One year!

18th February, 2011.

I haven't even started recovering.

1460...

... days, not counting whatever adjustments need to be made for Sex and the City, H&M, general lethargy, sheer boredom, my one month extension, my paper on Wild Foods, my book review, whole weeks lost to angst, frustration, confusion or chasing deadends, days spent doing Other Things, days lost or gained through whatever funny thing leap years do to such a calculation and days - sometimes weeks - of lying in bed with colds, flus and in one case, a broken bone...

... is the number of days that it took to hand in just under 80,000 words of Thesis.

I won't miss some of those days. Some others I'm starting to miss now that the Red Bull and coffees have stopped grating away at my nerves and I've stopped feeling like I'm in a fast tailspin, dropping too quickly into the huge question mark that is today, tomorrow, next week, next year...
But the days I missed right from the second they were over, more and more all the time, are the days I spent in Chincholi, and the long hot afternoons when I sat in the shade of the neem trees outside their pink temple, listening to the drone of the crickets and the gurgle of the doves and feeling truly happy, peaceful and blessed.

There's no feeling quite like it.
You re-read a paper on the back of which your research questions were formed, and out of curiosity, google the person whose manuscript you read four years ago and thought: 'Wow! I want to do THAT!'
You expect an old crony.
And find an incredibly handsome young American smiling broadly in the Indian sunshine.

Hee!

Writing

I feel a dark, languid energy.
2 pm and the garden smells of monsoon. Wet earth, leaves. I face a dark window. The field outside is unlit, but I can smell it. And hear it, alive with crickets, the stray dogs, a stray bird awoken suddenly from peaceful sleep. There's the soft glow of my fathers' old reading lamp. What a reading lamp. This is the kind of lamp that keeps you company through the night. Tall, bends this way and that, wherever you want light, it shines it. It must be 50 years old. I am keeping it forever, never giving it back.
The sound of tapping is addictive, smooth. It keeps itself going. Like when I run and the sight of my feet moving is sometimes the only thing that keeps them moving. Or when you wear heels, and you see their long tapering shadow. No amount of screaming pain in my calves is enough to make me stop creating those shadows. Lovely things.
On my screen, a PhD chapter. Almost done. Slowly, slowly. I have to read the lot and then send it to my supervisor. I am aiming for pre-dawn. In the background, there's Carrie Bradshaw and Belle De Jour. Tortured, sexy, writers. When my tapping stops, theirs fills in the spaces. And writing always turns me on. My lovely fictional friends here would understand that, I think.
The slow and steady sensuality of the sounds outside, the tapping keys, the click of thoughts, the mild pain in your muscles. The restlessness. The sense of movement, of flowing. When I finish this thesis I want to rip someone's clothes off. Until then, I have my lamp, and my writer-friends and the dark night outside.

(An Edit: Writing this far from the Man, I am, as always Paranoid. Note to the Universe: When I said 'someone', I wish you to make it The Man. And when I say I'd like to wait until the thesis is done, please, Lord, no, I did not mean that. Thanks. Back to work.)

The perpetual student is going to be teaching a class next week.
On the same masters she did.

Points to note, of relevance when the jury's out and she's on tenterhooks:
1. She asked for this. Not in a mystic ask-the-universe kind of way. She took an appointment with the course supervisor and said: IWANTtoteachonthiscourse, please please please.

2. It is a masters course.

3. It is the first time she will teach.

4. She has gaps in her knowledge that you could drive a truck through.

5. Instead of filling these gaps, she is obsessing over the following:

- What to wear
- What colours should be on the powerpoint
- If skin looks simply awful on the day, will they think I'm more adolescent than they are?
- Does simply thinking in this way make me more adolescent than they are?

Uh Oh.

'Soon, Govinda, your friend will leave the path of the Samanas along which he has travelled with you for so long. I suffer thirst, Govinda, and on this long Samana path my thirst has not grown less. I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions. Year after year I have questioned the Brahmins, year after year I have questioned the holy Vedas. Perhaps, Govinda, it would have been equally good, equally clever and holy, if I had questioned the rhinocerous or the chimpanzee. I have spent a long time and have not yet finished, in order to learn this, Govinda: that one can learn nothing. There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.'

Siddhartha,

Hermann Hesse

...
and yet, foolish enough is she to sit, at 23:11 with wiki open, trying to understand, trying to stay awake, trying to make him proud.
sad little clever girl, all he will say next week is uh huh

God. The power of that uh huh.