Dear R,

I’ve not heard from you in a few months. I’d have visited you during the break, but this has been a rather still summer, and maybe you’d like to borrow some of my quiet? I’ve made you a list.

Like most people, I remember spending the first pandemic summer cooking, cleaning, and catatonic. But never since 2020, had I felt quite as useless as this summer: holed up after a knee-surgery (did I mention that?)—doomscrolling, doomswiping, doomsighing, doomscreaming, inhaling some kind of ambient depression, you know? For most of us academics, summer is when we reconnect with our sedentary bodies, with our non-teaching minds, with our faraway families. I am used to my summer months being a prolonged cheerful rush: either rummaging through dusty archives or guzzling the best meals with family back in India, mostly both. Not this time. I wondered if a summer reading list could help, have you read any of these? Or maybe you’re wondering if living in Silicon Valley, with its huge South Asian-American diaspora, was my cure. As it turns out, this was going to be my summer of still days, quiet feelings, and ecstatic music. A season of feeling spectacularly ineffective became the season when this unexceptional place far away from family—with its ordinary aesthetics of strip malls and performance halls—unexpectedly began to resemble home. You’d have seen it too.

Like all bittersweet hope, it started with the near-impossible. Do you remember how one of our favorite South Asian artistes, the ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali, sings about resurgent winds of hope: the balmy breeze an effective cure for all heartache? Ooh I remember how mad we were when despite his global reputation, he had been denied entry to India because of his Pakistani citizenship, a shame! It had effectively eliminated any chance that I had of hearing him live with you. But by some miracle, I got to attend Ali’s farewell tour in South Bay. Sobbing and sniffling among strangers in a strange land at his sheer presence, I felt profoundly at home. Just like the ghazal said: melodious ripples caused all walls to come crashing down, and I felt free.

Freedom—from couch-life, from doomsday fears, from boredom—is what an indie band brought me next. Did you know that the folk-rock band Indian Ocean is exactly the same age as us? They performed in a show organized by a Bay Area feminist organization; and as we waited with bated breath for them to begin in that sultry stadium, I learned about the fabulous women at Maitri. Literally meaning ‘friendship,’ Maitri extends a hand to local women and children of South Asian origin who need assistance escaping domestic violence. While Indian Ocean took our breath away with their eclectic and magical compositions (especially these two), it is Maitri’s promise of a South Asian feminist alliance that left me with lasting sense of belonging. I know that you’d have felt the same: in a soul-killing moment, I’d glimpsed courage.

Courageous and versatile—we have often used these adjectives to describe A R Rahman—the last celebrity on my desi rockstar countdown *cue gasp*! As all of us in the audience sang our hearts out, he awed us in multiple Indian languages and across several instruments, including mesmerizing visual treats. But the two moments that brought a lump to my throat were when he performed his soulful 90s compositions, songs from Roja and Bombay. We used to rewatch these childhood films together in our college dorms, do you remember? My mind immediately flashed back to the many midnight conversations we had about how these stories redefined what it meant to value a national claim on any land, why such claims impacted ethno-religious identities, and how men and women performed and transgressed their assigned roles upon such terrains. At a time when our collective fate is riddled with religious, national, and gendered conflicts, when we can barely recognize what and where home is, the soundtracks of these films lent me faith. I didn’t know how badly I needed it, R.

My heal-this-heart-and-remake-it list is now a tad too long, haha! But before I go, let me share my summer watchlist of understated films. Even though you couldn’t come with me to the shows, you can cherish these from your couch! The Life of Chuck assured me that it is not Artificial Intelligence but the arts that will save our frail world (thank God, I was close to gaslighting myself!). Eva Victor’s superb debut Sorry, Baby depicted the precarity of post-trauma normalcy and the centrality of easy friendships (plus a nod to our complicated friend, the English department). And revisiting Grave of the Fireflies reminded me of the defiant vitality of quiet joys during ineffable grief, albeit ephemeral.

Being wheeled to all these shows by a loving partner, and being witness to their poignant stillness, I know that even my indoors-only-summer was filled with unflinching fireflies; I’ll be sure to send some your way. Say hi to Lake Michigan for me, I still belong to her (and to you)!

Hugs,
S