The sameness of the days, the comfort of it all

Re-set for 2024: of sitting with moments and the art of remembering

They rebirth me

Dear readers,

It’s been almost two months that 2024 arrived in our midst and I am only just about settling into it, as one does into a new house or a city, becoming familiar with its contours and shapes and smells and sounds. Now that it it is a little bit in the past, on reflection, 2023 was a very strange year for me; apart from the joyous, life-altering arrival of my daughter, who I have taken to grandly and sentimentally calling my raison d’aughter, I felt very uncomfortable, continuously tested, and questioning so much I had taken for granted or understood in my life. Motherhood and all its attendant changes of course have played a huge role in shaping how I see the world nowadays but it also led me to a cusp of change, the gentle reminder that just when you a tad smugly believe you have mostly figured out things, life is there around the corner, gently lobbing curveballs at you to say: there is so much to learn, there will always be so much to learn.

It will soon be four years since I started this newsletter on a whim one late February morning, sitting in the living room of the apartment I lived then, looking at the raintree outside shedding leaves, the tiny ombre golden-green leaves fluttering in the air, like illuminated dust motes. I arrived here because I wanted a refuge from the insistent instant-ness, busyness, hustle of social media back then, a garden I could retreat into from the chaotic cacophony of everyone expressing their opinions about everything and anything. Four years later, when so much has happened within and beyond me, the cacophony has become even more shrill and insistent and there’s so much about the world right now that makes me sad, furious, and powerless. I rarely bring politics over here but it is hard not to when there is a global-enabled genocide in Gaza happening in real-time for months now and witnessing the systemic, relentless erasure of lives (more than 13,000 children alone, a goose-bump, chilling figure), souls, generations, dreams, hopes, all that breathes humanity into life has been dispiriting and soul-crushing beyond belief. A prayer and hope sound trite in face of things but I truly hope that humanity will ultimately win and that peace (or closest to it that one can hope for in this jagged, broken world of ours) will arrive.

Garden haiku from my mum's garden

In light of such collective and individual cognitive dissonance, it seems a little disingenuous to ask: what does peace look like, anyway? I have taken to locating it in tight, little pockets of moments. I was visiting family in Dubai all of last month, for instance and I found it in my mother’s garden. January is a lovely time in the Gulf, when the furnace heat of the summer is a distant, impossible memory. I would look forward to waking up and emerging in the sweetly scented mornings, watching the sunlight fall upon the bougainvillea, oleander, blue pea, marigolds (who looked like extravagant suns themselves), and yellow flowers whose name I keep on saying I will look up but have yet to do so. One early morning, I stood in the balcony, watching a jade-sheened hummingbird briefly linger in the air, undecided whether to go forwards or backwards and I thought to myself, same, bird, same.

I would walk through the bougainvillea-lined walking paths of my parents’ neighbourhood, as I had done on previous visits except my daughter was accompanying me this time in her pram. I gazed at the shadows the bougainvillea stencilled upon the earth and the chalk-white walls, into the hypnotic blueness of the sky, and creepers climbing across the walls, from the inside into the outside, their violet flowers carpeting the ground below. These walks were vital for me, both for accruing precious memories with the baby (for both neither she nor I would ever be the same ever again) along with incorporating it into our routine. For the past few months, I have been sharing (read: rambling!) with whoever I meet about the baby’s routine, how we have ensured that she sleeps by a certain time, how it is imperative to have structure and shape to her days so she feels settled and less irritable.

And yet, it is not just her: it is also me who seeks comfort in the sameness of the days. It is in this sameness, the seemingly mundane yet extraordinarily ordinary moments that we live life. Rewinding back to four years ago once more, my husband and I were stranded in the United States for three and half months post covid being declared a pandemic. During those extremely uncertain, difficult days when we had no idea about the severity or long term implications of covid or when or how we would return to India, it was the routine of our lives in Bangalore that I would so desperately yearn for the most along with the physical home in itself. It is the quotidian that keeps us going and even though it may merge into seemingly faceless river of memories over the passage of time, I believe it is that which essentially nourishes and even makes us.

iamjustavisualperson

A post shared by @iamjustavisualperson

I have always found it difficult to inhabit the moment; I need to photograph or write or document it in some way or the other, the way one pins down butterflies and mummify them in glass boxes or press flowers in a diary. I have been thinking more than ever about this ever since my daughter came into the world. Every new month with my daughter brings a multitude of discoveries and encounters: look, she’s standing up, look, she’s side-walking, looklooklook… I take photos, I try to do painting journal entries (like above), I jot down notes in my phone, I even started writing letters to her in hopes of preserving the memories but I haven’t written one for ages because like my assembly-line excuse for so much else, I tell myself that I simply haven’t had the time. But I do have the time and I have to be mindful of how and where I use it. However, sometimes, one has to simply to sit with the moment and enjoy its company, as one does with a friend, as opposed to continually filing away the memories in a camera roll or one’s mind memory card in the hope you will savour them later. The truth is that sometimes it never happens.

Things come full circle

Speaking of memories, earlier this month, I watched a film after a long time, Three of Us, having heard so many good things about it. Revolving around a woman who has been diagnosed with onset of early dementia and then makes a trip to her childhood town to meet her childhood sweetheart, and indeed, her buried childhood self, it made me ponder a lot about memories - the making and remembering of them, how we store them in our minds. A few months ago, I asked here in my Instagram post: what are we but scattered memories? And so if we no longer have those memories, what remains of us, what constitutes us? In the film, there is a pivotal scene which occurs on a Ferris wheel, which others have noted is a perfect symbol for the cyclical nature of time. During Dubai trip, I encountered the same Ferris wheel (as seen in the picture above) after three years except I was facing it from the other side; I had literally come full circle, so much having happened in between - and it reminded me I was grateful for where I was standing right now, exactly where I needed to be.

I shall end here now, dear readers but not before saying that this newsletter has seen various iterations over the years; perhaps, it is fitting that it potentially assumes yet another avatar on its fourth anniversary. I hope to be here more often, as opposed to a monthly missive, sharing moments as and how they arrive, mostly unvarnished and hopefully providing you some semblance of peace as they have for me.

Till next time,

Much love,

Priyanka

End notes:

What I wrote

I was glad to have these two poems published in two different spaces. The first one appeared in the beautifully conceived and designed parking themed zine from Our Parking magazine, which is curated news and literature for the car owner and parking enthusiast. I have never published in a zine before so I was glad to see this poem find a home here.

The second one is a three-year old poem I wrote after visiting Varanasi for my husband’s birthday; every poem has its own trajectory and I was glad that it’s journey winged its way to the first issue of Topograph Journal, a place-based journal. I haven’t written a poem for ages, now, or rather, one that I feel I can send out into the world but I have to remind myself to focus on the process, rather than the goal, right now.

And finally, a special essay about a special subject published in Hammock magazine: the trees of Bangalore and how they helped me make home and lay down roots in the city. It was the first piece of writing I started working on soon after the baby arrived in the world and I will always remember the process of writing, editing, and revising which coincided with these postpartum months. I have been writing slowly but steadily and telling myself that it it is perfectly okay to take time to accommodate the new writing thought-process and style which is emerging during this new chapter of my life. I wonder what it will yield and what journeys it will take me in the time to come.