For 500

WordPress tells me that this is my 500th published post. It also tells me that there are 98 other saved as drafts posts that conceal my embarrassment well enough so I don’t have to deal with the embarrassment of the 499 published posts.

Blogging was fun. To all the amul babies who used to say blogging is not real writing, I hope your view of the world is just as pristine and that the King of England is treating you well.

I started writing in this small place with a name that I was very kicked by and because I wanted to get better at writing. Rumlolarum became a sweet home for every fleeting thought I had, every humiliation – real or imagined, and every other journey I often took to conquer worries around self-respect, love, and desire.

I learnt how to be here. And I’m glad that despite all the comic drama of the last decade where I was failing and learning how to teach, read, and live – rumlolarum has always taken me home to write. I’ve heard mad things about this place – apparently students came here to play drinking games every time they located a grammar error (how can you people drink with Wren & Martin’s balls in your mouth pa?); apparently I am not the real author of rumlolarum (lol)- but to be here and smile, on what seems like the other side is a lesson in forgiveness. Forgiveness for me.

So much of writing is guilt-ridden. How can I think I can write? Who am I to think I can write as well as her? What guts I have to think I can call myself a writer — some periya shakespeare ah? Slowly slowly, without telling me, blogging became a way of forgiving myself for dreaming that I could be a writer someday. And then one day, it just happened that I wasn’t guilty about calling myself a writer anymore. I was one. I am one.

Two people I used to obsessively read in my postgrad years led me to blogging and the desire to keep writing. They each chronicled the city in such enticing ways that I longed to be in the city at the same time that they were writing about. Even though they both said that they read and wrote because there was nothing much to do when they were growing up – they both demonstrate the one thing that their generation had that ours just does not – grit and a sense of fun.

Reading their old blog posts in the late 2000s was for me a way of learning how to be in the city. When I read them now, I am glad to be here, and to know that I’ll be okay. It’ll all be okay.

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Dreaming

My phone was dying at invigilation yesterday and this is dangerous for more practical reasons than I care to admit. If there is a question paper shortage and there is no one outside that you can plead to, then the student and I are both somewhat little screwed.

Yesterday however, there was no question paper shortage and no emergency except the thin voice in my head that wondered where that lovely blog I used to stalk all those years ago was? I typed in all the combinations of the two words I remembered with a 5% battery. Phone died, I felt weak, so I stared into space.

Today I sat at my table after invigilation and googled the link without any hassle, and the blog just came on, like magic, and I was returned to all those evenings and afternoons I spent years ago reading this blog, imagining independence and cities and independent women in cities. I felt more fondness for this writer than I have felt for anybody in months and wanted to run to her and tell her all about my life over a tall bottle of wine. That she may not be in town or be entirely uninterested in what I have to say is a fear I don’t have to deal with at all because reading her is a pleasure that will remain even if we don’t talk for months and years.

I read her and then I was moved into the kind of sleep that is yellow in its dreams. I must have napped for 10-15 minutes. I have no memory of what I dreamt about. But she was there and I was there and we were both chasing each other in a city that I was trying to reach in my sleep. I slept urgently and when I woke, I was grateful for having known her and to continue to know her. The dream was written in her language, with long and winding sentences that make me giggle and sigh and think of how much I love eating oranges.

For now, I am going to return to my dream and think of cities and how much they’ve given me and how much I love them.

Big joys for rumlolarum

This came out today and I am smiling. To think that someone sitting so far away (not that it matters) has read me and allowed rumlolarum.com to sit inside their body and mind is a gift I will cherish for a long, long time.

When I began this blog in 2014, I had no idea where it was going. I only knew I had to write. WordPress was on the syllabus of a new course and I had to learn it before I taught it. Odd that students seemed to outgrow it but I never managed to. AM was saying last week that I am the prototype of the first EJP graduate, I agree wholeheartedly.

I did become a graduate in that sense only after I began reading and writing, which through my undergraduate and postgraduate days, I hadn’t learnt how to. Like RP Amudhan once said, ‘It took me 20 years to realise that I could learn’

400

I can’t look back properly. I don’t know what I will find there. Some days, I’m afraid that I will be so ashamed of what I find there, I turn around quickly. But why must an unsure, timid version of you shame you? It’s still a girl – writing, scared, writing anyway, longing to run away, confused, angry, bitter, sad, but mostly in love. And I am not devastated that I am still all these things.

Dawn Powell says, ‘Better not to trust anybody much until you know them; then, not at all’

This helped me discover that if there’s anybody I don’t trust at all, it’s me. Never have and never will. It’s why I find myself in situations where I don’t like what I am saying or doing.

What I think and what I say are not always the same thing, except when I am teaching (and here too I have to try very hard). What I think and what I write are more sisterly even if they are not always twins. Sometimes the writing launches a thought. Often they happen together. But more often than not, the struggle, as always, is to retain the music of the thought in writing which is getting more and more difficult, especially after having noticed it.

I have always been afraid of people who can say what they are thinking clearly with very little reluctance and interruption from their own selves (Lila Lila Lila) With me, it seems as though I am so used to the interruption that even when I am close to a semi-solid articulation of a thought, I anticipate (sometimes even welcome) the interruption so I abandon the thought entirely.

***

I’ve been watching reruns of GG again & thinking how much I want to undo a piece written in 2016 . There’s so much more to say, so much better, so little I am now willing to be satisfied with. But it’s because of my blog that I am unable to feel shame about what I can’t undo now.

Last week, same day, I woke at dawn to write about Dawn Powell (gihaha) I don’t know when the piece will be out but that’s how it’s been with everything I have written over the last few months. I work at and push through pieces which I send off in a hurry, and then don’t see for a long time. I like this. It’s a new way of working and learning distance. All my editors in the past two months have been tough to please, I like this even more.

This is my 400th post and I am happy. (Reading Sheila Heti’s Motherhood has come at a perfect time)

rumlolarum.com is my baby; so much so that even after it became a website 2 years ago, I still won’t call it a website. I built my life here. Anniversaries are the only great thing about time. How else would we acknowledge who we were (are), keep them at eye range, and nod at them occasionally? (Didion)

Happy 400th to me.

In other good news, my Silk Smitha piece was translated to Kannada and you can read it here.

To Adult means what?

Featured Image credits: TeePublic

No one told me that a big part of being an adult is paperwork. I spent all of last week being a good adult. And must now die in the nostalgia of sweet childhood where being adult was a lot more fun.

I am still hungry for the romance that I assume will only arrive after running away from home. The romance of living alone with a cat which will come and go like in Eunice D Souza‘s poems. Of dealing with plumbing issues on my own. Of having the occasional dinner party where friends bring expensive wine, and after they have gone, of staying up late to wash vessels and finally, of gazing out into the window like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the enemy.

I have friends who live on their own and as I write this, I can hear their bouncing laughs. It is nothing like this. And I believe them when they say it. Even so, this has been my ultimate love story – to live alone except for those long weekends where lovers drop in and go, but cats always come back.

I digress.

The second thing I am beginning to understand about adulthood is that it’s mostly about being blind to it. A lot of growing up has happened over this year and I haven’t had the time to slow down, to see it, to either congratulate myself or curse it. Early last week, on Ambedkar Jayanthi, I wrote something that I had been trying to write for 2 years now. That post had been sitting in various angry drafts in various folders. It is a story I may have told very often, but for the first time, it didn’t feel like it was pointless. This time I had something to say.

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Until a certain point, my life was overcrowded with people whose victories were quite strangely and rather strongly determined by how pointless they could make me feel about my writing. I have kicked them all out of my life and that is the third thing about adulthood – the gift of being able to say fuck off.

First Post carried my piece. They have some really cool design so it reads differently and better than it does on my blog. You can read it here.

I am grateful to Snegaa, who is famous for making Brahmin bedbugs weep. Snegaa who has always been there – ever since I started this blog. Over the years I have sent her pieces that I’ve enjoyed writing as also those I’ve struggled with. She has always taken time to read them carefully and offer solid advice. As of today, she is my dominatrix agent who sends me one- line reminders about sending writing pitches to publishers.

Namsiess, the love of my life is actually My Brilliant Friend. She is my Elena Ferrante, and my Lila-Lenu.

Very quickly, before this begins to sound like some lame I’d like to thank speech, I want to return to that Saturday evening of December 2012 when I was a newbie in the department. How I shyly took a piece I’d written to show it to AM and how I’d turned around with great speed and ran for my life immediately after.

Over the years, I learnt not to run, I learnt to be less afraid of my writing and what he was going to say about it. Right from calmly telling me for the 100th time, why something wasn’t working in my writing  – to his comments in those balloon like things on Microsoft word that went – ‘Were you fucking sleeping when you wrote this sentence? WAKE UP’  – to ‘Vj, just keep writing like you don’t care’ — It won’t be an exaggeration to say that over six years, he’s the teacher I am still learning from. Not just how to read and write, but also to work, to be a friend, to ignore, and most importantly — to be kind.

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It’s my first time getting paid for something I’ve written. I have been waiting to let that sink in. It still hasn’t. And I hope it never does. Letting that sink in would be to forget the various small pleasures that I can otherwise mindlessly engage in. Like thinking about how all my school and college friends are married, about how I am every day grateful for not having done science/MBA/IIT/marriage/babies, about how I used to fail science and math but still managed to adult well, about how small I’d feel on days they’d return test papers with 9/60 and 3/50 — underlining boldly – the big failure I was to become in life.

I wish someone else was writing this but because nobody is going to narrate my life in third-person Anu Agarwal style, I must do it myself. That is the fourth thing about adulting. That sometimes you have to be the narrator, the writer, the heroine, and the villainess of your own fucking life.

P.S – Today rumlolarum is four-years-old. This baby has helped me grow more than I could have managed on my own. I’m all smiles and love. See? Proof: I don’t have to be married to be a mother.

Today I celebrate rumlolarum and my PCOD- prone uterus. Cheers!

 

Thank you, WordPress!

 

 

*** Featured Image credits: TeePublic

Small joys for Rum Lola Rum

 

Hello,

So this is my website (haw — never thought I’d say this) but you are now at rumlolarum.com. Bought a damn domain to celebrate 300 posts. It’s a Valentine gift to myself.

I believe I have withdrawal symptoms and worry that I will never be able to write again without the soft pinkish comfort of my older Adelle theme. It must be why I struggled for two days looking for a theme before landing on this one. It’s not as good as my old one but it reminds me of home.

This month has been weirdly good. Meta 2018 will officially be over in a day and I’m already looking forward to the next edition. I am not half as tired as I usually am during Feb but maybe that’s a lesson. If all Metas are like each other, how will I remember the years?

There are more reasons for why this month has been weirdly good. Ever since I interviewed writers Praveen Kumar and Manjunayak, I have been itching to write. Praveen Kumar put my laziness, self-pity, insecurity and everything else to shame when I asked him how he sustains writing. He simply said – Bitkodbaardu. Don’t surrender.

M said that’s how people ride in Bangalore Traffic and I laughed like 600 flower pots breaking on terracotta tiles.

Something changed after that interview. I have been able to wake up at 5:30 since then, to write. And I am surprised by how much I like it. I look forward to it with a delicious anxiety every night before going to sleep —  like I’m getting dressed to meet a new love.

 

 

 

 

Inside

Outside

I don’t always write though. I go out – watch the sky go from dark blue to light blue to vanilla white. I sneak into the kitchen to make Elaichi chai and then sneak out to crush said Elaichi pods softly because house is still asleep. The Brahmin house next door is up obviously. Their steps and garden already smelling like rain.

Discovering mornings has been the best thing to have happened to me. As David Bowie says it here –

Posting an excerpt here from that gorg interview:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Reading.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Discovering morning.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Talent.

What is your greatest regret?
That I never wore bellbottoms.

What is your current state of mind?
Pregnant.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Living in fear.

Current mood – A little happy and very yawn.

Current music – Juno

It’s all I am leaving you with today. And, this. Read, smile, love, sleep. Repeat. G’night.

 

For the 300th Blog Post

What can I say today that hasn’t already been said –

Except that I am happy 3 times,

happy happy

—-

I could say I am glad that I didn’t stop writing

Not when people laughed and cried-

Not even when they played drinking games, and made bon-fiery jokes about caste and capacity

—-

I could say that I am learning to understand the sound of words,

as they fall on my dead ears.

That I hadn’t known for a long time

that words are capable of music,

and of delicious terror.

—-

I could say that I am beginning to enjoy waking up

at 5:30 on some mornings –

When my body isn’t up yet

and my eyes are still sleeping.

But I have taught myself to be tolerant of the happiness of birds

that early in the morning.

Even though it is rude to be that happy —

that early in the morning.

—-

I could say that the first word is always a stranger,

and the last always a politician

But I’m happy 3 times.

happy happy.

That sometimes,

even if I’m Struggling Annoyed Jealous Insecure Sleepy Grumpy

I’m still Writing.

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Featured Image Credits – KVR IN BLOG.