Halloween special+ London + October issue

Dear spooks, it’s my favourite time of year -- spooky szn, saptaparni szn, celebration szn, almost my birthday szn. That wonderful time in Delhi when temperatures veer away from i’m gonna to kill you mfkr at the slightest infraction. Obviously this. is the time to launch ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS

I’ve just returned from London (just one of many similarities between me and one Rahul Raichand). Therefore this edition is heavy on London-related art and reflections. Let's get into it.

I visited DAUNT BOOKS in Marylebone, a place whose existence I had previously only known of as Marylebone Station on the Monopoly Board. My time in London --  a very rushed and hectic three weeks -- felt to a degree like walking, nay trotting (to keep up with O or catch yet another train to a meeting), across a giant Monopoly Board. Familiar but somehow different. It was also my first time leaving India since I moved to Delhi in 2014, for what I'd thought would be a gap-year of sorts. In the first week I felt like I could see my 20 year old double -- mousy, invisible and extremely self-conscious science undergrad -- walking on the opposite sidewalk, glancing at me now -- holding hands with this white man -- and wondering how on earth I'd gotten on the 'inside'. Being in London at 34 felt very, very different than being in Waterloo, Canada (incidentally where Rupi Kaur went to college) fifteen years ago. It was way more diverse for one thing; I could easily see myself belonging.

I walked down a darkening Regent Park one sunset. Trees on both sides of a beautiful gravel path, covered with yellowing fallen leaves. I felt like I was linside When Harry Met Sally, except that was shot in New York's Central Park of course. So are all major Western metropolises this casually beautiful then? They have access to enormous green parks and clean air, and we don’t, is that it?

That was actually the cadence of a lot of my time in London. Being overwhelmed with delight by how gorgeous and FREE the British Public Library is, then being gripped with envy at how different the lives of artists, writers, and the general public would look given such a facility. I was angry a lot. 

Back in Delhi I met a friend in Defence Colony one evening; we dodged cars and passed the open naala trading notes about London and Lisbon. My friend, a musician, spent parts of his life in the USA. While I railed about the misuse of our public funds for everything but the commons, he was much more resigned. Indians don't have the civic mindset to keep them functional, even if they did exist, he said. Public libraries for instance would be ruined. I can't dismiss this view outright. In London for instance we could carry beer and cider into cinema theaters. I can easily how wrong that might go here. I've been grim like the air since I returned. Not because I've turned into the West-is-best-NRIs I've often met, but because I feel so angry at how unliveable our cities have become.

Years ago I'd interviewed the lawyer and activist, Kiruba Munusamy and she told me how the DMK's free bicycle scheme had changed her school-life. I've never forgotten. It takes so little. Where is the political will? Why are we wasting crores on idiotic cloud-seeding experiments while giving thermal power plants extension after extension on complying with environment norms?

Since moving to Delhi in 2014, I've never wanted to live anywhere else. I an THE resident Delhi-apologist. Now trapped in my room with my stupid purifier, I feel the degradation in quality of life so keenly, I can't stand it. I feel pushed out.

OK back to Daunt Books -- multiple floors, excellent curation, a skylight, wood interiors and very sweet staff. My return-flight home was delayed on a classic London day (grey, rainy) and I found myself solo, sans umbrella, tramping through the streets in a pink bucket hat and bright blue blazer. Naturally I sought protection at Daunt again. I read through much of Ella Frears' prose-poem book Goodlord. Her earlier book Shine Darling has a poem I like a lot with an incantation of an ending. Here it is:

BECOMING MOSS

I lie on the ground.

I open my mouth.

I suck on a spoon.

I embrace a stone.

A beetle crawls by.

I empty my mind

I stuff it with grass

I’m green, I repeat.

The sun is a drink.

The yellowest squash

I can’t get enough

I can’t get enough

I can’t get enough

I can’t get enough

I can’t get enough

I can’t get enough

On my first visit to the bookshop, I'd picked up The Third Realm, the latest in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series. I hadn’t known that he writes fiction-fiction. I’d never been curious to read him given the heft of his books, Nordic settings and the heuristic of, oh ok old white male has written one billion words about daily life and titled it His Struggle lol 🙄. Then Devi, who took one of my workshops in Bombay, passed on his Harpers essay on our life inside technology. And my god, I was thunderstruck. He’d articulated things I’d been thinking about for years in some underdark of my mind (a word I’m borrowing from the writer Brandon Taylor, who also happens to be a Knausgaard-head incidentally). Take these paragraphs for instance:

The thinness of the world! That phrasing feels deeply true; the whole world transformed into images of the world. Yes, yes! Exactly. I went on to teach the essay in my Essaying course @workshopburi where we read it in conversation with Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (a favourite), the second in her living autobiography trilogy.

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