I genuinely don’t know what to write. Hmm… let me think. Do I actually have nothing to write at all? Or do I have too much to write and simply don’t know where to begin? I think it’s the latter.
I have a lot of things in little bits, each waiting to be written down. They somehow never seem to come together into one vast philosophical outburst that would burst violently from my mind like a flood. They just sit right inside me in silence because though there is a lot of things, they are all in little bits. These little bits tiptoe into my mind when I am on the bus, when I am home alone, when I am in class staring into a wall, when I am with friends zoning out and even at night when I am trying to fall asleep. They come and they go. So I never notice and I never write them down.
Thanks to the text “Nanga can you write something for the blog this weekend” I started stirring my brain hoping to catch some big fish of an idea. MHM. Nothing came to my mind. I stirred again and again and again. So now we have a lot of things in little bits. I like how it sounds. So I am going to repeat that again and again and again whenever I get a chance. I might even make it the title of this “thing”.
Lately I’ve been thinking about late evenings. I don’t mean the 5pm where the sky is all blushed in darker shades of yellow and contoured in the red of an overripe mango. That is for me, very loud. I mean the twilight of 7 pm where the sky is all wrapped in a weird blue colour with a dust of purple, maybe even pink if it is in July or August. I’ll see stars scattered like some bits and pieces of a biscuit if I am lucky. And if I am really lucky I will see a silver slipper of a moon flickering at the fainting light of the setting sun. That means it is not going to rain. And if I am really, really lucky I will hear the lovely whistle of the kettle in the kitchen accompanied by an adlib of “Chanduniiiii bring your mug from wherever you have put it”, that means Ammi and Thaththi are home. I go through this pretty much everyday unless I am stuck in that awful boarding place of mine. That means I am really really lucky most of the days.
But you know what I used to be even luckier. This bit is probably the bit that crosses my mind the most. In the late evenings there used to be a few other things that I loved other than the purplish blue sky, star dust, the kettle, Ammi and Thaththi. There used to be a shaky but happy voice of my Achchi and packets of Murukku Seeya bought every evening from the shop near my house because I have a strong bias for spicy foods. There also used to be a furball who flashed to the kitchen the second it heard the kettle whistle and it would purr and meow its way through the whole evening till dinner. At some point along the way, my murukku packets, that shaky happy voice and the soft purrings have faded into an oblivion which I dare not cross; as if someone stole them all one night at once. So I cannot help but think as I am sipping the tea Ammi made, “at least I am really really lucky though I am not even luckier.”
There’s one more bit that crosses my mind these days. That is a book called “Greek Lessons”. It has little to do with Greek, probably nothing at all I thought as soon as I started reading the book. It is about a man in his mid 40s slowly losing his sight and a woman who lost her ability to speak. Well, I know what you thought. “Ah it is a romance between them”. No, actually it is not. Their worlds do not collide in the way it usually does in romance tropes. Their worlds just quietly flow side by side without a collision. It is about the slow and painstaking process of losing one’s ability to communicate and one’s ability to understand the other. They may as well fall in love at the end and I don’t know because I haven’t finished reading the book yet. But it is about “Greek” lessons after all.
My initial assumption was entirely wrong. Thanks to the couple of modules I took in linguistics last year, I know that Greek is a language that is dead and it never evolves. You cannot necessarily say something in it. Even if you do, I doubt if anyone can understand. But then I thought, “Don’t we all speak Greek once in a while?” Haven’t we all heard people we love speak Greek once in a while? Haven’t we all at points lost our sight and our ability to speak? Haven’t we all felt our throats clogged in front of a person we love or our ears clogged in front of a person we don’t love? Well I have quite often felt my ears clogged while I am at lectures because I am thinking about a lot of things in little bits at those times.
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