I wish I could show you what goes on in my head. It’s so beautiful in here.
The last time I wrote about my personality, I talked a lot about the things I love. I can’t help but notice and say it again- we are what we love, the things we love make us who we are.
Things that make me happy are largely figments of my imagination. I have very active imagination. It is so fundamental yet so baffling - how your mind could take you to places you’ve never been to, how it can make you see things that you never saw. It is dangerous to acknowledge that nothing is unattainable in the world of imagination. It’s a drug and I’m quite high.
I never realized or acknowledged that active imagination is such a huge part of who I am. It is almost all of me, consumes me, fills me up with a world, with a sea of something indescribable.
As I type this, I listen to classical music. It is beautiful and it makes me happy. People with dreams and hope make me happy. Early morning walk to the park near my old home made me happy. Street vendors having sales made me happy. The old lady in salwar and sports shoes walking briskly made me happy. The toddlers running around mindlessly made me happy.
Remember the old man in the park? He probably comes from a far off place selling peanuts and snackables. He came every evening trying to sell in the park. His was a shrunk frame, there was only bone and hanging muscle. I looked at him and I looked at my palms, I couldn’t help but think how different we were- Me, with my full healthy body and him - shrunken and starved. Yet, I felt happy when he perched to have conversation with two middle aged men who bought his snacks. I wondered what tales he brought from a far off place and what these completely different men, of different ages, of different health and of different kind had to exchange. It made me happy.
Imagining a boy saying I’m excited to see the moon and a girl in some separate frame thinking to herself, I’m excited to feel the sun.
I was walking around Connaught Place and saw this old woman, elegantly dressed in plain white salwar with all the glory of that smartly kept silver grey hair walk into an old book shop. The book shop is older than a hundred years. Couldn’t help but think, the lady must have been frequenting the same old book store since very young. Oh how the city, her and the book store grew old together. That made me happy.
When women who are homemakers spend the lazy dizzying afternoons in their clam, dark, curtain bound homes reading books like “tongue in cheek” and laugh as light cracks in through every narrow nook and sides of the curtains, that makes me happy.
Remember in Chennai? when you take a bus early in the morning and return in the evening. All the people you see- old and young, dreaming and striving. That made me happy. Looking from the window of the bus - the old man who cycled in flair among a sea of motorized vehicles, his brahmin outfit, his naamam - my heart was screaming and cheering fashion, audacity, style, wtf!
It was my third time at White Rose London Supermarket, Mylapore. Eking out a living in a strange city for the sake of an internship and living off mineral water bottles. It was for mineral water I went. The smile and the greetings of the old door keeper, that sense of familiarity. It made me happy.
Deciding on eyeliner and ending up with dark chocolate. The awareness of inadequacy, knowing that all cannot be attained but be looked at and admired and longed for through glass windows. A soft happy kind of feeling that is.
Growing old alone, in the hills, tiptoeing to classical music. Being a healthy old woman, having lovely wrinkles, wearing cotton frocks. That is the taste of happiness to me.
To all the monuments that made me feel small, to all the people who just live their own way in flair, to all the souls that carry stories from places so far off. To my lovely home of the past, to Sunderayya Park, to Chennai and to Delhi. Thank You! 2021 has been a hell of a year.
While I won’t ask my Alexa to stop playing classical music, I wish you all the happiness in the world.
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