the verandah epiphany

Veranda. The architectural origins of which can be debated endlessly, or as it’s often called in colloquial Pindi Punjabi by my grandmother, “prandah”, is a space for communal living and interaction. At the center of houses, or a group of living areas, where evenings meant too much sweet and milky tea and fried street snacks, and nighttime meant stolen conversation, and private utterances. It’s airy - to allow for continuous and much needed ventilation in the warm, North Indian summers, and looks up to an open sky. Earlier this year, we projected old Bollywood movie songs on the veranda wall for my grandmother. We may forget in the age of YouTube and Spotify, that our favorite songs and artists are at our fingertips, at any second. Every drunk dancing memory, or every heartbreak, there for immediate and intentional recall. Unlike even perhaps during my childhood, where one could experience the pure bliss of a favorite song on the radio - unintentional, unpredictable. At the mercy of cable television, she gets to see her favorites rarely. It was a scene of pure joy and delight, while she watched and sang along to old classics. Here, Mughal-e-Azam, still a cultural powerhouse. The power of deliberate recall in this cinematic art form evokes nostalgia like nothing else. As though part of an infinite digital library, there for our summoning, scanning through countless memories, this invisible retriever brings back those initial first moments where you experienced that emotion for the first or even only time. This is the power of internet and new media, not to ingrain divisive ideas in a sinister IT cell, but to unite for the sake of what makes us all human: love and art. And if you’re truly lucky, a wonderfully human memory associated with a song.

my sister and grandmother, collected around a small fire to ward off the delhi winter cool.