I have been reading (4)

Love and Saffron

I have been really touched by some beautiful books recently. While I have been reading some academic material and re-reading children’s literature, I have missed reading. You know what I mean? 🙂 Somehow the brain compartmentalises reading so it is not enough if you have been reading anything. I have stopped fighting it but I have missed it.

So when I laid my hands on this beautiful epistolary novel, I dived right in. I love letters, reading them, writing them and waiting for them. And every night for the past few nights, I have sparingly read a few letters that transpire between two beautiful women who write to each other of their culinary experiments, of their little escapades, of the people they met and of life itself. I have waited to appreciate the friendship that blossoms through their letters, a bond that had me in tears from being overwhelmed at how beautiful life is and how little is needed to feel that sense of absolute delight. Ironical, isn’t it? 
And I wept at the end at how intertwined lives can get when you devote your everything as you write a letter. Not a phone call, not a message but a letter that requires you to sit still and let your ink flow to your mind and nothing else, as you reflect and confide. 
I remembered my own letters to a friend who was a nurse in the same hospital as my aunt. All our letters were in Kannada and after sending a letter of mine, I’d wait and wait with utter impatience for the postman and I was never disappointed. We wrote until she confided in me of how things were changing for her and that her address and letters are no longer certain. But I am so happy for that phase of my life and wonder why I didn’t do it more. 

Kim Fay @kimkfay has written such a beautiful piece and inspired by real people. As much as I wanted to devour it all in one go, I didn’t. I waited every night for bedtime and read only a few letters and I’d wait for the next. And the whole wait was so tearfully worth it.
And I am sharing this with you as I enjoy some saffron which K very thoughtfully brought back from Dubai. My very own Love and Saffron 🙂

Sweet Bean Paste

I read this book a while ago when A posted about how she couldn’t stop thinking about it. I am so grateful for this recommendation because it is one beautiful book, another evocative Japanese writing that truly touches on a multitude of intense issues with a clarity so simple and eye opening.

In writing about the unlikely bond that develops between a formerly incarcerated confectionary shop worker who makes dorayakis, a 78 year old woman he hires and a troubled teen girl who visits, he brings out the stigmas that prevailed in Japan around health and the kind of impact they had.

The story drives home a beautiful message on acceptance and understanding and therefore inclusion. ‘That’s why I made confectionery. I made sweet things for all those who lived with the sadness of loss. And that’s how I was able to live out my life.’

One of the things I have admired in people who do the same thing for years AND take pride in it, is the devotion. Cooking for example. It takes a lot to be so observant, skillful and driven to keep at it consistently. To know it all, like the back of your hand, to hear the ingredients speak and to watch them change. Meaningful work is not necessarily monetarily profitable work, not always. And to make something with joy and for joy just humbles me. And that belief was rekindled in me.

Why do we live? What purpose does a cruelly short life have? Or one with sickness? Or one that is ostracised? When Tokue answers this in the most profound and simple way, it left me thinking for days on. Each of our existence gives the universe its purpose. Everything else exists because you exist. And you exist to give it meaning.

To celebrate, I finished the last pages of the book with a dorayaki with sweet bean paste that I spent a few hours searching for. I will never forget the way this book made me feel.

Before the Coffee gets Cold

One Wednesday not long ago, I took an hour off early morning and went for coffee at a restaurant a few hops away. My favourite coop was empty and as I sat down, the staff who was fixing a coffee smiled widely at me, “I’ll be with you in a mo”. I peeled my layers off, took my book out and sat. As promised, she was with me, “would you like some coffee or tea?”
The eeriness of the striking similarity between what I was reading and my context hit me so hard and I must have smiled so amusingly at her as I told her how lovely coffee would be, because she went away without asking me what kind of coffee I wanted. 
The book is set in a cafe that lets you travel back in time with a few conditions, one of the most important ones being the inability to change the present. The rules get clearer as one advances further in the book through different stories. It traces the stories of four different characters as they travel back in time for various reasons despite this knowledge and it struck me that while a lot of us think wistfully of a time bygone, we often want to go back and change our decisions and actions in the hope of bettering the present. But there is much more to it, in these stories. It is about changing or saying something despite the knowledge that the present will remain the same if only because it lends a different meaning to the lives involved. Even if there is nothing that one can do to change the circumstance, there is so much one can do to make people feel better about it, about themselves. And that alone makes the journey worthwhile. 
While the concept seems out of the ordinary, the author approaches some of the most sensitive topics with a clarity so simple that is so characteristic of some of the Japanese fiction I have read.

As I write this, I cannot help longing for this very morning when the restaurant staff served me the most amazing filter coffee with some milk on the side as if she knew that it was what I wanted. I’d go back to this very morning and change nothing at all ❤️