Karni Niwas

From Padma- I wrote this in my journal: our room is like a powder pink dungeon that booms every time we close the door. Guess Where??

The enchanting room of window nook, tiny princess dresser hung on the wall, long stony shelves, the booming door, the electrified lizard by the toilet window; i present the humble cavern that protected from the outside world of cheats and bad men in the pink city.

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Walt Whitman

p

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If Not For You / Sab Kuch Milega

***

Having gotten tuned to the world of masala chai, clattering honks, gold-trimmed petite-square-sprinkled love-red saris, trains going nowhere, flower earrings, the times of india, pumpkin-orange turbans, twinkling eyes, curly moustaches, lizardy rooms, cold water, rickety buses, grime, rupee laundry, bumblebee-yellow-and-black taxis, dreams, jeera rice, adventure, danger and not missing home, it is now unspeakably odd to start life anew with mrts, clean hawker center seats, my palace-home, the instancy of email, bank accounts, the straits times. Maybe I was in a dream as I thought I'd be, but it felt more real than anything. And isn't real just in the mind? What's real is this: "After spending one million dollars on research, we have found that the number one cause of divorce is marriage" and my very real double-chin-a-shakin' grandmother griping about the neatness of my room with very furrowed tattooed brow, so off I scoot.

Judy Blue Eyes

Food For Love, the company hired to provide food at Woodstock in 1969, made the following estimates for food needed to feed 50,000 people a day for a three-day festival. Figures include: 30,000 loaves of bread, 10,000 packs of marshmallows, 700 kilos of peanut butter, 75,000 litres of milk and over 200,000 kilos of ice.

*

37. While most acts revelled in having appeared there, sitar player Ravi Shankar found it a 'terrifying experience' and said the crowd in the mud reminded him of the water buffaloes at home in India.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1204849/Forty-far-facts-knew-Woodstock.html

HE WAS A PUNK, SHE DID BALLET, WHAT MORE CAN I SAY

the Ellygator in my dreams. she wants to be an actress but her father says they have expiry dates so she wants to be a doctor and will have to 'work super super super super hard'.

"Yes, I will take care of the filing today. And no, that can't come off."

Life Signs from Panjim

ode to padma

dear padma,

my father said this looks fun.
p

you mad chihuahua

intoxicated with air-con avec silly pierre

hiding from the rain in panjim

making friends on the bus (not sure why you showed her the postcard with the seas of naked holy men)

I know you really got a kick out of this one...

and if you do expire at 55 i will visit you with lilies

in autumn

thanks for the ride (and all the wonderful meals we shared)

goodnight.


Ginger and Lemongrass, Bindi


(O the things you make me do)

a friend

As Lucy said so too, coming back to your room from somewhere else after a long time is like meeting an old friend anew. (Firstly, we have the luxury of having a 'My Room' and a world of our own.) You open the door, take a deep breath of the musty air, a flitting glance around at all the things that were too familiar before you left, that are now magic little new-old parts of the world, the bits of you that you left behind when you went to see other places and people, your lungs send a signal to your brain, I'm here now....

"Hello."

And it seems, or maybe just in that moment alone, like all that travelling, somehow, was to get back here, as if you'd never left, to dream of the next time you'd travel again.

thar

What I imagine about their lives: moustache oil, camel rearing tricks, rupees, dhal, chapatis, old mattresses, wives, sun, sand, shrub, dunes, folk songs, village friends, tobacco

And now, strangely or not, their photos are on the internet, a medium they may not have seen or understand.

p

Umed always said 'Velcome, Velcome' in a singsong way after we said thank yous for the meals they made from scratch. And Babu would say in jest, in response to thank you, 'Yes, thank you sir, thank you madam, thank you, thank you.' I tried watching them cook but they seemed to want to be alone, speaking in their dialect. Maybe they were catching up with one another; we were the first customers of the season. And we slept by ourselves on one part of the sand dunes while they slept somewhere near; we spoke about country-boys/city-boys and heard them talk very late into the night. I wonder what they were talking about for hours. And we were all under a big salty blanket of stars. They were 27 and 29 but looked 40, with weathered dark faces, deep rugged lines (the kind that run in some of the older men on my paternal side. it is most enchanting, like rough leather), old twinkling eyes, flower earrings, curly moustaches.

p

So happy and sorrowful.

our burnt loyal medals

notes:
-the toering that desiree took about 5 cities to find
-her drapey latticed anklet from an aggressive gypsy
-the henna we got on our feet for the wedding
-indian summer sandals from lucy, that survived after cobbling

a-cha!

We had a kettle
we let it leak
Our not repairing
made it worse
We haven't had
any tea in a week
The bottom is out
of the Universe

-Rudyard Kipling