Stable Beauty

I am finally back in Chennai after quite a long while. I had not even realised that I had unconsciously missed it quite a bit, the different sights and sounds inside my own house. I think I am also consciously holding myself back from proclaiming it as my “home” because I know that right now, I probably don’t have a material interpretation for “home.” But that is not to say I don’t feel at home in multiple places, just Ashoka, for example. I feel comfortable and at home there, like I belong there (which is sometimes hard to find even within my own family). I live and thrive in the material space, I am very earthly in that way (also, fun star thing, I am apparently a Taurus and this is how they are supposed to behave, apparently).

I think one of the deals about quite a bit of travelling like I did today is that I am left completely exhausted to the bone. But my brain is still running fast inside my skull and I feel completely out of my body in a weird weird way. Today was an extremely fun day and I absolutely enjoyed it. Moreover, I put an effort to look pretty and I think it paid off quite nicely, I did feel pretty. And it felt nice to feel pretty because that is not something I feel very often. Especially not recently, and well, I don’t have anyone else to blame but myself because I let things affect me and make myself feel things. There are times when someone might say something because they don’t necessarily know that it could affect me. It could be a completely normal thing for them to say, something they have said before, but I could blow up for that because I don’t like it or it pricks a part of me that I am not very keen on getting pricked.

But regardless, coming back to the question of feeling pretty and putting an effort. I have always been a very materially rooted person, I define a lot of things in my life based on material and physical terms and ideas. I love photos, for example, and I love the small things that people might do unconsciously for me. It could be a simple thing as getting my phone for me when I leave it somewhere by mistake, moving without even thinking about it to accommodate me in a particular space, a hug, an unexpected text message, and so on. The concept of beauty too, in my head, has been strongly rooted in this material and physical world. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean this in an “I condone the idea of objective standards for beauty or I only accept conventional beauty standards” way. I mean it more in an “I believe that a person’s beauty comes in their physical self” way. This beauty is not objective, it cannot be defined. So, if I find someone beautiful, I find their physical self beautiful and if I know them well enough, this beauty I find on their outside and on the inside converge and become a concrete whole that I cannot differentiate between. This happens with me with almost all my friends, especially those that I grow close to.

So, for me to find myself pretty today meant a lot of things. But the most important thing for me was that I found what was inside of me beautiful too. I was surprisingly happy with myself, I didn’t hate myself (as I tend to do at times). That is a strong feeling, to be able to smile at yourself in the mirror (and no, let’s not get into the whole image/real, other/self question). This didn’t have anything to do with an objective view of my own prettiness today, it had to do with my own response to what I was seeing. I could have looked hideous to anyone else’s eyes, but if I found myself pretty then that was key. Am I even making sense? I am in a terribly sleepy state and I feel like I am not making as much sense as I would like. But then, if we all made perfect sense all the time, then we would be doubly critical of people who make mistakes. And honestly, I don’t think they need to berated more, not when they probably berate themselves for it more than others do. We all make mistakes, forget where we are rooted and lose our footing, but then, at the core of it all, there does exist the stability we crave and maybe one day, I will find it for myself?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Fans, Heat, and Stories

I love fans, I always have, even though they have an annoying capacity to accumulate dust and dirt and could trigger an allergic reaction in me. I am allergic to dust, smoke, and pollen. It makes me sneeze continuously, gives me a runny, stuffy nose, and if it is my good day, that’s all that happens and it settles in a couple of days, by itself, or a day, with medication. But if it turns out to be my bad day, I would have to face the trouble of a blocked nose, wheezing, and at least a week of being sick. My parents say I have a very sensitive trachea and that is the reason I have drastic reactions to these things sometimes. I hate it, but there’s not much I can do about it. My grandmother says that doing Pranayama (a breathing exercise routine which comes under Yoga) can help me a lot, but save a few times when she tried really hard to get me started on it, I never continued with it. Well, I am most definitely at fault for that and she uses all opportunities to point that out to me. But in my defence, it is hard work and I don’t always run on amazing levels of motivation.

In India, as far as I have seen, almost every house has a ceiling fan at least. The heat makes it imperative to have one. I was of the impression that in the UK, one might not need fans because the weather is cooler. I could not have been wronger, it gets boiling hot here and I feel like jumping in a bucket of ice and staying there. The buildings, the cities, they are all built for the cold weather. They are built to be as heat-absorbing and holding as they could be, meaning that when temperatures shoot up, the buildings continue to do their heat-absorbing thing and people inside get slow-cooked to medium tenderness. My clothes are drenched, the one table fan my brother and I share in our room gives me brief seconds of respite before it turns away to do the same for my brother. It is unbearably hot, even though it is 11:20pm and it is supposed to be cooler.

The whole of England is actually facing a terrible heat wave at the moment and everywhere is as hot as here. There is quite nothing that can be done except escape into a place where there could be AC or some other cooling device. In India, even when temperatures shot up, we had the luxury of fans and ACs in our house, which would keep us quite comfortable. It was the outside that felt hot, Here, the outside is relatively cooler than the inside, but the windows don’t open fully, and the breeze is not very powerful either. I wouldn’t have, for the life of me, thought that I would miss Chennai’s heat, but I do. I miss it very much, it was a wonderful city, a wonderful house that I miss terribly.

Speaking of Chennai, I finished writing a story today. It is for a competition and I set my story in Chennai, during the 2015 floods. I actually felt quite proud of my story, which was a very welcome change because I generally am very critical about everything that I write. I am almost never happy with my work and for the first time, I felt quite content with my piece. Of course, I still wish I had the capability to make it sound as beautiful as the stuff I compare it to, quite unconsciously, in my head. But I am oddly at peace with it, I am okay with just letting my story speak in its own voice.

In fact, I think I have realised that the problem with everything I have written was that they spoke in a voice different from what I wanted them to speak in. For me, I thought it was a demerit, but I have come to accept it as something that is inevitable and not necessarily a demerit. I still have quite a long way to go before I could start seeing it as a merit, but I am getting there slowly. This has actually been something that has taken me the whole summer to arrive at. I am oddly at peace right now, there are a thousand conflicts and issues in my head, a thousand disappointed thoughts, but somehow I have managed to gain some form of control over them. I still struggle, I fail a lot, but I am getting better. I may never be 100% scot-free, but that doesn’t necessarily put me on the naughty list, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Conversation and Insecurity

It is actually quite funny how recently I have been struggling to find things to talk about on this blog. Today was quite a busy day, I bought a few things, a top that I was immediately in love with, some leave-in hair product for curly hair, that I am extremely excited to try, a few other things. My mom treated the whole family to some scrumptious food at a good restaurant, I tried food I never would have, otherwise, all the while bemoaning the loss of money, but I still ate a lot. We travelled a lot, we had to go and apply for the visa to go to Belgium, and we went by train. My time spent travelling every day for three weeks to and in Central London kept me in good stead. I felt comfortable in the London Underground when I got on the District Line from Tower Hill station, I felt like I was entering home (at the risk of sounding like a crazy, dreamy, sentimental, foolish girl). It was quite nice, it felt quite nice.

Today, I realised that I was actually feeling quite proud of myself for this blog. I was reading through a few of the things I had written, and I felt proud. I patted myself on the back for having been mature, for having been fair to myself, for being strong, and for holding on to this blog and continuing the fight, so as to have brought it along this far. I have seen many success stories, but I have seen an equal, if not more, number of failures. I know people who have tried this writing exercise, who have tried a variety of things but found that they could not hold on for long enough. When I started this blog, that was my greatest fear. That I would add my name to a line of people who also venture into something like this, only to fail. But now, I am filled with hope that I may actually make it to one year of posts, 365 posts. I will be hitting my 200th post tomorrow and that is an important milestone for me. It is proof to myself that I have held on so long, that I have it in me to hold on.

I started writing a story yesterday that I was inspired to write by a prompt put up for a competition. The prompt said, “Trains” and asked us to make what of it we will. I was very scared at first, and in retrospect, I think I should have started long back so that I could have focussed my energies much better. But I surprisingly have an idea for how my story is going to progress, a cliche story as it looks like it will be at the moment. It is set in Chennai, my home city, during a flood in 2015 that took the city by storm, bringing the poor and the rich alike, to their knees. It was a very troublesome period, the whole city was brought to a standstill, everyone was hit in one way or the other. It was a struggle to find a lot of basic necessities, the lack of electricity, phone lines, everything, meant that people had no way of communicating even with each other. Water had logged everywhere, people were forced out of their homes as knee-deep water made its presence felt, open wires were claiming lives, the government hospital was having too many visitors. Rescue operations were being conducted by army personnel in boats, in what used to be proper land and roads. It was a very scary experience for everyone.

What had annoyed a lot of people though, was the fact that none of the national media had covered this natural disaster of unexpected magnitude. It brought into focus one of the deepest insecurities that south Indians have had, that they are not considered a part of the country because of their geographical and linguistic isolation.  This isolation is a huge cause of many insecurities. Many a time, my feelings about my own isolation from a lot of things, makes me feel quite insecure. And being insecure is not a nice feeling, not as an individual, not as a collective. It makes people distrust even those who might be doing things for their own good. It brings into focus the imperative of good communication and of good representation (what the ‘good’ entails, is again a huge question that I won’t claim to know about). After all, people do say that a good conversation can make changes that can have large impacts. Maybe we can start with the first conversation right now, starting with ourselves?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Childhood Emails and Trying to be Wonderful

Today was a stiflingly hot day, even now, it is dreadfully hot. One of the downsides of having a hot day is the fact that it makes you extremely drowsy and tired. It is like all my energy was sucked out of my system, leaving me dry and extremely tired. In fact, when I was at the shop today, I kept on dozing off from time to time. Right now, the heat has become so unbearable, that I am sitting with a small table fan on my bed right in front of me. My hair, which I had just washed today, has started curling even more because of the humidity and the heat.

I am no stranger to heat and humidity, coming from the south-Indian coast. I have been constantly exposed to surprising mercury figures, I have walked out of it strong and surviving. But I think that was possible because of two things I had back home, ceiling fans and air conditioners. I would give anything for this house to have a provision for a ceiling fan in each of the rooms at least. It would provide some much-needed breeze in this house, especially with rising temperatures. No amount of open windows is successful enough to cool down the body. Even right now, my eyes are closing on their own because I am extremely tired.

I am going to London tomorrow, to meet with a childhood friend of mine. She is one of my oldest friends (if not the oldest)–we have known each other since we were both around two to three years old. Her father and my mother did their PG together, after which he moved to the UK. Her grandparents live in Chennai, and I have been to their house quite a lot. In fact, I have fond memories of her grandmother feeding us both, telling us stories, etc. She doesn’t remember quite as much, but I have always been known to hold on to these kinds of memories, so I wasn’t really surprised. This is the girl who I used to email so much as a pre-teen and early teen.

Young teenage me was a very lonely kid, gelt misunderstood by her schoolmates, felt bullied and used, and felt like she did not belong in that world. I sought comfort in the writing of another kindred soul from around 5000 miles away. This young lady always had a nice thing to say, had the most fascinating stories of education so different from what I was used to, she showed an interest in me, she cared, I felt safe and loved. For me, reciprocation has always been the biggest thing. There have been times when I have been quite a jealous individual, calling people out for ignoring me, for not replying to my messages or emails, or sometimes not messaging first like a petulant, hurt child. But this was one of the most beautiful relationships I developed, one that really gave me some much-appreciated knowledge on a variety of things.

She used to tell me that I was an amazing girl, always had tips for me to open up and interact more with people, we jokingly called her my ‘relationship guru’. I struggled to believe that I was amazing, I still do. I think that is something unique about people in general. They find it hard to believe that they are amazing people. It feels like it is easier to make someone believe that they are the lowest scum to walk the earth than to make them believe, from the bottom of their heart, that they are wonderful. I struggle to accept it when someone says that I am a great person, yet I understand that I struggle to accept it and strive to make sure others don’t struggle the same way. But that is not how the world works, I guess. But these are all small, baby steps, all small doses of happiness in small, casually typed out emails. Sometimes, those are the biggest steps that change everything, aren’t they?

And that’s my memory for the day.