June

I don’t normally write about my month or days but June is an unexpectedly windy affair, the branches outside my window keep knocking constantly so I open up the sacred space of my room into a rare invite to come and join me for a while.

Often the life you see me live is very different from the one I think I am living. For this month, I will let you be privy to my inner commentary as well.

1st June was when I made breakfast and planned to cook all meals of the day. There is this new hole I’ve been falling into wherein I do not work in the day thinking my work is easy to wrap up with one hour of actual dedicated time but then since it is not done I do not relax and partake in other activities till it is done. I then proceed to not work on it at all so I end up at like 10pm with no work or actual fun stuff I wanted to do post work done.

Since this is a self upsetting habit I am trying to work my way out of it. Step one of this was to cook without stifling my wacky intrusive voice. This has led me to making lady finger in coriander-mint curry in the middle of my work day. I am also working on reading ‘The Lowland’ by Jhumpa Lahiri. A lot of the praise around her writing has been around the immigrant experience and I am really eager to see if she is able to write any part of it that I can relate to.

I let Kankana’s upcoming birthday party excitement set in, I reached out to Monisha and asked her to make a pretty illustration for the theme. I really did not want to do anything for my birthday this year so my feelings towards helping her out with hers was getting a little tricky. If I put in a lot of my vision would that change it into a joint birthday? I knew I definitely did not want to do that. But I also wanted to help with it given the concept we were going with.

I also asked people on the IndieWebClub group for recommendations of other apps I can use to track events and tasks that are not Google Calendar and now I have one!

Missing an event I had filled a form for one month ago made me realise maybe my brain tracking system is no longer enough. I will see how this new tracking system works. I think more than anything, seeing the visual representation of what I already have will make me think twice before committing to a fun schedule of plans with no breathing room for myself. I highly value my breathing space.

1st June ended with a cozy shared dinner with Munazzah during which I introduced her to the Knives Out trilogy. For some reason I decided I would make her watch the second movie first. I do not think watching out of order is a sin. I have read so many book series in whatever order they were available at the library and it was still an enjoyable experience. After the movie I went back to my room that is now way less visibly cluttered and feels like collapsing into a cocoon. The weather helps me enjoy the quiet winding down hours. I imagine writing an account of my day. I imagine writing a lot of things that I have opinions on. I fall asleep imagining, basking in the perfect hour on my balcony with my notebook and pen and the wind that I will one day get to live.

2nd June opens a lot later than I thought. I have been struggling to wake up. There is a morning work call I have that I am avoiding very strongly. To actually not face this call I stay in bed as long as I can, in denial. When I did finally wake up, I decided to cook the black chickpeas I left soaked overnight. I’ve been trying to work on a set of rules to make the process more interesting, the primary rule as of now is to only cook with ingredients already at home. This meant I had to cook black chickpeas curry WITHOUT green chillis. I love green chillis, I tried to add all the other things that could bring in a kick of spice to the dish.

But I was working with a limited supply of onions as well. Green chili and onion are the cornerstone of all the Indian curries I like. I threw together a tomato heavy curry and heated up the black chickpeas.

We ate it with some leftover fried potato and sourdough bread before I left for work. I had something to look forward to today, the cinemanextdoor screening.

The weather was kinder, I could dress more fun. On the way to my office, while reading another Jeanette Winterson book, I got a text from Swastika. She had finished the annotated version of ‘Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?’ which I had shared with her a week back. A happy coincidence as I had also just finished The Lowlands and had all these thoughts about it that I wanted to write down. She asked if we should meet this weekend and I thought, why not today?

I asked her if she was open to meeting today. My day would change from a semi dreary one to a perfect one. I could leave early from office and meet up with her at a cafe to talk about the book, then I could go watch a movie. I would then go back to a home cooked meal. Sitting in office with the gorgeous weather just passing me by was agitating enough. I was also anxious to not be late for the movie. Last time I had left work 1.5hrs before and still gotten late because of the rain. I wanted to go early and sit in a cafe before the movie. Swastika was free to meet, so this imaginary plan now had a much higher chance of becoming true.

I wanted to take out 30mins in office to write a coherent review of The Lowlands. I was very onboard with the settings and the characters introduced and there were a lot of ‘food for thought’ moments. But it wasn’t a five star read for me. I wanted to articulate this properly though because we both had shared books really close to us with each other. But naturally I did not get time throughout the day and had to go into the meeting blind.

We met up at Muru Muru where I ordered a drink I did not like but the cafe overall seemed really nice. I would like to go there again with Himanshu and order different things. We talked about the books, about a bunch of other things and I felt nice to be in the rhythm of a newly forming friendship. I like how fascinating it is to unravel a person. (I have been told that understanding human behaviour is my special interest but I find it hard to believe there is anyone who does not enjoy this.)

At around 6pm I decided to leave for Underline Centre. I was hoping to catch Anik before the start of the movie because we were talking about overstimulation of senses that I wanted to further discuss with him. I made it right before it started raining! This whole week had been very rainy and I had been late for the previous movie even though I had left 1.5hrs earlier from office. I was determined to be on time, this time. And I was!!

Anik wasn’t there but Kavz was and they had the cutest book Aayush and me flipped through. The highlight however was a Tarot Reading they did for me. It was my first, as with all things I have a complicated relationship with zodiac and tarot from age six, for reasons that are extremely long to get into. I was expecting something vague and negative to decipher but it was surprisingly an insanely positive reading.

Before I list the cards I would also like to point out that I reached and went to pee with less than 10mins of thinking about is it okay to go pee now which is a huge improvement from my usual. I struggle to allow myself to pee in new places, especially if I’m talking to someone and the choice is to pause the conversation and go or just hold it in.

The tarot cards were :

• II Of Cups

• The Star

• III Of Cups

I realised a lot of the tarot reading comes from the reader. Their method of delivery and excitement carried a lot of weight. I struggled a bit with accurate facial expressions and saying my wows at the right time but I think overall I nailed it. I might have just looked a tad bit disinterested. I don’t know why it is easier to emote sometimes and such a task to translate what I’m feeling other times.

Anyway, this is what the cards mean in short :

Highlights a deeply harmonious and uplifting period for your emotional connections and personal dreams. It represents a powerful cycle of romantic bonding, joyous community celebration, and renewed hope for the future.

This whole account of 2nd June is leading to this very moment, which is the screening of the Documentary/Drama, Four Daughters.

I had further plans for the night, but this movie was a lot like hitting my teeth against the asphalt. It was like unexpectedly finding your mouth open into concrete. In a really nice way. I was stunned after watching it.

On my way back in the metro, I thought only about it. It consumed my thoughts in a way that made me want to grab everyone I know by the neck and force them to watch it. It made me think about how above all else, everyone values the freedom to choose. It’s why we do anything, even if our actions are self destructive. The fact that we get to choose it is the catharsis.

The tender, almost motherly lens with which the movie confronts all the hard topics stuck with me. When I got back home I realised I did not want to talk to anyone. I got myself a plate of dinner and went into my room, thinking over the movie until I unexpectedly fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

On 3rd June I was all dressed and ready to go to office, but decided against it at the very last minute. Kankana was back in Bangalore as well. I decided to work from home. After a bit of hanging out and catching up with each other Kankana decided she would make peanut butter sauce pasta. This was entirely new and foreign, not to mention the fact that Kankana was going to be cooking.

We made a day out of it. Even though the entire day was pretty fun, by night the social exhaustion was setting in. Lately, because I’ve been going to office more regularly, the social exhaustion has been setting in much faster. By 7pm, we knew Munazzah’s mom would be coming over to stay at our place. We had to clean up the house and remove all things offensive to her from the public spaces.

I really wanted to lock in and get the task out of the way but Munazzah was going through the stages of denial. We ordered different flavours of ice cream and comically only Munazzah’s wasn’t nice, we were also drinking a lot of cold brew among other things. We were all joking around till almost 12:30am. This is when we decided to go to the balcony and it was so pretty and insane.

The wind was blowing over the clouds and we could spot more than five constellations in the sky. Something I am sure I had never done in Bangalore before. I didn’t want to go back inside at all. Among the songs I played was Dear June by Mark Diamond. Something that struck me this time around was the lyric : ‘To be honest with you I don’t really mind the cold’.

The cold was rejuvenating me if anything. It made me feel like I could do things again.

I decided to write about June right then.

June with its breeze and rain, June the kind of cold I would love to borrow myself in a blanket and read with. The first week of June, already a place like home.