Early mornings

In Mumbai, the city, waking up really early in the morning holds out so much more to the day, to my day. It’s so much better to catch the city when it has just woken, it’s much warmer, less suspicious, people still have a sense of humour.

It’s funny how different the early morning in an Ahmedabad is in comparison, the people are so at ease with their every day routines, the old women in the street rush to meet at a friend's house to sing a few hymns to their favorite diety, a woman leans on the railing of her balcony, combing her hair, she watches me stand at the door of the house below, taking pictures. The old women finish their singing and hand out some prasaad* to me, flashing a fast smile my way as they head back hurriedly to wherever it is they came from. I’ve often thought of picking one of these old grannies and spending the day following them around their curiously busy days. They remind me of my own grandmother's routine in Quilon in central Kerala, a morning with her would mean she’d go look into the cow broth set on the wood fire in the outer kitchen (a delicious smell of wet earth-dry coal and burnt wood wafted out all at once when you stirred that broth), go get her basket and climb up a few yards up our rubber tree hill to pick some herbs (I could never figure if they were for the hair oil or for the kitchen masala), she’d take a quick look at some of the dry coconut holders collecting gummy latex from the rubber trees, and then, right there, still leaning against a tree with one hand, she'd give this wordless, wide eyed look to the high tree tops waving in the morning breeze for a moment before leaving.
I’d follow her back down as she went to see if the dry hay had been set out for the little calf and get back to the kitchen in time for the fisherwoman’s visit. I’ve always wondered what it was exactly she thought when she looked up at those treetops, sometimes she'd look down into the well in the courtyard with the exact same expression.

For now, I have to settle with early mornings elsewhere, and the secret lives of so many other silently whispering souls.

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Here's me stepping back to get the bigger picture.

*prasaad : blessed sweet meats handed out just after an invocation of a deity, the pooja

Old white cement bag

This is the old man who lives down my street.

He has two posts between two trees on the street, one on the floor mat of the bookshop at the corner, and the other on the pavement in the path of all walking by. He doesn't really interact. When it's raining you can usually catch him at exactly these same spots getting wet, like an old white cement bag.

He only let Anu treat his mange, hold up his tail, and hold his foot out while she bandaged it. The first time I saw Anu, 65, grey-white short hair, she had on a blue dress with white flowers peppered on, she was trying to talk the old man into being still while she checked his leg. I offered to talk to him so she could get on with the inspection, and she smiled. We exchanged numbers, and then the day after Diwali when old man ran away from his prime outposts she called me. He must have gotten scared of the crackers, she said. Sure enough, when I walked by that night, he wasn’t to be seen. 

A friend volunteered to walk with me through the crisscrossed streets in the neighborhood to look out for the old man, he wouldn’t stand a chance looking after himself in another street. He wasn’t even friendly, and young Mumbai dogs are very aggressive about their territories, we knew that. We didn’t find him that night. My friend started calling me to describe white dogs when he was out by himself on the street in the night. I didn’t have a photograph of him to help, I found myself describing his eyelashes over the phone.

I couldn’t bear to see his spots on the street empty when I passed by after. It made me feel terrible about the city. It made me think of firecrackers and how senselessly loud they must have been for him to run away, it made me think about fixing the streets of this city, designing a system where everybody really cared about the occupants and public works around their house or shop. Somebody taking ownership for something! I remembered the pot hole I fell through last monsoon, how I’d thought of getting a product designer friend to design a new way manholes could be covered, get graphic designers to design the top covers of the man holes, like the beautiful ones in Japan, businesses and designers and individuals could have their names or logos or whatever emblazoned on, did we really have no alternative than concrete blocks with three pieces of metal holding it straight over a 5 foot deep manhole?! I didn’t fall in that day, because my foot got wedged in the two metal rods running through the concrete, I broke my fall just 2 feet above the dirty dark water. A taxi driver who saw me go down, had to hold both sides of the broken concrete down to pull me out.

What would my old white man manage to do for himself in such a city.

A week passed before Anu called again, this time at 2 am.

She was smiling, I could hear it in her voice. The medical shop owner called her in the night, the old man was back on the street, and was sitting at his place on the pavement in front of his 24hr med store. He said he saw a woman in a car drop him off at the corner in the night. We never found out who the driver was, Anu and I.  But the old man is living proof of why I can’t stop holding out some more, just a bit more, for the people around in cities, in villages, in the worst alleyways of this country, in the worst of systems, these systems which never fix the manholes on the street. 
We run on chance. And in that case, I will be a provider of such chances. And I've got a lot of training ahead.

The ends of the streets

My father was an officer in the Indian Army, it meant I changed spaces every two years.
I always vomited the first day of school. New people, new faces, I needed to started talking all over again. We grew into quite a nuclear family. As I grew older, it got better.. .I'd look forward to a new place, new corners in the houses (we always shifted at least five houses in each place, each stranger than the last, the British left behind many queer dwellings), I'd plug a walkman in, and spend hours walking around the streets near my house. My taste in streets got sharper as the years went by, I'd go for the one where the kid's ball rolled out of, or the one which looked like it blocked out the street sounds, or the one the knife sharpener went through.
I was walking around the busy streets of the Ahmedabad old city, when I saw one of those familiar paths I'd always looked out for, leading away from the marketplace through a narrow alley between two buildings. I found the beautiful tree and this abandoned primary school, up there, at its end.
I took these pictures for the 14 year old in me who would have been thrilled at having a camera along. She'd have sat on the stairs over there and stared at the tree, she'd have climbed up a floor of the building and reached out for the branches extending into the balcony, she'd have wished the branches were stronger so she might have been able to scale down the trunk right from the balcony, she might have thought of all the kids of the school who might have thought the same.

the houses looked warm. the ant hills sniffed at the walls.

Squares

I used to know a man. Droves of young people followed him around.
If he sat, they'd settle down too. When he got up to leave, they'd leave, a little unsurely, in some direction, a faint tinge of abandonment forming into a lump in the throat.
Everyone was lighter when he sat himself under a tree, it meant he was going to stay for longer.

I saw him too. I'd pass his office and he'd ask me a question as I walked by about a film I was working on, I'd garble for words, and before I knew it, I'd have showed him my sorest spot, pretty much hold it in a sea of glorious light for display. I'd end up limply covering my mouth with a hand, just after..the words grinding to a halt. He'd nod and make it scarier by saying something completely in step with where I was with my film, I'd collapse on a chair closeby quietly, listening,... you see,..taking a film through its cycle is usually such an internal-organ-twisting sort of an intimate process for me, you usually have only yourself to echo ideas off. When you have an audience, it is scary. eerie. Like there's someone wandering around in your head.
These interruptions would get spread out into a conversation which leaned into a tree sometimes. People would trail in. At some point I'd notice the crowd, and wonder how I got to be sitting here, how I'd manage to get away from this collective of people staring at him, or how one did leave, from this comfortable spot under the tree.

I asked him how he did it once.
"I can't speak to all of them." he said after awhile.
"Teaching is like setting yourself standing on a floating square in space. You can take a corner, but the one in front of you, this guy you're trying to talk to, who you can see so clearly, and seems to have so many questions, he needs to stand opposite at the other end to balance the square so it doesn't tip over and we both don't fall. If he takes one step forward, I step forward to balance it out as well. It doesn't work any other way. I tell them about it. They know. Sometimes they don't want to move, they mean to, but know they won't,.. those ones step away themselves."

It hit me today. I understood it then. But it kicked back at me today.
I must go visit that tree we sat under. soon.

came suddenly

The Beatles - BlackbirdYesterday.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Dry, brown grass, a dirty window mucked with dried rain.
Not much to do, but to focus on paul's voice
Before I knew what the words meant
Before I knew it was about yesterday.

Posted via email from AMOR FATI