Category: Postcards from Texas

WFH for the summer!

So I took the highway again last week, after a break of 2.5 months. Of course that’s nothing compared to my initial break of 27 years before I started driving 😀 But getting reacquainted was far less daunting than I expected it would be.

My ankle is slowly healing and getting its flexibility (and hopefully strength) back. I’ve been working from home for these 2 1/2 months, and likely will be for another month or so. I’ve been to office twice in this time and can I say just how much I prefer my home-office, that’s inches away from my bed?

This is a new development cos a couple months ago I would drive to work twice or thrice a week with no complaints, and was in fact happy to do so. I remember a colleague mentioning, When you’ve worked here long enough you wouldn’t be so excited to spend a whole day in office. I see what he meant now.

I always have to wear a sweater or a cardigan while I’m in my cube at work. Back home even if we set the AC low at 72 (that’s super low for me), I have a space heater that I use for my room.

And snacks? What about snacks! At home I can munch on any thing I want. It also helps that my bath room is closeby at home, especially now when I think twice before taking a trip to the loo or the water filter at work to not work my ankle too much.

I also like keeping my ankle up at a comfortable angle while I’m working, and everything is set up well here since I’ve had months to adjust and rearrange things.

What about attending calls from home? Can’t do that if I’m in office either due to bad reception and having to walk away from my desk.

I thought I’d miss my colleagues more, but before I sprained my ankle, on two consecutive days I went in to work and returned home by afternoon cos nobody else from my team showed up. I don’t miss doing that.

And I definitely don’t miss the traffic, and I love not having to drive back in the scorching Texas summer with the sun blasting its way into my eyes through sunglasses. Phew.

The 5AM hour

Hours before daybreak belong to television lights thrown on younger faces asleep on couches, parents driving teenagers to tuition classes and early morning goodbyes.

Hours before daybreak belong to television lights thrown on younger faces asleep on couches, reflections flying past their curtains into the damp, sickly air. Parents that drive their teenagers to tuition classes for lessons they’re happy to forget about until they drive their own in a few decades.

It is the hour of early morning goodbyes in presence of a thoughtfully packed bag that doesn’t quite belong nor assume relevance until a few hours. Amidst stolen moments of delight at an infant air that speaks hope and possibilities in a way the approaching noisy day cannot.

The exam in three months? You’ll crack it. The messy long-distance relationship? It will be okay. The project you have a deadline for today afternoon? There’s plenty of time, and you know what they say about the early bird. (They say it has a false perception of time).

It is the hour of walking past gym-goers in a world of their own behind glass walls. The hour before tea and coffee, where everything seems a little less unequal, a little more messy, real.

If I were home it’d be the hour to appreciate a peaceful dawn before sweat-stained morning drowns it in bus honks and handbags clutched to chests. To be proud to belong to the land of (good-looking) temples, to be thankful for the smell of agarbati everyday at daybreak, and the person responsible for it.

Most of all, the 5am hour belongs to the “You can call me anytime sir/madam” guy who will not solve any of your issues in life, but whose constant uneasiness somehow convinces you whatever is plaguing you isn’t as bad as his own.

(I wrote this while waiting outside Texas Driver License Center yesterday morning, I heard that “You can call me” line one too many times.)

#21 Postcard – I cooked (and ate) well last week

I didn’t cook or eat properly the last couple of weeks, so I made a conscious effort to not let perishables go to waste the past week.

Warning – I bought pork chops last Saturday that I didn’t want to freeze so you’re going to see a lot of pork. The cooking was almost entirely done in the evenings after work. Also no breakfast – it was mostly leftover hummus or avocado on toast because they’re the easiest things to do on week day mornings.

Everything I cooked was yum! 😀

Pork fried rice/pulao thing. I cut the chops into thin strips, seasoned with paprika and salt, fried them to give a nicely colored crisp. Saute vegetables and ginger-garlic in oil, season, add the pork, then the sauces, then mix in the cooked rice.

Also curd for the tummy ❤

The heart wants what it wants – Rice with rasam and pork!
Cooked rasam on Tuesday night. Lazy pork with curry leaves, red onion and chilly powder, turmeric. I slept so well!
The rasam lasted me for another 3 meals.

Sandwich with lazy pork but without aromatics
I used a peeler to make thin carrot shavings because chopping carrot isn’t worth the effort plus the long slivers sit well within the bread. It wasn’t as crunchy as I’d like though. I coated the vegetables in the leftover fat from the pan.

Crab-cheese poppers – okay this came frozen and I just had to bake them in the oven. Ugh I didn’t click a photo of the dip – it was a ranchy something with bites of pickle.

I worked from office on Thursday. I had avocado toast for breakfast that I took with me (do not compromise, even if in office :P), and had packed orange marmalade sandwiches with me for lunch. They obviously paled in comparison with the lunches I ate all week, and I couldn’t wait to get home to have the rest of my rasam-rice 😀

#15 Postcard – Switching POV (Barfi! movie)

There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

“Wo jo ruki si raah baaki hai
Wo jo ruki si chaah baaki hai..”

– Phir Le Aya Dil, Barfi! (2012 )

You’d think things would have changed after 6 years. After Jhilmil, things have. Yet so much hasn’t and you do not know until your past shows up right in front of you.

Barfi saw his past through the stained glassdoor of Puja dukaan, now dressed in a starched cotton saree. The saree was unfamiliar but his pulse rose as he identified the figure through the glass. Shruti – he engraved on the new Prestige cooker, hands shaking.

He swallowed the knot in his throat, combed his hair down, pasted an all-too-easy smile and walked out to the main shop to meet her.

When she finally turned to him she smiled surprised, her eyes vulnerable as their last goodbye, while the scarlet of her sindoor stared down at him.

Barfi smiled back.

He smiled at the lie that you stop loving somebody once they leave your life. That one day, 6 years later when they show up, they will not take you right back to where they left you, a moustache-less heartbroken 20 year-old chasing after her bicycle and running along on her busrides.

He smiled, and this time Barfi knew well enough to not fall.

The ends of her saree were wet from the outpour, Shruti mumbled a goodbye as she stepped onto the road where her husband awaited.

Heartbreaks are hard not because of rejection. Heartbreaks are hard because of the shared future that crashes down before your eyes, because of the pretty-faced kids and grandkids you won’t raise together, bus rides with them that you missed and the what-ifs that haunt for long after.
There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

On the street, the man switched on the engine to go home. He looked smart. He probably read their kids bedtime stories to sleep, sang to the tunes of the radio and listened to her daily complaints. He probably woke her up from sleep by whispering her name, the name he could only do a botched job at engraving. Barfi watched as Shruti walked into the car, colorful bangles tracing her slender arm.

Jhilmil taught him that one can love again. Life reminded him there’s nothing quite like first love.

PS : I wrote this as part of Switching POV exercise for my writing workshop. I didn’t like it enough then because my narrative voice didn’t feel authentic, but it doesn’t seem too bad now 🙂

#9 Postcard – On Writing

Stephen King says, If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do it until your fingers bleed or until your eyes fall out of your head?

In On Writing, Stephen King talks about how he arranged saxophone lessons for his son when the seven-year old fell in love with the instrument. He soon knew that it was time to stop, and that the sax was not for him. He knew not because his son stopped practicing, but because his son practiced only during the classes set for him.

He says it’s better to move on to an area where deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher.

This follows an observation about gifted writers, good writers and bad; more importantly he acknowledges the existence of bad writers. It is satisfying to read things you have thought yourself. One can only wonder, however, which category one belongs to 😀

At this point, I was glad that managers of the world have not read the book, or they would know how to quickly verify it when candidates tell them My profession is my biggest passion. Okay, let’s not bring day jobs here. Moving on.

He says, If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do it until your fingers bleed or until your eyes fall out of your head?
Why then did Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird stop at one book? Her own answer is – “I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again”. Arundhati Roy says “Fiction takes time”.

I haven’t read enough to write about writers’ rules. But I guess people do what works for them, in general. Some find rules that worked for others, some set their own. The most interesting always being gems created by breaking the rules.
But like other fields, it’s important for mere mortals (which is most of us) to know rules of the game before we break them.

#5 Postcard – Work, school, weekends

I couldn’t wait to get out of grad school. Now I can’t wait for the long weekend.

In grad school, by the third and last semester, I couldn’t wait to get out of college.

My final semester was fall 2020 (August to December) so the frustration was all the more justified since it followed 5 months of staying home, and we were looking at another 4 months of online classes.

Friends that I spoke to couldn’t wait to leave (“get out”), what with the assignments, job market and the added stress of catching a virus while chasing deadlines. In fact, we all agreed students from my batch who graduated in summer probably lucked out.

I was also done with the lack of free weekends. Really, college is this long extending week that only ends after the final submission. It does help that the schedule is posted at the start of sem so you can plan out your life and, on a cheerful note, take an occasional break. Nobody did though, we just had days of limbo where we got nothing done.

Puneeth said, But once we start working we’ll just go back to waiting for the weekend, I don’t want that either.

I knew he was right, that’s how I remembered workdays as well. That, and the complete lack of energy to ponder or finish a running thought, because you leave early for office and are exhausted by the time you’re back home.

Which is why I love working from home, among other reasons that have been discussed at great length on LinkedIn. Yet by Wednesday I’m waiting for Friday again. It is comforting to know it’s 00:53 on Thursday as I write this.

I’d love to go back to the company from college, but I’d still choose my work over a life without off-days.

#4 Postcard – Convent schools, boarding life

There’s a Catholic school a 5-minute walk away from where I live. They have an adjacent church with a cross atop a spire that’s visible from my window, and church bells ring now and again during the day.

There’s a Catholic school a 5-minute walk away from where I live. They have an adjacent church with a cross atop a spire that’s visible from my window, and church bells ring now and again during the day. When the bells ring, I wonder what the kids in the school are up to – Is it time for a prayer? Are they assembling in a special room for lunch?

Of course these questions pop up because of the many rituals we had in school. We had a Mary behind a glass wall at the entrance landing that kids jostled to touch for morning blessing, and a chapel with clean floor tiles that was always deserted. When Principals changed, we wondered if the new Sister would be stricter or distribute nicer gifts on Children’s day. There were speaker announcements to gather somewhere class-wise to deliver yet another announcement, and a bunch of similar school things.
What I was most curious about, however, was the school’s boarding facility.

From what we’d heard, life there was unappealing – you had to pray at least twice a day, wash your own clothes, go to bed early, other general dull stuff. However, to me, the plus that paled all cons was that you could walk the empty grounds in the evening when nobody was around, the red earth glowing in the brilliant evening sun.

That was a sight you only saw if you happened to be at school for summer classes, or in the evenings after board exams while walking to the main gate entrance. Or if you had to arrive in the early hours for a class trip or an ISC meet – in which case you’d likely be running around to locate a student or to grab hold of your event’s teacher-in-charge. And you would steal glances from afar of the ground stretched out in the twilight, like stealing precious memories. 🙂

In tenth during Youth Festival week , a junior in our dance team was staying at the boarding cos her family was not in town. She was a window into the intriguing world with her tidbits : they had to wake up early in the morning, sit at a common table for meals, show up on time for prayer at the sparkling-clean chapel. One evening before practice, she went to her room to leave her bags and brought back with her the evening snack – it was pudina chutney sandwich, humble, believable. But of course, I thought, you could stroll around the ground any time you want to, alone or with a friend, in non-uniform clothes (slightly crinkled, because you washed them yourself), soaking in the peace.

After our last board exam in twelfth, we were slowly walking from New hall to the front gate. It was our last day in school, in uniform. We were exhausted and hadn’t planned anything special, no clicking pictures either. I think Divya said that out loud, the rest of us nodded and hmmed. As we passed by I realized I never got to stay at the boarding, never got the golden grounds to myself after all.

#2 Postcard – Low hanging fruit & Kafka on the Shore

To put down in words what lies behind the simplest of exchanges – in this case, a pause – must be some gift indeed.

If you told me today morning as I woke up, that I’d go on a reading spree and finish Kafka On The Shore by sundown, you’d have surprised me. I have not covered 350 pages in a day in years, I think. It’s not a feat by any standards, not even for the 14 year old version of me. And these pages were generously spaced and had wide margins.

Did I do this so I could write about the book in today’s write-up? I don’t think so, the story is brilliant and the book a page-turner.

I did do something else, I have to admit, because of the question, “What do I write about today“. I cooked three dishes – I used beans and diced tomatoes from cans, store-bought curd in a tub and a ready-to-boil fish curry masala so the whole thing took less than an hour. It was hard to not think I could write about this at various points.

200 words a day is low-hanging fruit, intended for those who find it difficult to get writing done. So once they hit the target they look forward to writing more until they slowly stop paying attention to the count. The other side to it is to prioritize Quantity over Quality – to do it before you do it well. I guess I’ll start somewhere in between.

Although I could write 200 words about the garlic I chopped for Rajma masala today (I didn’t count my words, but I had the narration going in my head as I peeled the cloves and made thin slices out of them). There was a tidbit I wanted to throw in about Nigella Lawson explaining why she loves canned tomatoes and how they’re a lifesaver though many look down on them; much like 15 year olds playing pretend-cooking-show hosts while they’re in the kitchen.

Of course I listened to her 10 years before I’d actually use canned tomatoes, and it’s one of the few things I’ll be sure to miss when I leave this country.

I’ll leave you with the below 2 lines from the book :

“Kafka, I-” She stops, looking for the right words.
I wait for her to find them.

To put down in words what lies behind the simplest of exchanges – in this case, a pause – must be some gift indeed.