Enrolled as a first year at Stella Maris College, when I was seventeen, I was a freshman abroad. I studied in the Fine Arts department, which encompassed both art history and studio art. We began with Mesopotamia and Assyrian, learning to diagram Buddhist stupas, and number Buddha’s attributes in sculpture ( a top-knot, elongated ears, and our favorite, loti-form lips.) I found my notebooks on this visit back, which I haven’t seen in almost forty years.
This time in my aunt’s house, in Chennai. Can time be measured in circling ceiling fans, beating back the heat? In the afternoons, perhaps, but mornings, papers rustle, the breeze cool. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been here last. The family has gotten smaller, and grief leaks. My father; my uncle. Meals are served, the rustling papers read. Outrage over the news. Could not a million be spent than in the personal acquisition of Princess Diana’s private letters? Imagine if that money was given to produce a play based on the letters instead. The best line I’ve recently read is in Interred with Their Bones, a novel by Jennifer Lee Carrell: “If you must choose a church, go to the theater.”
Yes, in India, musing about the royals, reading about Shakespeare, under a circling ceiling fan. Outside, the air is thick with the noise of traffic, worship, capitalism. The indifferent cows only come out at night.
Indira Ganesan, NJ fan, 2017
I am in NJ, under a slow ceiling fan, having celebrated the 85th birthday of my brother’s father-in-law. The two mother-in-laws are chatting about the overuse of cellphones; my niece is reading; and in another room my sister-in-law is teaching her father how to use free weights. I think my brother is with them. Traffic lulls by. It is summer. It is sultry without the wind. We are older than we think, yet the pulse beats. Outside on the terrace, the tomatoes grow incrementally bigger.
Indira Ganesan 