Interpretation
Dear world,
I don’t know how I can make you hear me. I am in a position where it seems almost too easy to make myself heard but I feel voiceless. Every sentence I utter to you sounds like a rant. Look beneath it and you’ll see the troubles that you and I encounter each day every hour in our race for survival. When I write about things like the wind and moon that subvert the social, economic and political, it doesn’t become an act of subversion, it instead passé. But even as talk about the social and the political I want you to feel with me the age old beauty of things we don’t give a fuck about – like the way the moon looks so big tonight. Sure it is a full moon night and sure there have been epics written about how someone’s beloved has the face of that full moon but stop. Stop and look at that moon. Even if Neil Armstrong landed with it and even if he said it was a giant leap for mankind and even if the Russians sent dogs or other living beings up there, it is so far away. Far away from all that you and I rant about. So there you go for once I didn’t talk about me. I talked about the moon because hey, I’m sure, you haven’t looked at the moon in a while.
Ajapa
Spices
I don’t want to glorify the days when the Greeks sent ships filled with gold and precious metals across the Arabian Sea in exchange for Indian spices. What I do idealize is the connectedness, in some sense of the ancient world that has seems to be lost to us in the modern world.
My father collects chilies, from all over the country and outside. His favorites closely resemble the Capsicum frutescens cv. Nagahari, that Indian scientists recently discovered was much hotter than the Red Savina Habanero. The chilies he collects are of different shapes and sizes. He ferments them in vinegar, salt and oil and before almost every meal, he places a single chili on a plate carefully dissects it into tiny consumable pieces and, adds to the cut up chili the liquid in which it was fermented and enjoys his meal with a relish. Even when my mom makes the spicy sauce or salad, generically known as achar for the meal, my dad indulges in his chilies. The fact that the Indian nation and specifically the department of defense invested in the research of Capsicum frutescens cv. Nagahari and went on to call it the chili of the nagas in reference to the “fiery nature of the nagas, ” is for me a big disappointment. What India has inherited from its colonial past is not only the tendency to attribute essential characteristics to citizens in a fashion no different from that of its predecessor but also the nation state with its strictly economic reason.
Diary 4
Watched Andrea Gibson recite her poems from back stage. I got hungry but I couldn’t tell if was pure metabolism/physiological hunger or if was something else. I thought about the numberless “poems” I’ve written and they then appeared abstract, faceless, flavorless – impersonal. Poetry is personal and it can’t be otherwise but what is personal is political and the individual is intricately woven into the fabric of society, institutions, the world and the universe. I can’t write as if I was just anyone, what I write has to be mine. I don’t want to be torn away from myself and told, “who cares about you?” because I know that many do. Many go through the same cycles of angst and joy and feel the same way I do.Perhaps, this is what heterosexual relationships do to women, turn them into faceless, de-individualized members of a group. I know that love is only a woman’s thing. The gentleness needed to nurture a soul needs delicate hands and a strong will. The only people who were willing to learn of my history were women. They listened with their souls and their ears were mere instruments. We talked about how fathers who wanted sons molded daughters into men and how mothers who were daughters themselves sighed secretly when they were told we were girls. I told my friends about how I always lived on the margins of the household, my room my sanctuary, never incorporated into the family, a temporary tenant who was meant to be decked in gold and red and charitably donated to the son of a man. My father who educated me, didn’t provide a structure for my knowledge. Deprived of it himself, he knew the strength of it. My education made sense only to the extent to which he knew it was enough to fetch him a son in law who he could relate to intellectually. They tell me I have every opportunity to grow and learn now but they don’t see that I’m handicapped. I can better cook a meal and fold the pleats of a sari than I can write in correct sentence structures. Because that is what I saw my mother do each day, three times a day. No one ever told me that what I read wasn’t enough, they said, I’d rather practice derivatives and functions. What if. What if I had read European history instead of doing trigonometrics. Like my mother, all I know is longing and regret. Countless what ifs is all I know. We’re handicapped by the way we are brought up. Dreary habits die hard and we all live in a rut, we’re too scared to walk out of the familiar.
I was reading Maria or the wrongs of women. I will go back to that.
Reading fate
Ok so I don’t usually do these things. After my visit to the crony fortune teller in Jamal, I had begun to think that most predictions are BS. But a few nights ago, someone started reading predictions for me and for some reason, it sounded so possible., so definitely true. Ever since I’ve started to believe that I will find true love between 23rd of April and the 15th of May. What is sad however, is the fact that I have finals exactly during this time and will be busy writing five papers so the question arises, how is it possible? How will I meet this person especially when the last party for the year at Mt Holyoke was the one where the fire alarms went off and I found everything so futile. Besides, I don’t expect to find true love amidst drunk men from god knows where. I know I’m talking like one of those women whose only concern is finding a date and finding love but trust me I have had too many things to think about and truthfully it is only in the past few days that I have been considering “looking” because my stars tell me it is a good time. So the next few events are Hampshire Holi, Himalayan Night and Mt Holyoke Holi. These are exciting but ot quite, so I don’t know what to expect. But something is bound to happen that is for sure. This month and the next are just about good luck (IN ALL FIELDS 
). So, I have my fingers crossed.
BTW: Presentation rocked! I enjoyed the assembly debates and wouldn’t mind reading more for my own sake. The next stop is the Tagore play which should be all right. Last day of classes almost here. I really need to finish these papers while my luck stays. Frankly I think everything is quite fine at the moment, not finding anyone wouldn’t make any difference. Its just just something raised my hopes even higher.
Diary 3
Dear Diary,
This presentation will be the end of me. Its also got to do with me trying to seem smart in front of this professor because I admire her. Anyway, I’ve decided not to go to my enlightenment class because I don’t think I should be wasting any time before this big presentation. This semester is moving too fast and I can’t catch up unless I skip a few classes. I’ve decided to take a easy way out to two of my papers by writing them on things that I have presented on. I’ll do Venkatesh’s book for Sociology and do constituent assembly debates for Religion and Politics. Then I have to do the Shahnameh paper, the Tagore paper and the Enlightenment paper. I better start soon. I really want to start on my research proposal too but from the work load I have no proper soul would imagine I’d be done, but I will.
This is what I found today. Makes me feel sad that I’ve stopped reading as much as I used to. Hopeful because the world is not too much of a dreary place for women who read.
NOTE: this is not an advertisement
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow. (Trust me couple of unread books, book browsing favourite passtime, havent cried in a while after reading a book, I like to smell fresh pages but old libraries work as well)
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami ( I like Murakami but I can only talk about Dance Dance Dance and Norwegian Wood). See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship (no). Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book.(it would be insightful to know that I fashion myself after Scarlett O Hara but i don’t do it so much) It will never be your fault if she does. My parents realized it was easy buying me birthday gifts. Every birthday gift was a book and a bunch of CDs.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.(:p)
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. I haven’t memorized Keats, does Wordsworth work? Tagore?I like Dr. Seuss but I’d start with the ABCs if I ever had kids. Plus I’d prefer the panchatantra.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. (this part is cheesy, don’t subscribe to it)
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.
Diary 2
Dear Diary,
Woke up around 10 30 after going to bed around 3 30 last night. Crazy shift. They had hazers (those machines that make artificial fog) and they forgot to turn the fire alarm on the third floor so the alarm rang. For a while I thought it was a part of the techno music the DJ was playing but then it was the fire alarm because the lights in the house came on and I couldn’t turn it off. Chaos. Drunk kids staggering out of the auditorium. Anyway, that was happening while I was trying to get through the consitutent assembly’d discussion over the report of the advisory committee on minorities. The things people were saying in the Indian assembly! absolutely preposterous, always looking at Muslims as if they descended from another planet. But I must remark, there were dignified discussions there too. So I woke up this morning, gobbled up a bagel and started again with the debates. A couple of days ago I was absolutely thrilled to see a Gorkha make a comment, recently it’s not that exciting there’s a pattern thats observable. The nationalist talk about the nation, the SC/STs talk about constitutional safeguards and Muslims continue to be treated as Non Resident Aliens. I am supposed to write a proposal on my research for the Shahnameh and I am clueless. I thoroughly enjoy the shahnameh as a bed time read and I would definitely read to my kids anytime over grimm’s fairy tales but I don’t know how to make a scholarly observation of it. The professor probably expects me to write about the Kayanids and India, lets see. I have to get done with this presentation for now and I need to stop reading all these debates. I CANT wait for my kindle. It will be a great companion when I travel back to good old South Asia (as you see I am entrenched in this notion of regionalism, Tagore wouldn’t appreciate it). Talking of Tagore it reminds me I have to do a presentation on him too and I thought I’d read some of my poems and tell the class how I’ve been inspired by him but maybe my poems are too lame. I don’t know. But the initial idea was to get a group of people to act out short Tagore parables.
my friend Emma came to visit and I while I was happy she came to see us and was happy to me, I realized that I do like being by myself. It doesn’t seem real talking to real people anymore. This blog is so much closer , and the people who read this so much closer to me than real people can be. It’s a sad irony. But I think there’s something pleasant about not hearing responses. I’m thankful to a couple of reader who have told me that they read this and don’t choose to respond. I really appreciate it. Although I wonder why you’d even find anything sensical about my ramblings.
BTW: I saw the biggest buds on the branches of trees today. It rained so hard yesterday and I was telling a friend of mine that its the only way that flowers can bloom and today I saw the bud hahahaha a reconfirmation that spring is officially here.
Diary 1
Dear diary,
Today again I felt the need to talk to someone, just anyone. I hate that feeling. It reminds me of my ultimate human bondage. The basic assumption of sociology is that humans are social beings, perhaps I have internalized the understanding of the discipline. It is spring weekend here. My feelings have been dampened by the lower grade my group got on the annotated bibliography for one my classes. Grades and numbers have always been my yardstick for happiness. One of my childhood legacies. I want to write a newspaper article about my school and my teachers, the constant fear about numbers and marks and ranks. It doesn’t matter much in college in general but it continues to matter to me. Back to spring- It was warm and sunny out yesterday so I took my sheet out and laid there in the sun and read through a bit of the book, but it was so warm and nice that I felt drowsy. Later I went to see seniors present their senior papers at the senior symposium. I met one of my professors there and he asked me why I was there. Me being the sensitive person that I am, felt that he considered me unworthy of being there. I guess it doesn’t matter. Nothing ever does. I miss Kathmandu and yet I’m scared. I have this constant need to go back home but home has changed. It means something else now.
I feel sad thinking about my summer project, it would be so much better if someone more driven did it. I haven’t written a proper proposal yet, referenced and well researched. Things are out of balance. I’ve worked such difficult hours in the past two weekends. I don’t even have to work. I have enough money. But I don’t want my weekends empty because I’ll get lonely but if I go off to work, I have no time to do things I HAVE to do. It is a paradox. But perhaps it is natural. They say women should slowly return to the wild or else there is that danger of going going berserk with it. I bought a nine inch Kindle! In America reading devices are more affordable than books! When I was younger I would love the smell of fresh books and I started reading out of boredom. I felt so confined in our Baneshwor house that I needed to play outside and the books transported me outside. Things have changed. This place is very much like Ithaca. There are open spaces and plenty to do outside. But you need to make time to do all these things. Ah well, one can’t be a child all her life now can she? I think by the end of this weekend (although I really need to work on a presentation) I will finish that newspaper article on my school. I am not worried about whether they’ll accept it or not. I’m not 14 anymore and I know that some of the things these newspapers publish are not at all good. Anyway, thats that for today.
Love
Ajapa
Love
I’m blessed to have known love
so beautiful, so true and so free
traveling across oceans and mountains
ringing through the universe
and softly descending upon me like the snow
or the whisper of the wind.
Light as cotton floating in the summer sky
gently swallowed me in its wholeness.
Perfect un-consumated love
like the divine longing for god.
There will be good things
There will be good things-
like arguments over dinner
about history and society
how flawed democracy is
and what a joke a nation state is
and all that draws our passion
In our heated discourse over Locke and Hobbes
you won’t demean me but see me as your equal
and feel blessed to have found a friend as me
and I will realize that the world to me has always been just
that it allowed me to borrow you as a companion.
As we both lie beneath the stars
on a sheet on the warm summer terrrace
listening to crickets
we will realize how blessed we are
that the world lent itself to our happiness
that learning nurtured our imagination
and we were free from the shackles that bind so many
and were able to grow together as human beings
yet fly like swallows on clear summer skies.In my angst and constriction
I’ve always found you,
like the dawn, a hope
spinning the long yard of darkness into light.
I know you are there, somewhere,
living with the understanding
that there’s nothing beyond humanity
- nothing but the desire to be human.
Tagore
When the world in its entirety says “I won’t let you go”, I can’t think of leaving the world abruptly.
