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.   

Always a surprise

Every year, spring arrives.  And every year, I am a little surprised.  

Intellectually, of course, I understand that spring will follow winter (though in 2011, for the first time, I began to doubt it, as winter persisted mercilessly).  I like the changing of the seasons here in the Midwest and have grown used to this cycle since moving to the northern United States.  I understand now why people talk about the weather.  In India and Kuwait, seasons changed, but except for the occasional monsoon flooding or red-tinted sandstorm, there wasn’t much to talk about.  In central Illinois, in contrast, change is the one constant.

So, why does spring surprise me?  I think it’s the boldness of the season, the audaciousness with which brilliant yellow daffodils and rich purple crocus pop up out of last year’s mulch, the glee with which the daffodils bob their heads in the central Illinois breeze.  Nature uses bright colors, colors that complement each other, almost as though to get our attention, to demand that we notice the earth is changing, that it is waking up and greeting the spring sunshine and the lengthening days. 

As a sixth grader in India, I memorized Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils—long before I had ever seen a daffodil in person.   I loved the image of flowers “Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” on the shores of a lake.  Years later, as a grad student at Penn State, I thought of the line “Continuous as the stars that shine/and twinkle on the Milky Way” after spending a late night lying in a field with friends, watching the Perseid meteor showers.  I had just come out as a lesbian and felt very alive.  My friends and I had not planned on our outing to the fields, so we were cold in our summer clothes, and the four of us were sharing one thermos of hot coffee.  We were all graduate students in English, so we tried to think of poems about stars as we watched the meteors; Wordsworth’s line came to me only after I was back in the warmth of my studio apartment.

I thought of Wordsworth again as I walked among the daffodils in Canterbury, on the grounds of St. Martin’s Church, the oldest church in England, established in 597 AD.   The church was just up the street from where I lived for the semester in 2009, and I often walked in the cemetery surrounding the building, admiring a spectacular view of the cathedral.  That morning, I was listening to music when a particularly catchy song came on, and I found myself dancing and singing among the daffodils and gravestones, and then ducking behind a bush and quieting down as some workers came to tend the grounds.  That spring in England, seeing yellow flowers adorn open, grassy spaces, I understood why daffodils moved Wordsworth to write poetry. 

Now another winter has come to an end, and daffodils offer themselves as gifts to our eyes, while their dancing forms inspire our bodies, inviting us to dance in the sunshine.

Holi: Saturated Color

Today is Holi, the spring festival of colors celebrated by Hindus all over the world.  I haven’t played Holi since I last lived in India in 1978, and I miss it.  Yes, one plays Holi, with colored powder and colored water; it’s a messy, exhilarating affair. I remember running all around our colony (housing estate) in an old dress, rubbing others’ faces with color and spraying water from my pichkari, my plastic squirt bottle.  (I remember one bottle in particular shaped like a fish.)  One Holi, my closest friend and I held hands and jumped in the deep end of the colony swimming pool; our dresses were wet anyway, and no adults were looking.  I don’t think we dyed the pool too much, and I achieved a rite of passage I had been afraid to until then: I jumped in the deep end. 

Looking back, I realize that growing up with Holi helps to explain my love of color: bright, saturated color.  The color of the world I inhabited as a child.  I like to wear bright colors, I like to paint with them, and I like looking at them.  One day, I might once again smear them on a dear one’s face. 

Below are some pictures of color in my life recently, and here is a wonderful slide show of celebrations all around the world: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/07/holi-2012-festival-of-colors-spring-songs-photos_n_1326812.html

 

 

The curtains in our living room, made of old saris. 

 

 

 

Pages from my art journal

Windows as art at the Indianapolis airport