Juvenis

Author's Note

The sixth month has come and gone, and I am stuck in in-betweens. Between happiness and oblivion, between understanding and chagrin, between affection and hatred, between order and disorder. Demands eat away at time, incessant gibberish corrupts quietude and want for company heightens solitude. It's both comical and devastating. Hence, keeping up with the theme of confusion, presenting to you: Juvenis.

The month of June takes on its name from Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth. 

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my hometown's skyline

❝ Clouds ❞  

 

And as sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the hills themselves must ponder the fate of the clouded, the darkened, either in pity, or maliciously rejoicing in her dismay:

... 

 something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover—the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon.

 

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse  

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A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece inspired by the very book I quote now. 'Miss Adeline Stephen' being its name, it was just a raw writer's expression of wonder at the mastery of Virginia Woolf. I look back on it now, remembering the plot only vaguely, but the yearning still shows itself inexplicably. 

Most of June was lost to yearning of things past. 

Only the sky remains unchanged in the hometown I called my own, the rest is lost to history. It's wondrous how time progresses, and one's childhood haven ages and distorts with the tides of time. 

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Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald; the first book I fell in love with

"The next day the great cloud still hung over the mountain, and the rain poured like water from a full sponge. The princess was very fond of being out of doors, and she nearly cried when she saw that the weather was no better. But the mist was not of such a dark dingy grey; there was light in it; and as the hours went on it grew brighter and brighter, until it was almost too brilliant to look at; and late in the afternoon the sun broke out so gloriously that Irene clapped her hands, crying:

'See, see, Lootie! The sun has had his face washed. Look how bright he is! Do get my hat, and let us go out for a walk. Oh, dear! oh, dear! how happy I am!' "

...

"the two together were like a cloud with streaks of the sun woven through it."

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I was eight or younger, a reader only acquainted with the likes of Enid Blyton and Ruskin Bond. This book was a present from someone I no longer recall. I remember rushing for it as it was released from the trappings of commercialization, only to be beaten to the action by a five month old cousin. Its cover still carries the crease with pride. Reading in the most solitary room, sometimes intentionally switching off the lights and reading only with the aid of the sunlight filtering through the windows. Ignoring the calls of elders to hide even further into the labyrinth that was my childhood home: with a single companion. 

The sci-fi and speculative fiction legend, Ursula Le Guin, wrote the introduction of the version I read. For years after the fact, I would tell people with utmost confidence that she wrote the book. Not a thing I'm particularly proud of, just something I remember.

I remember a lot. The color of the dress I was wearing, when my grandparents visited me at the age of four. The wrapping paper of the little toy computer. The diary I wrote in religiously around the age of seven with the squiggliest handwriting known to mankind. The old TV no one had the heart to throw away.The taste of aloe vera (long story). The tree that was cut down when I was three. That one particular monsoon when it seemed as if the sky had dropped the clouds themselves to curse us with storms. The flight of stairs at my childhood best friend's home. The fact that the neighbours put sugar on my mehendi to preserve it! Looking out of the bars of the window onto the cloudy sky and wishing aloud, a thousand times, for it to rain.

I remember a lot of irrelevant things.

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A room painted blue

With panes of yellow

And shadows of wraiths

A pretty white flower

On the wall, unwithered

A red sky with clouds of orange

Mercurial light rains down

Over recent-arrivals

A complex of bricks

Not a soul in sight

Just the sweltering gusts

Of summertime 

And the space above

That swallows you

You have returned

Once again

To a house enveloped

In crimson dust

The sky appears in 

a beautiful gradient

It lent its blood 

to your doorstep

Pink, blue and violet

Clouds encase the spectacle

It grows darker still

Layers upon layers of hideous hues

The evening comes to an end

A slight breeze, a darkening

Then a pause.

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❝ HARUKI MURAKAMI  kafka on the shore ❞

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

...

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

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