(June Diaries)
24 June: Winnie the Pooh
Hardly 10 minutes, a loud voice, a thirsty mouth and colourful pictures. Both Pooh & I were hungry and ready to hunt for food.
“The important bee to deceive is the queen bee. Can you see which is the Queen Bee from down there?”
23 June: Jallianwala Bagh by V.N. Datta
From a distance, books shine and glimmer, like a Pensieve. Full of stories, memories, if I put my head down in them, I will fall inside the hidden world and cannot leave until the last pages, when the memory fades…
It has been 5 years and 2 months to graduation today, leaving college, and history, politics, debates and classroom discussions forcing us to think of inhuman situations and the complexity of law dealing with justice…
Having moderated many and attended a few editions of Pocket Diary Book Club, this realisation rained down heavily on me, that I was lacking. Not behind, not learning but lacking, of the force, the will to push myself to do something for myself, to gain knowledge.
It took a lot of mental power, the first day of getting back on track is always the most difficult, I remember a week ago when I started going to the gym again, to not hang out, but exercise.
I went consistently for 6 days. I need an award.
But I got a pen, and permission to highlight. I opened the dictionary, remembered the word I was looking up the meaning of 15 minutes later, and closed Instagram.
I cannot even bring myself to say that I hate smartphones. It may jinx my addiction.
‘Qasir’: Revolutionary (the first word I turned to the notes at the end for)
32 times underline and yet to cross 5 pages of Introduction to the 2021 edition, this one will take some time for me to call it a friend…
4 June – 22 June: Wild (A Journey from Lost to Found) by Cheryl Strayed
There is a Forever 21’s couple’s movie voucher that I was delighted to find in it, to use it, but it was from a period before covid, 2018. It rests between pg. 233 and the words, “The dog’s name is Miriam.”
I am having a hard time listening to anyone talking to me besides my immediate family, because I am far away from India, up in the mountains, “I could’ve been reading Dubliners or falling off to sleep in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, but on this night the sky was too mesmerizing to leave. As I watched it, I realized I’d passed the midpoint of my hike. I’d been out on the trail for fifty-some days.”
I am taking it slow, absorbing, feeling, living someone else’s journey and yet, I do not feel like a fraud. I am living another life, a sentence only too well known by anyone who has ever read a book.
Whenever I keep the book down, I am in pain. I do not wish to be here, I do not wish to tell anyone that I want to go on a long, solo hike, away from human habitat, only to be told and tested, you are not strong enough and I think, if Cheryl wasn’t strong when she began, she became while doing it. Because she had no other way to heal from her mother’s death by cancer, her family falling apart, her shooting of Lady, her mother’s horse and hoping, hoping that now her mother can go to the other world, because she will need her horse with her to cross the bridge.
On a lighter, morbid note, I may just read this part of the book in edition 17 of the club, without warning, Section 300 IPC.
I am currently on: Pg 233. I have to hike to: Pg 316
29 May: The Library by Bella Osborne
If I want to get a boy reading, I will have to take away his toys, give him a few books and nothing to do.
Purchased because duh… the name was ‘the library’, a few books on the cover pic, cheap rates and I am running to grab the good ones before someone else does, like the sperm we are…
The Book Chor, a very respected and well-known game of thrones, the player who gets up at 9 am, reaches there by 9:30 am and gets people’s hands out of his book’s way very, very subtly, remains hungry 3 hours later.
But I got 39 books for INR 6000/-
So, like a skincare expensive product purchased because of the glamour of the outer packet, I shall, I had to! finish the damn book even though it turned boring 3/4th later. I wish there were better books about revolutions and libraries and reluctant sceptics turned readers.
But Maggi was cool. And the life on the farm, and reading, and yoga with conversations with a grandparent like figure post-school, and lemon drizzle cake, and food, lots of food.
I really want some food right now. I miss my grandma.
The scene of calf birthing…
“… On three. Slow and steady but with force. Got it?
Yeah. I had no idea what I was doing …”
“.. ‘One, two, three. Pull. Keep it steady. Here he comes…’
… I was on my knees and it was like pulling a dead weight, A picture of the little lamb the farmer had been carrying last week shot into my mind and I started to fight for this one. I wanted to save him …”