Onam

This year Wife decided to follow the pookalam ritual during Onam, creating flower-carpets for ten straight days. Every day there was a new layer, appended not to the previous day’s carpet but to a new one laid out with fresh flowers, and on the final day she ended with a ten-ringed pattern. I was assigned the role of petal-plucker: each morning I removed petals from different flowers (whose names I still do not know) and this practice acquired a meditative quality as I went around a flower, detaching the petals, observing for the first time their intricate curls and perfect symmetries, and it led me to believe that one could spend a lifetime observing the beauty of these forms. The petals, collected in bowls, were then picked up by Wife and arranged in circles at our doorstep to welcome, as tradition had it, the king Mahabali.

This simple ritual, repeated for ten days, left Wife feeling bright and chirpy in the mornings. Unlike me she is religious, and when time and circumstance permit she follows customs she learned from her parents. Such rituals, then, are connections to one’s past, one’s childhood; they are also connections to our communities, family and friends, and these days communities have moved online. So the ritual was extended: a photo of the pookalam was taken each day and posted on Facebook; some left generous comments, others were inspired to begin a similar routine.

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The ground beneath my feet

[This began as a comment in response to Beth’s reflections on using our hands. Soon I realized there were a bundle of memories waiting to emerge, and inspired by Dave’s response I decided to write one myself.]

Growing up in India, I spent a lot of time barefoot. School prescribed a uniform that included black leather shoes, but back home I spent the rest of my day wearing nothing on my feet. I wasn’t conscious of this: it was a way of life. The weather – hot and dry most of the year – may have been a reason, but it had more to do with habits that result from watching people around us. These people – our relatives, friends, and neighbours – put on footwear only when they left home, on an errand, for a social event, for work; at home they went barefoot.

I played cricket on a street near home, an unpaved stretch that would turn squishy with mud during the monsoon, and although I wore slippers out of home I took them off during play: it was easier to run barefoot. Sometimes a sharp stone cut my foot, or, when I went searching for the ball in a plot that hadn’t been weeded, a few thorns pricked my soles, but these were part of the game, minor episodes that were soon eclipsed by an action in the match, like a boundary or a wicket. When I returned home with a bruise or a cut I displayed it proudly – it perhaps gave me a sign that I was growing up, capable of bearing pain; then, ignoring all my protests, my mother sat me down and patiently smeared an ointment – Betnovate or Neosporin – on and around the wound, advising me to be more careful next time.

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No place like home

Returning after my U.S. trip, I spent the day at home, rediscovering familiar sights (the bookshelf, the balcony, and in the distance the line of trees, the church spires, the helmet-shaped cottages), sounds (silence, interrupted every so often by a car or a bus passing by, and the call of birds whose names I know nothing of), and smells (the bath towel’s lemony scent, and the lavender of wife’s hair). In the evening, as the sun went down behind the woods, on an impulse I picked up the car keys and took off on a drive. The road signs were recognizable, reassuring, and the slow pace – of automobiles, and of people – bespoke a rhythm of life I’d missed while I was away. On my way back, driving through the darkness (which felt intimate in a strange way), I stumbled upon a radio channel playing Mahler’s ninth, which was followed by an elegy by Elgar; I hadn’t listened to classical music for weeks, and I felt like a parched traveler in a desert who had just dived into a clear lake under a full moon.

Next morning, the good old routine: SWR2 on the Radio, Nescafe Gold instant coffee, Financial Times, (White) bread- (Salted) butter- (Pineapple) jam.

Familiarity is soothing, and the daily routine brings back a much-needed sense of control. The adventure and randomness of travel may be thrilling, but I need the stasis and sameness of home to regain my moorings. There really is no place like home.

Jewels of the East, hidden in the West

Last week, Wife and I decided on a whim to visit the Turkish quarter in Mannheim.

I had returned a few days previously from a long trip to India, and the first few days in Germany had seemed too quiet, a big contrast to the chaotic fabric of life in India. Imagine spending each day for a few weeks in a busy market, full of color and life, and returning to a monastery, where monks wore white and silence was the only sound. Even Wife thought things were unusually quiet: perhaps it was due to a short work-week (Thursday was a public holiday) that the Germans were all elsewhere, on a vacation.

Whatever the reason, we decided that the remedy was to get a taste of the East. But where? I suggested the Turkish quarter in Mannheim, a district we had discovered quite by accident while searching for an apartment last year. Wife concurred, and we set off one evening after an early dinner.
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A Morning Walk

This morning, for no particular reason, I decide to go on a walk. It’s cold outside, close to zero degrees celcius, but it is a clear day and the anticipation of a sun-filled afternoon makes this morning feel less cold. Behind the low fences surrounding little gardens facing the main street I spot the first buds on bare branches. Spring is beginning to emerge from the shadow of Winter (UNDER CONSTRUCTION, as Dave says), but if you looked at the landscape from a distance, you wouldn’t know.
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Saturday

At the hairdressers I’m assigned to the Turkish woman. In her mid-forties, she wears bright red lipstick, lets her hair hang loose, wears tight-fitting clothes – a light-maroon half-sleeved blouse over a black pant – that make her look more plump than is necessary. There’s a shine in her eyes as she goes snip-snip-snip all over. In about ten minutes she is done.

The owner – der chef, as the women (and girls) in the saloon call him – looks at me astonished as I get up from the chair next to him. He had started earlier, but isn’t halfway through his client.
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Santa tales

“…you get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing.”
– Joan Didion

In the recent weeks, there’s been a lot of talk on Santa. A colleague at work noted, with a touch of regret, that his four-year old already knew Santa was none other than the neighbour downstairs, and that he came in not through the chimney – they had one – but the front door. Another parent was furious: during a ride before Christmas, the anchor on a car radio channel had announced, with all of them listening, that there really was no Santa, it was all made up. Back home the children wanted the truth out; she had had a hard time rescuing the myth.
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Snowy Sunday

“Thousands of travellers have had their plans disrupted by further snowfalls across Western Europe.” BBC News.

Bad Homburg is a small city – population: 60000 – near Frankfurt, about 120 kilometers from where we live. L, his wife U and daughter J moved there recently from Vienna, and we went to meet them last Sunday. It was drizzling when we left home early in the afternoon; snow on the street had turned into slush. Driving was slow, so Wife sent an SMS: Snow on the road – so it looks like we might be late. U responded instantly: R u sure u want to take the journey today? It was one of those sentences that is – given the nature of the medium – difficult to interpret: Was she suggesting we cancel? Was it a request that we cancel? Or was it, as we assumed, a hint that it was okay even if we did not turn up? We were well on our way and were in a mood to be outdoors, so we decided to continue: We are already on the way – it is not bad it’s just slow. Midway, when light rain had turned into a snow-blizzard and visibility was down to a few meters, we wondered if we had understood her right. (Later in the day, when the real trouble began, I would think back to our decision.)
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The last days of summer

A habit we’ve cultivated in the last two months seems to be ending. In the evenings, both on weekdays and during weekends when we aren’t out someplace, wife and I sit in our west-facing balcony, reading. The floating clouds impart a sense of movement to the landscape. (Movement, I learned during those train journeys the last three years, stimulates thought; a window seat in a train is an excellent place to spend as much time thinking as you do reading.) Occasionally they create dramatic scenes on the blue canvas, like the fuzzy but promising beginnings of a large painting. When the clouds give way, partially or fully, sunsets are magnificent.

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The new, familiar home

When we were packing and moving out of our previous homes – Wife’s apartment in Brussels, mine here in Germany – we had these waves of premature nostalgia that made us think we would miss these places – old, familiar, filled with memories – a lot, at least in the early months of the transition. But life in this new home has proven us wrong: we’ve plunged into the business of living here, and although there are moments when the views from this apartment make us stop and stare (and we remind ourselves how lucky we were to find a place like this), for the most part life simply moves along a straight line and keeps us busy, from one week to the next, seldom permitting the extended leisure that is needed to drift into reverie and to think back to the weekends in Brussels.
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