I open at the close

Something they don’t tell you when you first start writing is that when you keep doing it, you lose people. At first you won’t notice it because it’s absurd that this should happen. Then you see it and you can’t unsee it. Then there will be sleepless nights like these where you wonder if you will get people back if you stop writing. You feel smaller than ever when you realise that you’ve actually already stopped. It’s too late. Thankfully, the gates are only closed, never locked and you can open them whenever you want to.

Open,

write.

Advertisement

Remembering to Read

This morning, on the way to SLV to pick up breakfast – a security guard, in his 70s, sitting on a plastic chair outside an ATM with a pen and a Kannada newspaper, solving crossword. A little ahead, another oldish man with a shovel, uprooting a small plant by the compound of his house. He was wearing a white baniyan and panche.

Pretend it’s a city: have a list of books and films I must run to. Days are happier when I remember to remember that there is a woman named Fran Lebowitz who lives the way she wants to, reads, smokes, eats, walks, and goes back to live in her apartment alone– and no man no woman no child no parent can ever tell her anything. I am most curious about her love life, her sex life. But she’s given me so much that the other stuff, though I want to know everything about her — can never compete with how she makes it possible for me to believe that I can live however I want to, that I am young to not have to work hard to feel alive. That anything I’ll ever need is already with me, that I can move to NYC and live there forever (bring money, she says but – lol)

I spent all of this week crying. I cried in lifts and restrooms, at home, and at work, while riding. I don’t want to be that way ever again. I like to believe that I am not myself when I am not reading women. The months I spent in lockdown reading Toni Morrison, Marieke Lucas, Makenna Goodman, Sheila Heti, and Dawn Powell were the best days of my life. Nothing can ever come close to the intimacy I share with a woman whose work I’ve just begun to discover and rediscover. My problem is that I give too much attention to my life. I must remember everyday what Toni Morrison said: “I write because otherwise I would be stuck with life” and what Fran Lebowitz said, “Reading is better than life”

Reading is real, supremely more real than anything else I’ve ever known. More real than even perhaps, writing.

Mouma

There is so much of hers I should’ve asked to keep. Her vibhooti-smelling blouses, her saris smelling of her, her creams and powder, her flowers.

I don’t know where I’ll find it in me to continue writing, as if nothing’s happened.

I’ll remember her for many, many things.

But today, I am only thinking of how she clung to me and wept, when she said bye and when she said hi – strongly, and weakly. Her arms – always smelling of vibhooti.