Small messages of spring ⋮ Cherry stars.
In my new lovely home made of the Himalayan mud and cow dung
I turn on the butter-yellow porch lights:
white flowers of the nearby cherry tree gleam
soft white stars slouching over my front garden.
I turn off the porch lights:
distant stars come to light
millions of them slouching over my cherry tree and its soft flowers.
I need to get the hell out of my bed.
Even the mynas of Vashisht, with their little yellow legs, walk more in a single day than I’ve walked in the last two years. They walk in spite of their magical gift of flight. They walk as if they are villagers walking around in the village, not birds.
What’s my excuse?
The fruit of the night.
Tonight, the fruit of the night swinging in the starry sky is finally ripe but on a higher branch, unreachable as always.
You cannot grab it or bite it, but you can taste it if you stick your tongue out. It tastes of warm milk mixed with fresh snow.
The full moon from Vashisht, Himachal Pradesh, India. March 2022.
Spring is here.
Over the snowy mountains, the white star blazes golden light from a corner of the blue sky. Against the blue sky, a black body in flight. A crow with a soft-yellow morsel in his beak. In such golden light and against the enormous blue sky, there is nothing more luminous than this yellow morsel.
Because it is spring, spring is here.
This Kathiawari bear is out of the blissful hibernation of winter and snow. Brain cells shaking off the fog. New thoughts streaming in with no effort.
Outside and in my crazy brain, spring is everywhere.
The petroleum jelly has gone back to being soft, and my lips too. Gone are the days of snow and it-might-snow, the days of bones stiff under layers of clothes, the days of hibernation — all of which I prefer and love, by the way. Everyone is outside, every little life singing an intensely green song. If someone was still hibernating yesterday, today they are out and busy. Every day is new, every day you bump into someone new.
The sun is out, springing, because spring is here.
A crow and a kite.
Earlier today around noon, I saw two crows soaring over the upper-Manali valley, matching the heights of the mountains. A hot but windy day and they were on a steady glide, once even circling as eagles and kites do.
While I was watching them with my head bent backwards, I was not only admiring them flying so high, two black bodies against the blue sky, but also trying to confirm if they were indeed crows. I was trying to zoom in on them with squinted eyes, waiting desperately for them to do something crow-like. But the pair disappeared behind the houses, leaving me baffled, perhaps for life.
As I’m not very sure that they were crows, as they were so brilliant at pretending to be kites, I’ll call them mini-kites for now — until I see them again, which I hope I do. And when I see them again, I’ll fly with them so they cannot disappear. I’ll pretend to be a crow with two crows who like to pretend to be kites.
Half moon, half river.
The half moon over the western peaks, straight before me from Vashisht. Straight but not exactly — for nothing is exactly straight in the Himalaya that is as crooked as my brain. The half white fruit rests right between my eyes as I look up.
It’s almost midnight.
My gaze shuttles between the moon and the river in the valley, the lovely little Beas that is dazzling in pale white, in the half-baked light of the 50% moon. The two are far from me, but not equally far, but look equally far, so they are equally far from me and I’m equally far from them. The three of us are as far from each other as we should be. The four of us actually, including the mountains. And now I want to talk about one of us, the river. The river that is suddenly white tonight.
As if she is smuggling milk from the nearby villages. As if she is slurping away snow from the mountains with her long, wet tongue. As if she had a savage desire to destroy those who have been destroying her and swallowed half the moon to keep her cool.
Now she is beaming from the half moon in her belly, under the other half in the sky. The dangerous little Beas in a pale white dress, borrowed yet her own. Half moon, half river. Half beast, half beauty.
An argumentative Indian.
Amartya Sen should have had conversations and arguments with me before writing The Argumentative Indian. The book would have been far better.
(By the way, I haven’t read the book.)
A mountain selfie.
A selfie from and into the mountains of Uttarkashi almost exactly a year ago on March 6 2021.
Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, India. March 2021.
This blog is taking over my life.
This blog is taking over my life. I hate it (because it’s taking over my life) and I love it (because it’s making art possible out of life).
It’s been 4 months since November 4 when I started this blog, and already I feel so occupied by it. It is starting to take over. My life, my mind, my dreams, my sleep. Over the last few years, I had made efforts to gradually stop being so serious, walking around always thinking of something— and now this blog is turning me serious, as if I wasn’t still serious enough in spite of my efforts against it. I had made efforts to gradually stop thinking so much— and now I’m thinking more than sleeping, so much so that I’m thinking while dreaming and making notes of my dreams.
It’s quite annoying, to be honest, to live like this. It’s so lame.
When I think of the blog taking control of me, I think of these lines from Morning Bird Songs, one of my most favourite poems, by Tomas Tranströmer:
Like Tranströmer’s poem,
my blog is getting bigger, it’s taking my place,
it’s pressing against me.
It is shoving me out of the nest.
Though, unlike his poem, the blog is not finished yet.
The blog is everywhere. When I look at the ceiling while resting, I see it crawling around—ultramarine blue lines on a white canvas. When I stare at the mountains outside my home, it forces me to think of something beautiful, something new to say about the mountains, even if it’s vulgarly mundane. It is making me go back in time and dig up old wounds and other things I had forgotten. It is sitting on my shoulders like a cat, watching me churn out posts like an attentive potter. Against my will, it wants me to create draft posts even when I have nothing to say.
Now I can’t think of anything without thinking of whether I can blog it. I can’t dream normal dreams.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Artistic pursuits are consuming. It can destroy without destroying. The dilemma of my rebel self and my desire for expression echoes perfectly in the words of Albert Camus:
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
I can’t wait to be done with this blog, I can’t wait until it’s no longer a blog but a book, a blue book in my hands. Until then, I won’t sleep, I won’t live freely. Until then, may it burn and with it I burn too.
Burn but with a fine balance. Balance the two imbalances, the two chief confusions of life, as keenly noted by the great Frank Herbert:
To observe everything that happens:
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.
To let everything happen and not confine myself to observing:
Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them.