What I like to think about during a pandemic

A warm day. Lavender titling itself to the rays of the sun. Bicycle rides. Wind passing through the strands of my hair. Grey woven shoes.

Nostalgia. My grandfather’s stories. My grandmother’s dances. My great grandmother’s intricate doilies. A school filled with tweeting love birds and giant trees with curved trunks — broken twigs and cherries rolling about and getting squished under the wheels of the delivery van. Dormitories with green doors. Benches in ochre — paints peeling.

Franzbrötchen. A plain notebook. Freshly baked bread. A bougainvillea pressed to perfection between the leaves of a white notebook. French plaits. Fries. Fountain pen. Dressing up. Dressing down. Desserts. Tight white drawers on a study table. Mural Art.

Childhood home. French windows. Neem trees. Stalks of curry leaves. Scents from the Henna Tree into my room. Jasmine creepers. Giant doors. Gardening. Ancient door knobs. Beach waves. Mangoes in summer.

Bun Maskas. Board games. Hostel life. Cheap trips with friends. Jeep drives. New Year’s Eve. Old Monk and Coke.

Sunsets. Sunrises. Sweat and workouts. Strayed. Meena Kandasamy. Arundhati Roy. Plath and Woolf. Poetry. Prose. Fat fiction books. Nonfiction and long reads. Painting. Writing mentors. Memoirs and fantasies.

Language. Tamizh in its unadulterated form. The curves of French and the grinding of German. The twang of Malayalam and the chisel of Marathi. Hindi. The rocky breaks and rolling pebbles that drive Kannada. The lexical borrowings of English. (Bazaar is an example) Red and black Oxford dictionary with its spine cracking from age and use.

My mother’s century-old mortar and pestle in stunningly thick brass. The scent of cardamom announcing the arrival of a festival. Carrots brewing in (vegan) milk. Jaggery. A cup of hot chai.

The smell of dogs. A & K prancing and jouncing like two brown frogs on the edge of a ledge. Unconditional love.