Neha Sinha

  On Delhi’s dirtiest air day – on a day when the Air Quality Index crossed 1,000 in the National Capital Region – I was out looking for hope in the smoke. On either side of me, fumes dissolved into nothing – looking like the world had ended in a crash and a ball of gas. I was standing on an embankment, and falling away from the bund’s steep sides was a wetland on the left, and old paddy crops on the right. Though the sun had not sunk yet, …

One looks for the filter to beep blue, an image that will remind you of how the earth, the pale blue dot, must have looked from the moon. The second batches of colours are those of joy. Winter flowers. You know you live in the world’s most polluted place when you have a mask for all seasons. There was the summer-monsoon covid mask. Owing to the heat and mugginess during the pandemic, the mask changed from a plain black or blue medical mask to creative, chic and breathable handloom masks. …

Juice ki dukaan se agla cut (Take the next turn from the juice bar) If you’ve grown up in India, you have heard these lines. You have also stored pocket money to have a dazzling glass of juice, twinkling with color, and topped with a wholesome white froth, served in a beer glass with a long straw. And you have waited to be picked up near the landmark that is the juice ki dukaan. Also you have mixed weird flavors of anar with gaajar—pomegranate with carrot– just because you can. …

It was the ugliest nest I had ever seen. On a dusty Eucalyptus tree on Delhi’s Hailey Road, a jumble of materials served as a nest. There was no shape to it. Most bird nests I had seen possessed a sort of internal logic holding the structure together—a bulbul made a cup-shaped nest, sunbirds made a long, hanging nest, tailorbirds sewed leaves together to hide their nests. Even crows, with their untidy, poky nests of sticks, had better architecture than what I was seeing. The nest on the Eucalyptus tree …

But the lockdown had changed the game. Not only were we all in the same rocky ship, I was now the one mixing and chopping and making allowances for weird sounds that can only be experienced, not explained. In the cacophony, Nature played its part too.   At first, the lockdown didn’t seem so bad. We could work from home – for many of us who don’t get enough staycations, there would be more time to fuss over potted plants in various stages of neglect, change cushion covers, create new …

Zrrrrr, zrrrrr. It sounded like a tiny helicopter whirring, a little motor in the grass. It was a cloudy day. The sky looked diffused and pearly, like it was reflecting a moonstone. I was out under the open sky. And the monsoon was in the air too. The sound came again, and as I listened intently, I realized it was something with an ancient lineage. Village children who spend time near wetlands on drowsy afternoons would know this sound – it’s made by dragonflies as they move parts of their …

‘The Puja feel is in the air, no?’ my aunt asked me. Both Delhi and West Bengal are still unbearably sultry, so no, the Pujo feel is not in the air, I thought. Durga Puja, Kali Puja, and Diwali come at that delightful time of the year when good food, good weather, and good clothes converge. The humidity of August abates to the evening nip of late September and October; the landscape bursts into generous visions of Kaas grass – tall grasses crowned with feathery, blossom like seeds. But to …

  But how do you find something that has no name, with only the picture painted by a young child? As a five-year-old girl, I would look out of the window of the taxi that took me to school each day. We would pass the same area daily, and the view should thus be the same – the city waking up, and its houses, cars, roadsides, gardens, trees. But each day’s thrill was in noticing new things next to the fixed, unmovable ones. A bird nest I could now see …

  The sky opens up, and it pours, and pours. The mist can be morose, and the sameness of the rainscape can cloud the mind. You may crave the rains when you are not in them, your favourite seat may grow mould, you may not be able to travel freely, away from quarantine zones or the threat of a vehicle breaking down in the waterlogged streets. Here are a few things to do in the monsoon, to fight the feeling of moisture seeping into our very soul. Cloudwatching: It’s been …

  It may not even be a stretch of imagination to believe that you may owe your life to a dragonfly   When you see the sun shining sharply after a shower, a catch in the light may hook your eye. Something against the blue sky and yellow light may be glittering, almost like a shard from a jewel. Occasionally it looks like a clear piece of glass, and at other times it seems to be a little patch of colour. Sometimes it darts by so fast you can’t tell …