Of that liminal country: postpartum months
Post-partum musings, flower poetry, and beachside walks
Dear readers,
Hope this finds you well.
I have been rewriting the opening sentence of this newsletter for a while now, both physically and in my head. I have come here many a time and then left, wondering what exactly is the shape of this newsletter and how do I intend it to be. It is presently a lump of stone, an empty canvas, the bleached white desert of a blank page and yet, no matter how hard I try to evoke a sculpture or painting or words from it, I just cannot do it. Perhaps, that is the nature of my life right now. My baby girl has just turned fourteen months and this one year plus major milestone has led to so many reflections and musings. What has it meant to be a mother? What has it meant to be an entirely new person since the day I found out that she had arrived inside my body? The last few years have been so tumultuous in so many ways that I am finding it hard to locate the pause and reset button. As someone who finds it difficult, if not actually impossible, to relax, taking stock has never come easily or naturally to me. And yet, I am gently compelling myself to do so in whatever ways I can do so: a solo walk in streets smelling of hours-old rain, peering into intimate gardens and slumbering windows, reading words about a bygone haveli to the sound of falling rain, or standing below a tree in monsoon robes, revelling in the starlight of falling green. In the few occasions I have commuted to one place or the other, I find my mind holding onto these moments of solitude, where I am briefly liberated from the laundry list of expectations and responsibilities, to muse and meander through the maze of my thoughts. It is in these meanderings that ideas and words gradually come to me, asking to be brought to life on paper.
This picture I took while taking an evening walk in my apartment compound a couple of months ago captures so much of what I am feeling these days, that grayland space between dusk and night, both the trees and flowers preparing for the night. I am a resident of this liminal country, right now, pondering upon all the past lives that I have inhabited and the new ones that potentially await in the wings. Postpartum months are not as much lonely as struggling to comprehend and process the changes that have occurred within and beyond you and - attempting to describe it when someone asks, how are you? How do you resist the urge to encompass all the journeys you have undertaken and continue to do so? Can you ever do so? Each mother crafts and speaks her own language of motherhood and it is impossible to translate it into words as we know and are familiar with. Perhaps, it is through what I create that I can even begin to convey what it has meant to be a mother.
In some shape or form, flowers drift into my life to infuse it with joy and wonder, especially welcome during times when you’re struggling to make sense of it all. Jacaranda season is over but back in April, when our local park was filled with mauve carpets, I spotted an abandoned bird figurine and made a shrine out of it by offering it freshly fallen flowers. I have seen images and idols of deities frequently placed at the foot of trees in parks, streets, and temples but this object appeared to have been displaced from a living room, where it perhaps graced a coffee table or a wall nook. Is that what it takes then, an offering of flowers to consecrate it as an object to be admired and even revered again?
On my occasional out and about in the city, I spotted bougainvillea adorning the vehicles. Years ago, I recall seeing a sprig of bougainvillea I saw adorning an autorickshaw driver while stuck in an inevitable Bangalore traffic jam three years ago and it got me thinking about all the flowers I have encountered in the many autorickshaws I have sat in Bangalore over the years. This poem, ‘The Autorickshaw Drivers of Bangalore Are Flower Keepers’ has been out looking for a home for a while now and so glad it found one in the lovely Indian literary journal, Pena’s second issue.
It’s been a hectic, frenetic few months and I can’t believe that 2024 is almost halfway through. For the past few years, around this time of the year, husband and I always debate as to where should we holiday: to the mountains or the beach? I am always advocating for the former although I don’t know why I have such a yen for the mountains, I have hardly visited them and yet there is something about the crisp cool air, the elevation, the mysterious mountains and the flora that calls me out. Perhaps, it was all the Ruskin Bond I grew up reading! However, like most years, my abiding love for the sea ultimately always wins and this year was no exception. It was our first time properly holidaying with my now very active, curious, restless toddler and she was happy to explore the textures of the sand, try to decode the shifting, heaving mass that was the sea, and especially delighted in baby coconuts that she found during her explorations and sand-playing.
And as for me, having anticipated what would be a rainy, moody, melancholy monsoon beach holiday, the appearance of the sun and blue sky utterly surprised and delighted me one morning. Back in the day, when I lived in Oman and there was a beach hardly more than twenty minute drive away, I would take long beachside walks, delighting particularly if the beaches were desolate and empty of people. All the problems and conundrums in your head seemed instantly soluble when faced with the sea; the waves’ lulling sound would erase the relentless soundtrack in your mind and all you could breathe in that moment was the salt-charged air. No matter how despondent or dull I was feeling, I would invariably return from the sea, replenished again. I no longer have the luxury of visiting the beach whenever I wish now so I made the most of our few days in Goa, practically living at the beach. There is just something about being by the sea that makes me a little bit whole again. I am grateful for all those soul-nourishing beach walks I took, enough to sustain me till my next beach visit.
I shall end here with this wonderful painting I discovered on Twitter the other day; I must admit that it was the incredibly captured shadows on the wall that initially got my attention. And yet, the more I peered closer, I saw the girl upon the swing, delighting in the moment and play, her friend perhaps awaiting her turn. Incidentally, the red ribbons in their hair remind me so much of the hairstyle my mum used to wear when attending school as a little girl:)
Hope the coming months bring more sense of play into my life.
Until next time,
Much love,
Priyanka
End notes:
What I wrote:
I wrote this poem inspired by a school classmate’s story about the time she and her family fled Kuwait during the Iraq-Kuwait war; the story remained with me all these years and manifested in the form of this poem published in Thimble Lit journal.
I wrote my thoughts about this exhibition of colonial postcards from undivided India at Bangalore’s Museum of Art and Photography for Open magazine.
Ever since I saw the Siddhi women’s incredible quilts at an exhibition in Bangalore a few years ago, I was looking forward to writing about their artistry and speaking with the woman, art-practitioner, Anitha Reddy who’s facilitating the quilts’ journey out into the wider world. I was so glad to do so for Elle India’s ‘Sustainability’ Issue and pleased that it came out in print as well:)
What I curated:
I am now heading the Visual Narratives section of Usawa Literary Review so it was quite a learning curve to curate the section for the first time for the latest issue whose theme was appetite. Do have a look here
What I read:
Books
My friend, Natasha’s evocative, thoughtfully nuanced review of Sara Rai’s memoir, Raw Umber inspired me to pick up the book and break through my stubbornly prolonged reading slump. I had never heard of the author before but the moment I began reading her words, I became familiar with her as if she were writing letters to old, dear friends ie us the readers. Given that I am becoming strongly interested in place and place-making, my own writing increasingly delving into it, I was mesmerised by how palpably, vividly, and intimately she conjures up the spaces she grew up or visited in, for example, her childhood homes or her maternal family’s haveli in Benares. The portraits she creates of her family members are as incisive and revealing as photographic or painted ones making us feel as if we too know them. The latter reminds me of another Sara, as in the acclaimed late Pakistani-American academic, Sara Suleri’s incandescent memoir, Meatless Days, which I re-read a few months ago. Having first encountered it during my graduate days, I had been unable to read more than a few pages but with a couple of decades under my belt, I found myself resonating with and losing myself in the words this time. I guess some books are meant to find you only when you are ready for them.
Links:
As a spouse of a liver transplant surgeon for over a decade, I have become familiar with the many steps of the complicated, complex journey that is liver transplantation for a while now. However, this incredible, visceral essay about an anestheologist preparing a body for organ retrieval in a time when AI can potentially perform the job one day really stayed with me for long.
What an amazing story about the lost language of Arab-Tamils!
I couldn’t stop re-reading Sanjana Thakur’s incredible short story, ‘Aishwarya Rai’, which is the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story 2024 prize.
What I watched:
I normally am wary of movies which are super hyped (in fact, I always end up watching them months later so that I would have forgotten the glowing reviews/hype about them) but Kiran Rao’s Lapaata Ladies deserved every bit of the praise and accolades.