Afternoons are my favourite time of the day. They don’t have the kind of pressure mornings have to be productive and beautiful. They don’t subscribe to the way nights must be lonely or creative. Afternoons don’t have that kind of presumption to them. They’re usually quiet and soft on their toes. I’m always sad when an afternoon ends, specially if it is on a day off.
This weekend, I spent time in the afternoon watching Young Sheldon, reading Manto (gifted to me by an old friend), and of course, sleeping. I was bamboozled into watching Young Sheldon by persistent Instagram reels in which his quirky family is being utterly charming and funny. Safe to say his mother, Mary, is my least favourite character (after Sheldon), and George, his father, is my favourite character. It must be said that Missy and Meemaw deserve their own show. I never got around to finishing The Big Bang Theory which I thought was glibly misogynistic, unnecessarily overdressed (they live in California for Christ’s sake, why is everyone wearing sweaters), and Sheldon was a pompous ass in that one as well. In Young Sheldon you can see how his mother spoils him such that he becomes an overbearing adult. I don’t think I will finish watching seven seasons of this show, but having a TV show to watch while I munch on a mini Twix has been a fun way to spend some free time.
When today’s afternoon seeped into the summer evening, I felt a sadness come over me. I’ve never been the kind of person who lives for the weekend, but it is high time that weekends should be three days now (more on that in my previous post). As Bill Waterson said, there should be more time to do all the nothing you want to do. I tend to pile up all the nothings I want to do and this weekend was one of those. Yes, I may have not been able to keep up with the NaPoWriMo this year, but I have let a little bit of life take over from poetry. When I was trying to post my 6th poem on the Daily Riyaaz blog, it was glitching a lot and I abandoned the pursuit. There is an expiry date to using Blogger. I think present day is well past that expiry date. For now, I have gone back to writing nonsense in my journal, some of that nonsense has become poetry that I might or might not publish on my blog, and some other nonsense has become slough writing.
Slough writing because SF helped me transition my new ink pen from a blue ink cartridge to a purple ink cartridge. I was afraid that changing from blue ink to purple ink wouldn’t be possible immediately. It is a new ink pen that I received as a birthday gift. I wasn’t ready to wash the nib under water like one is wont to do. However, it turns out that the blue ink washes off and the new ink flows into the water, first being a light purplish colour and then the purple deepens once you start writing. Somewhat like the sky at sunset.
I suppose there’s only so much one can romanticise the sunset, but on Friday I saw a plump, muted-red globe peeking at me from the back of ungodly concrete buildings and I had to stop for a minute because that kind of staring at me required a good staring back. Pictures of that sun in all its theatrical glory during the recent solar eclipse rekindled awe inside my plump, muted-red heart. The reflection of the solar eclipse through the leaves undid my stale jadedness so quick, I found myself surprised. That the sun was forming golden waves and crescents on the ground where we walk felt like the heavens rained on us a golden shimmer unlike anything we have seen before. That we could witness this was a reminder of the planet we have inherited, of the fact that we are so lucky to be born as humans. It’s a pity that we have forgotten this and been made to feel that our lives are anything less than magical, less than precious.
I see fascists and bigots on social media arguing that some people deserve less than others and I wonder what they had to say about the solar eclipse. It wasn’t as if the golden shimmer was theirs alone. Was it? But enough about the universe’s enchantment. How about the small things? Today I experienced first-hand what it means to make the basics accessible for everyone, because it is such a simple thing — everyone deserves the basics. My physiotherapist asked me to take a couple of injections, and for all of last week, I was unable to find a private doctor who, for the love of all that is good and holy, would inject me with those sordid vitamins I was carrying around for a week. Today, I went to a government hospital where a young, English-speaking doctor told me that not only would she administer the injections, but also that I didn’t have to buy them in the future. They were available for free at the government hospital. The whole affair took 15 minutes and 10 rupees and I was so grateful and amazed. My amazement didn’t come from the fact that I, a privileged woman, was able to get a cheap deal on my medical care, but that medical care is available to the general public as if it is a given, as if we deserve it for simply existing (because we do). I understand that government hospitals are not the epitome of medical help. But isn’t this what most resistance is about? The distribution of the basics to all of us not because we have somehow ‘earned’ it but because we ‘deserve’ it by simply being alive.
We deserve so much just because we are alive, because we are here. The biggest lie we have been told is that we have to earn our lives, earn the love of friends and family, earn the respect of fellow humans. I may be oversimplifying, but seeing what the students at Columbia University are doing in the face of colonisation and illegal occupation gives me so much hope. We humans tend to have this kind of passion when we go to college, and for those brief years, we think that the world will yield to our optimism. For the sake of all of us, I hope that the world yields to the optimism of those who are able to muster it. For the sake of all of us, I hope that we are able to reimagine our jadedness under golden shimmers, unearned caring, and unbridled hope.
amarllyis 
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