Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Sundays
Sundays are good days for me because they are postal holidays.
Not that I receive many letters ordinarily, but on weekdays I sit in expectation of a letter from you.
You have never written to me a traditional letter. I have written perhaps a total of 3 in the 7 odd years that I have known you.
7 years huh? It's been that long! Technically, our acquaintanceship has grown over 7 years. Does fascination and nostalgia and missing count as part of knowing?Why not? Every thought, intellectual or silly, heavy or light, every feeling, every emotion that has borne your name, the extraordinary color of your eyes, has been in some way a knowing of you.
Out of the 3 letters, the first one I sent to you from very far away.That summer, rife with almost 10 months of knowing of you, I was sitting in my house, the house where I grew up.
It was hot as hell.
Our house is an uncomplicated three storey house. The third storey is where I had lived out my girlhood, reclusively, indifferent to the heat.
The bottom most floor is the coolest, and drifting into the cool of this floor one can dream amazing dreams.
That summer, remote and distant from my girlhood skill for absorbing pain, I situated myself invariably in the dining room, the room that occupied pride of place of the cool bottom most floor of the house.
I would sit in the cool and the heat would wither away magically. I would see your face like a pale shimmering shadow, now here, now gone.My body would ache with what I know not.
Descriptors don't come to me easily.Nouns, adjectives slough off like old skin.
But there was ache of a pleasant kind.
One afternoon, I saw your face and thought of writing to you. I didn't know what to write to you. I couldn't have written a love letter, for that would have been a melange of indiscretion and absurdity.So I thought of writing about the seasons, of heat and the monsoon.
To write about the heat and the monsoon as it is would be a terrible cliche, for when Westerners speak of India and when Indians represent the place to Westerners, it is through the heat and the monsoon that they do so.
I was aware of the fallacy of repetition and predictability.
I was self conscious, for I didn't want to displease you.
To be honest, I wanted to be inventive and pleasing.So, I penned a letter where I imagined you and me in the heat of this landscape, in the pouring rain someplace under these skies.
I was discreet, concealing every truth in a cheap pseudo-Bollywood imago. I was clowning, as I always have whenever I have found myself poised precariously on the precipice of a reckoning (with my feelings for you).
I wrote of rain-wetting and heat-wetting: just as the rain can soak you to your bones, so the heat can drown your skin in rivulets of perspiration.
I had imagined the two of us getting wet either way, in the rain and under the sun.
I don't remember what else I had scribbled.
My heart had pounded as I had written my silly piece on a scrawny blue colored airmail.
I had to hide what I was writing from my parents.
Next day, my father had carried the letter with him. All international mail had to be mailed from the big central post office, named the GPO.
I remember the GPO: the mother of all post offices, where beggars and peons lay their cheek on the soothing cold of the marmoreal colonnades.
My letter went out to you on a very very hot day.
posted by Orlando @ 8:26 PM 0 comments
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Prelude
Dear baby to be. You will not come out of my womb, for sure.
In about 2-3 years time you will be lying, just as a foundling lies, in a pen with wrought iron railing; in an orphanage perchance in this worlds' troubled parts. And I will google you out and bring to me.
I mean to say, I will most likely adopt you, get to know you, make you mine by and by.
To you I will be pledging myself as a wholesome parent, a caretaker par excellance.
But before that moment, of bringing you from somewhere far out there, within/without the ken of my geographical knowledge, into my demesne, I need to engage in extensive work of preparation. Your arrival, sweet dear of my future, must be preceded by the arrival of another: your mother.
For baby dearest, though I would from day one feed you, imprison you gently in a soft, dimpled seatlet in the passenger's side seat of my small eco friendly car, take you astrolling in a state of the art stroller whose very size and aura of modernity will keep ill-wishing strangers at bay, socialize you into the fine art of reading and discerning, read to you chunks from Rabelais' Pantagruel and Gargantua, and from Rabindranath Tagore's 'Geetanjali,' and protect you from the menacing guns of Disney, I need another to help me help you.
I need somebody singular to be a partner of me and a mother of you.
For baby dearest, think of how much better would it be for me and for the both of us, if two of us, instead of just me, the one, were to coo good art and right thinking into your ears every night before you go to sleep.
I have an irrational belief that a child must be raised by two singular people, not one.
For, though in my thirties, a child but I am myself, and I can't hope to raise you alone.
This space I devote to the chronicling of my quest for your mother.
posted by Orlando @ 9:53 AM 0 comments
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