Exotic

Mix-fruit Ice Gola at Gulaab.
Ate two big spoons for you Swin, and two heaped ones for Ishoo.

I was asked most politely the other day to take one shelf in the studio (and many more later, one by one) and look through its contents, clean, clear and discard according to what we needed, what we could use and what we had just kept for a memory. 

I realised that Daddy was a lot like me when it came to storing pieces of work. He drew on practically everything, let it fly around, made stacks of insignificant drawings mixed with fantastic ones, wrote with what he drew and generally didn't bother about keeping it all neatly, safely.

I came to imagine that maybe he designed this as a lesson in the joy of discovery. 

This is his first letterhead. I love it, especially with the drawings on the left.

nighthawks

CAMP takes up most of our day, so Prerna and I go for walks in the nights around Bandra. We walk past quiet stretches of road where we navigate with cautious eyes past scurrying rats and up-down pavements; past clusters of young people around the curbs where eateries mushroom; to the beach where everyone sediments from the schizophrenic-ness of the city to quietly face one direction and let the sea absorb them.

Risky business

Eye tests continued

My mother just under went an eye surgery. For two days and two nights she has reluctantly followed all instructions - no phone conversations, no computer screen, no reading, wear dark glasses all day and most importantly - REST. She patiently lets me give her her daily dose of three different eye drops five times a day. I cant explain how hard this is for her. She is a workaholic, addicted to her phone and computer - all day and for most parts of the night.

Tonight she is finally very irritated and in a bad mood. She wants to start reading and driving her car and making phone calls and swimming in the vast ocean of the Internet.

While she is sulking, and we are both lying on the bed, she makes me read to her 'postoperative precautions' from the hospital's website. She wants to know how soon she can leave this exile. The website says "Rest is important for healing". I tell her this and she gets more agitated - its certainly not what she wants to hear.

I then remember Sindhu's essay and read out the last paragraph to her.

Ma says "I like the last line - 'But sadly with both eyes, I began to dream."

After a second thought she adds "There is nothing sad about this part."

She shuts one eye, looks at the wall and says it looks greenish-yellow.
Then shuts the other and says the wall looks white.

to you, and you.

This was me 2 days ago.

Think I look a little different now,

but you haven't seen me in more than that, 

so no one can tell, really.

I hope I see you soon. 

now listening

Ambience

What's indispensable is the ambience track, Suresh was telling us two years ago in our sound workshop. Most people overlook it but when you're sitting down to mix your sound, you'll know that if you don't have ambience from the same place where you took your dialogues, then, you're pretty much fucked. 


So, while Shaina and Ashok are still away and all is still here, let me describe to you the ambience of CAMP.


CAMP is dense. The small studio space is occupied by many computers and their subsequently numerous external drives. To fuel the army of machines is an army of extension plugs and to relieve it, fans.  Camputer.org, as you may have noted, has a lot of data in one place constantly being updated. The machines stay awake night and day, humming always their assigned frequency, deviating from them only to include the hungry force of the inverter that supports the air-conditioner. 


There is a hierarchy of hums within the room:
The ceiling fans with one wing looser than the others
The table fan that cools the skeletal CPU structure with many hard disks appended to it
The hard disks themselves
The high-frequency hiss of the plugs
The distant cloud of sea-sand-person-sweat that is Bombay


And the sounds from outside pervade the room like stones of different sizes fill a jar:
The gaps between the occasional airplanes
filled by stronger punctuations of crow calls
filled in by the finer punctuations of sparrow calls



Mix this particular (particle-ar) paste of sounds with the sticky coastal air (into which, as Tanvee pointed out, the fish give up their body-water to become preservable during the upcoming monsoons - more on it later...) and you have the ambient track that settles over my skin and ears. My computer did manage to perceive/record this sound but I'll let the imagination of it be my postcard to you, with love.