Day 5: Tempest and Tranquillity

“Sometimes I feel like my life is someone else’s dream”~ ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’, Kate Tempest.

Last time, I told you about Nabokov, the man who squeezed the bottom of my lungs and forced a gasp out of my throat. This time, let me tell you about hypnotism.

It’s not of the slow you are getting sleeeeepy pendulum kind. I wasn’t sleepy. I was awake, alive, and frozen.

When Kate Tempest said Imagine, I did; when she said Jemma and Ester and Pete and Zoe, I saw them come closer and closer and melt into my limbs. I’ve no doubt that if she’d said we stand here and grow roots, I’d have stood up, grown roots, and become an amaltash tree.

Kate, do you realise that you gave us no choice?

I sat there, breathing only when I heard her breathe into the mike. That was the only chance I had to catch my breath, as she piloted us, brakeless, weightless, into a journey from which we all came back more than a little ragged. A little broken in the best possible way.

I come away from this year’s Jaipur Lit Fest with books, few photos, and other things more important- Lila Zanganeh’s happiness, Kate Tempest’s chaotic brilliance, Sholeh Wolpé’s sweetness, Rosalyn D’Mello’s courage, among others. I leave with more goals, a desire to build and grow, to engage in passion more. I leave with the idea of working at writing, of getting better by working harder and every day. A lesson at once simple and confusing.

I leave with a knowledge of living with people I don’t know, in an unfamiliar family scene. I came expecting a hotel, and when I found a family home, I was shaken and a little afraid. But somewhere in between my first makki ki roti and preparing the child for an upcoming test, I found comfort, and a space that I could, for five wonderful days, call my own.

I leave hoping to come back some day. Hopefully, soon.

Think-Stream

I had a teacher once, who said that even if I couldn’t think of anything to write about, I should just put my pen to paper and write. He said it didn’t matter even if I wrote the same sentence ten times; perhaps the eleventh sentence would be different.

He taught me just for a year, during my eleventh grade. I missed him a lot the next year. I wish he’d stayed. He was 22 years old; he was the only adult with whom I felt comfortable sharing my poems. We would sit in school after he’d read them, and he’d point things out to me, cool things I’d never noticed I’d done with words; he’d nudge words into better order, so the poem wasn’t lopsided. By the time we were done, it looked like it was proud of itself.
Many people had told me that I could write well; he was the first person to show me how to write better.

I have a friend whose descriptive writing I prefer to Amitav Ghosh. Her story about cancer ripped into me, but I kept reading it because of the sheer skill it took to put those layers of words and story together.

I think about my third grade class teacher who hurt me so much, and I want to meet her again and tell her about it. I don’t know if I can forgive her; maybe it won’t be necessary, maybe she won’t even want to be forgiven.

I have a friend who is incredibly attractive to me because he’s intelligent and confident and mature and a lot of fun. I don’t know if I’m attracted to him. I’m usually not, though; it’s just sometimes.

Honestly, though, the person I love the most in the world is myself, at the moment. I think that after so many years, it’s time I started believing that I’m worthy of being my most important person.