Season of the Senses

(Published in First City magazine, October 2013. Last in the Dilliwali series, since First City shuts down after this issue.)

Of all the moments in the year when we Dilliwaley concur emphatically upon the utter cruelty of Dilli’s weather, there is only one when we’re all ready to eat our words. It’s the moment when one fine morning, without clues, hints or warnings, the air begins to caress rather than slap, the skies gleam painterly, and the mysterious fragrance trailing each one of us is absolutely undeniable. It momentarily softens us all - stoic, hippo-skinned long-sufferers of a city with unbearable weather-emotions. It gives us the gift we never did expect from our cruel lover-city: a thoughtful surprise.

This is my favourite time of the year; beginning from that surprise morning that arrives each year and yet, is always a surprise. September ends, October begins, and this large swathe of time arrives with an immovable sense of certitude, its experience so vivid and yet so delicate. After a monsoon that submerges with memories, steam and sweat, this moment is like being pulled out just when you’re about to drown – the sun is blinding sharp, the air is crisp and palpable against your arm, all the sounds of the world separate from one another and begin jolting you with the vividness of their crackle. The nights turn epidermal: dense and textured. The days are unbearably vivid: as if the sun has a million eyes, flooding every nook and crevice with ruthless probing.  

This must be what all the oldies meant when they said Dilli has not four, but six seasons: the two extra ones being the most enchanting. One is the monsoon – the season of deluge, of never-quenched desire, of the meeting of lovers. The other is the one we all are experiencing now, and which the unfortunate Engligh language has never tasted and hence never worded  - the sharad ritu. Not autumn, not winter, not monsoon: not contemplation, not intimacy, not desire. Perhaps a collection of the telescoped time between all three: the space ‘in-between’ that is not signified by an emotion, but more by the awareness of emotion. It’s like that from-out-of-time moment when you experience someone’s beauty, rather than just notice that they are beautiful.

Kalidas described this season as a beautiful river-woman in his ode to the Indian seasons, Ritusamhara: Sharad ritu is wide-hipped, languorous, luminescent. Unlike her show-offy spring sister, her beauty is quiet and thoughtful. A row of white cranes girdle her waist, she ambles through breezily swaying wheat fronds, wrapped in the enchanting rays of a spotless, clear-skied moon.

Of all the seasons he describes, this seems to me, the most wispy and myth-like. Which is fitting, because unlike the full-bodied thaw of March, the oppressing personality of June, and the seep-in-your-skin surreptitiousness of January, this is a season that can be experienced only fleetingly. It escapes more than it embodies; its experience is like the everlasting gap between desire and desire fulfilled. Unlike the other seasons, it has no peak; its anticipation is its experience. If monsoon is the season of caressing memories, this is the season of associations.

Every year I look forward to this – the delicious taste of anticipation and association over two whole months, arriving suddenly in September and fading out mysteriously sometime in November: Crushed supaari scent of the innocuous Saptaparani trees, which make themselves visible suddenly, in pista-green leafy bloom. The maddening story of the orange-stemmed Parijat flowers - secret tears of a lover that fade as her love, the sun, appears. As the weeks amble on, intoxicating strains of the Durga Puja’s dhaak rhythm aren’t too faint anymore; the bamboo skeletons of pandaals aspire for a larger-than-last-year avatar; the goddess’s huge eyes glow down on me amidst a smoke-cloud of sugandhi; there is khichuri bhog, ghughni, jhaalmuri, chop, and the smell and crackle of new taant sarees worn in innumerably exhibitionist ways. When the goddess departs, blessing the sindoor-smeared ladies and caressing the monsoon-fed trees on her way to the Yamuna, I can feel another pulse brimming - the distant tinsel clamour of local markets dressed up in golden-squared chaadar-awnings for Diwali shopping. Chinese fairy lights, crackers, clothes, kitchen splurges. Jigsaw-edged, glitter-coated oval hoardings, proclaiming the best discounts. Mountains of ‘kheel’, puffed rice that I always thought rather very funnily and aptly sounded like the Hindi word for ‘nails’ they resemble. Bataashas as luminous and beauty-spotted as the low-hanging autumn moon, and just as tempting to gobble. Lakshmi-Ganesh-Lakshmi-Ganesh-Lakshmi-Ganesh cast in sugar, mud, metal; sitting patiently, waiting to be taken home, loved for a day, abandoned under peepal trees a week later.  

Sometimes like a galloping pulse, sometimes like a rushed embrace, these flitting images, fragrances and cadences perfume this entire season; there is a quickening of the heartbeat; a humming bird trapped in my chest. I feel alive and restless, I feel gratitude and wonder. I am thankful that Dilli has not just a climate, but seasons that replace the petty, humdrum chatter of my monkey mind with vivid, expansive experiences of the weather-universe. I’m ever-enchanted by the compelling ways in which Dilli’s seasons of the senses create moments of encounter with emotion, as experience, as mood.

So enchanted, that like a lover watching his beloved’s leaving, I’m already smiling and looking forward to waiting a whole year of the return of this time, this season, this absent presence that will haunt for another five Dilli seasons to come.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When she’s not behaving like a ghost-enchanted Bollywood hero, seduced by this invisible season, the Dilliwali is busy shopping. Not in the tinsel-spangled markets (those are for watching, and penning column notes), but in the jostle-free environs of the internet. Diwali gifts? Indie sellers are still the coolest, you just need the right recommendations. One of the Dilliwali’s favourite is EnthuCutlets, two Bangalore-based ladies who make the niftiest upcycled stuff: decoupaged towel-pegs made with repurposed wood, pompom-adorned banana fibre boxes, patchwork memo boards that double up as chalkboard-plus-softboard.

An absolute hit from the Dilliwali home has been their chai-themed magnetic chalkboard: stick it up on the side of the fridge, and chalk up a daily thought, a to-buy veggies list, a deadly reminder. Or let the kids in the house lay waste to it and draw abstract ephemeral art for your morning musing.  

And uff, yes, they customise! Check them out at www.facebook.com/Enthucutlets, or as their contact email advises, writetoenthucutlets@gmail.com.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).