A diary of endings
Fragments from my notes on trying to read, make sense of the world, and saying goodbye to 2023
i.
I finally finished Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey despite hanging on to it for a year—at this point, it was almost like a burden, like a tapeworm gnawing at me leaving me hollow and bones askew. I managed to finish it in one sitting while listening to The Velvet Underground on a borrowed wifi connection from my generous neighbour. When I first started reading the book, I wasn’t impressed. Maybe because I was in a much happier place back then and Smith’s maudlin prose seemed to miss the mark. Today (one day in December), I relished her words, like a thick drink of chocolate going down the back of my throat, enveloping the depths of myself. What a difference a year makes. In between looking up words (like funereal, which was what I thought it was but had to look it up), I read comments on YouTube. ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ had a comment from a stranger named Chris about losing his daughter and getting reminded of her while listening to this song, which made me tear up. Someone commented that ‘Heroin’ calmed their panic attacks. I cannot stop thinking about ‘Femme Fatale’. And Chris.
ii.
It was close to two weeks of no internet at my house. Ever since 2 December, when Cyclone Michaung was formed in the Bay of Bengal, we had power outages (like the rest of the city), spending days plunged into darkness and depressive greys, making do with sparse candles and solitary thoughts, and being forced into conversations with each other. I hadn’t written a word in 10 days and spent my time looking out through the window, unclogging drains on the terrace in the midst of the cyclone, and recovering from an illness.
Not everyone has been so lucky. In the aftermath of Cyclone Michaung, parts of my city were flooded, stranding people out of the houses, leaving them without milk, water, food, and other necessities. A construction site in the south of the city caved in trapping 5 people within; three of them were saved but we lost the other two, their bodies recovered only after four days. Rafts and boats were used to transport oxygen cylinders, ferry people out of their houses, and conduct rescue operations by the fishermen alongside official rescue teams. But it’s the same fishermen, living and selling alongside the Marina beach, whose livelihoods were at stake when the Madras High Court ruled to evict fish stalls because of so-called encroachment. Horrors abounded still: a pregnant woman who couldn’t receive medical care, was then denied help until police intervened, delivered a stillborn who was carelessly returned in a cardboard box to the family by the hospital authorities. Even in grief there was no empathy from the powers that be.
Like the 2015 floods of Chennai, similar areas were inundated this time around too, but somehow the blame lay on the cyclone and not on the encroachments of lakes, failed urban infrastructure, poor planning, or apathy by (whichever party is in power in) the state government. While it also doesn’t help that Chennai is on the coast and the average elevation is only a few meters above sea level that shouldn’t be the reason for poor administration or inadequate infrastructure. The city floods every year, the privileged find their own relief, the poor are left to scramble for help and when it does reach them it’s too late. This repeats year after year alongside residential construction that swells at the seams to be able to contain the city’s growing population, but without keeping in mind the consequences of expansion which ultimately trespasses lakes, wetlands, marshes, reservoirs, rivers. Jayashree Arunachalam has written a comprehensive piece on why this city floods every year, and that the best thing we can hope for is to be prepared.
iii.
End of the year prompts on achievements always get me thinking if I’m worthy enough, if I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile this year, if I've written enough or have been recognised for my work, eventually making me wonder if I’m just good enough to be a writer and if I should continue down this path. Actually, I check with myself twice a year—once in December and on my birthday, which is a few days away from the exact middle of the year.
I don’t have much to say about any achievements this year except that I survived. Endured and continued to exist. Sometimes, even drawing continuous breaths has been difficult for the last three years, so I try to hold myself to fewer standards possible. Every now and then, a stray thought escapes into ether and it’s difficult to reel it in. Encouraged by this, a few other thoughts writhe into the air trapping me into a centre of darkness. It is here that I’m forced to find the light, grab the swirling thoughts and thread them onto an invisible string, before joining them at the ends making several knots and then throwing the whole contraption down till it breaks. Words rush everywhere like helium molecules filling up a balloon—I reach out, breathless, and find a way out of this void and into the next. Till the following year arrives, it’s a ceaseless dance, but I have to remember to take breaks. Tired legs create stasis; restless legs can hardly capture emotion.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück writes, ‘Why love what you will lose?/There is nothing else to love’. This is how I approached life in 2023, by learning to love and appreciating insignificance, by paying attention to the world outside, by witnessing the moment, and by trying to live the life I wanted to live. Of course, I failed and did not end up living the life I wanted to, but I came dangerously close a few times. I tried journalling, an activity that I chalked up to triviality and found that I didn’t have to labour over the words I was writing or take apart sentences and paragraphs and arrange them back together again (like I do for this newsletter). It was a rebellious and liberating process that made me gain a sense of myself. As much as I’d like to reveal my bare self here in an approach to honest writing, it is equally difficult to do it in a way that’s detached and I fear I will never do it any justice. After all, I write for an audience, albeit niche. Thankfully my diary has no eyes.
Although I cooked less than the previous years, I drew more and without an aim. Little loose sketches of people, food, objects, and flowers using pen, pencil, and crayons. A quick 5-10 minute illustration of my dream kitchen. Kettles and lamps from reference pictures and imagination. The writing desk I use everyday; the headphones that I haven’t charged since the beginning of 2023. So many illustrations of coffee brewing in an Aeropress, mostly because that’s how I’ve been making my coffee for two years now. A quirky comic of foods waiting outside the dentist that are pretty unfunny now that I go back to it. I’ve always been attracted to courage in writing, why I partly write about myself and my experiences, but I’ve always evaded courage in drawing. It’s funny, writing is almost second nature to me now having practiced it since I was 18, the many failures shaping my work, the many books and authors I’ve read holding me to high, almost impossible, standards.
Yet drawing has been different, summoning me to a standard that doesn’t exist. As a result, I don’t know what I’m heading towards, and uncertainty always gives me anxiety. Sitting to draw is like approaching the future: you’re trying to contemplate it, trying to fix mistakes in the present so the future has potential, overthinking every little mark or stroke and forgetting why you sat down to draw in the first place. One can find a sundry of reasons to make art but I really don’t think you need a reason. If you do, here’s mine: I started reading, writing, and drawing to battle against my loneliness and fill a void, which then transformed into an outlet for my angst so it didn’t become self-destructive, and, in turn, used it to confront the ghosts of my various dying and resurrected selves. What I knew but didn’t remedy was trying to fix the present to appreciate the future, when I should’ve have appreciated the present which would then set the future on its own course. The more I draw and the more I write, the stark difference between the two is that when I write something, it vastly improves with rewriting, trying to chisel words into different places then digging them up, revising and reviewing. Whereas when I draw something, a sense of urgency seems to help me more, and I find that they are obstinate and disobedient. I make writing happen, but I let drawing happen to me. Both are spaces of comfort and discomfort and both are forgiving and tolerant. And both are ways to live in the moment.
Happy 2024, here’s to many possibilities! The next newsletter will be out in January. Thank you for reading and supporting my work throughout 2023.
Miscellaneous
A short note on things I made this year that gave me so much joy: this banana bread with mocha icing; a bowl of sesame soy tofu, rice, and pickles; tortillas from scratch converted into quesadillas; the many components of mixture which took me four days; crisp poori soaked in saffron-almond milk.
This beautiful Andre Braugher obituary. My first sighting of him was in Primal Fear!
Rebecca may Johnson’s poignant and powerful essay, one of the best essays of the year.
This Ellen Bass comfort poem on a cold, rainy day.
I read a LOT of Nigel Slater when we had no power, so as a result my mind is swirling with his words and recipes.