human digestion

 in the mornings i wake up wistful, missing something i don’t have. i don’t know how i know this. maybe it’s because this thought prances around in my head each time i open eyes to the subdued sunlight filtering through the grids of my bedside window. i don’t want curtains and waking up is difficult.

somewhere between the slow but excruciating days of quarantine and the period after that, the week between Christmas and 31st that shouldn’t exist, i realised i’m always going to be sick. homesick, school-sick, sick of, sick with. and in these times, i remind myself of the vistas i left behind at home. it’s weird to call a city my home, especially when you live where i live. my white friends clicked a picture of the dark, smoky sky at the Delhi airport, shocked at the sight of a night sky so bright with pollution. but they’re travellers. i’m a product of this place. i will come up with all i can to justify my love for this suicidal city. 

                                  

a usual morning in the household, mummy cooking gajar ka halwa.  it looks like carrot and mayonnaise, said my cousin, referring to the appearance of the orange bubbling mass. at the back of my mind rests a resentful sigh, triggered by the comparison of the fundamental halwa to something so Big Ed and horrid. that’s what we get for being colonised, i almost thought. but the less uptight half of me laughs, because sometimes to understand complexities like religion or halwa, you remove ghee, you remove translation. and it looks more familiar. like carrot and mayonnaise. like insecurity. 

on the terrace, walking through what was the ruins of an impromptu family feast in the sun. the loungers are strewn astray, the table is the aftermath of the crude golgappa shop that maami had set up not too long ago, and gone is everyone, back to routine; it is a Tuesday after all.  it is now that my brother tells me that if you fold a sheet of paper forty-two times, you can reach the moon. if i was theatrical enough, i would have taken a step (or more) back to demonstrate the impact this simple fact had on me. if my brother was santa claus and inside his bag was every such simple but inestimably poetic fact or reflection, he would be unemployed within the first hour of christmas eve. because he’s terrible at opening up that bag. but either way, that simple fact. reassuring because it connects Commonplace, paper, to Somewhere There, la lune.  another reason to hold on to my physics class.

this is what i wish to do: to take enormities and pull them down to my level, giving in to the urge to grab that one giant of a boy in class by the collar and jerk him down, to dissolve these meals of wisdom to regular pumps of fresh passion to the heart, to understand the world around me. it’s a waste of time, i concede, to try to understand the world that’s probably not even real, to find it inside myself to love and work when nothing is real. but these thoughts i have, these little ideas that prickle my skin, these might just be real. hair is grass, eyes are puddles that ever so often (and maybe a little too often for me) metamorphose into waterfalls, fingers are hills, and now i’m running out of metaphors. but it’s striking to me how humans persist on believing that the universe is heliocentric not geocentric. we’re not that selfish after all, right? we need something distant to believe in, to pat our backs and aim for something that is enigmatic to us. 

now i am here, another hilltop, another compilation of moments that are temporarily mine. more songs, more memories, tears, blackouts, and lies. the other night i didn’t climb the arts centre roof. the ladder wasn’t rickety, it was a solid and cool metal, very real and strong. but so was the night and the disdain in my stomach. something intrinsic, instinctive drove me away, and somehow, i remembered the exact path back to my room.

the last day of [redacted] came and went, i watched as about forty miserable teenagers tried to dance, composed mostly of jumping. i can understand their need to jump, to somehow remind the ground underneath that we’re still here and a pandemic is not allowed to stop us from celebrating the end of this significant day, this one long day that hasn’t ended since march. 

and so it did end. for me it did. i feel like something has passed. maybe not the pandemic, but some other big beige cloud that camouflaged well with the dull skies of lockdown. but i still don’t know what i miss. not that knowing it would make it better. unless it’s the smell of camellia, or eggs for breakfast (or just breakfast), or the chorus of Pluto Projector, as long as it’s not one of these things that i miss, i can’t help myself. but the warmth of this evening is pretty, this piece has aged a whole day, snug in my laptop, ready to leave, and i’m full with the chilly water i filled after my afternoon nap. and i build these habits and encounters upon each other so that one day i will have made something complex like gajar ka halwa, so that people will need more than 42 paper stairs to reach the finale, the moon of my creation.