What Kind of Love Has It Got To Do With

New Delhi, India:

I first started telling my life story to my father over spicy tomato soup in 2009. Sitting in a busy restaurant in Connaught Place – a librarian from Oklahoma dining alone on my right, a South Indian family with two small children who were picky eaters to my left – he and I looked one another in the eye as I began telling stories. We crunched on South Indian papadums and, in between my little-girl gulps and tears, zig-zagged through pieces of the last 20 years. That was a two-week trip in Delhi to get to know my father.

In Connaught Place eating dosas

Later that week, we sat in a maroon booth at Nathu’s (in Bengali Market) in the warm evening heat, eating vegetarian sandwiches with abundant mayonnaise, drinking lukewarm, weak chamomile tea, and continued piecing together more parts of the past. At 31, I only remember bits; large chunks of my childhood are a dark blank to me. My memory has deleted years at a time. After a swig of the lukewarm, weak chamomile tea, I finally admit this to father. My dad, in a rare moment of showing me physical affection, put his hand over mine and said: “I’ll help you remember.”

He tells me he didn’t know where we were for almost half of 1987. Using our detective skills, we concluded that my mother did take off for India from the U.S. (Texas) with my sister and myself in 1987, without telling my father. In 1987 my father was still around in my life, but fading from it.  

I next speak with confidence. “Dad, I know where we were for part of 1987.” I pull out my digital camera to show him a picture I took in 2007. (I have a large memory card on my digital camera and am complacent about deleting photos).

In 2007, I visited the Ganga River in Haridawar (6 hours from Delhi), where I performed the final rites for my mother. I also located an ashram on the banks of the Ganga that my mother’s family has visited for generations. We met the elderly priest who runs the ashram (with his family) and he remembered my sister and me from a visit with our mother when I was 10 years old. (I was 10 years old in 1987.) The elderly priest also remembered how I loved to sleep on the roof. I have memories of the monsoon, bedbugs and rose petals on the Ganga River, but, that’s about it. To prove to me that he did remember, the priest turned to rolls and rolls of scrolls with dated signatures by all his guests. With a seeming power to flip through time, he immediately pulled the scroll belonging to my mother’s family scroll – the Dhingra family. Images of an old-school airport split-flap display with flight arrival/departure times came to mind as the elderly priest traced to a 1913 signature of my great-grandfather, who had signed in an old-school Urdu script. Then, flipping forward through generations, he reached my mother’s signature in 1987. My heart stopped a little; seeing her handwriting brought so much of her back. Right next to her signature was mine at ten years’ old and my sister’s. Geeta Raj. September 1987.

Dad and G

There it was, 20+ years later, preserved next to the Ganga River, my signature that I had no memory of. I breathe deeply and started clicking away with my digital camera. 

Back in Nathu’s (in 2009), as I tell my father this story, I scroll through the images on my digital camera. “Dad, look, look, I can prove it. We were in India in 1987.” I show him the shot of our signatures.

 My father held the camera to his face, the pain of lost time written into the curves of his cheeks, and sucked deeply on his cigarette.

 *******************************************************************************

It’s a strange feeling to get to know your father at 31, kind of like a pair of pants that don’t fit just right. Kind of like an interview, where you wonder how much or how little to say. How much distance needs to be between father and daughter before you question any plausibility of going back to “what was.”

I do have snapshots about my father stored away. From time to time, growing up, they either haunted or comforted me. Snapshots: how he used to tell me not to go out in the rain “because you’re so sweet that you might melt.” How he encouraged my love to read but would caution not to use a word “unless you know its meaning.” How he always told me I was a talented writer.

I’ve seen my father once or twice as an adult. When I saw him for the first time as an adult and not a little girl less than 4-feet tall, I was in India dropping my sick mother off at a hospital in Bangalore. She was very sick. It was a very long time ago. Providence played its role and I found myself with a canceled Air France flight, with a new itinerary that had me transiting through Delhi for 12 hours. The night before my 12-hour layover in Delhi, I shot-off a random email to my father with my flight details in Delhi. (Last I heard, he was in Delhi or close-by at very least). Email was the only way I know how to get hold of him; I had never emailed him before that night. I had no idea if he was alive, where he was, if he ever even checked email. I just gripped those seat handles on the plane as we landed in Delhi, not knowing if my father was waiting on the other end in Delhi’s domestic airport. 

Everything about my father that day of our meeting in Delhi’s domestic airport was grey. The years had shaded his hair into a wise-grey color. The airport floors were grey. My mind was fuzzy. My mind was grey. He was wearing a grey jacket, holding a bouquet of red roses. Our reunion was magical but also awkward. Like those pants that have moments of fitting perfectly and those other moments where you just want to change into a skirt. I wanted to flee. I wanted to stay. It didn’t occur to me until months afterwards that he may actually love me.

Portrait of Dad Close-Up

My father, the bohemian, had received my email the night before and boarded a bus to travel overnight to Delhi, stunned at how I suddenly materialized in India with no precedent. I later found out he only checked email once a month; what serendipity that he checked email when I randomly chose to write. Thank you, Air France.

I now know, after point-blank asking my father, that he loves me. That I am linked to him by the intensity of which he loves both my sister and myself. But like all the Gemini men in my life, my father is a difficult man to love. Do we actually get along, as two humans, or does he love me because I am biologically his daughter? Or does he love me for the person I have become, for my choices, my preferences, my judgment? For how I kept writing my whole life, like he told me, and for all the times I still blush at the idea of melting when I’m caught in the rain.

When my father says he loves me, what kind of love has it got to do with?

Dad and G at Laal Kila (Red Fort)

In 2009, I was and still continue to be esurient to know my father, to know his history, to fill the equations. To experience more moments, like the one in the round-about at Bengali Market, when I observe so much of myself in my father.

While watching him strike up conversations with random strangers at every curve of the round-about, my sister nudged me in the side and said “Uh, G, I think that’s where you get it.” I am well-known by many to talk with everyone I cross paths with.

 I guess in my case with my father, it is nature, not nurture.

 Back again in Nathu’s, the vegetarian sandwiches are long gone; we have now moved to the delicious chocolate truffles that don’t taste like other pastries made in India. My father tells me his journey through refugee camps, government-run widow’s homes***, working through his university years, earning 5 degrees. I’m hiccupping because I’m crying so hard; I feel so proud and am surged with intrigue. “Dad, did you know that I also moved to Washington, DC and then to Kabul? I had no idea you lived in either of those places.” I feel us growing closer. I learn how my dad enjoys photography and takes too many photos; my friends have the same complaint of me. In the process of telling stories, for my father, it was almost as if he was looking into a mirror.

 I am esurient for more stories.  To hear more about my father’s journey from present-day Pakistan during the 1947 partition to Punjab to Delhi to Kabul to Washington, DC, then to Kansas, New York City, Boston. To color in the gaps of who my father is, of what he believes in, of what he supports.

 Towards the end of my 2-week visit in Delhi in 2009, my father listened with great interest as I gave a presentation in a 5-star Delhi hotel to MBA students on international development; the very next day, he had tears in his eyes when I took him to the USAID offices / U.S. Embassy in Delhi to have lunch with my friends. I took his hand as we walked into the Embassy and proudly introduced him as my father, for the first time, to my colleagues and friends.

 Yes, there’s an assurance that we’re meant to be together as father and daughter. My large and bright laughter from listening to my dad tell how I would, at age 2, fearlessly jump from the highest diving board into the pool with an “irresistible smile” is further assurance. As my father smiles at the memory of me as a slippery, water-logged toddler, I know he’s smiling at my courage for jumping off the highest diving board as a 2-year old and for all the plunges I’ve taken in life since. That’s the kind of love it’s got to do with.  

***During the same visit in 2009, I beg my father to visit the government-run widow’s home he grew up in, after the 1947 Partition. Even though it was only a 3-hour drive from Delhi, my father had not been back since 1959. He calls his brother to tell him, “can you believe my daughter is the one taking me back to Mahila Widow’s Ashram after all these years?” We take donations and gifts for the ashram. I’m proud to be by his side and humbled by how far my father has come in his own right.

Mahila Widow's Ashram, Karnal, Punjab, INDIA, 2009

Mahila Widow's Ashram, Karnal, Punjab, INDIA, 2009

Dad at Mahila Widow's Ashram

Potty Mouth

Potty Mouth

I’ve noticed a potty mouth phenomenon at work for the past few years. Our bathrooms are your typical, government-issued stalls. Black and white checkered tiles, gray stalls, nothing “pleasant” about the design. I remember a ridiculous argument we had at my office in Bulgaria years ago – about whether the design of the new office space would have stalls with walls that came to the ground or were raised. I learned then that European bathrooms have closed stalls – for more privacy.

My colleague and I were in-synch with one another walking to the bathroom recently. She started telling me about how she was supposed to go the gym last night but didn’t go. The conversation started steps before the bathroom door, which was really unfortunate for me. I don’t understand why people keep on talking to you, even in the bathroom. It’s just uncomfortable and not positive for team-building.

Anticipating that she had a potty mouth, I purposefully shortened my responses in proportion to how close we were getting to the bathroom. If I had been heading to the elevator, I would have probably responded with: “Oh, well you can try going to a class tonight to make-up?”

But painfully aware that we were steps away from the bathroom, I kept my answer short, hoping the conversation would end as we walked into the door. “Yeah, that happens.” (Big smile to look nice but non-verbally signal that I am about to end this conversation.)

We cross the threshold, I dart towards the first stall I see. There were plenty of other stalls for her to choose from, but she chose the stall right next to mine. (I now see why my Bulgarian colleagues were fighting so hard for closed-wall stalls!) And then she kept on talking.

Ziiippp. “Do you go to the classes? Do you like them.”

A long, long moment of silence. “Ummm, yah sometimes.” I tried to sound very disinterested.

Eventually the conversation trailed off, after a few more one-liners back and forth. I think it came to a natural conclusion rather than her purposefully bringing it to a close.

What’s worse is if you’re sitting in a stall and two people on either side of you are having a conversation. That’s happened before. About work. About that memo they have to write. About that evaluation they have to read. About that email they will respond to. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s tricky because if you flush at the wrong time, when there is no pause in their conversation, you could interrupt the flow of their conversation. Then it might look like you’re listening. Or if you cough (to subtly signal your presence), your cough could be considered rude as it might interrupt the flow again.

I don’t think guidance for potty mouth etiquette has been issued yet.

Romance is “brewing”

Last week you introduced me to TAZO Passion tea.  I joke, putting away my choice of green tea, and say “I already have enough passion, the last thing I need is more!” And then I think I giggle.

It was delicious. The tea, that is, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Today you surprise me in the afternoon by bringing me TAZO Wild Orange Spice, saying it reminded you of me. I squealed so loud when I saw you brought me tea as a gift. I think I’ll reciprocate tomorrow with Numi Moroccan Mint Tea.

How did you know a cup of tea is my answer to everything? How is it that three different men have brought me luscious, exotic, delicious tea in the last two weeks?

You remind me of a simplicity

i think I’ve figured out

that you (blond, blue-eyes, sculpted lips)

occupy a space of simplicity

in me.

that you are the opposite

of the kind

of the LRA

kidnapping and torturing children,

that now run to towns every night to sleep

to avoid being turned

into killing machines.

 

that you are not

the children of Afghans who fought Russians

and grew up in madrases

to become institutions of hate.

 

that you are the many operational departments

of the UN,

unexplained, necessary, confusing but hopeful.

 

that you are resilience,

stronger than will.

 

and admist your affections,

which you drench me in,

little jewels of a juicy pomengrante,

pear juice dribbling down my wrists

during summertime,

warm oils on achy muscles,

 

your love of water

and my love of swimming,

our love of existing in water

 

i now understand a little more how the world functions

with reality television shows,

superstar drama

and struggling NGO’s

side-by-side

as a generation of HIV-AIDS orphans in Africa

become a generation,

as mental illness destabilizes the brave,

as seeds of hate mature into violence.

 

so now when you tell me

how my mother’s gold jewels

make me look like a princess,

and your favorite is me in yellow silk,

(that one I wore with the white lace)

at the wrong time,

it is the right time.

 

or when you make an inappropriate joke

when I’m trying to fur my eyebrows

at the complexity,

it now makes me giggle.

 

you remind me of a simplicity

which renews hope.

 

when our worlds collided on the street

you didn’t absorb my limitations,

and the laughter, the cool evenings,

the water, the teasing, the red t-shirts,

the tickles, the runny mascara, the prickly heat,

all told me I’m not limited.

 

i love how you’re happy to be yourself. i love how you’re happy to be yourself with me.

 

you are the capability of co-existence.

Some terms to live by

Some things I wrote while “chatting” with Hugh-licious today. Mind you, I was fever delusional, but perhaps for the better.

1. Mosquito doubts

2. The redonks, totally lollipop little 5-year old girl who taught me that Lincoln used to talk to trees and about a new tribe in Kenya in the same sentence.

Chat with hugh-licious, Part A.5

Hugh then informed me in South Africa, where he’s from, mosquitoes are called mozzies. So, I think I’ll leave it at: Mozzie Doubts.

(which begs the question, mozzie doubts who?)

and then before Hugh and I finished our chat today, I offered him a sermon. (a.k.a., my advice). And then at some point I, in a rather self-aware manner of my sermon’esque behaviours, proclaimed: “so I think the choir’s next.” Trying to apologize for my sermon’esque tendency by making a joke.

How I Experienced Wesley

Dear Wesley,

It seems we exist in water, share a lifetime between splashes.

 Right.

 Think about it.

We were floating the night we met. I had been sitting in a parked car,  finishing a call before returning the two blocks to the hospital where my mother was.  I hadn’t noticed you sitting with your friends across the street, on the lawn. But you noticed me, let 1.5 hours pass (while I talked on the phone the whole time), and walked across the street to my car. I remember hearing you (with your British accent) before seeing you: “Are you ok? You’ve been sitting there for an hour and a half – just wanted to make sure no one was holding a gun to your head or something?”

I removed myself from my reverie on the phone, looked at you standing in my car window with your yummy blond hair and confident blue eyes and thought to myself: “shit, I’m getting robbed.” In a split second I then realized you were actually checking on me. When I did, I assured you I was safe; you invited me to come join you on the lawn chairs, in the deliciously warm Spring weather.

We found ourselves leaning back in those lawn chairs on the luscious grass, looking up into trees and tiny flickering lights, hovering somewhere above the ground and under the sky. I leaned so far back I almost doubled over into a parallel time/space continuum. We talked about Scotland, you get up to get water, and in front of your friends, kiss me, softly, peck’ingly.  A kiss is a kiss is a kiss. But, wait, I just met you one hour ago.  Two hours after, the kisses melted into more.

The next morning, 4 hours after we parted, text messages drenched our phones:

 You (from work): “I’m floating.”

Me (from my mother’s 8^th floor hospital room): “that’s because I’m intoxicating.”

You (from your car): “Tonight? We’ll go find a pool.”

Me (still in my mother’s hospital room): “take me under, baby.”

Second date, less than 24 hours after we met, equaled swimming, water, heat, open air, the feeling of being consumed. Time became irrelevant for us in the water; we left the weight of our worries at the shore. All I had to wear was my stretched out orange speedo swimsuit, which I only wear when swimming laps.  It’s so ugly, I think. My boobs looked like awkwardly shaped lumpy yams in that suit.

Didn’t matter. The suit clung to me for seconds before it was an orange glob on the cement. We have sex in the pool, 4pm. We’re so in love, or whatever that means. Or maybe we were just that lost. 

 I felt like curving my hips in a planetary circle, like a Bharat-natyam dancer, when you wrapped a light pink towel around my hips, drew me in closer with the towel, and pecked me on the lips, all in a flash of a second. My drying hair had curled into lifelines of their own, bouncy and curly and puppy-spastic like. I call my mom to make sure she took her meds and don’t try to hide the call from you. You come from behind me, breathe into my hair (yes, something very sexy about that) and just hover in my energy field. Your scraggly, personality-filled, abundant blond hair  wet at its roots.

We have water, we have each other – it’s so much easier tomelt into one another when you’re submerged in water. I shiver, the March weather was slightly chilly for me, and you promise you’d get me a pool with warmer water soon. (I forget that promise, until months later, when you remind me of it.)

I tried to tell you how burdened I was the night we met. My mom was so, so, so sick, so many hospitals, so many psychiatrists, it was just her and me struggling again. I did tell you, but perhaps not with the clarity you required. With you, all that ugliness just flowed off effortlessly. I know I was a tall glass of water for you to take in, with my stories of Afghanistan, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Texas, DC, Serbia, Kosovo, Chicago, Boston and my unpleasantly complicated family.

As we submerge deeper in love, we plan for hot tubs, warm baths, skinny-dipping. Don’t forget, I spent an entire summer skinny-dipping on the coast and rivers of Texas with a boyfriend and knew every spot, but we found new ones.

I don’t know how to write about how, as I was leaving to go to DC to check on my life there, we separated. Don’t you remember how I told you that Texas is not my home? It’s all too painful to remember and still doesn’t make sense. All I remember is my mother, hospitals, cars, planes, my feeling of desperation, a happiness with you and massive joltings. Then, a blank space where we deleted ourselves from the grid.

Months later, in DC, miles away, after our separation, June just poured. The rain was relentless, my mother was sicker, the pressures more urgent. I walked home in the pouring rain for days that June, in my white suit, in my sandals, in my eggplant-purple suit. Just longed for the hot summer rain to wash it all away.  I redirected all my energy on my garden plot, but every drop reminded me of you. I met a boy in those rains who grew up on a street without fire hydrants. When I told him of the fun I used to have as a child, playing in the water on the hot cement as they would flush out the fire hydrants on my street, he asked me if I would take him there. We stood on the threshold of the bus, huge drops falling between us, talking of water. And, as I was headed back to Texas in two days to take care of my mother, all I wanted was to wrap around you in water.

Days later, I found myself stunned, in our unexpected movie’esque reunion. I flew to Texas on July 4th. I held my small mother in my arms as she slept, watched the fireworks from the quiet, dark 6th floor hospital windows, and wondered what you were doing.  Now I know we had both been staring out into the same fireworks, thinking of each other. You tell me you were consumed by those thoughts, which spurred you to call the day after July 4th, apologize, profess your love. We were 30 minutes into the conversation when I told you I was in Texas again, taking care of my mother. We were, not-so-coincidentally, two blocks apart. Yes, somehow again, without our doing, we had found one another once again.

You asked me to come, so we could see one another. I walked up to the backyard, you grabbed me by my pinkie and took me to the edge of yet another pool.

“Dip your toe into the water,” you whisper to me.

“You’re fucking crazy.” I respond. Why would I want to do that, I think?

But, because I didn’t know what else to do, I oblige. I slide off my sandal and, dipping my toe into the water, find it to be unbearably hot. What I didn’t know was that you had accidentally turned the heater on in the pool.

“It’s hot.” I state the obvious.

You grab both of my index fingers, lean into my right ear; I’m slowly melting being so close to you again.

“I promised I’d get you hot water one day,” your sculpted lips whisper into my ear. Actually, you were somewhere between whispering and being drowsy. It took me a few seconds to remember what you were talking about – the promise you made on our second date, now months and months ago, that we’d one day find hot water. And, when it all came back to me, I felt like the star of my own movie.

We came alive again in that hot hot water, 11pm, with Texas hot summer night rains pouring down on us. Tasting raindrops that squeezed their way between our lips. We agree to make it work this time, make plans, set boundaries. I tell you how I have to move back to Houston to take care of my mother full-time; you tell me to move in with you. You keep repeating how we have lost time to make up for. I’m floating up to my chest in the pool in my white swimsuit with pink flowers – I happened to have a suit on me that night, oddly enough. Banana trees, dirt, humidity, sweat, swimming, we make love in all of it. You pull me under the water, over and over and over again. And, I billow. My hair billows. Your limbs wrap tighter around me. We’re simply in slow motion. Everything around me, my realities, our bodies, swirled – the last six months; my thick and curly hair; my arms; the water; your arms; your blond hair; the so-recent gain of my mother’s mental health; my blond-haired, blue-eyed Wesley.  You and I again entered what was becoming our signature dance of finding one another, losing one another, finding one another; a dance underwater in slow motion.

***

I can now bear to see your name in writing, spoken, referred to.  It doesn’t burn like it used to. See, because you represent, to me, my greatest strength and greatest weakness. You are my most tragic and magical lover. After my mother unexpectedly passed 10 days after our reunion in the steaming hot pool, I couldn’t move back to Texas. I just couldn’t. Why can’t we move to your hometown, to London?, I balked at you many times. Why the fuck Texas? Why not Chicago? But you took my inability to move back to Texas as an indicator that I didn’t love you enough.

I didn’t know how to explain to you in those days that I consider my greatest accomplishment is that I was able to extract myself from the pain, trauma, complications, stickiness, mess of my history in Houston and leave it all behind. The fact that I re-created myself, my life, my identity independent of Texas is something I cherish more than I can express.

And, in an ironic twist of fate, many years later, I fall in love with an English man in Texas who doesn’t understand why I can’t move back to Houston to be with him. So the very reason that makes me who I am is the same reason you and I couldn’t be. My friends jokingly call our relationship The Texas Roadside Massacre, and I still laugh at that because I find it very funny but very poignant.

We’ve found one another many times since those early days in the water, tried muddling through for two years, and we’ve managed to exist in art, in photography, in jokes, in biking. I still continue to experience you, to experience the blessing you were, the beauty that we were, the horror of our final separation. Yes, Wesley, there you were, as Rilke writes, drop by drop.

How you made okra

Mom, I figured out a new way to make okra. I know how much you loved okra, how it was one of those dishes that was just ‘in your blood,’ how it stood for everything North Indian about you.

Lady fingers, bhindi, okra. However you want to call it. The names rather confused me, as a kid. Your fingers naturally became the measure of accuracy for the name lady fingers. Did my mother’s fingers, clearly the fingers of a lady, really look like the green vegetable tumbled into the white strainer?

And the other name, the Punjabi name, bhindi. Sounds oddly like bindi, the dot on your forehead. I still conjure up images of your big, red bindi. The big, red bindi on your forehead that maybe for you was more a significance of marriage or of fashion? I don’t know. I never did. But the images blur and mix, and marriage and food and symbols and green and red all become one in my mind, colliding.

 I’d sit with you, on the faux-wood kitchen table, and you would bring over a white strainer full of freshly-washed green okra. The strainer dripped with big blobs of water, even though you tried to shake off as much water as possible in the sink. Most likely, I was with you at the Indian grocery store while you hand-picked each okra. Actually, come to think of it, I still snap off ends of okra like you did to check for their freshness. The soggy ones, the ones with tips that bent but didn’t snap, got tossed away into the pile for a less meticulous mother to choose for her family. The crisp ones went through your arms into the plastic bag. Destination: your kitchen.

Not everyone knows this, but okra becomes slimy when in contact with too much water. Because of this, I’d sit next to you and, white paper towel palmed in one hand, dry okra after okra after okra or finger after finger or bhindi after bhindi after bhindi. I’d squirm when the paper towel got so soggy from pulling so much water from the okra, but we made do somehow. It was a mantra that we entered. A deep chant, one that you composed and that you recited. This was your system.

Next, in the assembly line, you’d slice off tips of the okra. Again, one by one. The slicing was the next line in the mantra you so carefully brought from India and preserved. I wish our okra-time together was as smooth as transitioning from one line to another, like it is in a poem, in a mantra, in a short expression of emotion through words.

But I was often annoyed. At how much work preparing okra was. Annoyed at you because I knew you were using only .9% of your talent, of your smarts. I didn’t like the machine you turned into – I wanted to see more at the end of a long afternoon of preparing okra than just dinner. I wanted to see you soar higher, complement the okra with who you are, with your inner mantra.

 It’s a conundrum for me. Because the beauty of you and your okra never went not noticed by me. After slicing the tips, your soft and gentle hands would horizontally slice each okra. Not too deep that the okra separates but deep enough to stuff it with spices. Sliced only in the thickest part of the okra, not from end to end. It was perfection, the hands of a surgeon. Your lady fingers would transform into multitudes, the bhindi then looking like a lady finger as you sliced.

Yes, mom, you had a preciseness about you that I just cannot replicate. I love it. You would never let me slice the okra but I’d watch, with eager eyes, wondering if I’d ever get that good at it like you.

Next you’d stuff the okra with masala. You never taught me the masala mix- but I can guess. A master blend of cumin, turmeric, black pepper, dried cilanthro. The usual.

 “Beta,” you’d say, “bhindi takes so much oil to cook.”

 You’d somehow, craftily, balance each sliced and stuffed okra, on a makeshift plate or surface, without spilling any of the spices. A clean transition from one harmony to another, from one pitch to another, in this now-complicated mantra of yours.

I’ve never actually made okra this way, since those times in your kitchen, because of how much oil you’d pour into the pan. No water, since it would make it slimy, and you’d just pour oil into the pan and sauté a big pan of okra until it was cooked. The mantra burned loudly through my nostrils at that stage….especially when the spices spilled out of the bhindi into the hot oil.

I wear bindi’s now, mom, and finally have become a lady and have lady’s fingers. Last week I came up with a new recipe, a new song, a new rhythm, a new mantra for okra. It involved the same drying, since that’s a meditation inofitself. But instead the okra was married to tomatoes, onions, potatoes and baked in tomato sauce instead of fried in oil.

Reflections on Moving

I place a full bowl of popcorn, freshly popped on the stove, (very little canola oil, very little salt, very little butter) next to the 24-carat gold jhumkhe earrings my mom bought me. I dug them out to wear to Paul Auster’s reading the other night (hoping he would remember me in the future by those earrings) and carelessly tossed them on the corner of the table. My mom bought them for me when my dad, after a childhood+ years of being absent, came to my sister’s graduation. He had brought a similar pair from India with him and, in a childish gesture, returned to India with them. I had always loved jhumkhe earrings – seeing how my father’s stupid actions hurt me, my mom went ahead and bought me a similar pair for Diwali that year. 

Next to the swollen bowl of popcorn, I place a steel glass of water with lemon juice that I had been carrying in my other hand. 

I think, like a flash of lightning – I must write. I have to write. 

This is how I prepared to pack up the better part of the past 5 years of my life. The mortality of the little things were suddenly so apparent to me – the last weekend I have in this apartment, the last meal I cook on this gas stove, the last garden I raise in this backyard. It’s comforting to me to bask in the finality of it all. When I first moved in, by myself, I had no furniture and slept on a couch I requested the previous tenants to leave behind instead of throwing away. The apartment was empty at night, in those early days, me sitting by myself on the old couch (which I had covered with a white bedspread I bought at Urban Outfitters for $15), sometimes watching DVD’s on my laptop. The echoes of the pristine wooden floors were tremendous at that time – while the light from the laptop was the only three dimensional object in the house, or so it seemed.

 How many feet have traversed the doorway of this apartment, how many versions of myself have crossed the threshold. Have I morphed along the way, one continuous stream of “Geeta’s”, each version unable to exist without the other, or have I changed mind, body and soul into myself at 30 years now? Have I come where I hoped I’d be by 30?  

The depth of the losses I have endured after first walking into this apartment seem so real to me, when I think about all the ones that occurred while I lived here. (Was my karma in this apartment in any way attached to the failures? Am I breaking free of karma or entering a new karmic debt by moving?) At the same time, the gains and strides which have blessed my path since I moved into 2339, Apartment 2 – described as without boundaries and invaluable. My life at USAID started here. The second half of my 20’s lived in and out of this apartment that I often made a spinning door. Somewhere along the way, while at this apartment, Washington, DC became “home.” My friends in DC transformed from acquaintances to family, with stories of the “old days” to reminisce about. I was no longer a student, when I moved into this apartment, but a professional I had so yearned to become. In this apartment, countless sublets, guests, friends, family and strangers have walked. I’ve had 3-day-long birthday parties (complete with sleepovers), bring your own topping pizza parties, and intimate dinners with boyfriends that were eaten during the stillness of night in the backyard over the flame of a single white flame. My mother’s long visits, helping her down the stairs in the snow, carrying her luggage up and down the stairs, teaching her how to use the bus down the street.

I know the parameters, the soft spots, the boundaries, the on-street parking rhythms, the touch of this neighborhood as you would know a lover. When I found this apartment, I was two days away from having to move from my old place. I had nowhere to move to – but I was holding out for a 2bdrm, with wooden floors, gas stoves, spacious energy on 40th Street. I walked into the apartment at 7am the day before I was supposed to move, signed the lease that night by 7pm, and sat deliciously on the steps afterwards with Marc, who happened to be jogging by as I signed the “J’ in Raj on the lease. I had gotten exactly what I was holding out for.

Earlier tonight I saw my tater tot. Walking up to the car on the street, I found her in the backseat, body folded into an L shape, sleeping in a carefree, beautiful, peaceful way. Her breathing was deep and rhythmic – I wanted to melt right into her restful state. Suddenly I wanted Clarity to be two again, waddling up the stairs to my apartment in the way she used to, so I could scoop her up and fall asleep with her in my arms, her comforting me instead of me comforting her. She was wearing a brilliant purple and radiant turquoise Rajasthani langa that I brought from India last year for her. The radiance from the bright colors and the silver sequins floated above her head, in an angelic way, but also calmed the energy surrounding her sleeping self. This image lasted momentarily, as it broke when I caught a glimpse of pink tights with yellow flowers that she was wearing underneath her skirt.

 This munchkin is so grown up, I tell myself and the munchkin’s mom, as I squeeze into the car to hand Clarity a gift box for her first day of second grade. Second grade for Clarity, I think, and a whole new home for me.  Let’s get on wid it. I’m ready. As I’ve witnessed her grow up, witnessed her slumber parties and dance parties and games all at my apartment, I’ve also grown up while being here. It’s been the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life, the only place I truly could call home for more than 6-9 months.