Imagine an elephant with one of these

Waiting

Illustration - Quentin Blake, one of my favourites

It turned 10.30, and people started drifting in. A few solitary lights lit up the windows, but no one moved inside. Someone came out, one more hour, she said. We sat on his brother’s scooter, playing a guitar and singing because that is what all of us do when we are together. People called, phones rang, a light went off, a gate opened.

We spattered forward, moved back. False alarms, bathroom breaks, the principal went in. We watched for the slightest sign that our vigil could end, gaping at the shadowy oompa loompa figures behind the windows. One more hour.

You were sitting in her room, waiting. Bated breath; acid reflux; too much F&H coffee; too much more riding on this than you would have liked.

12 am and it should have been done by now. Now the windows were opening so they could gape at our vicarious nervousness. Someone inside walked over and drank a glass of water. Some people left. Soon, very soon.

A door screeched inside. Fifteen more minutes passed and we clothed them in conjecture. The board descended and we rose to intercept it.


You made it.


But, of course.

New and Improved

So, my attention span's been getting shorter and without my morning cup of coffee I've been keeling over sideways in my morning lectures. I'm not even sure what that's a symptom of, but I choose to believe it's a sign from the universe that it's time to overhaul this blog. Watch this space, peopleses.

Art Stash

So, I have a friend who's studying to be a graphic designer, and I thought some of her stuff was really cool. The link's below:
http://upasnapandey.blogspot.com/

I think my favourite is the 3M glove advert.

Orbit

How much can you miss a place where, to begin with, you never spent much time? But suddenly, you find yourself standing in a mall holding a bar of soap to your nose, and the bottom drops out of the depths of your desolation.

Sights and sounds keep well; they hang in state in the pillared galleries of memory, etched in stone or as delicate watercolours that fade at the touch of a breath. Voices and noise and music play through concealed speakers and set the score for our lives, the tempo that we move by. They are retrievable, they are concrete in memory; they are rarely lost, only sometimes misplaced.

Smells and touch are elusive, but I am made afraid by the intensity of emotion they induce. Some are innocuous whistles warning the approach of a new train of thought. I sit in a college bus that runs from the hospital to campus, and the route is mapped in olfactory imprints. A coffee-steam X marks the spot where we start, driven away by the insistent shove of yesterday's fish as we drive by the fort. Wait for the clatter of bloody silver to die away, and it is replaced by the hawker-cry smell of beef pakodas at Lakshmi theatre. Or we may drive by the bakery on a Friday and the smell of freshly-baked bread will follow us down the street. We turn the corner near the jail, a little way away from college, and a dark green smell accompanies the degree's drop in temperature.

You can spend a night enveloped in it, and in the morning it will linger on your skin, on your clothes. But skin is renewed and clothes must be laundered and all you are left with is the remembrance of its existence. You feed for a year off a week's memories, tease them apart and hope you missed something, pray they will survive until they can renew themselves. Leave them to settle into the crimson morass that raises itself up and changes shape, muddy your feet over and over again as you wade in to recover them. And you can think that you have let them rest, sung them to sleep with the fishes. And then you let yourself be split open by the rasp of hair against your cheek, and alien smells like lilacs will run down a street framed in archways and call to you.

Turn away to go back to the smells of your life: the jasmine chains and hair oil, the sandalwood talc and beef pakodas by the road, the distant cologne and the shower gel, the antiseptic smell of hand-sanitiser and the cow-dung cakes of fuel. But the nighttime musk of remembrance has made you nauseous with longing, and the split between the worlds is all at once true and insignificant.

There is no world to return to, only an immediate environment and the larger truth of my reality. Dichotomies merge to lead me here, standing with a bar of soap in my empty hands.

Less-than-Perfect Timing

Mr S (the friendly fieldworker) and I visited a balwadi in a muslim colony in Vellore yesterday to find that two of the children hadn't come to school: they had just been circumcised.

Wash Your Hands Before They Eat

Another Sunday, which means another trip to one of the local grocery store-cum-bakeries. Our project involves making 17 kilos of an energy-dense nutritional supplement each week - arguably too much for a domesticated little food processor to handle; the bakery has a heavy-duty cake batter mixer, accurate weighing equipment and people to help out, so production has been conveniently outsourced. With the advent of the project, my lazy Sundays have been transformed by grinding 5 kilos of roasted peanuts, hauling them over to the bakery and supervising the making of the supplement.

The production unit is above the main shop and connected by a curved set of stairs behind the cash counter. It's dingy, the air heavy with heat and filled with the metronome clack of the bread slicer, or the whoosh of hot air from the oven. The floor is overlayed with butter, flour, sugar and grime and the doughy mess sticks to your feet when you walk barefoot, having taken your shoes off at the entrance.

I think they've gotten used to my weekly visits since they don't excite as much apparent comment as on my first trip here, and the fact that I can make myself useful by lifting and carrying seems to make it less awkward. Language is still a bit of a problem but my Tamil's improving and they practice their Hindi and English on me; the pale-woman-on-the-production-floor gets talked about but less. Still, it's funny how you can feel so alien in another part of your own country.

What am I learning? 1. Getting your hands (or feet) dirty is a good thing when the people doing your work for you are. Skin washes. 2. When you know what you need you can find ways to ask for it even if people don't speak your language. 3. It's not always pleasant to know where your food's coming from!