Moondog (Image captured by a friend)
When I was younger, I used to go over to a friend's house. They lived opposite my parents' house. On a cornice in between two roofs, we would sit, legs dangling and watch the sky change colours from afternoon light to dusk to night. I remember both of our outrage when skyscrapers came up nearby on the western horizon and blocked out the view we had grown to love.
Back at my parents' house, I quickly discovered "my spot": the highest point of our house, a slope leading up to a flat space generous enough to seat three or four people. I loved going up there alone in the afternoons. If I lay down in that space, all above me was just sky. Clouds and colours and light moving and changing. It felt like I was floating in space.
Without turning my head, I could hear from my right side the sounds of the betel-nut and coconut trees rustling in the wind. Their fan and wing-shaped leaves took up more space than the small leaves of other trees. The sound they made when touching each other or moving in the wind too was thus more spacious.
I remember climbing up to my spot at dusk too sometimes. One particular glorious memory stands out, of a night before an exam. I remember my AS English paper was the next day and if I didn't care enough about exams generally, I cared even less about English. I just could not bring myself to even think about it. All I wanted to do was be free under the sky. My parents used to lock up the roof around evening, so that day was an aberration. My mother had gone out and others at home were absorbed in their own activities. I went up to the roof and climbed up and lay down under the night sky. I don't remember precise details of what I saw but I remember now, even ten years later, how I felt: like I was among the stars, floating in peace in the welcoming darkness. I was brought back down by my mother yelling at me. They had been calling me and looking for me. It had been two hours that I had been up there… but what was time to me then? My mother also somehow believed that a snake could have come up to that point on the roof--
But I was so replenished, so euphoric from my time in the sky that all of the loudness of normal life did not land on me. I remember not studying or preparing still and going to give the exam in a very happy state of mind the next day. It was a good exam.
At university, I would sometimes lie down on the benches that were put for people to sit in and look at the trees and through their moving branches, the sky. It was nowhere as private as my spot had been so I didn't do it as often as I would have liked. Instead, I walked a lot and watched the sky. There were two or three windows in the academic block and administrative block which framed so many things so nicely that I would look at the sky from there. There were also two empty spaces across campus where if I sat, the walls and things around eventually faded from significance and all I was left with was the sky.
I remember walking one day when the sky was a fluorescent cobalt and evening was still some way away, and spotting a strange light in the sky. As I walked from the road in front of the library toward one of the clearings so I could see the light in peace, I realized it was something out of the ordinary. I called up a friend who I felt would know more about that light than I and he didn't. But he found out that somewhere on the internet there was a mention of a comet. Ah, a comet. I remember going up to my hostel and pointing it out to a few others but the crowded gathering at the gaping windows of abandoned rooms and balconies was too much of a spectacle. So I went back down, sat down by the side of a small road and watched the burning brilliance of fire in the sky. I remember feelings welling and wanting to pour forth and I remember eventually scribbling something somewhere. And as suddenly as it had come into my life, I remember getting up and going back, leaving the fire to itself in the sky.
Another memory stands out from university days-- close to the final days of our B.A. degree, I, along with two of my classmates lying down on the grass in the university park and watching the sky as a storm approached. And then thunder, lightning and rain as we jumped up and ran laughing back, soaked, to our hostels.
When I moved to Mumbai for work, I found myself staring out of the office window whenever I was at the cubicle, which was one of the reasons why I stopped working at the cubicle! The glass windows were huge, the office was on the 7th floor and often, the blinds were drawn shut to keep the sun out. But when they were open, huge clouds would float by, or the sky would just lie naked and expansive with pigeons and hawks flying and flying in their free lives. It made my life and work feel as meaningless as the day of that exam. In those moments if there was anything true, it was me watching the sky.
When my friend and I would eat our lunch or take a break or have our tea or coffee on the terrace, we would be under the sky again. Some nights, when we would be leaving work later than usual and one of us would wait for the other, we would wait on the terrace. Sure, there was a busy road beneath and noise and lights and cars, but at a distance, no longer really above, were Venus and the moon. Some days that was a relief and some days it made the city life I had dropped myself into feel even more suffocating. I remember my friend,who is Korean, once pointing at the crescent moon and saying that the word for it in Korean translates to unibrow.
When lockdown began, I was for the most part with my own devices. In the mornings, I would spend some time at the window looking at the life below and the one in front. I was on the fourth floor and the habitants of the open world were closer to me. The moon and the stars were not as easy to see but the birds and trees made up for their absence in a way. On hanging wires, crows would sit and be, taking flight elegantly when their sitting was done, making me think of them as acrobats in some circus in the sky. And from the 4th floor, when I moved to another place on the 13th floor, I was surrounded by clouds on all sides. The windows of the room offered many things to my eyes-- always the city with its cars, lights, milling people, noise and above, the rolling sea of air with its changing colours, sun, moon, clouds, but never the stars. As much as I like looking at the sky, I have never enjoyed living up in the air so to speak. My 4th floor rental had been the most away from the earth I had lived. So, the 13th-floor life was overwhelming. More so because going down for a walk meant walking into city life. It seemed better to live among the clouds, going down only when necessary, or when there was a sure way into a greener place.
Back at my parents’ house in Kolkata, I was relieved to be living closer to the trees and no longer surrounded by a cloudscape. I forgot to look at the sky, as I have before for stretches of time in my life. The grind and pull of this world is sometimes as engrossing as the flow and ease of that one. But during a visualization exercise in therapy, I was reminded of the moon again and through it, I remembered watching the sky.
The Japanese have a term which translates to “forest-bathing”. The idea is that whatever ails you, I believe emotionally and mentally, can be cured if you spend a lot of time in the forest, amid nature. I believe watching the sky, sky-bathing if you will, is quite similar. Be it when darkness is turning to light and the evenness of the sky is given more forms and shapes, or when it’s so black in the night that the silhouettes of trees and buildings at the distance cannot be separated from the sky, or when the moon and venus travel across with their bright lights, looking at the sky can connect us back to the larger picture. It is easy at least for me to slip into my inner world created by not just my longings and desires, but regrets, pain and suffering. There’s a concreteness to experience then and everything hits and feels like a brick. But if I spend enough time watching the sky, the way I look and feel about the world changes. Everything feels like touch and electric, soft and easy, and when painful, shocking but transient.
Commenti