The Kerala Trip

Manvi’s late and both Shweta and I knew she would be. Dammit Manvi, you’re closest to the airport as well. It’s 5:30am and Delhi is awash with the first real rain of the season…there’s actually something akin to ‘crispness’ in the air and suddenly leaving seems unnecessary. But we haven’t seen real rain, not yet. Or so he says on the phone when we tell him. “Yeah what you call rain we call light drizzle. See you in a few hours.” A few weeks ago Mushtaq said we could all come visit him in Kerala and I was obviously the first to raise my hand hysterically. Despite all the hob-knobbing of the coasts of India I’ve done, I’ve somehow skipped this most celebrated star of the south. So here we were, three girls with “the golden ticket” and some scattered wanderlust in our city eyes. We make the flight despite reaching the ‘names-being-announced’ precipice of lateness, Shweta asking, “Is there still time for Starbucks?” as we become the last people to clumsily enter the plane. It flies us to Mangalore where we lose a laptop (and find it again – hurrah!), buy the world’s largest bag of banana chips (it lasts us the next four days) and just about manage to hop on a train that heads to Kannur.

Mushtaq’s family has kindly booked us first AC but we plonk ourselves, luggage lunch and all into the first empty box we see because it’s raining and this, this is rain like we have never seen before. The only air-conditioners in these compartments are the ones God made at the start of the world and we shiver as the rain spills onto our thighs and shoulders as we press up against the bars at the windows. A whistle blows and then the breeze hits you in the face like pleasure itself and we’re off. You think that whistle is calling for a train to start, but it’s calling out to life itself, signaling it to slow down, which it does. We eat slippery, rich homemade mutton stew and red masala chicken off paper plates, delivered to us at the station courtesy Mushtaq’s Mangalore side of the family (his entire family we soon figure are basically all Michelin level chefs). Then we swing from the train doors, faces wet, world zipping by, wolf howling and laughter fresh. The world is a cool green chlorophyll bubble and we dip our fingers into packets of newly sliced mangoes, so thick they’re like pieces of meat, so orange our nails are painted, so sweet we’re hysterical from the happiness of escape.

Like this three mad girls arrive to the cacophony of Kannur and yet we manage to drown it out. Tattoos, Toms shoes, leather bags, headphones and jangly earrings we clutter out the tiny railway station past a slew of hijabs and checked shirts and we are deposited upon the entrance like some wayward children, giggling, and then he rides up, tan and lean, glasses and guns and he hoists our bags into the car, shoos our hugs away and herds us in like school girls because that is what we’ve turned into and miaow…we’re bouncing through the streets watching Mushtaq point out things that could be poignant memory or completely made up. “My first gym,” he says and gestures to a tiny pink square with lurid muscles painted on the walls. Kannur, or Cannanore – Land of Lord Krishna is home to the loom industry, spotless stretches of beach and sexy Delhi lawyer boy Mushtaq Salim. Now he tells us to close our eyes and all three of us comply. Two minutes later the car abruptly comes to halt and he says, “Alright open them,” and we do and there in front of us, twisting and turning, endless and oblivious, lies the Arabian Sea. And so our trip begins.

I’m not sure what we expected (houseboats? Tropic thunder?), but the essential elegance of this state shows up in the lines and slants of the old houses, the crumbly violet earth and the tossing water. Everything fits into each other and than the rain comes down to meld the pieces together. Thus the land touches so closely the water and the water so smoothly the sky. Everything rises into each other like lovers who never tire of one another. Does such a thing exist in humans?

Mushtaq likes to eat and he feeds us like we’re his pups – often, irritably and enthusiastically. There are brownies freshly baked by his cousin Niza, soft and chewy, molten yet firm. Tiny chicken filled French pies the likes of which we’ve never had before. Flaky, frilly edged textbook perfection all created just for us. Breakfast time rolls in dosas, idlis, vadas, puris, appam, stew. Soon after there is fish curry, ghee rice, prawn biryani, mutton biryani, spicy roast chicken, parotas, parotas, parotas, “mallu” shawarmas dipped in garlic sauces, onions everywhere…we eat endlessly and then lie around as the mosquitos (that Mushtaq calls ‘local pigeons’) flutter around for blood and we let them have it, swatting too sleepily at bites. In the evening there’s honey pepper vodka and dark rum and Sri Lankan arrack and stories and lies that act like sweet lullaby.

In the day we bathe with cold water and sit by the sea for hours. Clouds pass and perched on the edges of cliffs we barely talk. Music is played then isn’t. Books are read then aren’t. Coconuts come down from trees and we drink from them. We disperse, come back together. Silent then silly. Watch the storm, watch it pass. The air is damp and cool. We tug mattresses out to the long tiled porch and lie under the sloping tiled roof. Sheets wear thin under the graze of our skin. Write, stare at the water, forget time exists, stand strong against the rain then become one with it. What to say about this rain? That it is cold and bold and bone drenching. That it comes down when you most need it. When your insides are collapsing from sadness or you realize the star you were wishing on just burnt out. In the afternoon and at night or early in the morning, whenever it is you most need to cry your tears the rain comes down to give them company. The hibiscus and birds of paradise growing wanton across the front lawn bow down alongside the palms. Caterpillars crawl out, vivid in their wetness. We footprint every bedroom and soundtrack our steps with the call of the sea. What echoes it has left in me. It surges, we sigh. It sighs, we surge.

At the beach our pockets fill with sand and we leave it there to take back some of this land. We drive to Tellicherry where we have the heavenly fortune of staying at Ayisha Manzil, a heritage homestay complete with Malabari cooking classes, outdoor meals and unfair views. It is high ceilinged, cool and vast. Tall antique beds skimmed by mosquito nets, swinging old fans and the creak of old wood. Laughter cracks the air as we try yoga moves and photo shoots. The afternoon storm breaks, welcomes us, and we dip our warm bodies into a swimming pool filled with rainwater, displacing leaves long dead. “Check for snakes!” someone shouts and everyone splashes about in a mess of squeals soon silenced by lightning. We eat boxes and boxes of date and walnut cake and collapse into naptime only to wake from gossamer dreams at twilight. We walk around this ancient mansion looking for each other and meet over fried bananas and stuffed mussels. “And then what about massages?” we nag, having heard so much. So Mushtaq and his charming brother Sayeed pack us off to the Ayurveda centre. The Kerala massage is no jasmine scented white robed affair. It is robust, vigorous and rough handed…dung scented, medicinal and healing. When you are done, the oil is so slick and thick upon your body, if you were an ocean, small dead ducks would float upon your surface. I leave bruised but certain some demon has been beaten out of me. And that eventually is the trip as a whole. When you are warned a place has ‘nothing to do’, rest assured, it has everything to find. Against the dreamscape of a southern sky, something within is restored.

New York In The Fall Is A City For Mountain Lovers

Thank you New York for taking me from California’s sunny arms and placing upon my forehead your wintry kiss. For the rusty leaves of fall, creaking upon the trees, reminding me that despite what feels like a lifetime on beaches, I will never be a sun and surf girl. No, that is work for me and sandy shores have been my office place and my paycheck has come from wearing shell necklaces. I know some mermaids…they are girls with sparkles for eyes and skin that has bathed in the sodium of the sea. Delicious and free and warm with tangles in their hair, they ride life’s waves on the backs of sea horses. How much I have wanted to be one of them and on my best days sometimes I have been as deep as the ocean. But no, I am a mountainous creature, full of dark caves, frosty edges, tall and easy to fall from, peaks and valleys, and always high, high as a kite. I am not tempted by salt but by the sweetness of herbs. The heather and pine and the heavenly scent of magic grass burning. I know now that my heart lies not in the splash of the wave but in the crisp whispers that blow in the air channeled between valleys and carried up to the peaks. And this season, this which you call fall, here in this big city, is a season reminiscent of that. Autumn leaves/bitter breeze.

Thank you New York for reminding me that I am not a beach bum/bunny/babe and neither will I ever be a city fox, but I am deep down a ‘mountain girl’. That name first given to me by my childhood love, a boy who took me to the Himalayas and made me his own. He opened my eyes so wide to that sort of love, they have never closed again. The best lovers I have known have been mountain men. Boys who have dipped their feet in an ice-melted stream. Boys who have drunk tea in the morning mist and stood with me under a million-star-sky, blowing tiny puffs of breath into the night. Boys who have promised me Tibet, treks, Kilimanjaro, the moon... Thank you New York for making me walk your blocks – they reminded me how much I love using my legs. That I am never entirely satisfied by the comfort of a car seat, and a belt across my chest should be a bag upon my back. Thank you so much for your skyscrapers, they made me understand how much I was craving craning my neck to look upward in humility at something so high, you wonder how it was created in the first place. Thank you for your bookshops, quiet crannies, shelves full of knowledge that I needed. Deep in one of them I found a book of translated Chinese poetry called, “When I find you again, it will be in the mountains”. What a name, what a thought. And I did not dedicate that line to any boy in that moment, any ex-lover, or lost family and friend, not to anyone but my own spirit that has been in ‘wandering’ for months now.

I am grateful for your cafes, so many of them like the tiny holes in the hills. Cosy and cute. With scarves around my neck I sat watching the steam rise off hot drinks, and wrote with the peace I have only found in one other place. And for the long hours you have offered me in the quiet of Brooklyn, in the parks across the city, on the subway between stops, in the backs of taxis and sitting out on fire escapes. These hours that allowed my mind to wander, and it wandered far enough to find my soul and take her hand and bring her home.

Many thanks for your people, so weathered by the changing winds, the harshness of a life constantly climbing, but so inspired by the zeniths they have reached, the things they have seen that no one else knows.

As you can see, o wondrous city, my imagination has thought that you are a mountain range. The season fooled me into believing it. And now on this last dark morning, looking out at the peaks of Brooklyn Bridge, with their lights like tiny villages on cliffs, the tiniest flicker of sunlight on the 5am horizon, it is not hard to see why. Thank you, for reminding me where my heart lies.

The Weight Of Goodbye

My room has a corner that functions as some sort of shrine to the gods. It’s essentially a beautiful framed poster of the Dalai Lama bearing the quote, “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves”. A quote I believe in and exercise. Above the poster is a verse from the Koran that Billy gave me one time when he was convinced my house in Cardiff had ghosts in it. (It did, but that’s another story.) Under the poster there’s a small wooden table scattered with what I suppose over the years have become my gods. There’s a clay Durga, a wooden Rio Jesus, my baby Krishna (my first crush), Ganga jal and a cotton turtle (the one upon whose back the Earth once sat). There are also guitar strings (some sort of teenage offering).

From time to time I forget this is a place of worship and when I return home, drunkenly place random objects here. This morning I noted with some irritation the presence of a pair of keys on the table. I had asked my dad to take them back to Calcutta with him. I’d said to him last night on the phone, “Go to my room and look at that puja thing…the keys to the Calcutta house are lying there. Please take them back when you fly out tomorrow morning.” He’s always doing this. Forgetting silly things.

The “Calcutta house” is where he grew up…a small apartment on the corner of Elgin Road, for those of you who know the city. For those who don’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s an apartment in a building that’s crumbling like any other in that city. I guess it’s never mattered to me that it’s a bit decrepit or that the bathrooms always seem damp or that the doors have no locks, because it’s a house full of stories and I have lived in those stories like the princess of my own fairytale. From the first room on the right that my father shared with his brother; where he couldn’t fall asleep one night because he thought the spider on the ceiling would come eat him…to the balcony from which his bunny rabbit jumped to death. The same balcony through which a thief once climbed. That was when they put the grills up. It’s a house with history. Four girls went to their weddings from there. It’s where daddy took mama after he married her in that small ceremony in Germany. It’s where we learnt how to be grandchildren. It’s where the shelves are always full of pickles and lime and no one is allowed to sleep beyond nine. Where the maalish-waali comes twice a week with her oils, and where tea is always served on time. The furniture has never changed. The style has always been the same…velvet couches, pictures of gods collecting dust, tiny windows encased in iron wrought into what someone in the 70s thought was an attractive repeat pattern. The house has always been full – visitors dropping by unannounced at odd hours – for breakfast, for tea, for chatter and gossip. It’s a house where every single one of us has dreamt of love. The kitchen is always a-bustle except at siesta. And there is always siesta. The house smells of spices and looks like old people live there. Which they did, up until recently.

Dada was the first to go and I still miss his gentle hands and smile of angels. The couch in his room still offers up indents for his back. Then the surprise one, his eldest daughter. When she went the whole world went quiet and the house was the dark heart of all that silence. And then, exhausted from loss, my grandmother left. I packed away the saris and love letters, the photographs and medicine bottles. The weight of memories. And I did not cry.

I went back two weeks ago. It was a quick trip: paperwork/ kitchen work/ pieces of my heart that needed closure. But those three days became a lifetime.  And then I left with the key, a soul that was whole again, and a chapter closed.

I’m glad I did, because it seems tomorrow my father will hand the apartment over to the building again, where it will become just square feet again. And next month a builder will tear it down so that by the time I visit in November, glass and steel will have replaced my grandmother’s meals.

It was only half way through the day today that I realized something with a start, and I bit down hard on my palm when I did. He hadn’t forgotten. It’s not something he forgot to take… I recall now the forlorn way he had said, “Okay, okay beta,” when I’d shouted over the phone from a noisy bar, “Take the key!”

I had forgotten.

The key isn’t clutter on a wooden table.

It is in its final and rightful resting place.

Goodbye Calcutta you dusty star, you elegant mistress of phantoms…bleached dress of vintage, patient denizen, articulate old lioness. I have closed the door, but in the apartment in my heart, the light is always on and the kitchen forever a-bustle. And teatime is as ever at four, for anyone who comes knocking at our door.

A Love Of Boys.

The world talks about women. But I'd like to talk about boys.

I love boys. I realized again two weeks ago that I absolutely love boys. I am in love with their slow lope, their fast drive, with their easy limbs and stretched out chests, and their slouched shoulders. With the way they talk to women and the way they talk to each other. The way they talk about women. The way they are affected by women. The way they smell – of testosterone and too much cologne. The way they preen – hair products and creams. Their quirks, their dreams. The way they want to grow up, and never stop having ideas for when they do. How boys self-destruct. How they go into their shells and how they hurt but never tell. How they're always up to no damn good. I like that I needn’t put on a show with them. I like how boys put themselves first, and I know there’s a lesson to be learnt there. How they are particular about the peculiar. How they protect and guard – both themselves and me.

I have been in love for so long with the easy nature of a group of boys in sync with each other, that for a long time as a teenager I thought I wanted to be one. I wanted so much to partake of their banter and baggy jeans, their heavy metal and ‘makeuplessness’. The way they sat around in groups of three and five and seven and ten and made a sport their lives. The way they committed to the perfection of it, equal parts enthusiastic exhilaration and healthy competition. The way they smoked their cigarettes on still summer evenings, dangling them between fingers then dragging on them from between finger and thumb. They’d hang them from between their mouths, the cheap brand, and lean down to tie shoelaces, or drum on their thighs. They’d strum at guitars in driveways and on rooftops. The way they caught with gymnast wrists a key chucked, a ball thrown, a can of coke, mid air. A whole world of male bonding that I became privilege to, fell in love with, and put up a house in.

And so I learnt their guarded ways. I learnt that they say everything except when it means something. I learnt how there is a whole 'nother boy inside every boy that does drugs. That there is a different boy under the skin of every boy after two drinks. That they don't understand women so they hurt them, and when they do they discard them. And when there is one, then there is nothing and no one else. That they're always looking for a yes...always looking for an out, always looking for a mountain to climb, a place to fly. That for every boy who is arrogant there are two who don't know how much they're worth. And then every once in a blue blue moon in an electric cloud sky, there's a humble boy. I learnt that boys sing in the shower, talk in their sleep, dance with left feet and take watches off when they play ball. They speak stupid and talk rough, but always with humor. What a blanket of humor their lives have. And then they talk about love – always under the guise of that humor. That everything that isn't humor ends up in songs – writing them, listening to them, belting them out drunkenly while cruising around town. I love how boys don’t care…and my god how they do.  

I love that the fabric of their tee shirts is soft and worn, second skin. The tiny holes in the cloth they won’t give up. Boxer shorts/ aversion to creases/ favorite sweatshirts/ the sound when he sneezes. How they like kisses and how they forget everything but then remember that one thing. And sometimes you meet a boy who remembers everything but says nothing. How they hurt and are quiet. How they dispense of hurt. Boys’ hands. Boys’ sneakers. Boys' sarcasm. Boys’ bed sheets. Boys when they lie awake at night, not sleeping, playing the same song over and over again. Stupid tattoos in secret places, beautiful tattoos that mean everything. How it feels like their whole world has stubble. How much boys eat. I love that I have met boys who have given me pieces of this world…access to it. Gentleman, assholes, pained souls, dreamers, humorists. Layered, complex, idiotic, exasperating, gentle, invested, devastatingly beautiful boys. I love them. I love them from their terrible hair product that leaves your fingers sticky, to their awkward shirt collars and elegant collarbones. I love the sweep of their spines, the belly fat they despise, the armpit with signature scent, the tear duct that claims to never have wept, the tried-to-grow-a-moustache but it didn’t work lip, scars-from-bike-accident legs, forgot-to-cut-them toenails, scared-it’ll-never-be-big-enough penis, don’t-like-that-patch-of-hair body part, hate-my-family, hate-my-bedroom, hate-my-past, hate-my-home but so damn proud contradiction. All of it. I love it because it is enough. It is so much. And it has been and always will be enough. And now you know it.

Agistri, Greece

You can taste here the salt on my skin, carried across by the breeze, deposited in places even whispers have not found. Hair matted into octopi locks you can plunge a palm into and be lost forever. My lips crack in the heat in a smile and between them is always a festive straw transporting Malibu lazily to my mouth. Ice clinks at the bottom of the glass and euros scatter on the small wooden tables that fringe the deck chairs. I turn to lie on my stomach, feet dangling at the ankle, book splayed at a forgotten page. The days are long and languid and we laugh, heady from sunshine and the intermittent coolness of dipping between the aqua sea. Constantly drowsy, mellow and sensual. My legs brown and their skin grows smooth in the heat. Toes trap sand. These Greek boys hang out, with smiles that transcend language. Barefoot we cross the island and eat with fingers sour fish bathed in olive oil. Lemon scented summer.

The tall blonde girl with perfect blue eyes, the bride-to-be and I: we walk up the hill at night. The sky above us is dark and violet like the squid ink in our bellies, the island below quiet save for songs somewhere in the distance. We walk to the 17^th century chapel and stand in the courtyard giggling like schoolgirls, white wine drenched mouths, skirts whipped by the wind. Then we tumble into an embrace like three children. The stars are like pinpricks promising dawn. I am reminded now of how the girl who is to be a bride in 24 hours, ten years ago would walk me at night, just like this to English graveyards. How tame we have grown with time. From grave hopping to wedding shopping.

It is always cocktail hour here. Suspended minutes. White tulle dress billowing in the wind…a dolphin lost at sea…counting ferries on the horizon…the days melt into each other and one day I reach into my bag looking for those sunglasses that everyone says are perfect and I bring out instead my phone. I stare at it like it is an indignant seashell after a trip to the beach. Picked up at the time so lovingly, now simply a reminder of another place, covered in sand around the edges. I put it to my ear and listen for waves but I find none.

Remove the turquoise bikini, string-by-string, and you will find the tan lines like scars showing you where I have come from. Where I must go back to. But for now let’s forget. For now let’s pretend all that exists is this perfect balance of heat and breeze…this glow and the smell of jasmine under my balcony window where white curtains flutter diaphanous, and the door is always open, like two knees falling away from each other. “Come in,” they say. And outside the balcony at night on the right the moon rises as pale and yellow as the roses on the trellis. In the distance the next island glitters like a younger sister going for a prom. On this balcony there is a painting that is always is crooked, and there is always a towel drying. At dawn I stand very still, a silhouette against the light beam, and I bury my face for a moment in that very towel. You know the smell – of citrus and love, yesterday’s sunscreen and today’s sunrise…someone else’s cigarette smoke and the pine-flavour the air boasts…olives, mosquito repellant, flowers, muscle, salt. This…this is Agistri…and I no longer know how to say no.