie and me, plus Blue as the male bodyguard. We went into the water, and Meanie wanted to go right up to the place where the waves formed. Just to have them go over her in an arc - you know, surfer style. We went further and further, and the spot seemed just a bit out of our reach. Or maybe it was so scary that we didn't want to get there.

Finally, I got irritated and left the others and went right up to that place, and a big wave went right over me, and I capsized like a boat, and it was scary-scary-awesome.

We stayed there for a while longer. Just as we were leaving, a HUGE wave came, and all three of us fell over. Scary to lose your balance in that much water. We swallowed some water and came up sputtering, and then Blue and I realized that our glasses were lost. Meanie, miraculously, had kept hers.

Blue and Meanie immediately started searching for them, but I started laughing at our idiocy. To go out into so much water and dare the waves to do something to us! But we were so insignificant to the waves that they had just made fun of us by making us half-blind. And now these two were bothering to search for the tiny little things in the vast ocean.

Of course, I could afford to laugh because I had my lenses to fall back upon. Poor Blue had to survive the entire journey back without his glasses.

Purge

I want it to rain. A long endless storm, complete with thunder and lightning. A storm so big that everything else ceases to matter. Something to clean up this place and drive all the negative things away.

The sky should become so dark that daylight is forgotten. The sound of the water must pound in my ears and remind me of waves crashing on jagged rocks. Bird calls and car noises must be silenced. The trees must fear for their very existence and bow before the wind in supplication. Leaves must scurry from place to place in search of shelter and finally, finding none, die a sodden death.

The purging should be complete, at whatever cost. Even if a few innocent things are washed away in the whirlwind. There must be no mercy.

Aayiram Kannumai

I'm sitting in a large well-lit room, surrounded by books and journals. A silent room, in which a lot of people are reading books or working on their laptops. It's a dark Jharkhand night outside - the end of an absentee winter. I have a fat blue book open in front of me - Labour and Industrial Laws by P K Padhi. A blue marker and a pen complete the picture of the faithful ghissu.

Suddenly, in the midst of learning about legal and illegal strikes, I get an image. No, not an image. It's complete with smells and sounds and feelings. I can even feel mosquito bites on my legs.

I'm sitting outside my grandmother's house in Kollam. It's dusk - after six. My grandmother always sits outside in the evenings. She lights the lamp at five-thirty, says her prayers, and then comes and sits outside in the gathering dusk. I sit with her sometimes. There is a half-wall near the gate, with blocks that make comfortable stools to sit on.

We are both sitting in companiable silence. The sun is rapidly setting behind the tall coconut tree in front of the house. Its orange rays come to me through the gaps in the coconut leaves. The call for prayer from the nearby mosque sounds in the distance. Closer, I can hear the sounds of footsteps and voices from the road outside. Mosquitoes bite my legs and arms, and I slap impatiently at them.

This could, really, be an evening from any year of my life - from one of the many summer holidays I've spent there, or maybe the snatched weekends. My favourite house in the whole wide world.

Back when I was a kid, that entire plot of land seemed to hold so many possibilities for excitement. The guava tree was easily climbable, and led up to a nice cosy place for reading on warm sun-dappled afternoons.  The ladder up to the water tank was a perpetual challenge that my brother and I posed to each other. The front yard of the house would become a shallow lake in the rainy season; we would make pristine white boats using fresh paper from our Malayalam tuition notebooks, and make them jostle happily in the water. The jasmine flowers had to be plucked in the evenings. Not that I was ever girly enough to want to wear them on my hair - my poor grandmother always had to give them away to the neighbourhood girls.

Lying in bed huddled under a thin sheet and listening to the rain outside. Being scared every time I had to go to the spooky back portion of the house at night. Reading a book and falling asleep with my glasses on and having grandmother remove them when she came in to sleep. Sitting on the verandah and daydreaming. Staring at the pools and valleys formed by sunlight on the guava leaves.

Were those times actually simpler, or does it just seem so now?

(Title Translation: With a Thousand Eyes. It's a beautiful, beautiful song about longing.)

The Beginning of the End

The big tree in front has started flowering. White flowers, whose pale petals have already started withering and falling to the ground. Last year, the carpet of white on the ground meant the end of the year, the seniors leaving, a whole bunch of treats. This year, they are the omen of the final goodbye that has to come in a month, give or take a few days.

Winter is over, pretty much. It hardly visited, in fact. It is already too hot to sit outside in the sun and read. The sweaters in the cupboard lie dusty and unused. I get nimbu pani instead of hot comforting soup. What from the last two years would I not want to re-live.

I would try to capture stray moments, as is my wont, except that I'm too busy to be able to do such small things. Next month, I shall wallow in the bittersweetness.

Spectator

I'm sitting on the steps outside the Metro station at Central Secretariat, waiting for a friend. It's a mild day, almost warm - the bright winter sunshine falls upon me and warms my face and arms.

The road is blocked up for construction of some sort. A police jeep stands in the distance, the khaki-clad men watching everyone suspiciously. People scurry in and out of the Metro station. Buses, both Blueline and DTC, come screeching into the bus stop lane. The conductors recite place names in the poetry of long practice. Sweater- and muffler- and jacket-clad people get on and off.

They look curiously at me, this girl sitting nonchalantly on the steps in the sunshine. Huge shades, blue jeans, black Fab India kurta and black kashmiri shawl. A typical DU girl, yet not. Clothes a little out of fashion, surely? And a bit too much self-assurance, perhaps?

I still recognize the bus numbers, I find. After all, haven't I stood at this same bus stop hundreds of times, waiting for that magic numbered bus - the 610? Two years ago, I was one of this crowd, hurrying out of the Metro station to catch the connecting bus. Floaters and jeans and backpack - everything as comfy as possible for the three hour commute each day. Impatient to get home, not looking anybody in the face, perpetually hunting the distance for any sign of 'my' bus.

I look at them, these current DU kids, and they all look so young. Yes, that's me, all of twenty-one, barely a year out of college, saying that. They do, they really do. Especially the guys, trying to look cool in their low-slung jeans and their plugged-in i-pods and their gelled hair. Surely, we never looked like that? Or is it the fact that I'm out of all of it that makes me see the reality that always was?

My friend arrives. We hug, and enter the station. Now I'm part of the crowd again.

Fiction

The door clicked open, and yellow light from the hallway flooded in. With a start, she realized that she had been sitting in the dark for the past couple of hours, staring at the hypnotic starlight outside. The moon's rays slanted in through the French windows. Had she moved from the sofa all day? She couldn't remember.

His dark shape blocked out the light. She saw his arm reaching for the switch, and instantly put up her arms to block out the harsh light. She heard a click. And then another, a moment later. Cautiously peering past her arm, she saw that he had switched off the light again. The door clicked shut behind him. The renewed darkness felt cool and welcome on her eyes.

His footsteps sounded in the dark emptiness of the huge room - cautious steps, navigating the furniture. Soon, he was visible by the moonlight. Light coloured trousers and a blue-grey shirt. He went to the window and stared outside silently for a while. She kept her eyes on him, dispassionately taking in his slim form.

He turned and came back to her. Sat beside her on the sofa. Put his arm around her. Caressed her hair. She turned to him, and crushed her face against the crisp blue cotton of his shirt. Breathing in, she smelled the coolness of expensive airconditioning. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I forgot again." Once again, she had left the food untouched. Once again, she had forgotten to switch on the lights at dusk. Once again, she had not stepped outside.

"It's alright," he said. "It'll take time." She sighed, and snuggled closer to him. He hugged her tighter, as if he wanted her to melt into him. And so they sat there in the darkness, the woman who had forgotten how to live, and the man who was waiting for her to remember again.

Rain in XL

How I shall miss Jamshedpur weather. I must have said this many times on this blog before, but I just can't get over it, so I'll just say it again - it rains in Jamshedpur all the freakin' time! It's amazing. And it makes for excellent moods, despite quizzes and submissions.

Yesterday, for example. I came out of the hostel in the morning, on my way to class. The wind riffled through my salwar-kameez and tried to steal my dupatta. I had to shield my face and my hair against the leaves flying about. But soon enough, I gave up and just raised my face to the wind, enjoying the way it tickled my face.

Then, in the afternoon, the sky was overcast again. The mess was giving out samosas with tea, and Anu and I brought our plates out and sat on the hostel steps. The trees were waving, and there was a wind ruffling our hair. We discussed our Kerala plans for September, and talked about everything we wanted to do. It was brilliant.

And then it started raining. We moved off the steps and onto the veranda, and sat there and watched the rain. It was more of a downpour than a drizzle - something that you rarely see in Jamshedpur. People were running to and fro, shielding themselves with books. The sports guys coming back from the field were the only exceptions. It was nice sitting there in the protection of the veranda, hugging our knees, eating our hot samosas and being sprinkled with cool water droplets.

And then, today. I spent a couple of hours in the library in the afternoon, studying. And then came out at 4:55 exactly, because I had a meeting at five. And oh, the weather - it was gorgeous. The thing about the XL campus, you see, is its trees. Other campuses may have more trees and more greenery, but there is this.. quality about the very trees in XL. They are simply gorgeous. You walk through the campus, and you'll be dazzled by their beauty.

There is a path leading from the acad building to Bodhi Tree. It borders JLT and the admin building, and is lined by trees on both sides. And whenever I walk this path in the daylight, on my way to the library or the sports field or outside campus, I get amazed by the sheer beauty of the trees - every single time. There is this sparkly green-ness to them that is so breathtaking. They wave in the wind, and the colours change, a thousand shades of green, all around me.

At around dusk, I was sitting with V on JLT. Again, under an overcast sky, with a bit of a drizzle. The drizzle suddenly became stronger for a while, and then dwindled down again. It left the whole of the lawn full of water drops, which caught the fluorescent light from the big lamp on top of the hostel, and sparkled like a carpet made of a million diamonds.

And I looked at the sight, and wished I could take mental pictures, and sighed, and got frustrated, and burst out with, "V! Do you realize that we won't be here this time next year?" V got shocked by my sudden outburst, I think, and he said, "Arre.. That's a long time away, baba.." "No, you don't get it!" I said, even more frustrated. I didn't bother to explain more, but I had suddenly realized that I would see no more June's or July's here. It made me profoundly sad in a way I can't explain.

"You know," V said after a while, "We think that we'll never have as much fun during the rest of our lives as we had here, and that way, the rest of our lives actually does get ruined." Or, well, words to that effect.

So yes, the profoundest statement of the evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is all about the self-fulfilling prophecy. I shall now look forward to years of being bound to the desk, and of office politics, and loving Fridays and hating Mondays. Yay.

I can feel the time slipping through my fingers. Less than seven months now.