Some Things

There’s something about walking through the woods to my yoga class -
The fragrance of dry leaves, the fungus growth on the fallen trunk, the path that reveals itself with each step I take -
That reminds me of when I would follow my grandmother into the teak forest on the north side of the family home in Ottapalam.
You had to walk to the edge of the common property before you got to the teak forest that was planted by my grandparents
The path was hardly marked so you just had to trust your internal compass to get you there and back.
My grandmother had a good internal compass. I have a fairly reliable one of my own.

Whenever I cut a guava that’s just the right rawness
The green fragrance takes me back to the guava trees I loved as a child.
Guava trees are good trees to climb because the bark is smooth and the slope is gentle.
The one I climbed a lot was in the yard of our rented house in Kakinada. When no one was around, I would even follow its dangerously narrowing trunk to the roof over the verandah, climb on to the terrace and make my way down the steps.
There was one in Ottapalam too, on the way to the outhouse. This one I remember because of the fruit it bore.
I followed the progress of each guava from a dull white delicate flower to a small bulge at the end of the stem which then developed into the fruit. It had to be plucked at just the right time – too early would compromise the sweetness but a little too late and you were competing with the birds – mostly parrots - that loved them too.

There’s something about snipping comic strips from the newspaper and pasting them in a scrapbook that transports me to my other grandmother’s house in the village near Kuttipuram.
This village didn’t have electricity till the seventies so as children we spent our summer evenings reading Curly Wee in the light of an oil lamp. The comic strip Curly Wee was published in The Madras Mail and my grandmother had cut and pasted entire series of them in books made from scrap paper.
I cut my favourite comic strips from The Ann Arbor News and save them in a shoebox as a future scrapbook project.

Sometimes I think I do some of these things because there is something about them…