I haven’t read in 4 days. It’s been 4 days & Fransisco is still sitting amidst a circle of bystanders singing the news. I like having characters at the disposal of my whim. They don’t go about their business till I read further, they sit in their monolithic ways among bystanders, singing. Unlike life. Life does not function according to my whim. Mornings are especially tough. In the mornings I am sure there is a deeper shithole right under the shit I am trying to wade through. But as the day proceeds, the sun shines on me & fills me, or that is how I like to imagine it, with light.
If my day were a movie, here I would put a hyper-lapse of a sunflower straightening its spine to shine back at the sun. It is almost that unwarranted/sudden, the shift in my mood, day. It suddenly goes from work, which makes me anxious to eating papaya, taking meals for Dadi, and telling her the grand plans I had for when she was to be on bed rest. She told me grand plans don’t usually work out. I have noticed that all-wise women who have been dancing in the whirlwind of life say that. There must be some sense to it.
And yet – when I went down, borrowed my father’s favorite P. L. Deshpande book, returned with my tiny plan on my palm, I read the first chapter to her & my delivery was wrong, so were the pronunciation of the bigger words but I must have got the emotions right, for they created something in the room that was happy, energetic & healing, like a painkiller, not an antibiotic. I now know the Marathi word for shriveled – nothing feels un-grand about it. I would not know what a blouse piece was called way back in time, or that my Dadi stitched blouses out of it for people. She sat up, in the healing power of the room, without support, to pick a napkin & fold it at different angles to explain just how stitching worked then.
Grand things continued to happen. S texted. If you ever heard him drunk, you would fall in love with me. He has his way with words, he has the biggest heart and the nicest things to say. He makes people almost like themselves, makes them think that it’ll be fine, that there is no shithole, no tiny plans. Only grand ones and sunflowers rise to the sun, dramatically.