North(s)

Or, acts of burying compasses and directions.

If I could have, I’d have sent some dappled light along with this letter. Find a tree, get some tea.

This is a gentle reminder to linger, lounge and daydream without the algorithm nudging you.

A direction is just a story we agree to tell. If you fidget with them long enough, North becomes something that’s neither a place nor a direction, but something closer to a movement or a reckoning. . At least to me. At least in this moment, as I write

To read this is to wander, to arrive lost, to leave less certain. Let the North dream you unfamiliar.

Why else would snowflakes secretly smell like Jasmines when no one is looking?

1. If the North were merely its weather, it would be a monomania. It would be a weather that haunts. The closest one can come to experiencing it is, if one has spent an unhealthy amount of time hiding away from a weather that feels like it’s personally out for vengeance. Frost, heat, hail or anything actually— from an unprecendented 44 degree summer to a sudden snow day in May, counts. It’s not even that uncommon, if you’ve been alive in the last 10 years and you still haven’t had this experience, you are either too comfortable for your own good or you’re a climate-change denier, it’s up to you to decide which is worse (Two sides of the same rotting coin, in my humble opinion).

What matters anyways is, to survive here, one needs to learn to live in the throat of the storm—to let decay settle into your bones until it freezes you into a state of almost. This is how you survive: you become a creature of the present. No speculation, no what-ifs. In a state of never-ending present, that waits as long as you need it to, this climate then doesn’t feel scary anymore.

What else does one make of that snow on asphalt overnight? A gentle dusting like a muslin cloth laid gently over an entire city, that’s waiting for people to come back, take off the dust sheets and start living again.

2. Maybe, if North were a liquid, I’d think it would feel like drinking a warm, amber liquid that comes on as a great flood every time, to reorient and balance things out inside the brain.

3. Scratch that. I will make up my own directions and chart my own maps and compasses, it shall be a dynamic map full of chaos that keeps changing to constantly point to the closest thing around that can remind me about love. So, Dogs? Or will it short-circuit because I’m always hanging out with A?

Maybe North is just a kind act or a million. But kindness, like warmth, is a currency the North refuses to mint—it prefers the cold arithmetic of survival.

4. If North wasn’t vilified so much with its cold, grey nothingness, maybe North would exist in our memories as tropical islands do. The problem here is clearly us and our pretence of holding warmth as a virtue. They say seals don’t dream of tropics. Polar bears always seem to die in the same warmth.

The oldest war isn’t good versus evil—it’s perhaps, warm-blooded against cold. We, the feverish ones, built systems that melt permafrost into Evian bottles. Oligarchs in mink coats, stitching their names into glaciers. Maybe the water doesn’t remember much but it does seem that the ice remember and keep score.

I bet Grandmothers know this. Something about how they measure the earth in grains and full stomachs and not with currencies and differences

5. Is North so stable and ever-present because it has a North Star that is easy to orient to? What does that make of the million others that we refuse to orient ourselves to? More importantly, what do grandmothers feel about North? Mine certainly seems to have a fair bit of faith over the cardinal directions. Come Pongal, I always catch her cautioning us about how rice in a pot absolutely cannot spill over in that one direction.

Me? My faith lies in the cardiac North.

7. I stumble recklessly through time. My days, a daze of errands, anxieties and uncertainty. Unemployed still, yet a vague sense of reassurance from holding onto more than enough time, tea and words— in ink, in thought and the clamour in the head. Untethered, time pools in my hands like monsoon rain, and I am February in the Alps- half-snow, half-storm, suspended between collapse and bloom. The skies holding too much rain and snow, letting them spill over on the towns together, the snowflakes and raindrops descending in one last dance. A familiar dance of contradictions, South and North colliding in my ribs.

I am on a journey North— not geodetic, cartographic or even magnetic, more of a cardiac north, a pull so urgent yet comforting as only a heart can evoke. For someone North-bound, labels are not a currency that holds any value— think of those same mink coats for a South Indian rice farmer.

(I know for a fact that no self-respecting South-Indian needs a mink coat. Although, If you ask me, I suggest he find an abandoned, long-forgotten cemetery of people who died because the mink-Coated colonisers felt so, and put it gently over the earth where they lay buried with their kin. In the South, even the most absentminded kleptomaniac would hesitate before stealing something from a cemetery that smells like rotting jasmine.)

Incidentally, as someone who doesn’t know much about the North or its hinterlands, I wouldn’t even be at fault if I had imagined that the snowflakes had a faintly crisp Jasmine smell. A shower of Jasmine petals and snowflakes can confidently replace one another if they wanted to. Jasmines, like snow tend to bloom when the stars are out and when people go to sleep dreaming about the summer (like winter for others) that couldn’t come sooner.

Unlike Jasmines and snowflakes, the labels I carry— woman? Writer-in-waiting? Tea-brewer? don’t seem to be able to replace anything. Maybe it’s time I bury my identities in the cemetery of other things and labels I once held, and a new one— threaded with the scents of both jasmine and snowfall, to tide me over and survive the North’s dreaming.

8. Even the earth doesn’t orbit straight in a strictly elliptic path. It staggers, drunk on starlight, veering a bit towards North and then a bit towards South. I’m learning to love the wobble. To spiral is to walk North and then by extension, South? How comforting is the Earth’s shape, now? No matter what I pursue, with a few distractions and reorienting I can end up anywhere and everywhere. Passport control says otherwise, and yet.

As I wait for Spring, I’ll keep smelling the possibilities and daydreams. I hope you do too.