autumn – ARUNDHATI BASU

Namaste

I am back after more than a month and why, oh why, do I feel like a truant? Friday evening has arrived with smoky blue skies and a kingdom of clouds, so I am feeling it. The frothy state of mind that accompanies weekends. You know, cracking open a bottle of red to dissipate the chill of autumnal evenings walks, followed up with plenty of cheese, pasta al pomodoro, grilled veggies…

Let’s see what have I been upto during my absence here. Mostly I have been working on my writing, without distractions (phone and social media).

But I am a creature of sensory pleasures, so there have been sessions of baking upside-down cakes incorporating the flavours of the season. I have been scoffing a wedge a day.

Meanwhile, the beauty of autumn has me bewitched. The colours have peaked and faded, the leaves are gathered in huge piles everywhere, and the sun has been flaming out every evening over the bay with precision. It is like being part of nature’s gallery of astonishments. To keep up with my beloved workouts, I am notching miles on a Peloton bike. Paired with my evening walks, these gruelling sessions make me sleep like a log (not that I could ever complain about the lack of it, which goes to say that I am loving the extra hour of sleep everyday).

What are long, dark evenings tailor-made for? Devouring books. I have stumbled upon the delicious writing of Marlena de Blasi. Her artistry with words has woven magic into my evenings.

There has been a splash of travelling too. We took off to Boston for my birthday earlier in the month and traipsed around in freezing climes. Found that it did not match upto the images of it I had conjured up in my mind . Yet what a wonderful time I had with my love, examining its old graveyards, pottering around its posh neighbourhoods with their pretty bakeries and antique shops, tasting bread at a celebrity chef’s restaurant that made me shut my eyes and will myself to remember its divine flavours for a long, long time. Oddly enough, I thought I saw a man butt-naked from the waist down, running along with a troop of people dressed up in costumes. I am glad I did not choke on the calamari I was in the process of gobbling down.

On Monday, we travel to Seattle for Thanksgiving with the sister-in-law’s family. The excitement begins now — I love the countdown to a holiday — and continues into the next week. Here’s to cooking, baking, thanksgiving, and some loving with the family.

Now, it’s your turn to fill my ears with your life events, and fill your senses with a few suggestions of autumn’s resplendence.

Nov 22, 2019

Arundhati Basu47 Comments

An Autumnal Reverie

That folks are the leaves of my childhood. In Calcutta, when they arrive, they are the auguries of autumn, clear blue skies, gentle breezy days and the night jasmine. These leaves that sway their wise white heads in the wind are called kaash phool in Bengali, wild sugarcane in English. They are also a sigil of the Bengali festival, Durga Puja, when the Goddess Durga is celebrated for 5 days at a stretch with plenty of eating and fasting. The fasting only sharpens the appetite for the feasting that follows and the feasting is naturally followed by indigestion and plenty of digestion supplements.

Durga Puja arrived and went in mid-October and I felt the usual pangs of nostalgia that envelop me annually at this time of the year. It is a nostalgia for childhood I suppose and the goodness of this carnivalesque affair in Calcutta. No other place can measure up to it. Which means that I never go to any pujas around me. Bengali communities gather and celebrate it internationally. I chanced upon doleful version of it in Leicester in the UK once and that ensured that I never made the mistake of going to another one anywhere else. I would rather have the real deal than a pale imitation of it. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes, when a thing is of such significance to you that you have breathed and lived its glory all of your growing up years, you cannot bear for it to be whittled down by any measure.

Here is also one of my favourite season. Autumn. It holds such promise for the end of the year festivities. The chill in the air, the rummaging around in the cupboard for the right wrap and slipping on my favourite pair of boots, travelling and shivering in cold places, looking forward to cups of hot chocolate and mulled wine, pies and roasted meats. Ah, just scribbling about it gets me going. And this entire process of leaves changing colour, shedding their greens for rusts and oranges, makes my heart sing. It makes yours flutter too with deep-seated pleasure, I know.

This year however the incessant rains have given way to rot in the leaves. The trees are transforming their colours in fits and starts here as if confused about how to be. Those by the Hudson have almost turned bald because they cannot withstand the blustery conditions nowadays.

The colours are not as magnificent but I will take what comes my way for who am I to bicker with nature. The other day I stood on the rooftop of my building, the cold wind in my hair, and I marvelled at the way the sun’s dying rays touched everything around me with a tint of gold. I present to you an eyeful of kaansh phool that grows on the rooftop, the changing of colours in the park and the city’s skyline in the dying rays of the sun. It was as beautiful as this process of fading away of the leaves that is a thing of intense beauty. Did Dante Gabriel Rossetti not lay a finger upon the pulse of it when he wrote: ‘And how death seems a comely thing/ In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?’

Meanwhile as they do every year at this time, my neighbours, the squirrels have grown fulsome with their tails like wraps of the lushest sable fur and flocks of geese have decided to take over the racing tracks near the river. All in all, ’tis a joyful affair to go out for a run and hobnob with these delightful creatures of nature that seem to be rather pleased with the touch of cold in the air.

Oct 30, 2018

Arundhati Basu58 Comments

Liquid Notes

Nov 26, 2017

Arundhati Basu69 Comments

Les Feuilles Mortes

The Dead Leaves, says the title. Pourquoi? Well they are just out there and how does one just turn her eyes away from the golden, rustling beauty of them… How fast the days fly by as I sit at the desk with my thoughts, trying to put them down into a project which seems to be taking forever, devouring the Outlander books, baking once in a while. Smidgens of self-doubt have been bogging me down. The problem with smidgen is that it tends to balloon into mammoth proportions and then you are caught right under the heaviness of it, the self-doubt that is, and you feel nothing less flat than the perfectly pressed leaf which comes out from between the pages of a book. The leaf has more leverage in all of this as you can imagine. It holds more beauty in its faded glory than anything else pressed does.

The blustery wind whipped away chunks of these thoughts with icy fingers as I ran, bathed in the golden stream of the early evening sun, the trees bare and leached, the gulls gathered in little clumps around as the waves rose and ebbed in choppy harmony. I passed by the old man who has determination in his fingertips. He must be above 80, wizened by age. It seems that a stroke has robbed him of movement on his right side, so he leans in heavily towards the right. It has become a ritual for us to acknowledge the other with a wave. The only other person who haunts the park and the river front, along with the old man and I, is a young boy of about 15. He is a beanpole, all arms and legs, possibly a soccer player.

I find persistence and hope at the sight of these two.

Towards the latter part of the evening, a couple of squirrels decided to turn playful on me. I was kneeling to shoot mounds of dried leaves when these two tubby fellows capered around, coming up close and dodging like we were at some game invented by the two of them. Catch me if you can.

Naturally, I feel like I have had free therapy. Now the lemon and verbena candle is making the room smell so cosy and citrusy and it feels doubly nice as I dig into a hot salad of chickpeas and grilled vegetables, spruced up with a handful of blackberries, caramelised pecans and roughly chopped gouda. So I shall leave you behind with this jazz number and a few photos of sunset, armies of white clouds, ducks, geese, gulls, squirrels and dead leaves.

Nov 17, 2017

Arundhati Basu46 Comments

These Autumnal Days of Sudden Beauty

It has been a warm September. Every time that I walked to the nearest stores, which are admittedly 10 blocks away, I felt my pores opening up to the heat, trickles of perspiration coursing down the back. But yesterday, unexpectedly, there was a nip in the air. A beautiful evening had finally arrived. All I could do was bask in its breezy charm, let the breeze ruffle my hair and alongside rush through the rows of trees towering over me as it spoke to my senses in some strange tongue. Psithurism. Sonic and haunting. If there is heaven, it is to be found in the music of nature. In the gushing of that brook, in the breeze that ripples through canopies, in the ebb and tide of the waves…

Houses flanking the blocks with tamed and untamed patches of gardens, the ones matted with tangled ivy catching the eye because there is a certain something about wild overgrown beauty. The occupants of many house fronts: pointy-hatted witches, ghouls and skeletal figures swaying behind fences, a few macabre grins, autumnal wreaths in hues of gold, orange and russet upon doors, porches with autumnal leaves twirled around the balustrades. My kind of porch, I thought.

And then just like that, as I was strolling past an old rundown bakery, peering into windows scrawled with ‘try our cheese and nutella twists’, the feeling clamped down upon me. An intense wave of longing for the autumnal embrace of Northampton. The Racecourse, that sprawling park (you see it in all the shots) where I gathered leaves by the dozen every autumn, watched the seasons change in slow motion, where the trees were my beloved friends, where around this time the fallen leaves gather on the jogging path and trip merrily in the wind like children gone wild on a picnic, where the blustery wind threatens to rip the ponytail off your head as you run the length of its winding paths.

Below are the changes of season in The Racecourse which sprawls sublimely over 118 acres. How the scenes of life play out differently now from what it did centuries ago when cattle grazed upon its green vastness — a bucolic thought given that during the mid-1700s and 1800s it was the chosen spot for public executions. Convicts were brought over to the heath – that is now the park – in carts after they were allowed a last drink at the Bantam Cock pub a few miles off in Abington. In time, the gallows made way for recreational race meets before they were brought to a halt in 1904 after a fatal accident. Its final avataar was that of an army base and barracks during the two world wars before it was transformed into a refuge for pleasure seekers.

You would think that were might be dark memories clinging to the leaves. Yet it does not feel like the kind of place that holds onto disturbing memories. It is the stomping grounds of little girls and boys training in football, families armed with blankets and picnic baskets during summer, teenagers roller skating with abandon, school boys and girls romancing each other under the boughs of those trees, big and small dogs sizing each other up as they patter around with great solemnity, and the ubiquitous cyclists and runners. On the 5th of November, every year, when the Yeomen of the Guard search the Houses of Parliament in London ceremonially for whiffs of gunpowder-laden plots, in Northampton Guy Fawkes night is the occasion for a great bonfire on the green, hot drinks for shivering enthusiastic residents and fireworks beneath a star-laden sky.

There is a dragon too who lies half asleep at one end of the park as if in wait that someone should say those magic words, ‘Dra…’. Shush. Meanwhile if you keep running down the straight path, at the other edge of the park is a disused tram shelter and The White Elephant. From across the road, this pub taunts the hapless jogger with the wondrously warm smell of pizzas baking away in its wood-fired ovens. Now seasons may come and seasons may go, my friend, but that remains a given on Friday nights throughout the year.