Beauty and the Heat
I have a new best friend: A.C. Her breath is kindness itself, soothing and soft. When her angel wings beat, I am cared for and can sleep. She helps me stand up to the bully, Heat.
It is hard not to take the heat personally, not to feel that the great chunks of hot air thrown down by the fan are ordnance to wrestle me to the ground and pin me there. So when I leave the sweet company of A.C to sort breakfast I am on the defensive: face set like flint; sleeves rolled up; breathing deep. And like all the worst attacks, Heat plays with my mind: am I locked down or up?
To cook is to collude with the enemy. In the kitchen, Heat unleashes all his weaponry: steam from the kettle - shield me!- hot pans that strike right between the eyes and the gas flames aimed right at me whipped higher by the fan . My small act of resistance these days is cold brewing coffee. The fridge is another friend. We also loot and pillage summer for all we can and eat the fruit it has made sweet. There are mangoes, peaches, lychees, plums, cherries, melons and watermelons making our table sticky from its syrup several times a day. It is an obscene amount of sugar to feed children and really, if it were a factory producing this stuff, it would have to be closed down.
With my children we have another way to say no to Heat's bullying: we read. I have lingered over the Viking unit in history. Let's just savour the North Atlantic buffeting those sailors, imagine we are arriving at cold and misty islands or surviving in snow. Now we are reading about William Tell. We haven't got to Switzerland's liberation from the Normans yet but the Alpine air is liberty enough for me. And, in another story, when winter comes to Vermont, the cool of the pictures is a balm.
After lock-down eased a little, I spent two happy hours in Variety Books. The armed guard outside now has two guns. One, an AK-47, de rigueur for every guard and now, the new one for testing for fever. (It is the latter, I am pleased to say, that he aims at me.) Inside, it was easy to socially distance: I was alone for most of the time on three storeys except for a good chap with a mop, a couple of cashiers and the books themselves.
I passed the 'Current Affairs' table. Here you can pick up a book about the construction of the Taj Mahal; a copy of The Babur Nama, the court diary of the Emperor Babur (who ruled from 1526 to 1530); or 'Ain-i Akbari, the constitution under Emperor Akbar (who ruled from 1556 to 1605). It was a helpful reminder that time travels slowly and that I must not mourn the loss of three months here. Lahore will still be Lahori and the Moghul monuments will only have crumbled a little more. Shahi kulfa will still be served by the bowlful in all its sweet cold creaminess. Indeed, I could see the stall out of the window.
Next I sat for a while in front of the long shelf of 'Fiction from the Subcontinent.' A small act of reunification has taken place at this wall. Brother and sister writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh stand spine to spine, some even sharing an anthology book jacket! I dip in and out of many books, remembering stories I've read and places I've been, places I've read about and stories I've lived. The border is as porous as silk and I feel delightfully free hopping east and west, past and present, feeling neither locked up nor down. There is a Persian saying that 'Delhi is far away,' but right now, I don't feel it. Something is restored in me after months of restrictions, after 73 years of partition.
I choose a book set in Delhi we read as a class when I was 18, The Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, simply because I have never forgotten her lines about the heat, 'the blank white stare of the summer sun'...which later 'came slicing down like a blade of steel onto the back of her neck,' (and this all at break of day). Sometimes we read to escape; now I am reading to know I am not alone.
Finally I go upstairs to the children's section. I kick away a little dust from the floor with my foot and sit in front of a jumble sale shelf of discontinued lines. The fans turn slowly and sweat drips from my eyelashes like tears. Amongst some real clutter, there is treasure here to take home to the children: old books with fresh pictures, new stories and hours of enjoyment. I end up with a pile I can hardly carry but it is only when I get home I realise I've done it again: selected books that are full of cold. There's The Village in the Snow, The Snow Lady and Madeline's Christmas in which the Persian carpet seller nearly freezes in the Paris winter after he's sold his woollen wares. Delicious, every one of them. Then there's Sleeping Beauty. While I'm reading it, I realise that after these months (if not a hundred years exactly) of doctor's orders bed rest, lock down and summer heat, the hope of the Prince coming, tearing down barriers and bringing new life is just what we are longing for.
It is hard not to take the heat personally, not to feel that the great chunks of hot air thrown down by the fan are ordnance to wrestle me to the ground and pin me there. So when I leave the sweet company of A.C to sort breakfast I am on the defensive: face set like flint; sleeves rolled up; breathing deep. And like all the worst attacks, Heat plays with my mind: am I locked down or up?
To cook is to collude with the enemy. In the kitchen, Heat unleashes all his weaponry: steam from the kettle - shield me!- hot pans that strike right between the eyes and the gas flames aimed right at me whipped higher by the fan . My small act of resistance these days is cold brewing coffee. The fridge is another friend. We also loot and pillage summer for all we can and eat the fruit it has made sweet. There are mangoes, peaches, lychees, plums, cherries, melons and watermelons making our table sticky from its syrup several times a day. It is an obscene amount of sugar to feed children and really, if it were a factory producing this stuff, it would have to be closed down.
With my children we have another way to say no to Heat's bullying: we read. I have lingered over the Viking unit in history. Let's just savour the North Atlantic buffeting those sailors, imagine we are arriving at cold and misty islands or surviving in snow. Now we are reading about William Tell. We haven't got to Switzerland's liberation from the Normans yet but the Alpine air is liberty enough for me. And, in another story, when winter comes to Vermont, the cool of the pictures is a balm.
After lock-down eased a little, I spent two happy hours in Variety Books. The armed guard outside now has two guns. One, an AK-47, de rigueur for every guard and now, the new one for testing for fever. (It is the latter, I am pleased to say, that he aims at me.) Inside, it was easy to socially distance: I was alone for most of the time on three storeys except for a good chap with a mop, a couple of cashiers and the books themselves.
I passed the 'Current Affairs' table. Here you can pick up a book about the construction of the Taj Mahal; a copy of The Babur Nama, the court diary of the Emperor Babur (who ruled from 1526 to 1530); or 'Ain-i Akbari, the constitution under Emperor Akbar (who ruled from 1556 to 1605). It was a helpful reminder that time travels slowly and that I must not mourn the loss of three months here. Lahore will still be Lahori and the Moghul monuments will only have crumbled a little more. Shahi kulfa will still be served by the bowlful in all its sweet cold creaminess. Indeed, I could see the stall out of the window.
Next I sat for a while in front of the long shelf of 'Fiction from the Subcontinent.' A small act of reunification has taken place at this wall. Brother and sister writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh stand spine to spine, some even sharing an anthology book jacket! I dip in and out of many books, remembering stories I've read and places I've been, places I've read about and stories I've lived. The border is as porous as silk and I feel delightfully free hopping east and west, past and present, feeling neither locked up nor down. There is a Persian saying that 'Delhi is far away,' but right now, I don't feel it. Something is restored in me after months of restrictions, after 73 years of partition.
I choose a book set in Delhi we read as a class when I was 18, The Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, simply because I have never forgotten her lines about the heat, 'the blank white stare of the summer sun'...which later 'came slicing down like a blade of steel onto the back of her neck,' (and this all at break of day). Sometimes we read to escape; now I am reading to know I am not alone.
Finally I go upstairs to the children's section. I kick away a little dust from the floor with my foot and sit in front of a jumble sale shelf of discontinued lines. The fans turn slowly and sweat drips from my eyelashes like tears. Amongst some real clutter, there is treasure here to take home to the children: old books with fresh pictures, new stories and hours of enjoyment. I end up with a pile I can hardly carry but it is only when I get home I realise I've done it again: selected books that are full of cold. There's The Village in the Snow, The Snow Lady and Madeline's Christmas in which the Persian carpet seller nearly freezes in the Paris winter after he's sold his woollen wares. Delicious, every one of them. Then there's Sleeping Beauty. While I'm reading it, I realise that after these months (if not a hundred years exactly) of doctor's orders bed rest, lock down and summer heat, the hope of the Prince coming, tearing down barriers and bringing new life is just what we are longing for.
I love, love, love this one: from heat the bully,to the way you are drawn to get books referring to cold situations. All so poetic.
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