You. Are. Doing. Just. Fine.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write an advice column to my 15-year-old high school self. What would I say? What do I wish I knew? How could I be better equipped? Hugely complicated/influenced by the fact that I now teach 15-year-olds as a full-time job, I set out to do what justice I could to the task. And anyway, we could use a reminder every once in a while, right?

This letter is as much a response to the brief as is it a celebration of Headstart - the confidence it gave me to chase my dreams, the safety it gave me to stumble and fall, and the support it has given me ever since ever time I chose my path. From being the 6th grade kid who walked into a bedroom-turned-classroom to an alum beaming at the red brick buildings, this is the story of the last almost-decade.

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Dear 15-year-old me,

I remember high school. I remember there were some good days and other bad days. I remember feeling like those IGCSE exams were the bane of all student existence and the pressure to do well, first batch and all. I remember being the first batch to graduate, and looking at Facebook pictures of makeshift graduation caps for this year’s batch, I remember our small little celebration in a classroom where junior students ripped pages of their notebook to write ‘I will miss you’ notes. I remember the group of us, four kids in total, who made that class, and having class pictures with more teachers than students. I remember Culture Class and science lab and doing the Wizard of Oz as a musical in that last year at school. I remember splashes of colour and the odd sound, weaving a tapestry that makes my memories of high school.

You know what I don’t remember though? I don’t remember what that big fight was about. I don’t remember the words inside the colourful mind map that we discussed in Geography class, my teacher and I, one on one. I don’t remember the days and the months and the years that were meant to go beside the doodled map of Europe we created, an F-shaped France and bits and bobbles all around it making up an entire continent aeons away. I don’t remember what the essay was on; just my teacher reminding me for the gazillionth time that ‘no one’ was two different words no matter what I thought. I don’t remember much of my Economics, only the sheaf of papers that accompanied Anna as he walked in, showing us what real preparation looked like. I don’t for the life of me remember the details of those classes; the dates and definitions, formulae and figures. But the dictum of being prepared? Oh yes, that one I do remember.

You see, I know high school can be tough. It is that uncomfortable mix of feeling settled because you grew up in that building and feeling restless because, well, you are fifteen. It is feeling like the unfairness of the world is summed up in the five alphabets of I-G-C-S-E, topped with the cherry of being the first batch. No pressure, hon. It is the joy of small classrooms – getting to know each other so well, learning to work together, blurring the lines between school-friends-family. It is also the nightmare of small classrooms – what happens if you fight with the one other girl in your class? I get it. I was there too, remember?

So here it is, my (and by that measure, future-your) sage words of wisdom. Put this up on that pin-up board of yours, wedged between Math formulae and Biology diagrams. You are doing fine.

You. Are. Doing. Just. Fine.

I could sit here and write tomes of all the things I wish you knew now, or the lessons I am praying you will learn. Except, when the time is right, I know you will. You will learn to accept yourself, be comfortable in your skin, make the most of every situation placed before you. You will grow into forming opinions and standing up for them, engaging in debate and holding your ground. You will get over the fear of walking into a room of strangers and come to embrace it, get past the terror of a stage and grow to feel comfortable with a mike. You will stop seeing ‘studious’ as an uncomfortable label attached to the back of an already too-long name and accept it as the person you are, even swapping it for ‘muggu’ in later years, laughing it off as just another descriptor of a complex character. You will figure out how to make your choices and live with their consequences. You will discern the path less taken and agonize over whether you want to be the one heading down that way, and then go ahead anyway. And through it all, you will be okay.

But I am getting a rather long way ahead of myself, jumping the gun almost a decade. For now, just know that you are doing okay. High school will come and go. Grade sheets will be celebrated and forgotten. Friends will be made and lost and then settle into the comfortable distance of occasional Facebook pings and the silent knowledge of support. Teachers will last, through one school and the next, through college, your first job and beyond, always the reassuring green dot on your Gmail chat list, a text away from help and hope. And every time someone asks you after a speech or an article or a presentation or just coffee where the seeds for everything after were sown, you will smile and talk about that school you once went to, a once-minimalist building where you painted on the walls and decorated the classrooms, where you shivered through your first speech and stumbled through your first performance. Always a Headstarter, you will say, and you will mean it, long after you are gone. Then as much as now, remember. You are doing okay. And when you feel like you aren’t doing okay, think back to a line of advice that will stay with you for years to come from a teacher in those high school classrooms. You aren’t Atlas. And you are doing okay.

Love,

23-year-old you

Fresh graduate-ing

In definitely more personal writing than I usually put up online, a piece as the ink on my newly minted degree certificate metaphorically dries.

If this was Instagram, #instigram, and for the first time, a college post tagged #throwback. :/

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Dear IITM,

I miss you.

It has barely been three days since you officially closed your doors behind me and yet, already, I miss you.

I miss that corner in 409 that was witness to so many conversations; heartbreak and euphoria in equal measure, that space where we could sit in our t-shirts or kurtis and forget about the social norms of appropriate dressing in favour of just being.

I miss the view from my hostel room floor, the right edge of the clothes line blocking the otherwise uninterrupted view of the Chennai evening sky with just a few windows to remind me of where I am. I miss the ability to look up from typing away at my thesis till my fingers are sore, and notice with every paragraph the changing hues as the sun set and slipped away late into the midnight sky.

I miss knowing that no matter where the sun was and what tattered state those paragraphs were in, Ramu would have the best double chai on campus and anywhere between two doors to two floors away, I would have company to propel me through those few hundred metres, all the while our vocabularies getting ready to comment at how Himalaya was such a gendered space, how the female body was still a spectacle and how the adrak-waali chai was gold.

I miss Sharav, the building that was home for four years, stage to the complaints against monkeys and men in equal measure. The walls that surrounded me for those years bore the scars of generations past me, each Room Mother/Sister leaving a bit of her behind in that dingy, ten by ten space, before moving on, never quite just as complete. For years, I looked at a door forever scarred by green marker reminding me to take some mechanics textbook (and medicines) and I often wondered if to-do lists and memos were meant to last quite that long. Just beneath the switchboard was the rather detailed sketch of the female anatomy, and so many of us have wondered what the conversation was that put that there.

I miss the stretch outside Sharav, the one always spotted with deer and couples, each having their own fun unmindful of the others. I miss walking on the “sidewalk” to mess, cribbing about just how many times we had to subject ourselves to being fingerprinted as IIT Madras tried to embrace the biometric bug. I miss hopping over to Sarayu, barely decently dressed in short shorts and an overlarge grey t-shirt, to drop off readings. “Saaptutu varom, Anna,” we used to say.

I miss the department, and how it taught every last one of us to identify Warli art. We may not know Gond from Madhubani from Chikankaari but DoHSS produced batch after batch of a motley set of students who went out into the world armed with the ability to identify traditionally white paint on earthen backgrounds.

I miss the corridors. The stretch outside DCF where you may trip over a Dead Poets’ Society meeting if you aren’t careful, or the one outside the office where we squatted for our first All Coordinators Meeting when I was Secretary, more preoccupied with whether the man in a kurta was a professor or not (and where was that kurta from, anyway?) Oh, and the professors’ corridor, and all the times we have been at our tippy-toed best, trying to sneak past those we didn’t want to catch, hiding amongst the shadows of the collective. Or the monkey corridor, starting at 356 and stretching all the way to (Prof) Suresh Babu’s room, the site of much yelping and screaming, and during thesis writing, pacing. Standing at the MML door looking at the other end at 5 PM, you would see a rather dark tunnel with evening light silhouetting the other end, and so many Instagram feeds are peppered with that view.

I miss CLT, and the door on the stage left that always creaked at the uncanniest times. I miss the high of being side-stage minutes before a LitSoc drams performance, and the comfort of settling down into the blue chairs to listen as WM/LM solo filled the air. I remember the adrenaline of a two-minute costume change, and a play that saw saris falling off and hairstyling being improv-ed into the act. I remember the anxiety of events, hoping the seats fill up, briefing photographers to shoot at flattering angles, and the unfettered celebration when people stood in the aisles for an HSS department event. I miss being a freshie, cheering a classmate on while she sang, and being a senior, waltzing into the auditorium only to hear our favourites.

I miss the shortcuts – the OAT route to Guru, the dirt path leading up to CLT, and feeling like each of us discovered a step of it. My eyes are still not used to that monstrosity of a new department next door to CLT (Chem?) and its multi-coloured fountain. Instead, my eyes will forever be trained on the massive banyan tree that acted as our parking canopy, our photoshoot backdrop, our shade for late night conversing and confiding. And all this while, I will chuckle at the memory of someone asking me if insti had a banyan tree, and my response barely hiding my amusement. “We have a Banyan Avenue,” I explained.

I miss the rooftops, and the times that were spent on it, whether we were supposed to be there or not. From a freshie who climbed up Jam Tank in a sari to a senior who vegetated on ESB, I will carry pictures of that clear, starry sky even as my hands swatted at pestering mosquitoes. I will always belong to that generation who complained (against the dictats of conscientious citizenship, sure) about the newly installed solar panels on top of HSB. Where would we host department events now, we cribbed.

I miss the perpetual hunt for first phone signal, and then WiFi. Sometimes I imagine voices behind me asking “Airport Three or LAN5?” and for a second, I am back in that dingy, unhealthy, artificially recycled air of MML. Even today as I scroll down my phone, I see Wlan of varying numbers and each tells a different story – some classes survived thanks to class groups, some semesters when we’d know each other’s timetables based on Whatsapp activity, some classrooms better loved than others (freshie classroom, please!) And on days that I feel particularly lonely, I miss hosting WiFi networks, being asked whether it is my “usual” password and creating a map of our hours, each network name speaking of the trials and triumphs that dotted that night, that paper, that presentation.

Sometimes I even miss SAC, and the journey it represents. From meeting a girl in red tights and a white kurta at Orientation to treating her home as my own, from entering a lost freshie with no idea of what lay ahead to dancing my heart out for the first time at Sunburn, from getting lost on my way from Sharav to sitting for hours in a horrendous yet momentous graduating gown, what that hall has not seen.

I could go on about how much the classroom has taught me and what the professors gave me. I could write pages on how much we have grown and found the hints of our adult selves in that place. I could speak about getting a degree and everything else that we lost or gained. But I think I will stop here.

I miss the jungle and so, I write. Sitting hundreds of kilometres away, I create a map of memories that weave together half a decade, creating a dotted path through the jungle that this MA in Development Studies has been.

In what may be the first in a rather long series, this is just to say I miss it all.

Amongst the dust and cobwebs lies a history

A piece inspired by idle poking through old cupboard at my grandmother's place. Vacation writing :)

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The translucent bookworms slithered out from the frail yellowed pages, each seeming to echo an era gone by. She tentatively folded a corner in her hand, wondering if the page would crumble, leaving mere powder and the daft smell of Memory. Thanks be to God, there was a sharp crease, the self-assured sign of a page not ready to concede defeat to the pressures of Time. One after another, books were dusted off the shelves and pages were pried apart, some more unwilling than the others, as if the security of a long forgotten bookshelf and the anonymity of being one amongst dozens were too much to let go of. There, deep amongst the scores of books extolling religious words of wisdom lay a transparent envelope overflowing with an assortment of...invitations, were they? Perhaps letters preserving the air of Yesterday, a whiff of the past that wafts forth with the unfurling of the brittle page.

The letters were ordered, as were the postcards; the former the characteristic blue of Inland letters and the latter the peachy cream that spelt the erstwhile postcard. Every once in a while, there lay a white envelope bearing a foreign stamp, looking regal in comparison to its local counterparts. It bore a stamp from the UK and spoke of duty-free shops at Paris airport. "I hope the television comes to India soon," the author had written. "It seems like something Indians would enjoy." It came from a time when a pound was thirteen rupees, when monthly salaries were in double digits overseas but a fortune when converted.

Most of the letters asked about the family, the newborn baby and her cheeriness with a dash of the usual family gossip. Who was visiting who? Who was getting married? Who was expecting a baby? It was all there, scrawled into the last few lines of every weekly letter, just before the casual 'yours affly' preceding the signature. 

There was something oozing security from the words 'safe news' on the top corner of every letter. All is well, it said. Everything is okay. I am just checking on you - a brother writing in to his baby sister.

And then came the invitations. A wedding in 1963, the celebration of an upcoming child in 1968, the wedding of that child in 1990, another child born in between and the invitation to his sacred threadceremony. It was all there, preserving the story of not just one individual but the whole family in those white enveloped with the corners dyed a holy orange-red, lines from the scriptures and various Gods accompanying the names being celebrated.

These envelopes heralded the change of Ms to Mrs, of Mrs to Ma, of Gouri to Gouri BSc. There was growth here, new beginnings and fresh starts with new and renewed families. These envelopes here? Yellowed with age and squirreled away at the back of a forgotten cupboard? These here are eyewitnesses of a lineage.

#throwback: 20-nothing

Yes, not surprisingly I have been miserable on the consistency front on this blog. Somehow that last post became too much of a favourite and I was terrified to top it off with something mediocre, boring, inconsequential. Basically, it resulted in my latest four month hiatus and usual excuses for my absence. Been the Achilles' heel to my writing as long as I can remember. Ah well. I am back now and isn't that what matters? :P

This piece is, in all honesty, a year old - almost to the day. I see a follow-up to this coming so thought it made sense to put up Chapter 1 first. Hopefully then it will drive me to put pen to paper (ahem, type on keyboard, that)? As of now, the next title is in my head with words of a vague introduction floating in space. Hopefully this post will push me to sit down and capture them? Somehow, I have a vivid image of chasing down words with a butterfly net... Anyway, I digress.

This is the piece - 20-nothing

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A babble of near incoherent voices hum behind me in a language I have come to recognize instantaneously. The words make sense, the tones are familiar and the voice is one I have grown accustomed to after many days of bitching, bonding and bawling. Laws and diagrams are floating over my head, being thrown from one BTech to another, in a hurried scuffle to beat Father Time looming in the distance. The fan above me is whirring rhythmically, in slow circles almost in a bored drone. What it must be like to be a fan, I wonder. Rather thankless job, I would imagine. The lights are at a rather inconvenient angle, forming slanted shadows over my shoulders, lurking just out of arms reach. The scene is mundane enough. Highlighters, pens, open notebooks, watches, keys and wires. I am surrounded by the life of a college student the night before an exam. A life I belong to, engage with, am engulfed by. Yet, right this minute, there is something is amiss. Something small, intangible, even ignorable. Yet, it exists.

My breathing is a just a little shallow. My heartbeat is just a little too fast. I am just covered with goose bumps. The rate of facebook notifications flowing in have just increased significantly. None of them are telling signs and no one would even notice. Yet, I know. I am engulfed by a wave of childish enthusiasm, juvenile excitement for what lies on the other side of the Cinderella hour.

A little red ‘1’ just popped up on my screen. An acquaintance from Singapore wishing me. My phone just vibrated. A friend apologizing for not being able to call. My parents sent me offline texts. One friend said he wanted to get me flowers and another mentioned my ‘orgasmic love’ for stationery. Suddenly, I feel like the two year old of almost two decades ago, staring at a carrot cake with icing in a strawberry summer dress, knife held jubilantly in hand and waiting for what lay on the other side of that slice.

I know. Two hours from now, I will not feel any older, any wiser or any prettier because of the day or the time. Two hours from now, calls may or may not flow in, from those who are supposedly meant to call. Two hours from now, I will be two hours closer to my last exam of the semester, something at the top of everyone’s mind, just as it should be. Yet, two hours from now, I would have crossed another boundary in my head, another milestone would lie behind me.

For the longest time, the oldest I could think of was 20. Grown-ups, adults, people who knew what they were doing, they all fell under the umbrella of 20-somethings. Blog posts and magazine articles that had lists of advice for them were brushed aside as being too far in the future to be paid attention to. Twenty-somethings were cousins in college, older siblings working, the people you aspired to be. She was the girl at the bus stand who looked like she could do as she pleased, phone in hand, ear phones plugged in, wearing a casual kurti with leggings. She looked confident, acted important and dressed appropriately. She was everything the awkward, gawky adolescent in me aspired to be.

Today, I am told I am at that threshold myself, a zebra-crossing with childhood behind me and adulthood on the other side. There is a solace in adolescence, a safety net in the teens, a carpet for soft landing that has suddenly been pulled out from under my feet.

Perhaps I am over-thinking this. Perhaps nothing will change after all and the zebra-crossing will be more of a ramp, a long drawn out process of gradual change. But right now, it is momentous. Seven years ago, a thirteen year old girl squealed at the prospect of joining the elite company of teenagers around the world, marking her official entry into the world of adolescence. Today, the girl is awaiting her exit from that company and the induction into the scary world of ‘young adults’. Yet, when I stare at the mirror, I see a seventeen year old staring back at me. Studying for boards, finding my grounding, shakily rising on my own feet. Nothing has changed. It couldn’t have.

As I get increasingly distracted, I promise myself I will come back to this. I will write about this till the words dry up, the brain clears up and I come to terms with what is happening. As of now, my shallow breathing and inexplicable excitement has a very simple explanation.  Beneath the sleep-deprived, aching, hostelite college student who is meant to figure out the answers to life and love lies a young girl; a girl enraptured by rainbows, cotton candy and warm hugs, craving for vathakuzhambu at home with Ma, wondering how she suddenly got all the way here. The girl in the mirror is scared. 20-nothing isn’t so far away after all. Shit.