Burning Books

I go farther.

From home,

From what I know,

But so I meet more of myself

And I like what I find.

I wrote this almost four months ago, not truly knowing what it meant, but maybe I am starting to understand. I watch me living this life, and sometimes I laugh at myself, and sometimes I frown. I’ve been trying to listen to my thoughts and take time to understand them. Maybe this is a prolonged adolescence, or maybe I am only now starting to grow up, but I’m finally learning how to be happy with myself and by myself. I love the people I have in my life, and I know I want them there. But I am also incredibly thankful for this juncture that I am at right now. I am thankful for the people who have let me go or pushed me away, because without this space, it would have taken a lot longer to get here.

In the past, I’ve been able to look back at my younger self and appreciate the distance and the difference, but today, I’m conscious of the change as it is happening. As light and peaceful as I feel these days, there are also moments of profound sadness. I am distressed by the understanding that I am different today than I was a year ago, six months ago, or even a week ago. And the knowledge of the many, many changes to come. But we never really leave behind any experience, any mistake, or any part of ourselves, try as we might with some. I am waving goodbye to the latest form of myself, but with the knowledge that she, with all the others, will follow soon and stay with me until I die.

People are noise. Melodious, and maybe necessary noise, but at the end of the day, friends, lovers, and family are all muffling the conversation between you and yourself. We define ourselves by our relationships: today I am a daughter to my parents, a sister to my cousins, a friend to my friends, and maybe one day, I will be a wife to a husband or a mother to my children. But to be only these things, and to expect only these things from others is to reject the ever-evolving self.

I have always surrounded myself with people, music, books, television, perhaps because I feared loneliness, or feared facing myself. I look back at the way I have behaved with people at times, and I feel wretched about it. I regret the selfish things I have said or done, just because someone did not meet my needs or expectations.

There is a chapter of Don Quixote, where the knight-errant returns home to La Mancha after his first round of adventures. His family and friends, recognizing his madness, conclude that he is getting his crazy ideas of knighthood and chivalry from the books and novels that he reads. While Don Quixote sleeps off his fatigue, two men spend the day in his personal library, sorting through his vast collection and tossing his precious books out the window to be destroyed. They keep a few treasures for themselves, burn the rest, and then board up the room, painting over the door to make it seem like it never existed.

“He came to the place where the door used to be, and tried it with his hands, and turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after a good while he asked his housekeeper whereabouts was the room that held his books.” No one gives him a proper answer and instead they feed him some story about a magician having vanished the library.

This scene broke my heart. What gives someone the right to burn a person’s books and board up his library, and keep him or her from following the path they feel is right? I am probably getting confusing at this point, but let me end with this. If I have ever kept you from your library, burned any of your books, or told you not to be a knight when you wanted to, I am so sorry. Maybe I will not always understand why you do what you do, or want what you want, but I will try to remember that what I see is only an illusion of your complex, private reality.

I won’t cheapen these thoughts and this farewell to penultimate me by saying that Spain is the reason behind them. But it is one hell of a poetic backdrop.

Observaciones

1. Northern and central Spanish is much easier for me to understand than southern, especially Andalusian, Spanish.
2. Whenever I confirm someone's suspicion that I am indeed Indian, they claim, "I knew from your eyes!" (It's probably my permanent dark circles, or as I like to call them, nature's eyeshadow).
3. I have invited pretty much anyone who expresses an interest (so, the entire office) to visit me in India sometime.
4. You do not stand on the left side of the escalator unless you are the only one on it.
5. People will queue up and wait to get a stationary spot on the right half of the escalator, rather than walk up the empty left half. Walking up the regular stairs is for foreigners.
6. Food is left sitting out for hours, instead of being immediately put in Tupperware and stowed in the fridge.
7. At 8 PM, there is a Spanish game show that my neighbors watch on high volume every single night. The theme song is very catchy, and during the show I hear gongs, cheering, "boing" sound effects, laughter, and not-great singing.
8. The verb for flip out, freak out, get high or be crazy about something? "flipar"
9. I heard a friend play the guitar and sing Spanish songs, and almost cried, it was so beautiful.
10. Nutella is the most expensive item on my grocery list.
11. The last trains leave their starting points at 1:30 AM.
12. The night buses are called buhos, Spanish for owls.
13. Many people smoke. A lot of men and some women roll their own cigarettes with loose tobacco, rolling papers, and tips (and are so practiced at it that they will do this while walking down the street).
14. Cars will accelerate madly towards you if you are crossing the street without a walk signal.
15. Every person thinks his or her hometown or village (pueblo) is the prettiest.

Daytripping: Alcalá de Henares

I'd been in Spain for over 6 weeks, but not once ventured outside of Madrid (except to Stuttgart, Germany). There are many smaller cities and pueblos within a stone's throw (if you can throw a stone so that it stays in the air for an hour) of Madrid.

Assuming I would wake up at a decent hour on Saturday morning, I planned a day trip to Toledo, the former capital of Spain. When I woke up at 1 pm, feeling ill, and generally uninspired to move, I knew Toledo wasn't happening. I Googled a more manageable option, Alcalá de Henares, and announced to my roommates that I was going on a trip. [Neat trick for very lazy humans: Tell other people that you are going to do something, especially when you are on the verge of not doing that something and chain-watching Youtube videos instead, and then imagine that they will judge you very harshly for not doing that something.] With my monthly pass, the roundtrip to Alcalá cost just 4.50 Euros, and trains run frequently, so I was on my way easily.

Traveling alone when you aren't used to it can be a bit jarring at first...You might feel the urge to cry at passersby, "I have family and friends who like me! I am here alone by choice!" But resist.

At first, I walked around feeling lost. I was thankful to come across gardens and parks that gave me a chance to squint discreetly at the tiny map on my iPod. I tend to pay more attention to birds when I'm on my own.

Just when I started to think that this city was rather plain-looking, I came across this archway, which was my portal into the old, fortified, and pretty areas. "Alcalá" means citadel in Arabic.

When I reached it was early afternoon, so not many people were out and about.

The giant storks and their humongous nests are a common sight throughout Alcalá de Henares. The city is home to the University of Alcalá, founded in the late 1400s.

Catedral de los Santos Niños. "Constructed between 1497 and 1514, it houses the remains of Saints Justus and Pastor, two Christian schoolboys martyred near the city during the persecutions of the Roman Emperor at the beginning of the fourth century."-Wikipedia

For a moment, I thought I had taken a Portkey back to our ancestral village in Karnataka. The older homes there look exactly like this!

Plaza de Cervantes. The main square in the city. As the sun began to set, lots of families with their insanely energetic and loud children came out to play.

Cervantes, I found you! I sat here and read a chapter or two of Don Quixote, feeling incredibly lucky.

This was a beautiful museum, showcasing the Muslim influence on the city's architecture and culture.

I ducked into Café Hemisferio to reward myself with a delicious hot coffee drink for successfully spending the day alone.

The woman

Every morning, I come out of the República Argentina metro stop and walk five minutes to my office building. I pass by a hospital, Sanatorio San Francisco de Asis, and outside this hospital's brick compound, near the gated entrance, sits a woman. Every single day, all day long, she sits there. She used to look bigger before, but now I see that she is pretty tiny. Maybe there was an other woman before her, or maybe she wears fewer layers of clothing now that it's warmer, but it doesn't matter. The thing is, the sight of this woman stirs up a hot, hot sense of shame in my chest every single morning.

She has a leathery brown face, wears complex layers of clothing, a band of blue fabric wrapped around her head, and does not look very Spanish. She holds a coffee cup (filled with coffee or change, I don't know), and a laminated sign, with some lines of writing in Spanish. I've tried to read the sign for over a month now, but it's not very easy when I breeze past her, ashamed to look at her for too long. I do know that it says something about children, probably hers, and has a picture of children on it.

This morning at the metro station near my flat, two people were handing out breakfast cookies as part of a product promotion, and they gave me two packets. I ate one on the train, and was daydreaming about giving the other packet to the woman. When I got to the Sanatorio, I very nearly brushed past her as usual but some part of me forced me to stop, dig out the biscuits from my backpack and hand them to her. She accepted them graciously and said something to me, but I couldn't hear because I had my earphones in and the music was loud or maybe it was my pulse, but I nodded in response and went to do social work on a computer.

The part of me that made me stop? I just hope it grows and gets bigger than the part of me that ignores her twice a day.

Lazy Vegetarian in Spain

Anyone who has witnessed me surviving living independently at some point during the past 5.5 years knows that I am utterly incapable of eating properly for more than a day or two in a given week. Very occasionally, I have a burst of inspiration where I buy good groceries and cook up a delicious and nutritious storm, with leftovers. If we have ever shared a meal together, then you know that I eat as if I have never seen food before and as though I am never going to see food again.

The problem:

• Time (Prep +Cook + Clean) = 1 hour
• Time (Eat) = 7 minutes

And that's if I don't eat straight out of the frying pan.

I still have to play airplane to get myself to eat vegetables. And if you have ever tried to feed me broccoli, I probably dislike you a little bit, and always will.

Now, Spain is famous for its delicious food, but unfortunately, 90% of that deliciousness is found here:

15 new words I have to learn just to avoid ordering pig off the menu.

My saving grace right now is my love for good bread, eggs, cheese, and potatoes. I present to you bocadillo con tortilla española:

The only thing I order at traditional Spanish eateries.

It's pretty good, but very bland for taste buds that have grown up with South Indian and California Mexican food. I might start carrying around a bottle of Tabasco sauce in my purse, like Nong does.

Most people here react with disbelief, pity, or confusion when I say that I am a vegetarian. Friday, one waitress stared at me with grave concern before declaring, "Well, at least you like eggs."

I'm not exactly struggling to find food here, but being a lazy vegetarian in the United States (where there are Trader Joe's) is significantly easier. I really want to use my time in Madrid to get better at eating well at home so that I don't look like this in two years:

Prince Gerhardt on his 25th birthday

In the next installment of Lazy Vegetarian, I will take you grocery shopping in Madrid!