044 - This Interlude
A mid season letter
Hello!
Hope you are well my dear reader, especially you the new. Bombay Daak is on its seasonal break since June. This is the first of a mid-season issue, an interlude before the Season 3. What might we orchestrate?
I am in a sunny and rainy Palakkad as I write this. The sun is so sharp, it slices you like a knife. And it rains as if it is the very end of days. Diced and drenched thus I remain indoors, settling in to a reading repose.
I drove down here from Bombay two weeks back.
In my day and a half long journey John McPhee | kept | recurring. It reminded me of the time when whichever page I turned I found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I suppose I have to read Draft No.4 now. And with that Sam Anderson interview I suppose his Boom Town joins the list as well.
Meanwhile, even a 1500 km drive wasn't enough to finish Jared Diamond's epic and long Guns, Germs and Steel. Later that night I incidentally read why an anti racist book like GGS is still wrongly shunned by the left that dropped the same day.
The day before my drive I read Suji Kwock Kim's The Korean Community Garden in Queens:
Yesterday hydrangea and chrysanthemums burst
their calyxes, corolla-skins blistering into welts.
Today jonquils slit blue shoots from their sheaths.
Tomorrow day lilies and asters will flame petals,
Like those bursting, blistering flowers, I was looking for a change in my days. Unlike last year, I have barely read this year. While my city got its move on, I got stuck in a pandemic induced limbo. I wanted to step out of this comfort zone, but I hardly knew where its edges were.
Conveniently it was my anxiety over a long solo drive that convinced me that I must. Perhaps, I thought, I might find that missing edge somewhere on the way. Maybe at its very end, as I reached home.
But by the time I drove my dirt washed car across familiar paddy fields and coconut groves, I was too tired to notice, what coming back home felt like. The only drama on the drive- a passing storm at Chitradurga, that I drove through almost blind.
As the days rolled in that sense of home found its footing. The familiar smells of the kitchen garden, the daily theatre of drongos in the trees, the morning mists and pink clouds at dusk, the warm rice and the hot pickles, were all welcome. But home truly lies in the ordinary conversations that thread these little days together.
I am thus recuperating from non existent maladies here. Slowly beginning to read again, write again. Celebrating in bits every day of this birthday month to its very end.
Hope you have a great end to this strange year. I shall see you soon in the next with a third season of letters. In keeping with my time and place, I am reading Suji Kwock Kim again with her Rice Field Road at Dusk. Let me leave you with that till then.