i am even when i can't think

kerala is fine, thanks for asking. i like being back even when i don't. my nani is younger. my nana is more anxious. amma is toggling between two routines now, dubai vs kerala, the way i do delhi vs kerala. achan has been caught in kollam vs kozhikode for a while now. we are hardly a nuclear family anymore. my parents are more attached to their respective ageing parents living on two opposite ends of the state even while they fall deeper in love with each other every year. the fragility of life is written into all our routines. we are all trying.

i got off the auto at the main road when i reached and decided to walk the 10 minute walk to our house tucked in the green thicket by the arabian sea. i hoped to cross the temple my nani crutches on, the white one-storey house on the way with a full length of windows across the front wall, and a glimpse of the sea. what i was not expecting to cross was the brand new CPI(M) office, flashing me all it's teeth. all polished walls and ambient lightings, like nobody had informed the office of the party's failure in the last assembly elections yet.

when i got home, my dad informed me they renovated the space after the elections. so resilient, so hot. my mom pulled my leg, saying it must have pleased me to see the new office. but idk. the old space was hardly an ‘office’, it was a brick construction of a shed, unpainted walls, tied up flags, plastic chairs, a table, and a che guevara poster. there was a certain romance to that. but i said, “the AC must be nice.” and shrugged. my dad noted that party meetings used to happen at party members’ houses and now, some blame these new offices for the party's downfall. “they aren't connected to the people anymore.”

it’s more than that though. i still remember when shailaja teacher was health minister during covid and everybody was celebrating kerala governance, and i was both proud and smug that it was happening when a party that was communist on paper was in power. in these elections though, shailaja teacher, who is loved enough by the people to have won if CPI(M) ran projecting her as chief minister, was deliberately made to run from a losing constituency. pinarayi vijayan, the tyrant that ran the state for the last decade, is a ‘gunda’, my nani says.

asianet news is perpetually running on the tv at home. we rehearse the big news breaks of the day atleast thrice before we go to bed. kerala is fine, thanks for asking. it's raining buckets.

oh i am terrible, thanks for finally asking. they've put a maala on me and they're calling me swamy. no non-veg, swearing, sex, footwear, colourful clothes, shaving, nail trimming, and a flexible addendum of things my family deems to be un-swamy behaviour as and when convenient- for two weeks. i’m doing the sabiramala pilgrimage. it took a while but i think i have managed to start communicating my definition of a swamy back to them and it's actually quite fascinating the extent of behaviours a swamy is allowed if you just know how to contextualise them.

i have come to the disgusting realisation that i am even when i can't think. descartes was pretty selective with his sermons, it turns out. grateful to him for giving me cartesian geometry in high school though. equations make so much more sense when you can visualise them as graphs. billie eilish put that particular quote in better context though.

when i can't think, i choose to simply react, as opposed to thinking and acting, i guess? there are many reasons i can't think sometimes. but mostly it's that i’m thinking about something else. and if i’m thinking about something else it's because i wish i was somewhere else. kerala is fine, thanks for asking.

when i observe myself reacting, either in the moment or in retrospect, i am struck by how intimate it feels. i get more insight into the way i think in general. (not what im thinking in the moment tho, cuz im thinking abt smth else but-) there's so much information about who i am in parts & what my predispositions are. it's like the person i would have been if i believed in god or something. (that's not a very unswamy thing to say because i am being that person rn). & then i think it must take a certain degree of safety to just be like that & trust my ‘reactions’. do i feel safer in kerala? maybe i am so completely tangled in how delhi is unravelling, making, and changing me. & it's only when i come here that my body actually catches up to all that change. it's a privilege to just not think, kerala is fine, thanks for asking.

but i miss delhi, thanks for asking.