Update: Moving my books' specific blogposts to Divya's reading room

Taken from Preethi's blog; since I have been raving about the new found well-knit public (free) library close to home, I thought i will join in too.(Secretly, I wanted an excuse to re-read 'God of small things' for the umpteenth time :) ) Also, keep this space alive.

Moments by the Sea

It is change of seasons in Boston; all that rain and spring giving way to a green summer. The soaring temperatures, warnings of a heat wave and tropical country like humidity have been a welcome respite and a reminder of the Indian summer that I so miss! And like all Bostonians, we had decided to not let such good weather go past us and have plans to gather enough sunshine to last the winter!

The weekend past we had made a trip to the Ogunquit beach in Maine. Even with the warm sands and crispy winds, the waters were still icy cold and the waves splashed in foamy contentment. The coastal lagoon of Perkins cove was an ever scenic walk with the ocean crashing against the rocks.

I had in childlike spirit, trekked the subtly steep mossy rocks leading to the deep splattering sea. The rock divide, caused waters to gush through them creating a rivulet of waves and gurgling noises. In the silence of the noisy waves, the tinge of a saline humid fog and the sea salt in every breath, we had parked ourselves on the rocks to capture the view that lay ahead of us. And I believe I could arrest that picture perfect sunny misty sea, as beautiful as it was, only because we had forgotten to carry the camera and if anything could hold that moment it was just the memory.

Beaches have always been an unwavering infatuation and considering that one can’t travel to the sea here like I would all year round to Besi beach in Chennai, beaches to me, have become that sought after feel of freedom. There is always an inexplicable romance about watching the unending horizons and feeling the brackish whiff the breeze brings to your face. And having grown up waddling in the shankumukam beach of Trivandrum, I would still associate the beach with a west coast Arabian Sea and the crimson sunset;

My best moments with appa, preserved in remembrance, were begging to stay for the last dab from another wave, until the orange sun had hidden itself and painted the sky pink; I would then return, holding the conical paper pack of sand-fried peanuts, sticky salty legs and sand grabbing to them, much to the annoyance of amma’s sense of hygiene.

But then, as I watched the dusk set in on the Ogunquit beach, a grayish blue sky with streaks of red here and there, the east coast had failed to recreate the magic of a sunset, of that scintillating red fire like waters and burning skies. Yet, to me, the sea is that pinnacle of free will; of leaving your ties behind on the land, of knowing that there is life beyond the little space you have created for yourself in the world, of letting go your inhibitions and running free.

Ah! The beautiful sea!

ScrabBlues

My life for the past few weeks was a restless wait from one weekend to next; hoping to get some sought after sunshine and enjoy the gelid weather through warm layers of sweaters, walking down the crowded streets with aromatic hot coffee. Ousting the prophecies of global warming and the like, this time around, the characteristic New England winter is here to stay in all its passion and variegation.

It has always amazed me, how nature controls ones life style in this part of the globe; how one acclimatizes to avoid excessive slumber, regulate the diet cycle, keep up gym resolutions, indulge oneself to avoid the pangs of depression the gloomy season can leave on you. It was on one such mission that poker had become customary on cold weekends last winter. This year with the core circle of poker friends strewn around the country, how the winter would unwind is a question mark.

As much as I love the chill and the intermittent snow it brings, finding the lack of daylight at 3 pm can be most difficult part of adapting. To top it is the perfect slowdown of life’s pace that, even the fifty minute drive to the remote theatre playing Om Shanti Om can be accounted as fruitful activity on a winter weekend.

It brings to my mind the science text book of third std., when I had memorized on a sultry warm November of Trivandrum, what people do in winter – wear warm clothes, drink hot soups, sit around a fire after early sunset and play indoor games. As if going by the book, we have been cashing on new adult games of taboo, scrabble and clue for that imperative wintry caffeine fix.

After the reviving of scrabble many years hence, I have also managed to remain hooked to its better alternative; scrabulous on facebook. Here the urge to cheat on cooked up words is carefully denied. And somehow learning a new word seems exciting again and even better when you are winning the game against your worst opponent when you were eight. Though a passing winter amusement, I am sure group games are in, for a while to come.

It is wonderful and intimidating all at the same time, how life is once again coming back in a circle; when games made friends at eight, you move on to teens shunning snakes and ladders as child’s play and as the mellowed tweens (as Div coined it) set in, games keep the friend circle chirpier than three hours of gossip over coffee or a sneaked out night at the club.

Such is the unfinished game of scrabble, when the vowels are too many on your plate, the words are there but not lucrative, you pass the turn, you make the inconspicuous word “on”; but stay yare to find the next best meaning, look up a dictionary; and in the end move on. A move to kick back on the winter blues, a move to keep the group engaged, a move to the next little step of life… all in a cold laid back evening hour.

Tagged again by gayatri….

Here are the rules:
1. Players start with 5 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 5 random facts.
3. Players should tag 5 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

1. I can laze, sleep and watch meaningless television for the entire day and stay un-bathed until night. It’s my most sought for wont during summer holidays. Have not done that in ages though!

2. I love washing dishes. Yes, not when I have a time constraint or when I have a pending deadline; but when at leisure I love to get those greasy vessels all shining. Makes me happy watching them all bright.

3. I can study continuously for straight 20 hours without food, water, break or getting up from the chair. Done that; scored awesome in the exam as well!

4. I am a big fan of olives. And when served with apple martinis; I simply devour them. So I could be sipping a zillion martinis, just for the sake of the olives.

5. I am a very impatient reader. The best record has been reading the book ‘Rebecca’. I had found the first 3 chapters extremely slow and ended up starting the book all over again, almost 5 times and took a whole year to complete it! I simply loved the book!!

I tag –

Div, Mithra, Satish, AC, DMK

Tagged!
1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it:
Right eyebrow. Bad hit on the door, while playing lock and key in school corridor during small interval, in 5th std.

2. What is on the walls in your room?
Post-it notes of ever pending errands.

3. What does your phone look like.
Motorola ROKR. White. Miss my huge Nokia first model Fone back home!

4. What music do you listen to?
Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, English Soft rock, selected Telugu.

5. What is your current desktop picture?
Random, fishes in deep blue sea.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
A long walk with appa on the terrace.

7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
I have nothing against it!

8. What time were you born?
6:00 AM

9. Are your parents still together?
Yep! Pretty much!

10. What are you listening to?
“Wake me up inside” – Evanescence

12. The last person to make you cry?
None.

13. What is your favourite perfume/cologne?
Escape by CK.

14. What kind of hair/eye colour do you like on the opposite sex?
Black/Black

15. Do you like pain killers? Hmm dig them when the head kills.

16. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
Nope!

17. Fave pizza topping?
Black Olives

18. If you could eat anything right now, what would itbe? Amma’s 7 cup sweet.

19. Who was the last person you made mad?
Someone very dear.

20. Is anyone in love with you? :)

Continuing -- I tag Mithra, size, div, Preethi, Hiten

The modest hypocrisy

I half-distractedly turned the pages of the book I have been reading to sleep for the past one month. I lifted my eyes to see the little ganesha idol, amma had sent me, sitting corpulently on the window porch. Belonging to a class of non-religious, yet non-atheist genre, I simply adore the paunchy god, who seemed to smile at me at that moment. Beside him were the pile of ten rupee notes and one rupee coins, I had bribed him to initiate a gambit of selfish requirements a long while ago.

It reminded me of the reverend Ganesha in my drawing room back home, who I would pray and recite prayers to, only on the tonic exam mornings. The kabir das dohe comes to mind –“dukh mein sumiran, aur sukh mein kuch bhi nahin.” It left the inkling of a god-fearing mind and I soon plunged back into the book, shunning the semi-guilty feeling.

It made me wonder if a little hypocrisy is more imperative than acceptable in life. It may range from how far we express our innate religious instincts to habits we possess or clothes we wear or how far we hold our tongue.

One of my oldest experiences of setting double standards was facing orthodox relatives. At the age of ten, I would obediently listen to amma and aspire to know if pottu should be always worn in front of Uma periammai or I must unquestioningly fall at Murli mama’s feet. Having told how to behave, because of the gender I belong to, rather than for my whims as an individual, I didn’t possess the liberty to defy traditions or unexplainable practices like most of my counterparts of the opposite sex in the family could; including appa. He would never be asked why the ‘punol’ always slept on nails behind doors, but adorned his chest only when elders accompanied us to temple.

When the phase of helpless rebel had weaned off, I had mastered the art of harmless two-facedness. If a pretentious humbleness could mean peace later, it must very well be done. One such instance was the jubilant 25/25 in the unit test in mathematics stuck to the fridge, making a proud daughter to amma; little did I know that Ramu mama’s arrival was to burst my bubble “Girls are very bad in doing maths. How come you seem to have scored well?” No sooner had the uncalled for been uttered, amma pinched me to keep more words to myself. I had the plastered indignant smile accompanied with the words much unlike me –“Well the paper was very easy.” Looking back, picking a feud then, might have spelt ruin of family ties for years to come.

I am further confounded by the cloak of needed duplicity as to how far can one go with it? It is often that you are expected to wear this cloak not just with people who hardly matter outside closest family circle, but sometimes with family or to be family as well. A classic example would be that of “meet the parents” when every pretence carries with it the jeopardy of working against you in future. And ironically, necessary pretence is more than welcome to make that first impression.

Another instance of well delivered profess, is the constant anxiety to be a daughter/mother/wife every economically and emotionally independent woman in this world undergoes. The world around her refuses to comprehend her as a woman but as everything aforementioned. I am sure, I will not be believed if I were to state that she clandestinely feels like a woman above everything else, which she carefully envelops with what her nearest world expects of her. It only varies to what extent she can be unassuming to express it.

It bewilders me to put myself in a state to walk this line between ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘modest hypocrisy’. When does one turn into the other, takes a composed yet mature mindset to decipher. As, I still linger in the aura of life as ‘me’ ahead and not as being an expected ‘she’; I say the line is a cake walk. But when the mind is puzzled to transition from ‘me’ to ‘she’ I am but apprehensive of what waits ahead.

An evening at the Charles

It was a perfectly facetious evening I spent yesterday with my friends over a cup of tea. As I cautiously dipped the parle-G in the piping hot tea, tacitly removed the biscuit before it softens enough to sink, and let it smoothly crumble in my mouth; I couldn’t help but smile at the feeling of neutrality and peace the cold evening, blue skies, the shimmering yellow sun through the window, the lazy couch, the munch-able potato chips and the company of friends provided!

As a torpid hour or two of levity passed, we decided to take a stroll to the scenic Charles River. Thanks to the birth of spring, the sun continued to shine late upto 7 pm, prolonging the evening with ease. The promenade extended over the street laden with shops and restaurants that told anecdotes of my stay in Boston in the summer of 2006. It brought a freezing smile on my face, owing to the biting wind that had engulfed the city after the latest snow storm. We trudged our way through the icy footpath, enjoying the chillness a pile of white snow emanates, which to my experience offers softness, much unlike a cruelly cutting breeze.

I had never experienced Charles and the pathway for joggers next to the river, this white and beautiful before! My memories race back ten months ago, when my attempts to jog were accompanied by the greenery and gambit of joggers flooding the tracks. The ducks that waded smoothly on the little streams of the river that I loved watching from the bridges connecting pathways were now missing due to the frozen waters. The yellow sun was now scintillating the semi-frozen river with an orange-ish tint that reflected to envelope the sky crapes lining the river bed with atmost elegance. I stepped on to the wooden dock, now smothered with snow, fondly remembering the summery warm weather when I spent many hours waddling my feet in the waters below, seated on the wooden dock. I breathed in the nothingness, the crystal clear purity of the waters below, the line of dazzling tall buildings erected on the other side, the crimson sky succumbing to the fierce sun and the soothing chillness … I wondered only if life was just as perfect as an evening like this one!!

Bed-time

Its 11:30 on a cold Thursday night. I lay lazily wading through the pages of “Life of Pi”, the book I borrowed from Satish last evening. I dig the Haagen Dazs pineapple-coconut flavor, well aware of it nullifying my efforts to crunch in the mornings. Yet I gourmand the ice cream as I read on, pulling the blanket, cozily sinking into the couch, slowly tilting my head till its comfortable enough doze off. I slur over the voice inside my head coaxing me to “brush your teeth” before bed. I read on savoring and imagining the story through my remnants of Pondicherry. I faintly smile and go over the funny incident in my office cube, my thoughts candidly drifting away from the book. I am suddenly aware of my surroundings, the curry which needs to be in the fridge, the dry plates that have to be dropped into the sink, the very ambitious dosa dough that needs to be battered from wrong soaked proportions of my folly and ignorance – 1 cup rice and 3 cups of urud dal. I tell myself “tomorrow…. May be”. I slothfully crumble deeper into the couch and flip the pages, placing the light and empty ice cream cup on the table. I am no longer reading, but waddling over the lines, dissolving the milky tang tarrying my tongue, letting pangs of sleep crawl over me smoothly, steadily until it expedites as the declarative yawn. I cede to the angelic, leaden and natural hypnosis of slumber… until the next sunshine….