It's getting on to be my favourite time of day: 2 am. It's been a while since I've been awake this early. Recently 1:15 has been the magic hour; my eyes obstinately begin to droop shut, lodging a definitive protest against late-night Partha Chatterjee or Hedley Bull. Or, God forbid, both.
But tonight sleep eludes me and I can float from book to computer to slanted windowblinds, watching the ocassional lights of early morning and listening to the hurried cars zip past.
I can remember Delhi breathing slowly in these early hours. I can remember Bangalore - refused moonlight strolls, traffic-free, over zealously-lit and all.
The mornings routines stumble into one another as all mornings do anywhere. Dull light peers in from half-open blinds, my laptop sparks to eager brightness jolted to life by the many voices on radio 4, the room lights stagger on in artificial brightness, the heater is shaken from the night's inertia and the blinds are flicked open. A routine has created itself and now heaves to impose its lumbering structure on me every heavy morning. Outside it is nearly always the same; a dull morning yawning through shadows of clouds overhead. Monotony broken sometimes by brief gusts of rain or wind.
This morning, the reminder that you can hope to leave the weakest links behind you in the city of their birth, but some things never leave. Morning nausea, exaggerated cramps, carry-over migraines - all float seamlessly from the bright aggression of a Delhi summer morning to the dulled sopor of a disinterested winter morning here in London.
I can imagine AshaD's slippers clapping loudly up 54 steps (yes, I counted), the steady hammering and then the bright enquiry, "Aaj kya banau, beta?" and panda-eyed, the protest-request reply, "Khichdi".
"What's she made?" P would ask, hurrying out. Lifting lid. "Khichdi? Again?"
Then in the late morning, unable to venture further afield, the Day Visitor and I would sit on edges of Lahore-Furniture wallah's rented bed, ploughing into AshaD's culinary delight. Potato plus carrot plus beans khichdi. Made to Order for one temporarily ill Thin Girl and one Permanently Ill From Overeating Day Visitor. "Nice," he'd say, and get some more. The AshaD cure. Guaranteed to Win Hearts (one afternoon only) and Influence People.
I left everything (mostly) behind quite happily. I could do without crazy Bollywood hits rasping to life at midnight, forcing a complaint call to the Lajpat Nagar police station. I could do without the illnesses, the grime. The travel to small towns where the driver would screw up his nose and refuse to eat till we got to a "better" (read Hindu) area. But the khichdi. Sort of clambered into on me and travelled all the way across seas and mountains, a British Asian customs officer, a crazy ten-and-a-half hour flight... because the khichdi, it seems, is always going to define me. Some things will never change.
