Two images are imprinted on my mind from my reading of The House on Mango Street from the early summer of 2019.
Image One:
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.
I read it as an e-book back then which I lost with my old phone. Now when I searched for this part, I was surprised to find that the ‘she’ in here is not a random lady from Mango Street as I had remembered but the narrator’s great-grandmother whose name she got. And the cause of her sitting in sadness wasn’t due to longing for her husband as I had again wrongly remembered but because her husband forcefully married her. I don’t quite know how or why the details of these got changed in my memory, or was I making my own story with the words I read? Because what I remember, this lady sighing by the window with her chin resting on the palm of her hand and elbows on the table, is one of my earliest descriptions of what was to become my soft summer musings.
Image Two:
I am especially proud of the spiral staircase to the rooftop. I'd always dreamed of having one, just like the houses in Mexico…I plopped yoga mats on the rooftop and we sit cross legged to watch the Sun descend…The sky absorbs the night quickly, quickly to dissolve me into the colour of the plum. I lie on my back to watch clouds scurry past in a hurry to get home. Stars come out shyly one by one. You lie next to me and drape one leg over mine like when we sleep together at your home. We always sleep together when I'm there. At first because there is no other bed but later after Papa dies just because you want me near, it's the only time you let yourself be affectionate.
This one was really difficult to find, as all the available e-books were of the 10th anniversary edition while this quotes the introduction of the 25th anniversary edition, which I finally found via an audio recording of the introduction from YouTube. This one I haven’t misplaced in my memory, I remember it just what it was. Perhaps because I would ask Ma to put her legs over mine when we used to sleep together, before I got my own bedroom. This was one of the earliest experiences of finding specific nooked truths from my life in literature.
This is a love letter to those soft summers and nooked truths we find in books, movies and music.
I have been now, as I reel back as far in childhood as I possibly could with my forgetful mind, I think in love with soft summers forever. But it wasn’t until the later half of 2019 when I was deeply enamoured by the trailer of Call Me By Your Name and then heard the movie song Mystery of Love that I truly fathomed that I was in fact in love with the soft hues and warmth of early and late summer. I wouldn’t watch it until January of 2020, holding myself back to not get carried away. In between these yearnings, I had also discovered Yasujirō Ozu’s movies and French cinema which too have this easy-going merry-go-round feeling. Wait, now that I think of it I had known this feeling but by a different adjective preceding—it’s the lazy summers. And there it all comes in pristine consequences, the summer vacations, the ripening of mangoes, jackfruits, slurping lichis, jam, jamrul, coconut water, going from room to room bare feet, the dry indolent afternoon breeze, the bristling of leaves and swaying of branches, the gyration of the fan, the sweeping of curtain end on window sills, the sweet sudor and small breaths, the fleeting laughter and heavy breaths, the happy sighs, the light cadence of bodies for quick naps, the gossips late into humid nights and no electricity. The year before, the summer of 2018, was pebbled with disappointment, fears and mares being the first year when I no longer had a summer vacation, marking the end of school life, and a looming sense of mystery as to what summers would now come to mean. I was then only a few months into my regular writing habit which was my first habit that I adhered to. It seems like a sorcery of how much is relieved by simply writing down what one means.
There are soft summers tucked under other seasons around the year. The winter sunlight, the sky after monsoon rains, the pink of the autumn evening sky, the call of koyal rejoicing the blooms of spring. It is Call Me By Your Name but also In the Mood For Love, The Fall, Amélie, Titli. It’s like tango, like tandem of pedestrians coming out of the cinema hall. It’s in the distant murmur of train passing, the hushed plays of children in the afternoons, the eddies of conversations coming from downstairs, the sun soaked pillows, the going to cinema after lunch, in the open windows at night as we sleep, in the twinkle of the stars dotting the clear sky, the light steps back home at night, the humming of night insects devouring the quietness until blue hour. From the long edifying pleasure hours to a sense of alienated melancholy. It consumes the stillness and the momentum, conglomerating the ebb and flow of daily life. At times distorting the natural sense of perception, of depth, of time—like a giddy dreamscape, like recounting a memory. It’s in the fleeting audacity, the passionate restlessness, the silent mourning. It’s vaporous like Miley Cyrus’s cover of Lilac Wine, a gut feeling like Lady Gaga’s cover of Bang Bang, like the swaying consequenced by Amit Trivedi’s Sham. I remember hurrying to my window to catch the soft summers passing: two girls holding hands and singing nursery rhymes walking back from school on the last day before summer vacation; the call of vendor selling mishti doi; cows coming from I don’t know where to the empty plot in front of our house and munching on the grasses and wild plants. It’s been here for eons before anyone wrote about it and is yet unconventional, a revelation, like a woman’s guffaw. It’s like female friendships—with deep red and green inner worlds that clash and coexist in the yellows, purples and sky blues of the outside. It has a way into every nook of shadows, leaving its odor when the light escapes. It’s in the male gaze and in the female gait. It’s in the touch of things, like how she runs her fingers through the seeds of papaya in The Scent of Green Papaya, and when later she carefully wears the red lipstick. It is when you become others and others become you, like in The Waves by Virgina Woolf. It’s in the low roar of the sea, the white of the sea shells, the grittiness of the sand and the warmth tucked in it from the day’s heat if you dip your toes inside. It’s the curiosity of indifference.
When I woke up today (sunday) morning at about quarter to seven, hitting snooze every ten minutes from six o’clock, my room was bathed in sunlight unlike since late Autumn. There was a slight chill in the air outside, I felt keeping my hand lightly on the laced half curtains after opening the windows. Plucked the dead leaves from the money plants I keep now on the window sill, went on to open all the other windows, the sun hadn’t yet come into the Western rooms. With every window I opened, words came hurling in. It’s been long since I journaled in my notebook, ended up writing three pages at a stretch. My eyes were still tired from spending the whole of yesterday on my phone trying to write just anything. Now as the sun falls on my temple, it makes my head dizzy but in a rejuvenating way. On my way downstairs, as I opened the high staircase windows, I said to myself—it’s the first day of summer.
Recommendations
my soft summer booklist:
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Letters from a Young Poet by Rabindranath Tagore
Goodnight and Godbless by Anita Nair
God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli
Figuring by Maria Popova
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
The Glass Essay by Anne Carson
Anecdotal Evidence by Wendy Cope
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
my soft summer movielist
My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
The Garden of Words (2013)
Amelie (2001)
The Fall (2006)
Titli (2002)
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
Good Morning (1959)
The Discreet Charm of Bourgeois (1972)
In the Mood For Love (2000)
His Girl Friday (1940)
The Red Balloon (1956)
Uncle Frank (2020)
Kahani (2012)
Before Sunset (2004)
my soft summer playlist
the lakes by Taylor Swift
Hey Girl by Lady Gaga and Florence Welch
Khaabon Ke Parindey by Alyssa Mendonsa and Mohit Chauhan
Dream a Little Dream of Me by Ella Fitzgerald
Quizas, Quizas, Quizas by Nat King Cole
A Waltz For a Night by Julie Delpy
Donna Donna by Joan Baez
Dancing Barefoot by Patti Smith
Gracias A La Vida by Mercedes Sosa
You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry
My Funny Valentine by Frank Sinatra
All of Me by John Legend
La Vie En Rose by Emily Watts
Save the Last Dance for Me by The Drifters
Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope you all find love, beauty and peace in the mystery of daily life.
Until next time,
sit by the window and think of soft summers for a while.