The year was a mixed bag. Of many happinesses: Chellam and Podimol coming into our lives and bringing along joy and responsibilities in equal measures; moving into this lovely old house in the Nilgiris; R exhibiting work at the India Art Fair; KL11 being able to mentor students for the first time; many long trips for work and otherwise; good food; family gatherings. Of many things that humbled and saddened in excess: Kalyani’s many old-age-driven health problems; P and family’s sudden passing in a road accident; R’s papa leaving us after a week-long ICU-stay; associated complications and stresses; being with the many old people (‘bystanders’) lost in the corridors of TVM Medical College.

The courses this year were all excellent—the students did more and better work in the weeks we were together than I had any realistic right to expect. The colleges often felt less like going home—thanks to the bureaucracy and general slowness in moving things. KL11 has had a wonderful and exciting—if a bit too full of meetings—year.

But it has mostly been about loved ones leaving. Here’s hoping for many better revolutions around the universe.

Sun sets in Kuppady. Chellam on a superlong makeshift leash. Mathai’s snacks. Mellow conversation. Fog.

[Timothy] Morton calls global warming a “hyperobject,” something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Such objects are more giant than the giant objects of megalophobia; they can’t be captured in a photograph or even an abstraction. Time-lapse gifs of melting ice don’t help; their extreme compression only minimizes the impact of what’s happening at actual size. Global warming is happening everywhere all the time, which paradoxically makes it harder to see, compared to something with defined edges. This is part of the reason we have failed to stop it or even slow it down. How do you fight something you can’t comprehend?

— Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory

Reading this, looking at the aerial-photographs of pyres in Delhi, tense-traversing the length of Kerala in the middle of the pandemic. My prayers are with the very many families weathering private hells and the possibility of unfillable voids. Title.

R: Shooting star.
Moi: No mann. That is not.
R: Shooting star. (Makes wishing noises.)
Moi: Stop wishing on satellites and shit, maann.
R: (Keeps making wishing noises.) I’m done!

2019 was, as one is expected to say at the end of such a particularly generous year, generous. I turned thirty with unsurprisingly little effort and climbing some nearly snow-clad mountains accompanied by grief and loneliness and an unforgiving cold, mentored some exceptionally brilliant kids at two different design schools and towards the end of the year[1] and in one of those schools surrounded by open fields and hill-ranges carpeted in the prickliest of grass and populated by phantom peacocks and watched over by brutalist architecture and the sweetest of dhaba-made black-tea, fell mundu-over-manbun in love with the kindest, bubbliest, most strong-willed and not-so-strong-stomached (she claims otherwise), breathtakingly beautiful lady I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. In the beginning, it was strictly professional, R having called thisguy to talk Typography with her students (who adored her way before I could start) and demanded a daily course-plan (the audacity!; I’d always made them yet no one had ever asked). Over texts, I assumed R to be a married old-lady with twenty-two kutti-monsters and five cats (or the other way around); she sounded (and texted in a way that sounded) so patient and well-sorted (which she turned out to be despite the confusion with kittens and kids). When I met her for the first time, clad in a bow-tie-polka-dotted dress floating around her luminous self like a loosely defined cloud, my heart skipped a couple of beats despite the obvious, obligatory anxiety at meeting students whose names I had not by-heart-ed over the journey to the course. Over the next three weeks, we talked for longer than I’d ever talked to anyone for (in thirty years’ worth of three-week installments), often from five-thirty in the evening to two-three in the morning when the cafe-folks would throw us out with knowing smiles as they shut shop for the night. Over the next three weeks, R consumed copious amounts of dhaba-black tea because I could not figure out she was downing the liquid just to be around me sans the awkwardness of being around with no intention of drinking anything (she prefers coffee and mint-lime juice; and that we consume volumes of, now). Over the next three weeks, I ran away from her after many late-night dinners fearing having to open up about the skipped heartbeats and the butterfly population that had claimed permanent territory in my stomach. Over the next three weeks, after the prickly-grass trekking incident (sans-R) and many shooting-star-punctuated night skies and conversations under them, we told each other what we had been wanting to tell each other for quite some time, over coffee and exchanged winter-wear and a broken kolusse that I kept insisting I would safekeep for her (totally off-context). Over the next three weeks, R helped fill a cup-shaped void in my life while filling out an R-shaped one less visibly.

It is absurd how unpardonably minimalist, reductiv-ist even, love at first sight as a cliche operates. It is incredible how one notices a person from afar, sleep-starved and polka-dotted and bubbly, and know (just know) somewhere in the long-abandoned-and-vastly-significant vaults of one’s heart (or head, or both; I am confused) that this person (vyakthi, in R’s terms) is meant to be significant in one’s life in ways one has always wished for. Here is to the many years I’ve been waiting for R to waltz (she would prefer to bachata) into my life. Here is to the many years ahead, together.

—

1: While the country’s ruling class was falling out of love with democracy and constitutional values and the rest of the country was finding itself defending those values with their sweat, blood and tears; the unrest around us in stark contrast with what we were nourishing.

Early (-ish) morning climb up the hill with S, V and N (minus R). The grass was prickly, their stalks knee-tall, the sun above-and-to-the-right toasty, the prickling incessant. Yet the whole thing went down well. Now that I know the road (a chicken-egg-type-situation) often doesn’t exist, anticipating many more mornings up there among the sea of gold-tinted grass, pointing one places where the feet find excuses not to stray. At the hill along and outside the W campus, Kamkol.

I think I am leaving some (prickly and randomly so) seeds pinned to the shoes in memory of the walk and the late-into-the-morning conversation that framed-and-set-it-up so well.

Why go to all that trouble, to do all this? [Talking about typographic niceties; dashes, quotes and the like.] Aesthetics… is not such a compelling argument for this. Or for anything. Because it is highly subjective. Furthermore, it is a function of time and space. At a larger level. What we, Indians consider to be beautiful, Americans might not consider to be beautiful. Aesthetics is also very infectious. In some senses, you can be trained to like certain things. If I faff a lot about this font [points to a screen showing various kinds of quote marks, dashes and an ellipsis and their HTML character codes], you will suddenly start liking it. Because I faffed about it. … These are the kind of questions we dabble in… [in] academics. … Ha… matlab, for whatever reasons.

— Girish Dalvi, Practical Web typography (1) on D’Source

I had the browser open to Girish’s homepage on the quirky and sane IDC website and one hyperlink lead to another and in no-time (in real time, though, it was thirty seven seconds into the first video), I was grinning at that lecture-series (in four parts). Outside of the video, he dabbles in teaching typography, books, sharing obscure and critical information—processed, and presented with deliberate commentary after being asked six times, being nice to people, commenting on excel-sheet course plans and helping young kids (…) testing teaching-waters, etc., when not putting together an impressive (intimidating) number of multilingual fonts with folks at EkType.

I started teaching typography and accoutrements (mostly accoutrements) in August 2018. This course has me really painted into a corner with the constant struggle with whether to preach the thin-stemmed crystal goblet or twirl a moustache a-la Victore. (Fuck your middle-path.)

It continues to be a process of getting paid for learning new stuff. And I think the learning equation is heavily tilted to the wrong right side. Here is the course-as-a-commentary HTML thingy. (Updated often; some useful links.)

The one on top is Miss. SJ’s attempt at subtly commenting on the course. (I kid.) The bottom one (I need a New Cubicle) is from Miss. AS. She’s repurposed an otherwise dry exercise real well as a back/fore ground.)

* An up+coming Indianie band with its roots firmly in place in the underbelly of a forgotten surgical procedure.

While the fairgrounds are full of life and lights and odd juxtapositions of the well-thought-out (like the many muscle-powered rides that go round with one delirious kid in a random car tied [the car, of course] on to the rotating platform[1], lit up in a baaraat of zero-watt bulbs [or LEDs masquerading as those] with wonderful pieces of jugaad-ed electrical wiring wizardry[2]) and the fantastically random (the five Freudian dogs sniffing out politically incorrect definitions of people from a paying crowd, aptly named [the dogs] Raja, Rani and two other names I failed to commit to memory), the show is—without question—stolen many times over by the man with the mike (to the right of the image) drawing a sizable crowd to the well-of-death with his (almost) non-stop banter. It is as if he is enjoying himself tremendously. He isn’t[3]. But he makes it all sound so convincing in a non-annoyingly self-deprecating way (India’s largest such well-of-death, featuring three thousand three hundred and thirty three nuts and bolts and two hundred and seventy five light bulbs[4]). On my first visit to the fair, I had assumed the speech to be a well-rehearsed—and by now, standard—affair. I was wrong; today’s version is subtly politically charged (the pathos is almost palpable) with a long-drawn joke about the absurdity of it all and the flash-hartal. Then there is the manic laughter every once in a while, followed by a bout of Tamil with an accent so Sivaji Ganeshanesque it is hard to not cheer from the edge of the crowd that has by then gathered to just watch him pour out this heartfelt piece of hard-selling prose. Some people in groups wolf-whistle in approval. He weaves the absurdity of issuing a no-smoking warning at a show that promises frequent encounters with death and so on, into the narrative at some point. Peppy bollywood music peppers his pauses. The volume knob does its little dance. He takes reviews from the unsuspecting crowd on their way down from the ‘well’ after a show. Even the most inarticulate reviewer sounds like Gordon Ramsay on a particularly good hair day.

People expect in fairgrounds an encounter with the absurd. Or at least something off-kilter like a board shouting ‘BREAK DANCE’ in tall, outlined capitals over a ride where people are tied to their chairs and hold on to their lives and sentient dupattas. The well-of-death salesman mixes a deadly dose of self-awareness into the cocktail of the less than routine and serves it on the rocks. We are part of the joke-making mechanism so we laugh with the jokes and not at them. It is stand up comedy in first-person VR, if you will. His prose is the reason you make peace with the amplified cacophony of it all.

1: Kids have it the worst when it comes to peer pressure.

2: I am in awe of the one where the lights on the periphery of the rides take their juice from the axle. It is like an electric train, but wrapped around a crude cylinder.

3: He takes a short break from the banter once in a while and leaves people awkwardly staring at each other with no one to listen to, and their phones conspicuously not out. During the breaks, he is in serious conversation with a person who appears to be the show’s lead rider and probably the business partner.

4: Or something to the same effect; I was laughing through that part and failed to pay attention. The 3,333 bit is quoted right, though.

I’ve been bringing back flowers—dried, dead, fallen, plucked prematurely, tread-on with sports shoes and bare feet and by the monkey-on-the-bicycle, slightly wilted overnight—to the apartment and stacking them in a glass tumbler ceremoniously for the past two weeks. A less than disingenuous archaeologist (or a flowers-in-jars version of a taphonomist) would be able to chart mood swings with a casual sideways glance at the now almost-full tumbler. (Note to self: scan before the contents of said jar hit the waste bin.)

The habit cemented itself in place during the Diwali week when there was no one else in the rooms (or outside of the rooms, I think) and the flowers helped fill the empty flat with other dead things. The setup: a prodigious loneliness post a botched morning run (because the air is too chilly in an unexpected, sneaky way air can be—somewhat perverse for Vijayawada—in November and because I under-slept after a regular late-blooming allnighter); the sun in neat geometric patterns across the quilted lawn; abandoned patches of termite-churned earth; almost-dandelions, dry and anticipating a wind kind enough to put an end to their lo(u)nging, etc.

Then on the seventh day, I enter the room flower-laden and exhausted and sweating through layers of running shorts, and the lady[1] is all smiles and eyeing the tumbler. She’s decided it will be nicer to have some out-of-the syllabus flowers in there. (The housing society has an efficient, predictable flowering plant pattern in place. Take the same route everyday and you end up with the same dead plant parts in nearly the same stages of decay filling your table-top glass tumblers. It is no fun. Not when you realise the effort-v/s-effect imbalance is skewed obviously towards the former.) She’s decided it is time for a change from the timetable-esque tableau in the tumbler. A small, kind act of adventure perhaps. She’s decided on a hibiscus in light orange turning a deep crimson towards the inside, and a light pink one I can’t hang a name onto, with a stamen that resembles a regular wick (not John-) deep in the middle of the whorl. She says the Chembarathi (H-biscuit, Hibiscus) is a Mandaaram. I nod a satisfied/surprised/acknowledging nod and don’t betray my small-ish internal outrage. Then I realise an orange Chembarathi is as “Chem-” (red) as a non-white Mandaaram that is indistinguishable in terms of all etymological minutiae from an orange Chembarathi.[2]

I’m outraged at my internal outrage now.

1: She is from Namburu, “that side.” She helps clean the utensils and the bed-sheets and the room and makes a mean dal curry given the chance. We are past the ‘have you seen the pickle-jar’ phase, without having been through the ‘mynameiskeyaar-whatisyourname’ phase; so it is somewhat weird to be around when she is. The scene is domestic but it is a furniture-showroom-with-ordinary-lighting type of situation.

2: Later (three days later, today) post a long-ish (short) conversation with Miss. S on the appropriated names of flowers I realise this would mean a wildly different kind of nostalgia out of context. Maybe not in the original greyscale so much. Yet.

The landscape presents itself differently when you are standing in a bus (to Vijayawada this time); the ditches that seem to hug the road otherwise turn out to be rivulets a stone’s unexcited throw away (and towards the city, yellow LED lights line the otherwise shapelesss water); the acacia plantation appears grounded not far below the highway; the lively first-floor rooms are less enticing to peer into over their now displaced sense of privacy; the potholes and too frequent speed bumps feel more immediate to the spine as the grab-pole rubs against you in calculated thrusts of mild indignation.

The bus looks empty from the outside, observed head on, and I get in to a sea of sitting bodies on the floor and shopping bags of the thick-and-well-worn variety (not the fresh-off-the-supermarket variety; these ooze character) in various states of disagreement with their owners and the floor. My knack (thanks to the road curving outwards to meet the bus stop across from home) for being able to tell how full the bus is from the outside doesn’t help when the people retreat to using the floor for what it is. The lady conductor is annoyed there are too many passengers going too many places along the way. The bus has to stop before it can reach a respectable speed on the highway, with all the speedbumps and people getting out at stops they mistake for their own. Small arguments materialise as the people who mistakenly get out defend their choices and the people inside launch small lessons in geography and road construction. The bus sticks to service lanes dodging the occasional cow (and later, three dogs facing away and oblivious to evening traffic). The driver is a man who has seen enough; he doesn’t honk anymore, at the cows or the three dogs. During an argument (not the mistaken bus stops one, but a different one about state transport buses not stopping where they should) he keeps looking to the left at the man aglow in righteous anger and pays no attention to the road in front. There is a moment of panic as the bus veers into the dusty footpath, while a quick flick of the driver’s wrist sends it back up against oncoming traffic. He looks forty; the lady conductor maybe older by a year or five. He’s switched off the low-floor bus’s modern contraptions and a touchscreen hangs dead to his left. The lady conductor is always angry, and has a yellow malli tucked into her hair shaped into an awkward pretzel with an air of being messed with too many times. She folds the notes lengthwise and holds them between her fingers the way private bus conductors do. She resembles a Geisha in her oversized coat over a floral print polyester saree and the folded notes swatting at an invisible fly like an unfurled fan. I don’t share the image with her for fear of being yelled at in Telugu. Telugu at rest sounds like it is going a thousand kilometers an hour; you can’t tell if the people yelling at you are in fact, being polite. Of the bunch of University students that get in at the next stop, a girl in a tie-on niqab eases into a rehearsed texting position along the shopping-bag-laden aisle. She handles the holding-onto-seats-while-keyboard-pecking act admirably well as the older lady sitting sideways on the seat in front stares with what I take to be a sense of worn time. As always, I am more concerned whether the texts are well punctuated, capitalised and if the ellipses are true ellipses. She (not the niqab girl; the old lady) smiles as our eyes meet at yet another unplanned stop and people rearrange themselves and their bags and their drooping children to acknowledge the newly empty seats. We reach Vijayawada in an hour that seems to pass with no more mistaken exits. As we pass the compound walls decorated in flowers (in different stages of undress, if that is possible) and the city wakes up into the evening, the bus conductor looks relieved and the niqab reunites with her friend who had scored a seat early on. The friend wears a pissed off face and rimless spectacles in place of a head dress. I think the head dress could have traded places.

The bus station reads nothing like a destination. People are in flux. Even when they are eating from the many stalls that make the bus stand, they seem to be holding a ticket to somewhere. The stalls don’t look like permanent structures either. Some essential grounding element is missing in the way their walls meet the tiled floor at strict right angles. I wonder if improperly brutalist buildings look restless too. I wonder if there is a direct bus to Chandigarh.

Baker’s Inn is (as it seems the right—the only—way to be) tucked away into a lot right after the Paradise Biryani building. I vow not to look up a bookshop on the ill-behaving Maps application. For a change, I let biryani sit higher in the checklist as I retrace (the ten) steps to Paradise. The store is empty but for two tables and IT people at the counter, waiting for their take-away orders to turn up. The menu is tilted to favour real biryani aesthetes and not the grass-and-peas ones.

I wish, for the three hundred and twenty seventh time, there was a half-plate option for people who prefer the fine-dining-walk-of-shame-from-the-counter alone. (It is degrading for the same reason it is easy to find a seat in a packed restaurant when you go in as a party of one; the management is happy to fill tables if that means more money and less conversations. Then there is the original thing with two-plate dinners disguised as single, full-plates.) This restaurant is near empty and disorienting; in its airportly odorless-ness. I pick the corner-most seat. A helpful cutaway diagram in a McDonaldesque printed sheet below the kadhai boasts extralong basmati rice and extrarich masala and a Biryani Club membership ad promises a free one down the line. (I imagine that one to be a slippery slope or a very thin line if at all, as I fiddle with the sides and a dearth of spoons. I eat with my hands. [Not that nobody else does; I just don’t use the cutlery for transportation.]) The well at my father’s place is dug like a giant, condensed L. The bottom caves in to (Under? Below? Imagine a huge, solid, rounded L of emptiness.) where one stands to draw water from, and one can’t really see into it as far as one would like to. I proceed to recreate that well in the biryani pot, avoiding the extralong rice for the (three; 3) pieces of paneer and many pieces of carrots impersonating more pieces of paneer. (I must say one of the three [3] pieces was more of a slab by biryani-pot standards. But I digress.) Tiny insects (about the size [and consistency, and taste] of a cumin seed) nosedive into the leftover rice and I can’t tell if they are used to this. The badges just say PROBIRYANIDIVETEAM. The insect-garnished food releases a nice biryani-smell as I bring handfuls closer to my noggin, not like fake-biryani at all. I wonder if the IT regulars at the counter had something to do with the aroma-late-release mechanism. The hara bhara kebabs (all nine [9] single-person-shaming pieces) taste tired, in an appropriate way. I wish I had the blue Tupperware lunchbox with me. I am sevety-nine percent certain, that along with the towel, a Tupperware lunchbox is one of those things you can’t afford to get out of the galaxy without. I attempt reading some fairgrounds-reporting as I eat and it doesn’t work out the way it used to. The food demands attention (with the kamikaze cumin seeds and whatnot) and the chain-restaurant ambience makes me focus more on the spices in an attempt at savouring it despite.

Baker’s Inn is equally lovely for its lack of patrons at this hour. The portions are surprisingly one-man-friendly for the Valentine’s day ambience. There are no (0) fake flowers in sight. I order a Rich Truffle pastry to go with the coffee. It turns out to be sweet enough for a table of four. (I don’t mind.) The coffee drips from a swanky CCD-branded machine and sets expectations right. Not a lot happens over it. The paper cup has pink butterflies and random basic shapes on it. This I hate.[1]

I take a different road back to the bus station and am glad I did. As I get off the auto onto the loud and in-flux bus station premises, Mr. D calls up to say Dekho is in a design history book now. He wants to know if I am happy. Maybe the news hasn’t sunk in enough to make me sound cheerful. I manage to ask after the studio people before the buses and people going places are too unbearable to be talking on the phone. I text him with a promise to eat more cake if that helps bring more good news. He says I should, everyday. Design history books are expensive business. Having something you helped make printed in one of them is supposed to be a big deal first, and a soft-but-heavy cross to bear, next. I skip the big deal bit and find a Guntur bus. I look at the cropped-and-saved Guntur Talkies poster to double check if the bus is really Guntur-bound. The conductor confirms this and seems to be less on edge than the last one. I think this one is married to the driver. There is something very domestic in the way she hands him the one-liter ex-Sprite bottle. A frail young man is sleeping on the 3-seater bench ahead of where I sprawl. He is asked to leave at the first stop. He doesn’t look surprised at the request and is relieved the demand came early. He plays a fixed, recurring part in the domestic scene, judging from the way all three parties take the whole deal in with an unstated-kind-of-compliance. The bus is a home on wheels at night. All scenes turn domestic past the hour a city sleeps. This is why it is wise to stay on the streets after the shuttered shops have shut and the last of the hundred-rupees-no-bargains-pajama-vendors have gone home. The bus is empty and jumpy on the speedbumps. The conductor breaks into a song and the bus is now a cradle. She doesn’t have a malli tucked into her perfect hair.

1: With the appropriate intensity expected of a man on a biryani-then-sugar high.