Covid lockdown writing Monday 23rd March: Downtown

Paint yourself a fantasy life scenario with the help of the lyrics of a chosen song.

#500words #lockdownwriting #notlockingdownmywords

Post on your feed, tag us.

Downtown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfDvk0

When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go - downtown.
When you've got worries all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help I know downtown.
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
No finer place for sure downtown
Everything's waiting for you.

I am neither alone or lonely, and there is no downtown to go to at the moment.
But, in my mind, we can watch a play at India Habitat Centre, followed by dinner with friends in Khan Market or at one of Lodi Colony’s tony new restaurants. Or just a romantic dinner for the two of us…
If that is too far to go, (and Delhi’s borders are sealed, by the way, in reality, not in my fantasy world), we can always drive down to The DLF Mall of India and watch a movie. Irfan’s latest, English Medium, was released last week, with reasonably decent reviews. (And then the movie halls closed down). This particular mall also has two decent bookshops, so perhaps we can go and browse there. And a quick potter in Fabindia, maybe, just to see what’s new.

Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows downtown.
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close downtown.
Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over
Happy again.

The downtown of my youth was Connaught Place, where a bunch of us would scrounge through our pockets, and pool in our meagre resources for coffee at India Coffee House, keeping aside our bus fare home, of course. The first discotheque we knew of was The Cellar. Going there meant an occasion, or a rich friend who could treat you to a meal and a dance out there. The five star hotels had their discos, but they were too rarefied for us to ever aspire to. Dancing was more likely at our college festivals, or cast parties after the annual college play. And as adults, colony dos, club shindigs, new year parties. One time, on holiday in Goa, we won a prize for the liveliest couple on the floor, two pairs of two left feet notwithstanding…

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along.
So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
Don't wait a minute more, downtown
Everything’s waiting for you
Downtown

We are both senior citizens. After all the housework sans helper and accompanying fatigue, a very satisfying downtown would be our favourite local Chinese restaurant, a mere 4-5 kilometres away. I can see us enjoying our favourite soups and dimsums, while we decide on our main course. I think that’s the first downtown we’ll opt for, when life comes back to normal.
Please, Life, please?

Petula Clark Downtown. 1964 snapchat : alexhashs

Three Lists!

Alright #lockdownwriting challenge folks, here's your second prompt:

500 words by 5 pm, written and posted on your FB feed.
Tag us.

1. Today's prompt is a list.
2. Make three lists of anything you want. Title each list. Populate each list.

Lists!

I make lists as aides-memoire, mostly To Do lists and shopping lists, and menus when I am expecting guests for a meal. I can't cook for a party if I haven't planned out the menu and requisite shopping on paper. Then there are the endless mental lists, like lists of

1) Things I am Perpetually Planning to do, and Don't Actually Do like sort out the million papers in the several shelves and drawers that I possess, (not even thinking of those in the spouse's study: I value my life!), dispose of now defunct leather handbags, text books that I used in my long ago college years, cassette tapes that hold wonderful music but have been lying in our basement for years now, with no system to play them on: the spouse has been aspiring to get them digitized, also for several years now. (I recently learned that Goonj uses old cassette tape to make some rather interesting wallets). This is a merely aspirational list, with no great intention or ambition of fulfilling it, but, nonetheless, a list. Of acts of omission, if you so wish to call them, of acts which may never take place. I have always aspired to leave my affairs in good order, so that my heirs are not inconvenienced unduly. (Yes, I did throw out all my old underwear a few months ago, when Covid 19 wasn't even heard of). I still hope to do these things someday soon, if Time Is With Me.

2) Things I used to wish for:
Pretty crazy ones, beyond the usual romantic dreams of enduring love and a happy family life, which, I am happy to say, have largely been fulfilled.
I had very specific requirements for my next janam! I was never tall, nor thin. For the longest time, well into adulthood, when motherhood and greed had added to the avoirdupois, I asked to be tall and slender in my next birth. Unhappy feet rendered making myself taller with heels in this janam not really practical, and I was too lazy/greedy to lose weight. Since giving specifications for my next birth seemed eminently doable, I also asked for a good singing voice. It took me years to accept that I couldn’t sing. For most of my life I inflicted my tuneless renderings upon an unfortunate audience, mostly my family. I am happy to say that little children, (at least my little granddaughters) like what I sing, and I do remember several wonderful children’s songs from my own childhood. But, as a music lover with a discerning ear, I want to be able to offer aalaaps and ragas and exquisite Kabir and Meera bhajans to discerning listeners, whose encores echo in my delighted ears!

3) What I Wish For Now:
A future. For humanity. For love. For this beautiful world we have so sadly mistreated. For the world's children to forget what masks are. For air purifiers to become defunct. For a happier world, where there is kindness, compassion, and humanity towards all life forms, as well as our beloved Mother Earth.

Hope in the time of Covid 19

I thought to myself that hope is knowing there is a tomorrow, a next week, a next month, a next year... Hope that is essentially uncertain, given that nobody is guaranteed a tomorrow anyway.

Ask me, I lost both siblings to extremely sudden natural deaths, and both parents to long drawn out, slow departures.

You get my drift. Hope was having the luxury of time to plan for, places to visit, people to meet, meals to enjoy. Hope was what we ordinary mortals based our lives upon. Not just mere mortals: business, industry, election campaigns, banking, agriculture, the stock market: you name it, everything in our allegedly civilized world was based on the presence of hope, the hope of the planet and its people collectively having an infinite number of days in which to live their lives.

We had booked tickets and accommodation for a trip, for a wedding in the family. The spouse had business related travel. Family was coming in from abroad. There were gatherings planned. All was cancelled, and we were happy that the spouse and I, both senior citizens with our inevitable medical conditions, had enough medication for the next few weeks. Groceries and daily needs were available. We have piped gas. I have books and social media and more than enough housework to keep me busy. The spouse has been working remotely, and relaxes with Netflix. He has stocked up on the necessary relaxing beverages too!

For much of our married life, there had been, of necessity, spaces in our togetherness.
Post-retirement, there was a phase of too much togetherness, made especially difficult by hearing issues and TV volumes! Wireless headphones didn’t agree with the TV viewer. Closed doors in a medium sized apartment were not very effective. Fortunately, business opportunities arose, and travel happened. The new normal for our two-person household became a longish weekend together and a four day work week apart. There were so many things that had to be fitted into the week end, that I would take a much needed break the day the spouse actually left. Departures were usually early morning, arrivals late night, adding to our collective fatigue!

We have, after some years, spent an entire week together. Homicide has not happened! That gives me tremendous hope for a future that we might or might not have! I went downstairs last evening to pick up some milk, and on my way home I was greeted by a young couple pushing a pram. I did a double take, as I hadn’t realized that a baby was imminent in this particular family! (Their first child is about seven now, the baby is six months old). I think of the state of the world that this little child has been born into, and I wonder. What was normal for us will perhaps never be normal for my grandchildren, or for the babies born in and around the year of Covid 19 (never having seen masks of any kind in common use till my sixties, for example).

I realize that hope is, willy-nilly, part of the human condition. Without it we are as good as dead anyway. 


Mathangi Krish #lockdownwriting challenge.

Thanks for getting me to switch on my desktop and actually write something, Mathangi!
This is the prompt:
500 words by 5 pm, written and posted on your FB feed.
Tag us.

Begin your piece with:
I thought to myself that hope is....

End with:
I realized...

Sunbird

How did the sunbird know
that there was an aloe vera blooming
on my seventh floor balcony?

The flowering shoot came through
a gap in the pot stand,
and caught me unawares.
This lazy gardener plants no flowers,
happy with green in various shades:
all blooms are a bonus!

How did the sunbird know
that its presence was needed?
It dispelled sadness from a tender heart
with a brief sighting,
bringing great joy
while sipping nectar from an aloe flower,
unaware of being
a tiny miracle.

                                                                                                              All that's left of the aloe flowers!

The first post of 2020

Life in India has been immensely strange over the past several months, and since mid-December, the situation has become extremely distressing, to say the least. No inspiration to blog. Just keeping busy with mundane things, and snatching bits of joy whenever possible. Here's one little bit, gleaned from yesterday's pickle making session: I present to you the Garlic Herons.

Book Review: Coming Back to the City

As someone with very little actual experience of Mumbai, most of the Mumbai lore I've absorbed comes from books and movies. Life in  Mumbai's chawls was exemplified for me by movies like Piya ka Ghar. One heard of the old textile mills being torn down, and being transformed into modern malls or expensive flats: real estate prices in Mumbai remain sky high. Politicians and their henchmen, trade union leaders, self-made entrepreneurs and their success stories, the NRI who decides to return, the conman and his moll, Mumbai has them all.

Anuradha Kumar uses all of these tropes, and yet goes way below the skin of each one of her characters. Each one of them is real, and each one's story links up with the others brilliantly. There are love stories, old and new, a deep sense of the history of a place and a movement. There is an act of raw physical courage, motivated solely by the need to save a few buckets of water for that day's assignment! The author has deep empathy for each one of her characters, whether it be the beautiful, unhappy Pooja, married to the henchman of the local don, her neighbour Richard with his constantly blinking eyes, his mother Rosie who finally finds happiness while working as a housekeeper after the death of her violent and abusive husband, poor rich girl Raina, who craves her wealthy parents' attention, Sneha, the extremely successful radiologist who is devastated when the sex education classes she conducts at a municipal school are shut down, Suhel who has seen the utter misery of his mother's life and his parents' marriage, the lecherous, successful Ghatge who will stop at nothing to save himself, his wife Gauri who manages to hold her own, Mahesh, the utterly frustrated henchman, Suhel's father, who decides to marry for love, despite his age, the doctor-artist, Pankaj Joshi, whose paintings have a seminal role in the story, Neera Joshi, journalist, who was romantically involved with trade union leader Ramakrishna Desai a lifetime ago, to name just some of them.

The writing is exquisite, painting vivid pictures of both people and locales with brief, succinct strokes. The book is beautifully constructed, layered delicately, in a spiral whose hub remains one single chawl. An unlikely love story makes you long for a happy ending. There is huge suspense.
And yes, the flamingos on the cover do find a mention!

Unwanted, unheard

What is it about women’s voices that can drive men mad?

Mad with lust, desire, rage? When is it sane, their conversation?

Only when there is parity between them, a rare event indeed.

How much do people actually listen to others, especially across genders?

Fathers listening with rapt attention to their little daughters,

But for how long? Work or boredom will soon stop these precious conversations.

Wise women learn the art of silence, of how not to confront,

And yet do as they please, under a veneer of peaceable harmony.

What turmoil seethes under that veneer? Not known, until it breaks out

Sometimes as illness, depression, divorce, insanity, sometimes never…

And then you see these images of women in different countries

Across the globe, protesting violence against their gender,

Against the violence that has cost so many female lives.

And they have painted a hand across their mouths,

different colours in different countries,

A hand silencing their voices, their unbearable, unhearable voices

That sometimes lead to death. 

Femicide, a word I hadn't heard of before, is a reality 

in a world where feminism has been around for decades.

How hard is it to listen with attention and affection,

before the voice turns shrill and hysterical and unbearable?

And even if it does, the voice is demanding a hearing.

Shutting it up will not work. 

It will not work.

it will not.