Creeping Phlox and Monsoon Umbrellas

Each spring, the creeping phlox curls around the rock at the base of the mailbox.  Lavender-colored, star-shaped flowers and delicate leaves brighten up the pale grey stone that has lain bare all winter.  The flowers draping around the rock comfort and please me—and, surprisingly, they remind me being a child opening up an umbrella at the start of the monsoon season in India. 

In India, the monsoons also bring the start of the school year in June.  Back when I was in elementary school, every year, my parents bought me new rubber sandals required for my uniform. Some years—to my delight—I also needed a new umbrella and a new raincoat.  Unlike the sandals, these did not have to match the school uniform.  I remember one umbrella, pale blue like a faded bird’s egg, with a brown print of leaves and flowers around its edge.  It had a brown plastic handle, and it was full sized, not the small, kids’ size I had had before.  When I would open the blue umbrella, I would create a temporary haven from the rain. 

Not that the rain bothered me.  I loved the monsoons: the relief from the heat of summer, the inviting puddles in the brilliant green grass, the smell of the wet earth, and the blanket of grey sky, a charming change from the incessant sunlight.  I also loved the start of school; I would inhale the new notebooks, savor the sharp edges of the eraser that had not yet been used, and delight in the novelty of overhead lights in classrooms on especially dark days.  The monsoons also brought the potential for drama: heavy downpours, potential flooding, and the need to huddle under umbrellas. 

To find relief from my predictable young life, I imagined those umbrellas were temporary shelters, mobile homes I carried with me.   I would pretend that I had to remain within the borders of the umbrella, my footsteps not straying outside.  And sometimes, I would set up the umbrella on the back verandah and pretend I was a vendor squatting on a sidewalk selling paan, a betel leaf chew.  Even then, I think I knew that the life of a street vendor was difficult, not glamorous.  But I couldn’t resist creating that temporary shelter, that little home in the circle of the umbrella. 

Now, seeing the phlox curl around the stone by the mailbox, I recall the circle of that temporary childhood home.

Laughing with my Desi Sisters

Bangles by the dozen in Southall, London, England.  My partner and I spent an afternoon laughing and eating chaat with Anjana and Mina in this "Little India" in the spring of 2009.  That evening, I shook hands with Annie Lennox as she signed a CD for me at the Oxford Street HMV, but hanging out with these dear women ranked as high as meeting the superstar.  Memories of that day came back as I wrote the post below about women I met last week. 

“I don’t know.  Shit!” I replied, as I drove a car full of passengers to a local hotel that I should have been able to find easily.  Laughter greeted me.  I laughed, too, and my passenger, a Tamil woman I’d just met at an interdisciplinary conference about India, chuckled: “You sounded so Indian right there,” she said, repeating my words and my emphases. 

We were returning from dinner downtown: four women and a baby who had met on the first day of a three-day conference.  Over dinner at a Thai restaurant, I had had the unusual pleasure of not being the only desi, the only Indian at the table.  In fact, there were three of us, all academics.  The fourth woman with us, a white lesbian from California, is the mother of the baby.  So I wasn’t the only lesbian either.  It was a liberating experience, one that I sunk into the way my I slide into favorite old pajamas that I had forgotten about but which feel just right. 

Our conversation was loud and wide ranging, joined by occasional squeals from the baby.  We talked about gay people we know in India, about the papers we had heard that day, about the books we read growing up (by Enid Blyton, of course), about whether the only one at the table without a smart phone ought to get one.  We laughed as we took photos of each other and planned reunions—in California or at the Niagara Falls—reunions that we all know might never happen.  “Conference promises,” I think someone called these recently.

By the end of the night, my vowels had changed in shape and my consonants were more sharply enunciated.  I was saying “caan’t” and “baathroom,” though I was mostly still too shy to throw Hindi words into my sentences as the other two Indian women did.   I speak Hindi so rarely that until I am with my mother or back in India, I feel like it will come out all wrong. 

That absence of Hindi is one of the losses I have grown used to, almost to the point of not noticing it—until an evening like the one I just had, when its presence reminds me of what is missing the rest of the time, and the part of me that is missing, too.  The woman who was tickled at my pronunciation of “Shit!” is a linguistic anthropologist and had been teaching me how to say certain “n” sounds in different Indian languages, including Sindhi, my mother tongue.  I almost got them right, too. 

The other Indian scholar and I ended up going to a late showing of the new Hindi movie Kahaaniat the local Art Theatre.  We laughed at the subtitles, grabbed each other’s arms at the scary parts, and talked about the ending of the film when I drove her to the house in Urbana where she was staying.  But neither of us had to translate the film for the other, and both of us were curious where in India the star, Vidya Balan is from.  (She is Keralite and grew up in Chembur, Bombay, I found out on IMDB later http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821480/). 

              

All this happened last Friday.  Since then, I have missed my new friends and the ease with which we shared our meals and told our stories.  Yesterday, I received an invitation to a cha, a tea being given for a group of queer desis up in Chicago later this month.  I could connect with old friends there and laugh some more and hear my accent change again.  April is a demanding month at work, and the drive up there is tiring, but I am considering it seriously.  Now that I remember the familiar, comforting feeling of being among my desi sisters, I don’t want to forget it again anytime soon.

Grateful--no foolin’!

The flower garden behind the house as it looked this evening.  Everything is nearly a month early, and the implications of that worry me, but I relish the beauty, too.

This evening, I returned home after grading papers on the patio of a café in downtown Champaign.  We had record breaking warm temperatures (which worry me), so it was lovely outside, with birds hopping around me and the sun shining on my back.  Somehow, spending all Sunday afternoon on grading wasn’t so bad.  And my students were doing better on their papers; it’s reassuring to know their writing skills are improving.  Their comments on their classmates’ rough drafts were often helpful and kind, never mean-spirited or even indifferent.  They make me hopeful. 

As I left the café and walked to my car, I passed three striking sculptures along the street.  A few minutes later, stopped at a red light near a huge bed of daffodils and red tulips at the edge of Westside Park, I felt a delicious sense of wellbeing, a result of working hard and of soaking in the sunshine.  

As I drove home, I passed two young women walking; earlier they had been working at the table next to mine.  They were smiling and talking, and one had her arm around the other.  They reminded me of the couple my partner and I had seen at Meadowbrook Park yesterday, two young men, walking hand in hand around the prairie.  How much things have changed in two decades, and how grateful I am, I thought to myself. 

I felt grateful this morning, too, for one of my safe spaces, the Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church I attend.  I wore a new t-shirt today, one that reads, “Amasong: Champaign-Urbana’s Premier Lesbian Feminist Chorus” across the front.  As I drove to church, I thought how fortunate I was that I didn’t have to think about walking into the service in that shirt.  There was no contradiction between the words on my t-shirt and my silver UU chalice pendant, a birthday present from my partner, Marilyn.  At church, she and I sang the hymns as we always do, arm-in-arm, sharing a single hymnal. 

This afternoon, driving home, I passed Jarling’s, our favorite custard shop, and grinned at the familiar lines that extended out the door.  Driving past Hessel Park, I noticed adults walking on the winding path and could hear children playing.

Perhaps it was the golden late afternoon light that was shining on everything, or knowing that Marilyn had brought home pansies for me to pot for our front stoop, but I felt a glow of gratitude.  I know the world is hard and can be mean, but there are places and moments of beauty and joy.  Today, I felt in the presence of beauty and joy, and for that I am grateful.