What if it's all okay

(I’m going to start posting here occasionally because I’m taking a break from social media. The real reason, though, is that my father lovingly brought this site for me last October, and I might as well use it. Also, since I haven’t really shared this blog extensively, I find the idea of posting into a near-void very appetizing. My English teacher once said that for any piece of writing, there must at least be an implied audience, which means that even if I do not admit to it, I am probably writing for somebody. In any case, if you do somehow manage to stumble upon this, I hope I do not entirely bore you.)

I can’t recall which one, but it was either Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage or S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z, where the protagonist talks about how she distances herself from the world to wash her mind. As a new financial year begins, I think that has also become my priority: to wash my mind. I spent time the other day making a list of people I hold dear in my life and my prayers for them, and felt suddenly overwhelmed by how much abundance there is of love in my life. Every intersection, every curve is filled with bounty. I let the word shukr rest between my lips like a granule of sugar, contemplating its sweetness, letting it melt on my tongue. The grandpa who runs a vegetable shop near my house gifts me a pack of strawberries, says “Thank you for existing”. My granny always has experimental onigiri flavours in store for whenever we get to meet. Insomnia seems to have creeped up again, and at the first mention of it, my friend from university drops by and leaves me a bottle of GABA-enhanced vinegar. My roommate and I, between doing the laundry and dishes, between one old song and another, have built a joyful microcosm of our own. Today, I come to the elementary school where I have been teaching Japanese part-time for the last four years — a place that I could attribute to singlehandedly having altered my life in ways I could never foresee — and my student greets me with a handmade letter.

With sakura now in their post-full bloom phase, the petals have begun to scatter and even as I try to make space for gratitude and beautiful beginnings, I can feel the onset of 五月病 or “May blues”, a specific name attributed to the sudden, strange drooping of spirits after the financial year begins. I know it’s still not quite the middle of the year, but we’re far enough into 2024 for the slow, slicing dawn of a (hopefully transient) existential crisis.

Yesterday, a friend and I ran a couple kilometers by the river, taking occasional breaks to throw pebbles in the stream to see how far they would go. Truth is, sometimes things don’t go as far as we’d hoped they would; some pebble trails, no matter where you aim at, are like hiccups: they begin and end abruptly. We roll up our pants and walk into the almost unbearably cold water, our feet oddly glowing in the transparent water. We talk of the transparency of people, too. What does it mean to be able to reflect something exactly as you see it, without distortion? In essence, all life is always a preparation for loss but faith helps me find some anchorage. As does taiyaki.

Post my workout, I sip my strawberry protein shake slowly, letting its artificial flavour remind me of Mother Dairy Strawberry Ice-Cream back home. No matter how many fancy strawberry ice-creams with real fruit I eat, my love for a cup of Mother Dairy is unwavering. What does Hagen Dazs know of how little children at local weddings run up to the ice-cream corner, their tiny heads barely over the counter, eyeing the Mother Dairy or Amul cups with the longing of a lifetime? Again, I am reminded of how my patterns of loving are intrinsically tied to zid. People, places, things — the only way I know to love is to love obstinately, or to not love at all. Zid, though, I insist, is capable of finding its balance. Even as I yearn for luxury, my mind backtracks to National Park and Sher Ali bhaiyya who would make the best omelettes in the world. Trying to memorize bits from Homer’s Odyssey, I would wander to his stall, order a mosambi juice and a cheese omelette. Absentminded as I was, I would often forget to carry my wallet but there was never a time he refused me my omelette. “You can always pay tomorrow”, he’d say and I would, but it was extraordinarily moving for me because simple instances like this taught me the value of trust in a city that is known for its distrust. We need to actively spend double the amount of time we spend shielding ourselves from the world in learning how to trust it. A friend in Osaka, as we were scribbling poetry and talking about eccentric food combinations like peanut-butter & ketchup sandwiches, stunned me with his question the other day: “What if it is all okay?”

Truly, what if it is all okay?