Summer-nostalgia

the air conditioning is turned off, it’s 6:30 a.m, and i’m awake. the onslaught of sunlight, my curtains like a sieve, the dust collecting near the panels of my dorm window, somehow holds the light before it reaches me.  

it’s palmyra season, the swaying trees, branches bare and jutting upwards, in surrender to the sky. “take me,” they seem to say, it’s been a long haul and I want to come home. footsteps of my grandmother’s house, i gaze up and I haven’t grown older. i feel five, eleven and twelve and nine, the accumulation of all the years that are long gone. the past beating inside me like a second heart.

the village deity, sculpted in stone, a shrine built under a palm tree, always did move me. the devotion of these people, to god or just life? to insure them against its trials. 

my grandmother says, 

she wards off the evil spirits that 

decide a happy dance in the dead of the night. 

troubling lone travellers

‘summer’- nani’s home? dadi’s house? 

(the answer involves a delicate contemplation of the persisting family dynamics), 

but I don’t even call them nani or dadi,

that’s what all the people I know back in Bombay would call them; 

the perpetual outsider, running away only wanting to be chased and brought back - 

withered, 

wilted, 

hands picking at the white palmyra shells, 

velveteen dusky hued hands against the pale white, revealing the chubby wet contents of the fruit, you know it’s summer, the melanin never escapes summer. indigo airlines,

  those cashew boxes and the sequence of white dots forming a worli art-like airplane, against a deep blue nothingness, green rimmed, salted cashews; the box later finds itself promptly placed, between Tupperware dabbas in my mother’s cornucopia; 

the rush of significance climbing up the ramp, the memory of that feeling lingering even to this day, the inertia my legs felt, my hair twisting itself into myriad strands, the air heavy and humid, gushing from the whirring engine, the sheltering sky an awning above. timing the chorus of the song to the plane taking off, my mother disapproved of headphone usage, she still worries about radiation, nineteen year old me  hallucinates her frown in my peripheral vision every time I plug a pair in the only world that I would truly come to own; caught there in that moment of flight, in the vacuum between my pinna and the padding. but somehow, I still try to find cracks and fall through them.

Written by: Nithila