Dear Reader,

Today is India’s Republic Day and also a Sunday. When we were kids, we always hated when a national holiday fell on a Sunday. We felt like we were being robbed of a holiday. But that doesn’t bother me anymore, especially as I’ve not grown into the normal adult world of weekdays and weekends. For me each day is the same. Working as a freelancer has taught me that weekends are stupid. It is much better to work every day of the week but less hours per day. And then when a holiday comes around, or you take a bunch of days off for a vacation, it really means something.

Sorry for starting this letter with a digression. This is not how I wanted to start, but I find that the older I get, the more I digress in my writing. I’ve got an opinion on everything and whenever I sit down to write, I can’t stop myself from unloading my opinions. “Weekends are dumb. Adults are stupid. I’m the only one smart enough have figured life out.” I know how this sounds, trust me. I try hard to not write such thoughts because I don’t want to come across as a smart-ass jerk with a superiority complex. The fact that that’s how I sound when I write freely, must mean that deep down that’s exactly who I am!

Damn it! I digressed again while apologizing about the previous digression. What I wanted to start this letter with was a description of where I am in this moment. I’m sitting outside the house in the sun. Sunbathing (albeit Indian style with all your clothes on) in the winter, is one of life’s true pleasures. Add to it some peanuts; not pre cracked and salted ones, but groundnuts still in their shell and then you break them open one by one; and maybe a refreshing citrus fruit or drink, and you’ve got paradise. Especially if your house happens to be surrounded by nice trees and you can hear the birds chirping, like I can right now. My situation right now isn’t perfect though, because the new four lane highway above our house (in the mountains roads often end up above or below houses) is noisy and the air doesn’t feel as fresh as it can in the mountains.

When you do clothes-on winter-sunbathing in the mountains, it’s all about continuous heat management. After the first few minutes of soaking in the sun, you start to feel hot because you’re wearing all the layers you need inside the house or when the sun sets. One by one the layers start coming off. You start by sitting facing the sun but soon, you turn your back to it. Then, if you’re working on the laptop, like I am right now, you find a piece of cloth, like a towel or a shawl, and put it over your head and over the laptop to make a makeshift tent, so that you can get some shade and see your screen. It reminds you of childhood days when you built forts in the living-room with bedsheets. In India, we called them tents in the drawing-room, not forts. And they were often in the bedroom because our parents didn’t like us playing in the drawing-room which was only for guests.

The guest-only drawing-room became a key signifier of prosperity and success in a newly independent Republic of India. It was forever to be kept clean and organized. In order to achieve this, some families kept their sofas still in the plastic it came packed in, for years. Pictures, awards, souvenirs and various trinkets along with religious calendars and patriotic posters were displayed proudly in the drawing-room. The guests were received and offered tea and then the young kids in the family were told to recite a poem or even just the English alphabet if the child was really young. Impressing the guests was the mission and the entire family played their part in it.

It didn’t matter that the rest of the house was nowhere near as clean or well organized as the drawing-room. Indian culture has always differentiated between what is shown to the world and what is reserved only for the family; from drawing-rooms to weddings and family relationships. We always had a set of “good clothes” to be worn only when going out, or when a guest was coming home, or during festivals and special occasions. Rest of the time we wore our “home clothes”. These often started their life as “good clothes”, often for your elder sibling, and then with wear and tear and after a few repairs they were demoted to the rank of “home clothes”. That wasn’t the end of their life though, they could still be demoted further to “sleeping clothes” and then some of them would be lucky enough to become “dusting/mopping clothes” when they were completely torn to shreds. Sometimes these shreds would be resurrected as a patchwork quilt along with other dead clothes from everyone in the family. No wonder Hindus believe in reincarnation!

Is this what I wanted to say in this letter? I don’t know. But it seems fitting to talk about Indian culture on Republic Day. The only problem is how do I end this? I have to figure out a way soon because the last thing about clothes-on winter-sunbathing in the mountains is that you can only do so much of it. Soon it becomes unbearably hot, no matter how many layers you take off or how many towels you put on your head to create some shade.

So maybe I should finally describe the scene that I wanted to do from the beginning. I am sitting on a plastic chair in the winter sun under the shade of a towel laid over my head and the laptop screen on my lap. When I look at my shadow, I can see the translucent shadows of the wisps of heat rising from my shoulders. It’s that hot in direct sun! A cow keeps mooing in the village below. She’s probably hungry or perhaps they tied her out in the sun and like me, she too has had enough. Some dogs bark from time to time. I think these are the rottweilers who live in the yard of the big bungalow. There’s an ancient tree leaning in to their yard and I saw young monkeys climbing that branch just to tease the black beasts. The birds continue to sing and the highway traffic continues to buzz above me on the mountain. The pollution and dust in the air creates a little pinch in the back of my throat, which reminds me that this is not as good as it feels. The sounds of my mother working in the kitchen are reassuring and I think lunch is about to be ready. So, I’ll end this letter here and hope that you enjoyed reading it.

Thanks, and Happy Indian Republic Day!

Rudya Aditya