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Walking with writers: Yashasvi Vachhani

Contrary to writerly stereotypes, Yashasvi Vachhani is quite sociable. When she's not writing, she runs the Osmosis Award for new poets with fellow writers Kunjana Parashar and Kinjal Sethia. She holds literary and other workshops and till recently, served on the literary curation team at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. Yashasvi Vachhani (Courtesy the subject) In the course of the evening, Yashasvi relates how her childhood home, Manik Moti, a building in Khar, was redeveloped. It took some five years, and during construction, Yashasvi and her family lived in the same suburb. They returned a year ago to their redeveloped home, to taller and more capacious Blue Lotus. The upgrade brought much joy, peace and a feeling of being secure. It also brought with it a feeling of disorientation. Some of that found its way into Yashasvi's work. This included a poem which bridged the old home temporally with the new. Referring to the poem, she begins the walk from her building by pointing out the portico as the location of her own room in the old structure. Outside it is a small yard, where a sedan car stands by potted plants. She points out a couple of trees that were in the old compound and now stand on the public footpath carved out from the property. Home and belonging, transience and constancy, gain and loss layered together keenly evoke a sense of disorientation in some of her poems. Along with old neighbours, she says, came new people. I gather they are nice enough. The only matter is things have changed. Now, she says, when entering and leaving the new building, people don't cross paths. '(In the old place) we could see who was coming and going,' she says, referring at one level to their being new. At another, she is pointing to architectural design. Small talk with neighbours may foment mutual acknowledgement, lead to a sense of ease, and at some point, bonding. The new constructions and for that matter, new mindsets, seem better suited to individualist living. This, too, is understandable. There are still plenty of people around who are familiar. A woman dressed in a sari goes by. They exchange a cordial, smiling word. The woman, Yashasvi says, did domestic work for them in the old building. She still comes around to work for other families. The new situation is positive overall. It satisfies, and then some. She observes that the building is sturdy. Their new home is on the first floor, above stormwater in the rainy season. The building is beautiful, I say. She agrees and accepts the compliment with thanks. Yashasvi remarks, 'That's the almond tree.' It's still inside the property. It stands by the gate, looking a bit cramped in between her building and its neighbour. The bark looks healthy, the green and red leaves are vivid, numerous, thick and stiff. Under its piece of the sky and the sun, it is thriving. Far more expansively than the tree, I'd say, Sindhis flourish as a whole. They've made a home in India, specifically in this city and surrounding ones. Over time, their families grew. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were born in the country. Yashasvi was too. She is 36. The almond tree is mentioned in a poem of hers that appeared in Singapore Unbound, 'About things from here and there'. The poem has a mother and her two daughters, one being the narrator, sitting together to watch a serial or movie from across the border. Mom said look, so many people still speak in Sindhi where Sindh is, we are technically refugees here, di replied. [...] Imagined an almond tree it bled The narrator is told she, too, is 'technically a refugee'. It perhaps inspires her deeper personalising of the loss of the ancestral homeland. The narrator appears to reaffirm her understanding, intensely or otherwise, that the term applies to her. It is a self-searching undertaken by other young Sindhis, too, who were born here in India. Here seems more directly relevant to many of them, there mainly by dint of importance to elders. In many families the situation is reversed. It might be the parents who say they are now householders (grihasth) here, they have made lives in India and are no one's refugees; the children, in search of roots or a cause to bring the community together, might insist otherwise. This doesn't apply to the narrator in Yashasvi's poem, who answers the universal question in her own way. 'The narrator does reaffirm (she's a refugee), but not like in a strong way,' she explains. It's a puzzling statement in light of the vigorous image where the 'almond tree/ it bled'. Still, I can relate with the feeling of the quest. I am not Sindhi. My origins can be traced, my family says, to a village on Maharashtra's Konkan coast. I can name the village. I've never visited it. My ancestors left for the city by choice. In the village I have no people. If I do, they are strangers. My mother tongue, Marathi, and sister tongue, English, are spoken where I live. What I miss is my childhood home, a universal and occasional longing. On the whole, it's alright. And it's not the same as a lost ancestral homeland. What I can empathise with more, is a fellow writer experiencing big feelings. I can imagine watching a Sindhi serial and wondering about the old des. Constantly changing: A road in Khar West, in Mumbai (Vijay Bate/Hindustan Times) Every writer has big feelings. It's a raw resource like crude oil suddenly gushing out of the earth in your backyard, kickstarting your creative engine, pumping your piston, heavy on you, heavy on your surroundings. Creativity guru Rick Rubin has called them a blessing and a curse. Big feelings fuel a drive to make art. They are tough to handle. So, thank goodness for trees, including almond trees. May they flourish. Thank goodness for metaphors growing on them. They go to show, maybe, that things can work out for communities, and for writers. Yashasvi's other poems range from the expressionistic to the surreal, poems with themes (not fully mappable on her private life) of a longing for belonging, for freedom, for greater agency and boundaries, more frankness, catharsis, to become shakti, even. Looking at the soft-spoken, diplomatic and astutely observant poet walking gently towards Bandra, you'd never guess the contents of Morph Sis!, another one of her poems. It begins with eating a melon redly and suggests a metamorphosis larger than life, larger than patriarchy: – in the mirrorwatch her emerge – devi hair askew, juice snakingdown her chin splitting into tributaries along skin – a turtle inching out of her shell or a pappilio clytia emerging from chrysalis,feet first – Speaking of matrikas in red, Yashasvi has chosen for herself a vibrant palette of crimson and cream today, with accents of gold. These colours are associated with vitality, initiative, plenitude, auspiciousness, amity. Their extroversion complements my low key grey, black and navy blue scheme that suggests, 'Occupant is Respectable and Conventional: Nothing to See Here.' This poem forms a chiaroscuro with her soft-spoken persona, with her quick wit that appears in daily interactions. Walking by her old school that's close to home, she half-jests, 'I'd still be late.' The school building is the same. Across the street, almost all of Yashasvi's block, eight of 11 buildings by my estimate, seem to have been redeveloped in the past decade. She jokes that she's become used to construction. The wry humour is relatable for Mumbaiites. She says she can tell the stages of construction from the noises. 'For example, laying marble,' she says. 'One crane with a blinking light reminds me of Aladdin's lamp. We speak of seeing beauty in the everyday as a way to cope.' (Shutterstock) We speak of our manuscripts in progress. 'I'm a late bloomer,' she says. I say my book-length project made me an alcoholic in its first draft, made me a teetotaller in the second, and, around draft three, kept me abstentious while making me emotionally equable. Now, the MS is finally going well. 'It's your first,' she says, understanding. It's tough to be a late bloomer in a city of ambition, a city eager to be made, re-made, developed, redeveloped. Where each building takes a monumental pose, a book that is as hard and audacious as a construction project, is far less visible and unlikely to be lucrative. But it's alright; we know we'll be okay. Having recently left the team of the online journal, The Bombay Literary Magazine, she has now founded her own lit mag, The Tiffinbox Review. It's a welcome development and aims to provide an outlet for distinctive new writing. TTR will accept work that's surreal, bizarre, weird. It's what Yashasvi too wants to explore in her writing. A win-win. -- The sun sets behind passing rain clouds, pardein mein. We wind up in Bandra around dusk, and sit on the tiled steps at Carter Road, facing the Arabian Sea transformed into blue-black ink. We speak, looking at the big water on which a bridge, the Bandra Versova sea link, will span the horizon. Right now, it's a bare metal and concrete spine being extended by cranes that look like birds. The conversation moves on to environmental themes. One crane with a blinking light reminds me of Aladdin's lamp. We speak of seeing beauty in the everyday as a way to cope. And just like that, time passes. After a quick coffee, only my sixth of the day, Yashasvi hurries back to dinner with her family. I staunchly resist the siren song of a sweet shop, and leave with my blood sugar level unimpeachably intact. The colours of the night grow darker and more beautiful. Delicate droplets of rain shimmer in the halos of the streetlamps. Suhit Bombaywala's factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala.