Have you ever felt this urge where you’ve decided on something and feel you need to achieve it and you certainly can by being strong and pushing through it whatever is choking the progress? That’s what was happening to me as I grinned and bore all the setbacks, creative half-truths and roadblocks Vaseem was generating.
One morning as I gazed at the view to die for from my bedroom it struck me that it was no longer giving me joy. I don’t mean it in the Marie Kondo sense, surely I can use this phrase without everyone acting as if she has patented it. Nor does it mean that I decided to discard my house and the view. No. It means I was fed up. Of the monsoon. Of the leech that wriggled its way onto my toe through a minuscule hole in my sneaker. Of the rain that fell when I decided to go for a walk. Of the rain that stopped the minute I took off my walking shoes. Of the clouds that obscured the hill opposite. That blocked the moon. That blocked the sunshine. That turned the garden into a mudfield. That short-circuited my laptop.
Photo by Ankhesenamun on Unsplash
I left Sage Cottage in the care of the caretaker on the off chance that one day Vaseem would say he was coming and actually mean it. I drove back to Delhi, taking the long scenic route which was now the only road open. The next week the monsoon hit again. It was well past the date for the end of the monsoon so this could only be Climate Change. There was a series of landslides and the cottage was cut off from the nearest town where we get groceries. The electricity was also cut off, and the cloud bursts ensured rainwater spewing down the slopes in ever-increasing volumes of water. I lived in fear of hearing Sage Cottage had been washed away.
Once the clouds stopped bursting and the electricity put in an appearance I continued my many-pronged reminders to Vaseem. A strategy I developed was to phone him every evening to ask if he would be working on my wooden room the next day. If he didn’t answer the call it meant he wouldn’t. If he did, it meant he might. He always promised he would if he did speak to me.
The updates and setbacks are a jumble of ups and downs that my irritated brain has forgotten. Getting anything built is a lot like childbirth. You forget the pain of it. You’re wired to do so otherwise no woman would have more than one child. I’m sure it’s the same with building.
Festival season dawned. A daughter came visiting and we ventured out. Masked of course but I went out for the pleasure of it instead of for groceries and walks. Life began to take on a less survivalist air. We went to a mall. Then to a restaurant. It felt like I was taking off all my clothes and prancing around naked with only a bikini bottom. I felt as free and as vulnerable with the mask. Durga Puja came but gatherings weren’t allowed. A decision I applauded. Unlike the permissions to dip in various holy rivers on various holy days that are being permitted now. CR Park was a ghost town compared to most years but the air felt festive.
I didn’t bother with Vaseem. Neither reminding him, nor questioning him. I even stopped answering his calls. His creative and bizarre fiction wasn’t amusing me anymore.
Sometime in October, four months after the deadline, Vaseem messaged me. He was triumphant as if he had wrestled a crocodile. The room was done.
Now it was his turn to keep phoning me, asking when I would come to see it. I wasn’t interested. Once my daughter left Diwali loomed. This was a setback. I wanted to transport most of my furniture to Sage Cottage. I was looking for a truck. As I compared prices that swung like a pendulum between ‘so low there must be a drawback’ to ‘so high I might as well buy a truck’ we were staring Diwali in the face. Religious people who believe being mindful to not add to pollution is a restrictive practice (they have rights you know) burst crackers. There were bans on fireworks and despite the ping ping pong of fireworks all through the night, some in the lane that connects to the police station, nobody was stopped. The air turned into a gaseous cesspool. The farmers were blamed for burning stubble. The power plants were blamed for using coal. The government was blamed for waiting every year till the end of October to have meetings to think of solutions to the pollution choking Delhi. I began to cough. And I could not stop.
Overnight I packed the car with three cats, a three-tier compost pot, some autumnal clothing and rushed from Delhi to Sage Cottage sucking valiantly on cough lozenges, smiling through the buzz of cough syrup, cursing the fireworks. But not the farmers.
Vaseem came to see me the next day.
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