Skip to main content

Reaching Sun

Last day of the year found us in a local bakery getting pastries and coffee. The only other customer in the store was an elderly man sitting in the corner working on his laptop. We talked about the year that had been - the surprises that came along the way. It was a beautiful sunny day outside with only a nip in the air. I was not dressed warm enough - sunshine does not always been warm, yet we look at a cerulean blue sky and imagine the coat can stay home. It was one of those days. 

It made me think of cues and miscues in life - and reading a signal wrong can result in a chain reaction of uncontrolled events. Such has been the case with a person we know well and we watched helplessly as her life unraveled due to actions taken in haste, hate and despair. We wished her well and hoped in the next year she would allow love to touch her soul and live a life happier than she did these past few years. I wished for us and the ones I love that we could enjoy those sudden bursts sunshine with spontaneity but not forget to carry a coat just in case the weather turned. 

The weather turned completely bleak over the new year and the news headlines matched the level of gloom. This has been one of those years when shaking off that feeling of statis from the past one felt particularly hard. New Year greetings were exchanged with family and friends as a matter of course but it did not lift the spirits. The happiest news I heard at the end of the year was that my best friend had landed her dream job and was finally getting a chance to live close to her ailing parents - something that had caused her a lot of grief in the last couple  of years. It made the the end of 2021 feel warm. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more